Virginia Lt. Governor Winsome Earle-Sears on Tuesday renewed her call for school choice after Virginia’s Advanced Placement ranking dropped.
According to the College Board’s latest report on AP performance, Virginia graduates qualifying for college credit on at least one AP exam during their high school careers dipped from 9th to 11th ranking. The commonwealth tied for ninth in the nation in AP performance in last year’s College Board report and ranked third in 2015.
In addition, Earle-Sears echoed Virginia's Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera call for higher standards for students, telling ABC 7 News that the report is "disheartening."
"This is very disheartening information, and for me and as well for parents, but when you think about it from the student’s perspective, it's devastating," Earle-Sears said. "When I was on the school board, we had much higher standards and you see what happens when you lower the standards. And these are children's lives. These lowered standards happened of course during the previous administration.
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"But I want to talk to parents directly and say, there's a tug of war for your children, and you've got to win that war. And that means we've got to have school boards that you agree with - who agree with your idea on how to educate your children," she added. "We're hearing parents just want the basics: reading, writing, arithmetic, science, technology, and they're not getting that. Their children aren't getting this. Parents are telling us that they want school choice, They want something different."
Earlier this year, the lieutenant governor issued a press release calling on the general assembly to provide more educational choices for parents and young people in the state.
Earle-Sears pushed for a school choice bill that would allow parents to use state education funding to cover the costs of educational opportunities outside the public school system, a move that has failed in the state legislature this year.
However, red-state governors across the country have passed universal school choice legislation, igniting what experts call a "revolution."
Most recently, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, R., signed universal school choice into law, joining several other Republican governors. The school choice movement has achieved several significant victories in pushing universal school choice legislation, which did not exist anywhere in the country a year ago. As of now, six states passed universal school choice, including Utah, Iowa, Arizona, West Virginia, and Arkansas.
School choice became a salient issue after the COVID-19-induced lockdowns sparked a conversation on the scope of the government’s authority and the type of content that should be taught to children from public school curricula.
