Virginia Releases School Quality Profiles
The debates over what the new scoring system actually means have just begun.
By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Email Martin
The much-anticipated School Quality Profiles were released by the Virginia Department of Education — two months late — at 2 p.m. Tuesday afternoon.
Stafford County Public Schools held a meeting with media to explain the new system and how it has affected Stafford schools. Spotsylvania County Schools will be releasing its press release later this evening, with additional explanatory information coming on Wednesday.
Fredericksburg City Public Schools sent a notice to district families saying it is “reviewing the state’s new school ratings system to understand what it means for reporting complicated information.” It continues, “We are also preparing to explain this information to families in clear, easy-to-understand language. The data has not yet been fully interpreted. Because of that, we do not want to speculate about its impact on student achievement in Fredericksburg City Public Schools.”
What Makes the New System Complicated?
The new system splits reporting into two broad categories: Accreditation and Performance Level.
Accreditation is based on a checklist of requirements each district must complete. All schools in Caroline, Fredericksburg, King George, and Stafford are listed as “Fully Accredited.” All schools in Spotsylvania are Fully Accredited or “Accredited with Conditions.”
Performance Level is based on a highly complex set of calculations that rate individual schools as “Distinguished,” “On Track,” “Off Track,” or “Needs Intensive Support.”
Matt Hurt, who is director of the Curriculum Instruction Program, said that the new accreditation system has some positives, but there are several issues that will prove confusing to parents and educators alike.
The system, he told the Advance via email, is “overly complex.” He notes that the system is “weighted” and that the weighting “changes based on a number of factors.”
This is troubling because “the public release of the data was delayed for two months while VDOE worked through errors in the calculations and data submissions,” Hurt told the Advance.
He also noted that “The rules to calculate the results have not been published in a document. Training has occurred, but there is no document to which we can refer to that we can see how this is tabulated.”
Adding more confusion to the results, Hurt says, is that “this system uses a proprietary calculation of growth [to calculate growth in the elementary and middle schoolss for the 2025 year only] that is not made available to educators. Therefore, they cannot ‘check the math,’ which negatively impacts faith in that system.”
Consequently, he continued, “this system is not viewed as transparent by many Virginia educators.”
What Does It All Mean?
The Advance is working through the data and will have more reporting on the results, and the meaning of these results, soon.
Local Obituaries
To view local obituaries or to send a note to family and loved ones, please visit the link that follows.
Support Award-winning, Locally Focused Journalism
The FXBG Advance cuts through the talking points to deliver both incisive and informative news about the issues, people, and organizations that daily affect your life. And we do it in a multi-partisan format that has no equal in this region. Over the past year, our reporting was:
First to break the story of Stafford Board of Supervisors dismissing a citizen library board member for “misconduct,” without informing the citizen or explaining what the person allegedly did wrong.
First to explain falling water levels in the Rappahannock Canal.
First to detail controversial traffic numbers submitted by Stafford staff on the Buc-ee’s project
Our media group also offers the most-extensive election coverage in the region and regular columnists like:
And our newsroom is led by the most-experienced and most-awarded journalists in the region — Adele Uphaus (Managing Editor and multiple VPA award-winner) and Martin Davis (Editor-in-Chief, 2022 Opinion Writer of the Year in Virginia and more than 25 years reporting from around the country and the world).
For just $8 a month, you can help support top-flight journalism that puts people over policies.
Your contributions 100% support our journalists.
Help us as we continue to grow!
This article is published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND. It can be distributed for noncommercial purposes and must include the following: “Published with permission by FXBG Advance.”