Students who showed proficiency in SOLs are failing nationally normed tests. This is why Virginia did not want common core. They knew their students would fail and wanted to appease parents with inflated grading.
https://wtop.com/virginia/2022/05/state-report-blasts-virginias-public-schools/
"A Virginia Department of Education report released Thursday morning slammed the state of the commonwealth’s public schools, saying expectations, standards and academic performance have all been in decline, while the achievement gap among Virginia’s students has grown.
The report, presented Thursday morning by Virginia Superintendent of Public Instruction Jillian Balow and Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera, also says the state has failed to be transparent about academic failings and calls for an expanded say for parents in public education.
The report blames lagging achievement on a series of factors and policy choices that took place over the last decade and were exacerbated by school closures in 2020 and 2021, state officials said on a call with reporters Thursday morning.
“I think there’s a general culture of just lowering of expectations,” Guidera said. “What happened before today is we took our eye off the ball.”
Among its core takeaways, the report states that state Standards of Learning reading test results fell from 2017 to 2019 for grades three through eight, and that 42% of Virginia’s second graders scored below reading benchmarks on PALS assessment (a metric developed by the University of Virginia that’s used in Virginia elementary schools). The report also points to a growing gap between SOL results and national assessment results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, calling the difference an “honesty gap.”
“Only 38% of Virginia’s fourth graders and 33% of eighth graders were proficient in reading on the 2019 NAEP, compared to 75% and 76%, respectively, on the 2019 state fourth- and eighth-grade SOL reading tests,” the report says."