See below for video from Fairfax County School Board Chair Karl Frisch, responding to Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s press conference last week about SOL data “before the information was shared with school divisions.” According to Frisch, the information was NOT presented by Youngkin in a fair way.
“Now, a person who’s actually looking out for public education, their first thought would not be how do I put this into a slide in a press conference before I even tell the school division about these numbers. Their first thought would be, well, that’s an outlier, I wonder why that is, and then they’d dig, and they’d see the tiny number of students who take the SOL exams in those subjects in Fairfax County. And then they’d wonder, well, where’s everybody else, what are they taking? And they’d see that, oh, they’re taking the approved alternative assessments that are approved by my very own Department of Education. That’s some of the context that might appear in a press conference if there’s actually a care to partner with school divisions to see students improve. And that would be the charitable way of describing it…What they wanted was not accuracy, they wanted their headlines, and they got their headlines about Fairfax County Public Schools – misleading and confusing a lot of people, disrespecting our hard-working educators and the students that they teach…One thing we teach kids to do in our schools is admit when they were wrong; it is the very least we can expect from the Chief Executive of the Commonwealth of Virginia…So we’re being penalized by [Youngkin] for allowing our students to take a college-level exam instead of an outdated SOL exam. Wonderful. It’s good to know what side he’s on.”
‘At last night’s board meeting, we discussed annual pass rate data for student SOL assessments. As I noted, I was dismayed when the Governor held a press conference last week about the data before giving it to local school divisions. It was especially troubling that he misrepresented our writing and history/social science scores and ignored the fact that we continue to lead the Commonwealth in math, science, and reading.
As the Superintendent mentioned last night, the latest SOL data shows Fairfax County improved in math and science and held steady in reading, outperforming Virginia as a whole in all subjects. Our math pass rates increased even while more students took accelerated math courses (6.8% increase in 5th graders taking Advanced Math and 9.5% increase in 8th graders taking Algebra I or higher).
In addition to the SOL data, Superintendent Reid also noted that Fairfax students succeed at a rate of over 90% in writing and history/social science when considering all state-approved exams, which include AP and IB (writing & history), WorkKeys (writing), and State performance tasks (history). Not only that, the number of AP tests taken went up by 6,275, and the percentage of tests passed also increased.”
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