Poll Shows Near Unanimous Support for Greater School Accountability

In a survey conducted on behalf of the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy by Mason-Dixon Polling & Strategy between December 17 and 20, 625 registered voters were asked:

QUESTION: Virginia has approved a new framework for school accountability that utilizes comprehensive data, including academic proficiency and academic growth measures by student subgroups. This data would be made easily available and understandable, so parents know how well their child and local school are performing. Do you support or oppose this new framework?

The poll shows that 86 percent of registered voters in Virginia support a new accountability framework – with almost no variation in support by race, age, gender, region, or even political party. This data should be a wake-up call to Democrats in the General Assembly.

As the Thomas Jefferson Institute recently testified before the state Board of Education, more data is always better than less data. This non-controversial fact seems to be well understood by voters, but less understood by elected progressives in Virginia who appear worried that greater data and accountability will expose failures long hidden by Virginia’s current accountability measures.

The truth is that our current accountability system fails to distinguish school performance and actually groups almost all of Virginia’s public schools (88 percent) as high performing and accredited. A school accountability system that fails to provide any real variation in performance is the same as having no performance measure at all.

There is a little known “honesty gap” in Virginia’s school performance which refers to the discrepancy between how well our students perform on state standardized tests versus their actual proficiency levels as measured by national assessments like the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). This gap reveals a concerning disconnect between the picture painted by state-level data and the reality of student achievement.   As a result, a higher percentage of students were deemed “proficient” on state tests than on the national assessments.

This leads to almost all parents falsely believing that their child is at or above grade levels in reading and math – when in reality, according to NAEP scores, only 32 percent of fourth graders and 31 percent of eight graders in Virginia are proficient in reading and 38 and 31 percent, respectively, are proficient in math.

Former Secretary of Education under President Barack Obama said it best in support of stronger accountability measures: “Lying to parents about how their children are doing academically is definitely the easier path, but it is always the wrong path.”

Interestingly, the main argument against Virginia’s new accountability measures (which just yesterday received federal approval from the U.S. Department of Education) is not so much about what they measure, or how the new system will be implemented, but rather that the results of the new framework will undermine the public schools and lead parents to seek alternatives.

Lauren Grob, a self-described “liberal who works in education policy” praised Governor Youngkin’s new accountability framework in the Richmond Times Dispatch, noting that “higher standards can drive performance” and “will put Virginia in compliance with federal mandates.” Her objection, however, was based on a concern that the new accountability measures would reveal significant performance deficiencies that would undermine the current system and lead to support for “private school vouchers and charter schools.”

Virginia’s parents deserve to know the truth about the performance of their children’s schools and should be trusted with what the new measures reveal.  Without good data, we will continue to fail our students – especially our most vulnerable students who are all too frequently trapped in poor performing schools.