Virginia Education Ranking: A Comprehensive Analysis

Virginia's education system is a subject of ongoing evaluation and discussion. With various metrics and reports offering different perspectives, it's crucial to analyze the available data to understand the state's educational landscape. This article delves into Virginia's education ranking statistics, considering various factors such as student achievement, public school quality, and historical context.

Historical Context and Educational Development

In 1607, English settlers arrived in Virginia and established Jamestown. While the colony prospered on tobacco farming, with indentured servants and enslaved Africans sustaining the economy, its Native American ranks were devastated by a “war of extermination” that reduced their numbers from 20,000 to 3,000. Later, descendants of those settlers started planning their own independence from England.

After the election of President Abraham Lincoln, Virginia became the eighth state to secede from the Union, on April 17, 1861. In the following days, Union Army forces crossed the Potomac River to seize Alexandria, a slave port at the time, to prevent the Confederate Army from having a base so close to Washington.

The surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia that signaled the end of the war was signed at the courthouse in Appomattox on April 9, 1865.

Following the Civil War, Virginia remained generally rural and resisted social changes. The state Legislature enacted a Racial Integrity Act in 1924 barring marriages of “whites” and “coloreds.”

Read also: Virginia Peninsula Budget Guide

Current State of Education in Virginia

Public School Rankings

Virginia has the fourth-best public schools overall in the United States, ranking fourth for quality and third for safety. Virginia public schools were found to have the fourth-highest math test scores in the country. WalletHub ranked each state’s public schools for “Quality” and “Safety” using 33 relevant metrics. Metrics included high school graduation rate among low-income students, math and reading scores, median SAT and ACT scores, pupil-teach ratio, the share of armed students, the number of school shootings between 2000 and June 2020, bullying incidence rate, and more.

Student Achievement and Performance

The latest report also provides the first high resolution picture of where Virginia students’ academic recovery stood in Spring 2024, just before federal relief dollars expired in September. While the National Assessment of Educational Progress described changes in average achievement by state, we combine those scores with district scores on state assessments to describe the change in local communities throughout Virginia.

Virginia was 45th among states (including the District of Columbia) in terms of the size of the 2019-2022 change in math achievement, and 46th in terms of improvement between 2022 and 2024. As a result, Virginia ranked 51st among states in terms of math recovery. Similar to math, Virginia was 46th in the country in terms of the 2019-2022 change in reading. However, Virginia was 14th in the country in terms of its improvement in reading between 2022 -2024. Average student achievement in Virginia remains almost a full grade level below 2019 levels in math (.92 grade equivalents) and three quarters of a grade level below in reading (.72 grade equivalents).

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP, or “The Nation’s Report Card”), 31 percent of Virginia’s students scored at or above the “proficient” level in reading in 2022 (the most recently available data). Or let’s look at math, the subject most affected by the long school closures of the Covid-19 era. According to NAEP, Virginia’s eighth graders’ average scores dropped 8 points from 2019 to 2022. By some estimates, that drop equates to approximately 80 percent of a school year. So yes, Virginia’s students are off track.

Factors Affecting Student Performance

Covid is not in the rearview mirror, at least as far as our children are concerned. Students suffered massive learning loss, and they are still moving backward in terms of student achievement. In the face of these realities, Virginia’s state superintendents believe that we shouldn’t worry because Virginia is ranked number one in the country for business, so how could its education system possibly be bad? That’s a dubious assertion for a rating that only counted education as 5 percent of the total-and is certainly at odds with The Nation’s Report Card.

Grade inflation is already a massive problem in our schools; kids are bringing home As and Bs on their report cards, even if they are one or two grade levels behind in reading and math. Let’s not make the problem worse by extending grade inflation to our school ratings. Let’s follow Governor Youngkin’s lead and tell parents the truth. Our kids are off track. Our schools are off track.

State Initiatives and Policy Changes

Governor Glenn Youngkin is under fire again from Virginia’s education establishment, this time because a new school accountability system his administration is promoting refuses to put lipstick on a pig. This is not sitting well with the powers that be who run Virginia’s local school divisions.

VA is in the process of revising its student performance-level descriptors such that they will include four levels. In anticipation of this change, ECF has adjusted VA’s currently reported reading outcomes to the four-level model in order that our displays of their reading proficiency outcomes will be more comparable to other states.

Broader Educational Attainment in the United States

To provide context for Virginia's educational standing, it's helpful to examine educational attainment across the United States.

National Overview

Overall, 90.3% of Americans over the age of 25 had graduated from high school in 2021, with the highest level found in the state of Massachusetts at 96.1% and the lowest in the state of California at 84.4%. 34.9% of Americans over the age of 25 had educational attainment of having a bachelor's degree or higher in 2019. The state with the highest percentage of people having a bachelor's degree or higher educational attainment was Massachusetts at 50.6%, and the lowest was West Virginia at 24.1%. Advanced Degrees, such as Master's Degrees and Doctorates were held by 16.7% of Americans at least 25 years old in 2019. Advanced Degrees were most common in Massachusetts, with 26.3% of Massachusetts residents holding an advanced degree of any type since 2019 (it is regarded as the best state for Higher Education), and they were least common in Mississippi, with 9.3% of Mississippi residents holding an advanced degree.

KIDS COUNT Data and Child Well-being

The 2020 KIDS COUNT Data Book was released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, an annually published resource that tracks child well-being nationally and state by state and ranks the states accordingly. The report is based on the latest available data for 16 key indicators and also identifies multi-year trends-comparing statistics from 2010 to 2018. For the 2020 report, those data are 2018, so they do not reflect current conditions amidst the COVID-19 crisis.

Overall Virginia ranked 14th in the Nation. Virginia Ranked 11th in Economic Well-Being and improved in 3 out of the 4 indicators since 2010. Virginia Ranked 6th in Education and improved in 2 out of the 4 indicators and remained the same in the other 2 indicators. Virginia Ranked 18th in Family and Community and improved in 2 out of the 4 indicators and remained the same in the other 2 indicators. Virginia Ranked 24th in Health. For this domain Virginia stayed the same for one, improved in one, and worsened for 2 of the 4 indicators. This domain includes new data on childhood obesity that has not been included in previous years.

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