The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) rolled out a new way to grade public school quality across the Common-wealth this year, and Albemarle’s results are a mixed bag. Of the county’s 24 schools, one-third were ranked as “Distinguished” (the highest category) while 20% were “Off Track” (the second-to-worst) under the new rating system. Western district schools topped the list with five—WAHS, Brownsville, Murray, Ivy, and Henley—in the Distinguished category and the sixth (Crozet Elementary) just four-tenths of a point away in the “On Track” group.
The state’s newly unveiled Performance and Support Framework for schools replaces a long-standing set of limited accreditation ratings that provided an opaque and uninformative appraisal of each school’s performance. In 2024, nearly 85% of Virginia schools were rated as “accredited,” while the rest received years of “conditional accreditation” and waivers. No school in the state had been denied accreditation since 2018, and in Albemarle none had been denied since 2016, despite the county having several schools that had sub-50% pass rates on reading and math assessments.
The VDOE aimed to make school performance ratings more transparent and helpful for families and better positioned to steer state funding toward schools that need it. Whereas the old system counted students as “passing” their Standards of Learning (SOL) tests even if they failed but did better than the prior year, the new framework weights every student outcome in its “mastery index” and adds measures of growth based on past performance and readiness for their next stage.
In a brief presentation at the October 9 School Board meeting, Assistant Superintendent for Strategy Patrick McLaughlin unveiled the new ratings and the four new performance categories that schools can be rated as—Distinguished, On Track, Off Track, or Needs Intensive Support. See the nearby graph for how each Albemarle school fared.
Pieces of the Puzzle
To rate a school, the framework looks at several factors and awards points for things like SOL proficiency rates, how well students grow in their learning each year, and their readiness to move on to the next stage of their education or life. It uses a points-based weighted Mastery index for students’ SOL pass rates in math, reading, science, and English language learning. Schools receive extra credit for students who score above proficient and partial credit for those who are not at grade-level standards, so every student’s performance is accurately accounted for…