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ast week a reasoned and J—icomprehensive report on school Standards of Accreditation (SOA) was issued by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, a conservative think tank in Springfield. The author, David Wheat, is a Senior Fellow at the Institute, and served on the Governor’s Commission on Champion Schools and was an assistant to President Ronald Reagan.
On Feb. 7, reacting to Mr. Wheat’s report, Kirk Schroder, the president of Virginia Board of Education, indicated that he was open to changing a rule that requires every public school to achieve a 70 percent student pass rate on state exams by 2007 or lose the school’s accreditation. If you remember the last school board election, this was presented as an overarching issue which resulted in significant changes in the make-up of our local school board.
Mr. Wheat points out that in 1999, only 6.5 percent of Virginia schools met the SOA requirement, up from 2.2 percent in 1998. Further, 66 percent of these meager pass
96.6%