Education Legacy: Schools Must Improve Under McDonnell . . .

ARLINGTON Bob McDonnell faces a daunting workload as Virginia's 71st governor. The budget crisis and transportation are headliners, but Virginia faces other serious challenges. A key one is im proving our schools. While Virginia has public schools that are as good as any in the world, we also have too many not giving all students the education they need to succeed in life and work or to keep the commonwealth economically competitive in a globalized economy.

Conversations about education in Virginia turn on the 98 percent of public schools currently "accredited." Too rarely does anyone ask what that label means. In general, to be accredited a school must have roughly 7 in 10 students passing the state's Standards of Learning tests (SOLs) and in a few years high schools must graduate a certain percentage of students as well.

Considering the importance of education, 7 in 10 is a low bar. But even passing scores do not always equal success. The scores a student must achieve to pass the SOLs often do not indicate preparation for post-secondary opportunities in college, the military, or the trades. This is why Virginia's performance on the SOLs does not track performance on other measures like the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Perhaps most importantly, school performance is judged only by average scores so schools can be accredited even if many minority or poor students fail the SOLs. In fact, if Virginia were to make accreditation conditional on performance broken out by race and income, the percentage of accredited schools would fall.

Unfortunately, it is easier to blame poor performance on poverty or parents than to address the role of schools. And too often we confuse supporting the pubic schools with playing down bad news or creating measures that distort true performance.

Given the stakes, our commonwealth simply must do better and aim higher.

Virginia faces a school funding problem that will be difficult to address in the next several years, but there are other reform measures a governor can take without busting the budget. Mark Warner, for example, successfully used low-cost executive actions to improve schools. Education is also an issue where the governor-elect could demonstrate a commitment to bipartisanship. His common ground with President Obama on charter schools illustrates how education policy can transcend partisanship.

Here are four issues demanding attention:

• Make accreditation a truly meaningful measure. Virginia should hold schools accountable for educating all students, regardless of race or income. At the same time, Virginia should ensure that passing an SOL test really means something and we are not, as Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently put it, "lying to parents and children" about educational performance.

• Collect better data on education outcomes. Virginia is largely flying blind about how effective our teachers, teacher preparation programs, and various initiatives are despite the billions we invest in them. By making some basic changes to our state education data systems -- for instance, linking teacher and student records together -- we could have the data we need to better understand and improve performance.

• Fix the schools in Petersburg. Acute educational problems there have been allowed to persist for too long. Under Virginia law a "takeover" of the Petersburg schools is not an option. But as the civil rights group JustChildren repeatedly notes, the lack of a takeover option has turned into an excuse for doing too little. Improving schools in Petersburg is a question of will and leadership, not technical know-how.

• Make public charter schools a real option in Virginia. In states similar to and different from Virginia, charter schools are introducing choice, customization, and competition into public education -- and producing better outcomes for underserved students. As education analyst Erin Dillon noted on this page in July, Virginia is ambitious about providing choice to affluent students, but when the conversation turns to disadvantaged students suddenly the obstacles become insurmountable.

The governor-elect can change that and bring more federal education dollars into Virginia. In Albemarle County, Superintendent Pam Moran is using chartering to improve the schools, and in Arlington, parents used to sleep on the sidewalks waiting in line for that county's choice options. There is demand and need for more public options in Virginia.

Too often in education we prefer what Martin Luther King would have called "a negative peace," or the absence of tension, to the disruptive work of dramatically improving our schools to serve all students better. So there will not be a shortage of people telling the governor-elect why ambitious reforms are a bad idea, too disruptive to the system, or not needed.

His challenge is to communicate the reasons why we must improve our schools and lead Virginia to do it. Whether we voted for him or not, we should support that effort.
Andrew J. Rotherham, co-founder and publisher of Education Sector, a national education policy think tank, is on the board of directors of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia. Contact him at .