(Editor's note: Volume 6, number 1 of Virginia Issues & Answers included an article about Virginia's Standards of Learning (SOLs) by Lawrence H. Cross. The following article presents a different viewpoint on the SOLs by a member of the Virginia Board of Education.)

Five years ago, Virginia began a sweeping reform of public education, one of the most comprehensive in the nation. The guiding vision of that reform is ambitious, yet simple: to raise student achievement through accountability for results, with the goal that all our schoolchildren, not just a lucky few, will be prepared to compete successfully in the global economy of the 21^st century, whether they go to college or enter the workforce right out of high school, and will be informed, responsible citizens of a democracy.

The entire reform consists of four components, linked by a compelling logic. To give the public-school system reasonable time to adjust to the changes, the reform is being phased in gradually and will not be completely in effect until the academic year 2006-07. The components are as follows:

• The development of high, content-rich academic standards in grades K-12 (the Standards of Learning, or SOLs, adopted in June 1995 and available to local school divisions to begin implementation thereafter);
• The use of criterion-referenced tests aligned specifically with Virginia's SOLs to measure children's progress in learning the new standards (the SOL tests, field-tested for the first time without score in the spring of 1997 and given for the first time for score in spring 1998, nearly three years after the adoption of the SOLs themselves);
• The linkage of student achievement on the tests to school accreditation and graduation requirements (the Standards of Accreditation, or SOAs, which were adopted in September 1997¹ and which fully phase in the graduation requirements for the high school class of 2004--today's eighth graders--and school accreditation requirements by academic year 2006-07); and
• The reporting to parents and the public individual school performance on a broad range of indicators, from SOL test results to school safety indicia, on the School Performance Report Card (now being issued annually).

This article focuses on the use of the tests for accountability purposes, i.e., for school accreditation. It argues that Virginia's education reform is already working and producing the intended results precisely because the SOL tests have real consequences and that decoupling the tests from consequences for the schools, as some critics want to do, would undermine accountability to the ultimate detriment of Virginia's schoolchildren.

WHY DID VIRGINIA LAUNCH THIS REFORM?

The reasons Virginia began its effort to raise student achievement are essentially two-fold. First, while many of our schoolchildren were doing quite well in our public schools, far too many others were falling through the cracks and were left unprepared for success as adults in our economy and society.

Second, the 21^st century will be characterized by a knowledge-based economy more competitive than ever before in history. Academic achievement levels that may have been sufficient in the past will not be enough in the future. Consequently, all our students, even our previously successful ones, will need higher levels of skills and knowledge to get the good, well-paying jobs that will flow to those countries and states that have the best-educated workforces.

There are some who argue, in effect, "America and Virginia are doing fine economically today, ergo our public schools must be fine also, so just leave the status quo alone." This view ignores the overwhelming evidence that too many of our schoolchildren are clearly not doing OK, and the business community, which is the most responsible for, and knowledgeable about, America's current economic success, is vocal about the need to produce high-school graduates with higher levels of knowledge and skills in order for Virginia and the United States to continue to compete successfully internationally.

The Business Roundtable, U. S. Chamber of Commerce, and National Alliance of Business have even gone so far as to adopt a joint policy stating that their members--who collectively employ more than 34 million people--will consider, when making business location decisions, a state's commitment to achieving high academic standards for all its students, not just a few. Virginia's education reform is what the business community is seeking and will make our state even more attractive for future investment in new facilities and good jobs.

Virginia employers have complained for years about high-school graduates who come to them for entry-level jobs lacking basic academic skills in reading, writing, and math. Test data support both the employers' complaints and our reform's premise that too many of our schoolchildren are not achieving at adequate levels:

• The Literacy Passport Test (LPT) began in the late 1980s and was given to all Virginia sixth graders
• for nearly a decade. Each year, approximately one in three sixth graders failed to pass all three parts of the LPT, which tested the most rudimentary of skills in reading, writing, and math. The failure rate for minority children was even greater. This abysmal failure rate showed no improvement whatsoever for a decade.²
• In 1994 Virginia's students suffered one of the nation's largest declines in reading ability as measured on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), often called the "Nation's Report Card."³
• Throughout the 1990s approximately one in four Virginia public high-school graduates has been unprepared for college-level classes in English or math and has required remedial work. That much of this need for remediation is satisfied in community or less selective four-year colleges does not diminish its significance as evidence of inadequate preparation in basic skills at the K-12 level of too many students.⁴

Let me make something emphatically clear: I do not cite these statistics to engage in gratuitous criticism of the public schools. I am a product of public schools and will always be grateful to my teachers for the quality education that I received in those public schools. I know that any evaluation of the test scores of public-school students must take into account that the public schools, unlike private schools, must accept all students who show up at their doors, regardless of the income or educational levels of the parents or the physical, emotional, or social pathologies that some students may bring with them.

Yet the data clearly show that too many children in our public schools are not achieving at levels necessary for success in a global market economy. It is because the public schools must attempt to educate all children, because the role of the public schools is so important to our future social and economic success as a commonwealth, that we must insist upon a higherand broaderlevel of achievement among our students.

