The Virginia Board of Education on Thursday revised the state’s school accreditation and graduation requirements.
Schools, starting in the 2018-19 school year, will be rated as either accredited, accredited with conditions or accreditation denied. Before Thursday’s vote, there were nine possible ratings, ranging from fully accredited to partially accredited to accreditation denied.
The board approved the new requirements with an 8-1 vote. James Dillard was the lone no vote.
The new standards put more of an emphasis on closing achievement gaps, the state Education Department said in a news release, by including progress toward English and math proficiency, student attendance and dropout rates.
“Under these new standards, schools will be rewarded for the success of students who are on a trajectory toward meeting Virginia’s high expectations, even if they are not quite there yet,” Virginia Superintendent of Public Instruction Steven Staples said in a prepared statement. “This addresses an inequity in our current system which sometimes labels schools serving children in poverty as failing when in fact students are making great strides and showing high growth from one year to the next.”
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The new graduation requirements will take effect with incoming freshmen. The main change is that the number of required verified credits needed for both an advanced-studies diploma and a standard diploma goes down to five from six. Course requirements for both diplomas stay the same.
A verified credit is given for a course where a student earns a standard credit, but also passes the course’s SOL test or an alternative assessment approved by the state board. Under the new requirements, fewer SOL tests are needed in order to graduate.
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Virginia on Thursday also became the first state in the U.S. to adopt mandatory standards for computer science education.
The standards, approved unanimously, but reluctantly, by the state Board of Education on Thursday, are a framework for computer science education in the state. Other states have advisory standards, but Virginia became the first to have mandatory standards.
Board member Anne Holton voiced her concern with the grade level appropriateness of the standards before the vote.
“The standards, they seem ambitious to me,” she said. “These are not meant as aspirational standards, they are meant as a mandate that our teachers need to be able to teach.”
“We’re clearly leading the nation and that puts an extra burden on us to get it right.”
Mark Saunders, the director of the Education Department’s Office of Technology and Virtual Learning, led a presentation of the department’s process in adopting the standards.
The presentation satisfied the board enough to vote on the standards rather than delay action until January.
A unanimous vote followed, adopting the standards jump-started in 2016 in the General Assembly with the approval of House Bill 831.
Now, computer science will be part of everyday curriculum.
“We’re going to be integrating it,” said Chris Dovi, the executive director of CodeVA, a Richmond-based nonprofit that helped shape the legislation. “It becomes part of the vernacular rather than a separate course.”
Other business:
- The board honored Staples for his upcoming retirement as the state’s public schools chief. Staples is retiring Jan. 1 after serving as the superintendent of public instruction since March 2014. Juanita McHale, the senior administrative assistant to Staples, is also retiring. She was also recognized.
- The board is cutting the number of meetings it convenes from 10 to eight for next year. Meetings will not be held in February and May, in addition to the regularly scheduled off months of August and December. The board plans to review the decision before adopting its 2019 schedule.