A view outside at Chesterfield County Public Schools. (Courtesy of Chesterfield County Public Schools)
In a rare moment of bipartisan agreement on education policy, Virginia leaders have enacted sweeping changes to the state’s K-12 testing system, aiming to raise student performance and make the Standards of Learning (SOL) assessments more meaningful.
Despite ongoing political clashes over broader education policy, Gov. Glenn Youngkin and state lawmakers united earlier this month behind a plan they hope will strengthen student outcomes.
One of the ways the legislation aims to improve outcomes is by making the Standards of Learning (SOL) assessments count as 10% of the student’s final grade — a shift from current policy. The legislation will also require the release of more past exams to improve preparation.
“This is a gigantic step forward for Virginia students,” Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, D-Henrico, who believes the changes will offer a clearer and fairer way of evaluating students while creating opportunities to make assessments more rigorous.
“So it’s kind of a win all the way around and will hopefully put us on a better path for better student outcomes across all the different classes,” he said.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Emily Anne Gullickson said in a statement that the bill is a “forward-thinking step in modernizing” the commonwealth’s approach to student assessment and achievement. She also said the bill codifies several reform measures adopted by the House Bill 585 Work Group and supported by the governor to make recommendations for the state assessments.
VanValkenburg successfully introduced the bill creating the work group in 2022.
“By introducing greater flexibility in how schools evaluate student learning, this legislation reinforces Virginia’s commitment to educational innovation,” Gullickson said.
The proposal, carried by Del. Dan Helmer, D-Fairfax, and VanValkenburg, seeks to improve how the SOLs — statewide standardized tests — are administered and used to evaluate what students should know at the end of each grade or course.
Assessment results help determine student performance in core subjects such as mathematics, reading, history and social science.
Last August, data released by the Department of Education showed modest gains in reading and math pass rates for the 2023-24 school year after a period of targeted recovery efforts. But performance in other subjects remained below levels seen during the 2022-23 school year.
The governor’s administration and Democrats have traded blame over the mixed results. Youngkin’s team has faulted decisions made by the previous Boards of Education, while Democrats and former board members have defended such decisions, which included changing accreditation standards and adjusting the threshold for what’s considered proficiency.
VanValkenburg’s original version of the bill failed to pass in the Senate in February. However, Helmer’s version passed with technical changes before securing approval from the General Assembly.
“I think this makes Virginia a leader in delivering a world-class education for families across the commonwealth,” Helmer told The Mercury.
The lawmakers said the legislation will help ensure that the state’s next testing contract improves the quality of the tests and makes them more transparent — including the release of more exams afterwards.
VanValkenburg said having the vendor release additional tests will allow teachers and parents to use them as practice tools. An earlier version of the bill called for all tests to be released, but that proposal fell through during negotiations.
“Our tests have for the last 20 years been very low quality, and the reason they’ve been low quality is because we haven’t wanted to spend money on them, and the quality of the tests clearly need to improve,” VanValkenburg said.
Under the legislation, tests will be administered during the final two weeks of the school year — a change from the current practice of five to six weeks earlier — to allow time for retakes. Because of early test administration, students who pass often miss class time, as teachers focus on helping students who need to retake the tests.
As a result of the change, VanValkenburg said it will eliminate about a month of lost instructional time each school year.
“After the exam, there are high levels of absenteeism as teachers concentrate on test-retake prep for the few kids who failed,” the two lawmakers wrote in The Virginian-Pilot in January. “During that wasted month, little other learning takes place. In effect, students lose a month of education — a year of lost instructional time over a career.”
The legislation also aims to improve transparency by giving parents a better sense of how well their students performed on assessments, shifting the grading scale from 600 points to 100 points.
VanValkenburg said, for example, that parents are far more likely to understand a score of 87 on a biology test than a score of 487.
“Pretty instantaneously, you’ll be able to see what you did well on, and what you did poorly on, and teachers will be able to see that too,” VanValkenburg said. “So as a teacher, you’re going to have more time to teach, your kids are going to have more incentive to do well, and you’re going to get more feedback quicker about what went right and what went wrong on those tests.”
The legislation is set to take effect at the start of the 2026-27 school year.