That is where the SOL tests come in.

RESULTS COUNT, TOO

It is the third component of our education reform, tying test results to accreditation, that has drawn the most criticism. Critics often say, "It is unfair to base a school's accreditation solely on test scores."

That is not an accurate description of what Virginia is doing. When the current Standards of Accreditation were adopted, the Virginia Board of Education required that many other criteria be met in addition to test scores for a school to be accredited, e.g., minimum staff-student ratios, instructional program and course offering requirements, and physical-facility and safety requirements. To the many requirements for certain inputs, however, the board added an important requirement for certain outputs in the form of student achievement on the SOL tests.

What the board did was simply recognize a truth. For decades students have effectively been held accountable for their achievement or lack of achievement in our public schools. If students failed to get a good education in our public schools, it was students who paid the price in their lack of preparation to succeed in college or lack of skills to get good jobs in the economy. The new SOAs introduced a revolutionary new concept. In addition to students, the public-school system itself would be held accountable for student achievement.

So the real issue at the very heart of this debate is this: notwithstanding the many other criteria that are already required for school accreditation, should actual student achievement, verified independently, also be a requirement for school accreditation?

Frankly, much of the criticism of our linkage of school accreditation to student achievement on the SOL tests boils down to a complaint not that student achievement is the only requirement for accreditation, but that it is a requirement at all. Some critics fundamentally believe it is wrong to evaluate schools on whether their students are actually achieving. I respect their position, but those of us who support Virginia's reform believe, on the contrary, that student achievement is the most important element of school evaluation.

Furthermore, it is precisely because it is an accreditation requirement that Virginia's education reform is already working. To repeal or dilute this requirement, to decouple accreditation from student achieve- ment, would effectively gut Virginia's education reform and do a gross disservice to our schoolchildren.

NEW FOCUS ON STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT

Our standards-and-accountability-based reform is clearly working. I say this not only because we have seen substantial improvement across the board in student achievement levels on the SOL tests this year (including in many schools with high percentages of minority and socioeconomically disadvantaged children who, many have said, cannot be held to high expectations), but for other, broader, reasons.

Anyone who has talked to numerous parents and educators from around Virginiaor followed closely the extensive media coverage of this issuemust acknowledge that the public schools of Virginia are now focused on student instruction and achievement as never before in recent memory.

Even many critics of our reform admit this phenomenon. Typical was the comment I received from a public-school educator from Spotsylvania County who, while still skeptical about the SOL reform, conceded that in his 25 years as a Virginia public-school educator he had never seen so much time and effort being spent on student instruction and academic achievement. I have heard similar comments from other educators across Virginia.

Because the SOAs eventually require a 70 percent pass rate on the SOL tests in the core academic disciplines to achieve full accreditation,⁵ the schools must focus on raising achievement for the broadest possible range of children. This includes those who, before the new SOAs went into effect, were too often ignored and given social promotions from one grade level to the next until they were finally handed a diploma they could barely read and sent out into the world unprepared to hold down a good job or to function successfully in our society.

Numerous newspaper stories around Virginia have detailed creative and innovative programs developed by educators in our public schools that are focused on helping children raise their achievement levels. Summer-school en- rollment this past summer reached an all-time high, driven by the need to provide remedial help to children who did not do well on the SOL tests.

Importantly, widespread evidence exists that schools are increasing classroom time for slow learners in the SOL academic areas, especially in reading, which is essential to success in all other academic areas. Coupled with the Early Reading Initiative, begun in 1997, we are already seeing tangible, encouraging signs of success in raising our students' reading-skills levels. For example, when our students took the NAEP reading test last year, they reversed the large decline suffered by our schoolchildren four years earlier, instead posting one of the nation's most significant increases in reading scores.⁶

Can anyone seriously contend that this dramatically increased emphasis on student achievement would be taking place absent the SOL tests and their consequences? Of course not, and this illustrates why what is more important about the SOL tests is not whether they are multiple choice or some other format, whether they have more items or fewer, but the fact that they count, that they have real, not sham, consequences. Therefore, raising achievement for the broadest possible range of students must be a primary objective of schools.

Because the SOL tests are graded independently, they expose such practices as grade inflation and social promotion. There is obviously a role for other types of tests, but for accountability to work honestly and accurately, the assessments used for accountability must not be vulnerable to manipulation.

Last fall, members of the Virginia Board of Education came under substantial criticism on the grounds that we did not set the passing cutoff scores on the SOL tests high enough. We were accused of failing to raise standards. While that criticism was from a different end of the ideological spectrum than that occupied by those who now say the SOL tests are too hard or too demanding, the same answer applies to both camps of critics. Within reasonable parameters of rigor and methodology, it is the fact that the tests have consequences and student achievement must be taken seriously that is more important than many of the details.

