While Virginia’s economy continues to grow and garner accolades such as the 2019 CNBC Best State to Do Business, threats to Virginia’s prosperity loom. Each year more and more proposals are introduced to meddle in the employer-employee relationship, mandate additional employee benefits, and increase the cost of doing business in the Commonwealth. To address these...
Senator Mark Obenshain and Delegate Rob Bell have proposed a Virginia constitutional amendment permitting the State Board of Education to authorize public charter schools. If passed this year by the General Assembly, it goes to the voters for approval in November. Because charter schools are relatively unknown in Virginia, it’s important...
1/9/2011 – Local school boards are understandably drooling over the possibility of getting out from under the poorly-devised accountability rules of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). That federal system has annually moved the “finish line” of educational success further and further down the field until, this year, 342 Virginia schools...
A part of Governor Bob McDonnell’s trio of education improvement laws this year was the establishment of procedures for local school boards to contract for virtual school programs -opportunities for students to work with their curriculum and teachers over the Internet, rather than in a traditional classroom. But the vast majority...
12/15/2011 – Shortly after I was elected to the Fairfax County School Board in 1995, a gentleman rose at a school budget meeting to ask, “Can’t we charge these kids for their textbooks?” The legal answer was, “No, not without losing all your state aid.” The larger answer, however, dealt with...
One of the hottest topics in education today is the growth of online learning or virtual schools. Today there are more than a million enrollments in K-12 online courses nationwide … and more than 200,000 of these are full-time students in full-time online schools. The ability to learn is no longer...
Judging from the platforms of both gubernatorial candidates, Virginia’s Standards of Learning exams may be in for a tougher time next year. Both Ken Cuccinelli and Terry McAuliffe have called for a commission to review and revise the SOLs and SOL exams, even though the Standards are regularly benchmarked against the...
“The research shows that kids who have two, three, four strong teachers in a row will eventually excel, no matter what their background, while kids who have even two weak teachers in a row will never recover.” ■ Kati Hancock, President, The Education Trust From President Obama to the conservative-leaning...
I still have my notes from nine years ago. Speaking at a dinner meeting hosted by the Thomas Jefferson Institute, then-Virginia School Board President Mark Christie argued that “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) was doomed to failure. “No Child Left Behind requires that 100 percent – every student – meet a...
A wise boss once told me: “Be careful of what you ask for. You might get it.” In the ongoing discussions over Virginia’s Standards of Learning exams, advocates of SOL reform may want to keep that adage in mind. Those who argue that, without exception, Virginia’s Standards of Learning program...
