Get the lead out

Imagine you live in a small, fictional country. Your government cares about health and the environment, and it's recently issued new regulations about lead contamination. 

Lead, as you likely know, can cause all kinds of human health problems--from headaches to high blood pressure, memory problems, and miscarriage. In young children, lead poisoning causes developmental delays, learning difficulties, seizure, and more.

So, your government is going to require every neighborhood and community to reduce the level of lead in the water, in the soil, in buildings and in the air. Lead levels will be measured through a variety of tests, starting this year, and in 12 months each neighborhood and community will be publicly rated on how much lead is present. Communities will the highest lead levels will have to enter into a special agreement with the government and cede local control of environmental services, waste management, water treatment, and parks.

What kind of tests will the government use? Well, they haven't developed all of them yet. But by this time next year, they'll be in force and your rating will be published. 

What kinds of funding or assistance will the government provide to help communities reduce lead pollution? Well, they haven't worked that part out yet.

If your community loses some of its local control, what exactly will that mean and how long will it last? Well, the special agreements haven't been drafted yet.

But you'd better get started with that clean up, because it's going into effect one year from now.

Maybe you live in a wealthy neighborhood. Individually and collectively, you can pay for companies to come in and work on the problem. You don't want your neighborhood to earn a failing grade, right? What would that do to home values?

But maybe you live in a neighborhood that's less well-to-do. The houses are older and smaller, and many likely still contain lead-based paint. You live closer to the municipal waste incinerator, which for many years contaminated the soil, air, and water nearby.  You're going to start with more lead pollution, and your neighborhood has less money to fund its own clean up effort.

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​Of course you don't live in a small, fictional country, and nobody is testing your yard or your blood for lead levels. But something very similar is happening in the state of Virginia to our public schools.

Recently, the Virginia Board of Education approved a new School Performance and Support Framework to evaluate how well schools are meeting academic expectations. The new Framework replaces the current accreditation system, which critics have charged is not rigorous or transparent enough.  The Framework will  rate each school as Distinguished, On Track, Off Track, or Needs Intensive Support. The Department of Education will publish these ratings next fall. School divisions with a certain percentage of schools rated "Needs Intensive Support" will be required to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the state. 

Whether or not you believe we need a more rigorous accountability system, you've got to admit (I hope) that we need one that's fully built. 

What assessments will the state use to gauge academic performance? Well, some of them exist today but some of them haven't been created yet. Even the most familiar, the Standards of Learning, will be changing this year as new standards for Math and English Language Arts have rolled out. (It's worth noting that Virginia is introducing the new math standards and the new math SOL test in the same school year; normally, teachers get a year to familiarize themselves with the new standards and the related test rolls in the following year.) 

What funding and resources will the state be providing to schools that are rated Off Track or Needs Improvement? We don't know yet.

What will the Department of Education put in the MOU it will require for the lowest performing schools and districts? No one has seen it yet. 

It's a little like not knowing if you're actually going to earn your college degree because the university hasn't figured out its degree requirements--even though you're starting your senior year and you have less than 12 months before you're supposed to graduate. 

Or like the lead testing in my imaginary country. Similar to the less affluent neighborhoods in my example, there are schools and school divisions in the Commonwealth that will be disproportionately affected by the new academic accountability system. 

Under the new system, students who are English Learners will "count" towards a school's overall accountability rating after just three semesters. Federal law requires that school divisions test all EL students after three semesters, but until now in Virginia we've used those tests to check for growth of content knowledge, not mastery of the content. After just three semesters, an EL student's science SOL score may say more about the student's understanding of English than their understanding of the science content being assessed. For this reason, many states that count EL scores after three semesters will test students in their native language; Virginia does not allow this.*

In APS, 27% of our students are English Learners. The state average is 9%. In several of our schools, EL students comprise 50% or more of the student body (Carlin Springs and Randolph are highest at 75% and 59% respectively). What will those schools' ratings look like when compared to schools like Jamestown (2% EL) or Discovery (4% EL)?  EL students and families are also often economically disadvantaged. The extra support that more affluent families tap into, like private tutoring, disability screening, occupational and speech therapies, and more, are beyond the reach of many immigrant families, which exacerbates the gaps across and within school communities.

In Arlington, most of our school funding is locally generated, with the state kicking in just 14% of the school division's revenue. In other, less affluent counties in the Commonwealth, the state contributes two-thirds or more of the school division's operating funds. 

I imagine that if the state does not appropriate additional, dedicated funds to support schools labelled Off Track or Needs Intensive Support, school divisions like Arlington will figure out another way to finance the extra staff and resources we'd need for these schools. But what if you are Lee County in Southwest Virginia, and 70% of your education funding comes from the state? Or the City of Petersburg, which is 63% funded by the state? (It's worth noting that Petersburg schools have been operating under an MOU with the Virginia Department of Education since 2004. The state's involvement for 20 years has not yielded significant improvement.) 

I'm all for accountability (just like I'm all for lead-free neighborhoods). There are parts of the new school accountability framework that I believe could be beneficial. And in our country, state, and community, we do need to act with greater urgency to close chronic opportunity and achievement gaps that can have lifelong consequences for English Learners, students with disabilities, and our Black and Brown students. 

But "getting the lead out", if the solution is not crafted with care, is in a best-case scenario blundering and ineffective. In the worst case, it will do real damage to those we had ultimately set out to serve.



*The issue of when and how to test English Learners on subject area content knowledge is complex, and (at least in my study of it) does not lend itself to blanket guidelines that dictate how "all" EL students should be assessed. Variables include the language in which instruction was delivered; whether a student is fully literate in their native language, which is not the case for many students whose formal education was limited or interrupted before coming to the US; a student's English language proficiency (e.g., are they at WIDA Level 1 or WIDA Level 3?); and more. It's also not clear to me that a blanket "number of semesters" rule makes sense. Three semesters may well be too soon for some EL students' scores to "count" as a measure of how well a school is equipping students with content knowledge. Eleven semesters (or five and a half years) feels to me like it would be too long in many cases.

I note in WestEd's 2019 independent evaluation of APS's English Learner program that a large percentage (44%) of middle school English Learners had been classified as English Learners for five or more years, and a large percentage (40%) had been English Learners since Kindergarten. Since that time, of course, APS has made significant changes and investments in English Learner instruction as part of its 2019 settlement agreement with the Department of Justice. 
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