Some critics say the SOL tests will not raise student achievement. Used alone, of course not, no one contends they will. It is the vastly increased emphasis by the schools on instruction and learning that the SOL tests plus accountability for results have produced that will raise achievement levels across the board, including for many of those children who are capable of achieving but who have previously been written off as incapable because of their demographic or socioeconomic characteristics.

Conversely, to decouple the SOL tests from the consequences linked to them would diminish, if not destroy, the powerful incentive now driving the schools to increased focus on student academic achievement for the broadest possible range of students.

MAKING THE SOL TESTS AS FAIR AND EFFECTIVE AS POSSIBLE

We recognize that the SOL tests should be as fair and effective as we can possibly make them. We have gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure that our SOL tests are correlated with the material actually being taught in Virginia classrooms. Rather than automatically accept the test items prepared by the test contractor, Harcourt Brace Educational Measurement, we subject all proposed test items to a rigorous screening process in which Virginia classroom teachers play the largest role. Through content-review committees dominated by public-school educators and bias- review committees that include groups such as the NAACP, all proposed test items are screened for correlation with the SOLs, age and reading-level appropriateness, and material importance (we do not want to test the obscure or trivial) and to remove any real or perceived ethnic or gender bias. These committees have the authority to eliminate proposed test items, and they do so frequently.

This past summer, board president Kirk Schroder also appointed an advisory committee on the SOL tests that is co-chaired by Henrico County Schools superintendent Mark Edwards and board member Jennifer Byler. This advisory committee's diverse membership includes several public-school educators, prominent business and community leaders, and both Democratic and Republican state legislators. The charge to this committee is to advise the board on ways to improve the SOL testing program, to help us make it as fair and effective as we possibly can. Our goal on the board is continuous improvement of the testing program.

We also recognized that the biggest challenge in designing fair and effective tests lay in the area of history. Many of the history SOLs themselves call for analysis and critical reasoning, as they should. History should not be taught as rote memorization, and we do not want to test history as "trivial pursuit." That is why earlier this year we worked with local curriculum directors and college history professors from across Virginia to produce a teachers resource guide in the history SOLs that emphasizes the understanding and critical analysis of historical facts placed in broader context. We want the tests to reflect the richness of the SOLs themselves, and we will continue to work toward that end.

Some have said that our approach encourages "teaching to the test," that teachers will just emphasize test-taking skills, not content. This criticism is baseless. A child cannot do well on the SOL reading tests unless he or she is a proficient reader, cannot do well on the math tests unless he or she is proficient in math, cannot do well on the science tests unless he or she has learned the classroom science material. There is one test-taking skill, however, that does help children do well on all the SOL tests, regardless of subject area: the ability to read and write the English language. That is a test-taking skill that will benefit each and every child immeasurably.

A BETTER EDUCATION FOR A BETTER FUTURE

Much of the angst of the past year was the understandable byproduct of a transition from a system of inconsistent, often low, standards to one of uniformly high standards with accountability for results. That transition, while not complete, is far more advanced now than it was even a year ago. Throughout Virginia, local superintendents have been showing strong leadership in implementing this reform and embracing accountability for student achievement. There are now numerous individual success stories in schools that some would say could never be successful because of socioeconomic factors. In each case, a strong principal and teachers committed to academic achievement led the way.

While the guiding vision of this reform is to raise student achievement, one of the important, salutary effects of this reform's ultimate success will be to increase significantly the credibility and stature of the public- school system itself.

For nearly two centuries, our public schools have been the primary engine of opportunity for the vast majority of children. They have offered children not born into wealth or privilege the tools to fulfill the traditional American parents' dream that their children shall have better lives than they did. That is what this reform is all about: ensuring that all our public schoolchildren get the opportunity for a better future by giving them the skills and knowledge they need to be successful in a global economy and to be informed, responsible citizens of our commonwealth. Fulfilling that vision will be good for our public schoolchildren and good for our public schools.

ENDNOTES
¹ 8 Virginia Administrative Code 20-131-10 et seq.
² Outcome Accountability Project, 1998 Virginia Summary Report. Virginia Department of Education, 1999.
³ National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 1994 Reading State Report for Virginia. National Center for Education Statistics. U.S. Department of Education, 1995.
⁴ Fall Admissions File Summary Data. Published since 1989 by the State Council of Higher Education (SCHEV). Report prepared by director of institutional research, SCHEV.
⁵ The SOL tests are given in grades 3, 5, and 8 and at the end of high-school courses in English, math, science, history, and social studies (geography, civics, economics). The required pass rates in third-grade science and history are 50 percent.
⁶ National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 1998 Reading State Report for Virginia, National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. Department of Education, 1999.

Mark Christie, an attorney in Richmond with the firm of Williams, Mullen, Clark & Dobbins, has been a member of the Virginia Board of Education since 1997. In the early 1990s he participated in two major initiatives to study and reform the Richmond public schools, one sponsored by Richmond City Council and the other by Richmond Renaissance, a public- private partnership of community and business leaders. From 1996 to 1998 he was the chief counsel and director of policy for Governor George Allen and was heavily involved in the development of K-12 education policy.