Virginia’s governor on Thursday unveiled a plan to help students struggling with pandemic-related learning loss as the state education department released results from the state’s Standards of Learning.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s ALL IN VA plan calls for an “intensive statewide tutoring initiative” that would provide students with three to five hours of weekly tutoring. The tutoring would be for 18 weeks for students who received a score of low proficient on their 2023 SOLs and 36 weeks for those who are not proficient.
Reading specialists for grades four through eight will be hired, under the governor’s plan, through an accelerated expansion of the Virginia Literacy Act. And a task force will be formed to help figure out how to reduce chronic absenteeism.
Watch the governor’s news conference:
Statewide, 69 percent of students passed the math SOL exam and 73 percent passed the reading exam. That compares with 66 percent passing the math test last year. Last year, 73 percent also passed the reading portion.
According to a Virginia Department of Education news release about the test scores, more than half of third through eighth graders “either failed or are at risk of failing their reading SOL exam, and nearly two-thirds of third to eighth graders either failed, or are at risk of failing, their math SOL exam.”
“Grade three through eight Virginia students are still struggling to recover the learning loss from the pandemic and are not performing as well as their pre-pandemic peers,” said Virginia’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Lisa Coons.
In reading, the department said Hispanic and Black third through eighth grade students “experienced the most significant declines in reading performance from 2018–2019 to 2022–2023, with an 8 percent and 7 percent decline respectively.”
Both groups saw a 20 percent decline in math scores over the same period.
According to the state, chronic absenteeism (missing more than 18 days a year), doubled from 2018–2019. The education department said students who were chronically absent had lower test scores. The scores turned out to be 25 percent lower in math for those missing school than their peers who came to class. Reading scores for the chronically absent were 18 percent lower.
Under the governor’s plan to help students recover from learning loss, schools would use $418 million allocated by the Virginia General Assembly. Of that money, 70 percent would go toward tutoring, 20 percent to literacy efforts, and 10 percent to responding to chronic absenteeism.
Feature image, stock.adobe.com
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