How do different Virginia school systems rate across the board? School administrators will cherry pick the results that reflect the best on them, critics the results that look the worst. One reader, who asks to remain unidentified, decided to combine the Standards of Learning pass rates for all grades and subject categories, removing a handful, like geography, which was not uniformly reported. The result is a composite grade/subject score with a perfect score of 3,300.
The top 10 and bottom 10 school systems appear above.
If you’re looking for good, solid schools, your best bet may be the Roanoke Valley, where Roanoke County scores second in the state, Botetourt scores fifth and the City of Salem scores tenth. The City of Roanoke takes the 95th spot, but that’s one of the best among Virginia’s urban-core school systems.
Not surprisingly, the tally shows a wide disparity between school systems. You can get a sense of the performance distribution from this scatter chart. (Sorry, I couldn’t include school system names; the chart would have been illegible.) For details download this spreadsheet.
The data is interesting but there is one important that that it does not do: It doesn’t adjust for students’ socio-economic background or the educational level of their parents, critical variables in affecting outcomes. Thus, the data says as much about the demographics of a school system as the competence of its teachers and administrators. In an ideal world, there would be some way to measure “educational value added” so we could determine whether educators were doing a good job or not.
— JAB