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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]
4. State Testing- just get rid of it already. It takes away from the students learning and puts pressure on teachers to only teach towards the test (this is what happens when you tie teacher raises and school funding to test scores). Let’s be honest- rich people care about it because the high test scores affect their property value. We don’t need to be making decisions about public education to benefit some rich people and their property values 
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What a thoughtful post. I agree with your concern, but would like to highlight one contradiction here:

State testing (SOL and VGA) are, for better or worse, the only place where students get at least some feedback that allows them and their parents to see how well they do with respect to their peers. This is because SOL results are publicly posted on the VDoE website and are uniformly administered throughout the state.   This is unlike all other school assignments where the score, in addition to being provided without comments, is also opaque to the point of being meaningless.

I would actually like to see a system where students receive their SOL score as a letter grade, thus providing incentive for students to do well and not just for teachers that their students do well. Teaching to the test, btw, is not a bad thing as long as the test is good ([b]the SOLs are perhaps a bit too watered down, given their express purpose of just testing the very basics[/b]). But let's have students master these basics first, as evidenced by tests, then teachers can stack all the other nice things they want to teach on top.

As a side note, standardized tests will also help [url=https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview/sttf-report.pdf]members of underrepresented groups[/url] proportionally more, thus contributing to the political goals of some.[/quote]

I don't know about their express purpose of just testing the very basics [b]but the SOLs are not watered down and do not test just the very basics.[/b]  They are tests of the standards - doing well means that the student has learned everything they are are supposed to have learned.  The SOLs are not easy, basic tests.  They also go in several-year cycles, for some years parents complain that they are too easy so they are raised up, then parents complain that they are too hard so they are lowered down a bit.  In 2019, we were in a harder phase where the tests had just been made harder.  [/quote]
Unfortunately, this [url=https://honestygap.org/state/virginia/]is not true[/url].

[i]"Virginia receives the “Honesty Challenged” designation for reporting state proficiency rates that exceed NAEP by 34 percentage points in fourth-grade reading and 36 percentage points in eighth-grade math. Moreover, at a time when most states around the country are closing their Honesty Gaps, Virginia’s increased in both subjects."[/i]

This is based on data collected by the federal government, btw, not some fringe group.  Look at the maps provided by the [url=https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/studies/statemappingtool/#/]National Center for Education Statistics[/url]: Virginia is the only state in the US where state proficiency standards are mapped [b]below[/b] what the rest of the nation considers "basic proficiency." Translated, this means that a child who scores a 400 in Virginia's SOL may not even meet "basic proficiency" (the lowest of the federal standards) in other states (true for 4th and 8th grade reading).

If you lower the bar by more than one standard error, your proficiency rates go through the roof - but they are meaningless, of course.
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