In Virginia, Newly Elected Governor Inherits School Improvement Push

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Democrats’ romp in last week’s Virginia elections offered an almost complete redemption of their poor performance four years ago.

In that race, Republican Glenn Youngkin upset national expectations to seize the governorship, with a raft of GOP challengers riding his coattails to both statewide office and a new majority in the House of Delegates. Their victories were powered by growing discontentment with then-President Biden, but also backlash to local education moves ranging from COVID-era school closures to proposed limitations on gifted education.

Those results, among the first signs of the tumult that would come to define the Biden era, were flipped this time around. Virginia Democrats racked up commanding margins up and down the ballot, with U.S.

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Rep Abigail Spanberger’s gubernatorial win accompanied by a 13-seat swing in the legislature. The part of unpopular incumbent president was played by Donald Trump, whose sagging approval in the state helped sink Republican candidates.

What’s not certain is whether Spanberger and her party have won back public trust on the issue of K–12 schools — or whether they intend to roll back portions of the far-reaching education agenda enacted during Youngkin’s time in office. The outgoing governor has shepherded the adoption of a new school accountability system, raised cut scores for proficiency on federally mandated exams, and revamped the state’s academic standards in history, math, English, and computer science. Some of his initiatives have won support from across the political aisle, but resistance from some educators and progressives could tempt the ascendant Democrats to reverse others.

One of the most moderate members of the U.S. House, Spanberger struck a cautious tone in laying out her education proposals during the campaign.

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Among the top priorities listed in her 10-page policy plan is a commitment to upholding academic rigor by making student outcomes transparent to families. But with educators already raising objections to shifts in state testing and many Democrats skeptical of the newly implemented accountability framework, she could find herself presiding over a turbulent majority for the next several years.

Andrew Rotherham, a longtime player in Virginia’s policy scene who was appointed by Youngkin to a seat on the state board of education in 2022, said that by piloting a successful recovery from post-pandemic learning loss, Spanberger could find her way to “a national leadership role” in the future, perhaps on her party’s presidential ticket.

“She’s someone who’s looking at 2028,” Rotherham said. “Her national imperatives actually line up pretty well with what’s good for kids, but she’ll be under a lot of political pressure.”

Representatives of Spanberger did not respond to a request for comment.

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Unified control over a blue state will reflect on Democrats nationally as much as Spanberger herself. Beyond tackling school assessment and improvement, the party will have to confront questions that weren’t yet on the agenda the last time it captured the governor’s mansion: how to infuse literacy instruction with lessons from the science of reading, how to counter burgeoning demand for private school choice programs that have been established in other states, and how to decisively reclaim K–12 education as a winning issue for the center-left. Exit polls from CNN showed that Spanberger beat her Republican opponent by just 10 points among voters who listed schools as their most important issue, compared with a yawning 63-point advantage among those listing healthcare and a 27-point edge with economy-focused Virginians

Democratic State Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg, a high school teacher who sits on his chamber’s education committee, applauded legislation passed over the last few years to improve literacy instruction and revamp state testing. The Spanberger administration should aim to carry out those goals and focus on lifting student performance, he added.

“What their priority needs to be, and what our priority needs to be, is continuing the work we’ve done,” he said.

New accountability system

The state of Virginia schools came under national scrutiny early in Youngkin’s tenure, when a series of indicators revealed significant declines in K–12 learning.

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The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress, a nationally representative exam commonly referred to as “the Nation’s Report Card,” showed that fourth-graders in Virginia lost some of the most ground in math and reading of students in any state over the previous three years, even amid a national crash in scores precipitated by the pandemic. An analysis by economists at Harvard and Stanford estimated the learning losses as roughly five months of reading instruction and nearly a full academic year of math instruction. Pass rates on the Standards of Learning assessmentsthe state’s mandated annual exam, also lagged far below pre-pandemic levels.

Although much of the blame for the swoon was attributed to COVID-related school closures, the new administration argued that its origins lay in the dilution of academic expectations under the previous Democratic governor, Ralph Northam. In a report issued at Gov. Youngkin’s request, the state’s department of education argued that slumping student achievement had preceded COVID’s emergence by several years, but was masked by the lowering of cut scores for proficiency on state tests in 2019 and 2021; strikingly, that decision was reached even as most other states around the country were raising their own proficiency bars.

Many state Democrats panned the report, dismissing it as a racist “dog-whistle,” but Youngkin’s campaign to revisit the cut scores and build a new school accreditation system — the existing one gave the vast majority of schools good marks, even as student scores had plummeted — quickly won allies. Todd Truitt, a Democrat and father of two school-aged children in northern Virginia, said the state’s academic standards just a few years ago were “pretty much alone at the bottom.”

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“There was a definite lowering of standards, objectively,” observed Truitt, who has written in favor of much of Youngkin’s K–12 program even while supporting Spanberger and her party this cycle.

After several years of design work, a new accountability framework was adopted in 2024 that made substantial changes to existing regulations, including by reversing a policy that allowed schools to leave the academic performance of English learners out of their state ratings data for over five years. Legislation to delay the new system’s implementation was defeated earlier this year when several Democrats crossed party lines to help kill the measure. In the months leading up to this fall’s elections, the Virginia Board of Education also voted unanimously to significantly raise proficiency cut scores on state exams.

Rotherham said at the March meeting when the vote was held that he and his colleagues intended to “dramatically raise standards in this state and report honestly to parents.”

Sen. VanValkenburg, one of the Democrats who voted against delaying the adoption of the new accountability system, praised local lawmakers for their work on the issue, pointing to a rethink of literacy instruction that passed unanimously in the state legislature in 2022. His own legislation to modernize state tests also attracted widespread support in both parties and became law this spring.

In the past few years, VanValkenburg said, “a lot of movement on education” has been achieved. “Some of it’s been Democratic-led, some of it’s been Republican-led, but a lot of it has been bipartisan.”

The ‘honesty gap’

After the blue wave in last week’s elections, Gov.-elect Spanberger and her allies will have little need of bipartisanship over the next few years.

In addition to winning all the state’s topline races, Democrats stormed to a 28-seat majority in the House of Delegates. Their margin in the 40-member state Senate is still a slim 21-19, but unified control over Richmond will allow the party to take the lead in future debates over schools.

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Spanberger will largely determine the order of operations. Her public roadmap for education policy specifically mentions not just the implementation of tougher school accountability measures, but also changes to state tests “to ensure that parents and educators have the best information possible to improve student performance.”

How her fellow partisans regard those commitments is somewhat hazy: Most Senate Democrats voted to put off enacting the new accreditation system — an idea spearheaded by then-Sen. Ghazala Hashmi, who has since been elected to serve as Spanberger’s lieutenant governor. What’s , leaders in several major districts havepublicly attackedthe new framework as too harsh on public schools.

Yet support for higher standards is considered likely to hold steady. Denise Forte, a nationally known education advocate who leads the civil rights-focused EdTrust, publicly endorsed the system as a means of closing the “honesty gap.” While not offering a firm statement backing the accountability push, Spanberger has said in an interview that “accountability is vital to ensuring that our kids are learning.”

Progressives may instead turn to school finance reform, another of the new governor’s priorities. Democrats in the legislature have spent much of the last two years wrangling with Youngkin over funding for schools, proposing this winter to send nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to local districts to cover the costs of hiring new staff. One of the wealthiest states in the nation, Virginia was recently measured as 33rd overall in per-pupil spending.

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Rotherham said Spanberger would have the opportunity to build her national profile by focusing on updating the state’s school funding formula and remaking the Science of Learning exams to make their results legible to families.

“Politically, she could say, ‘We weren’t there yet, and I took it to the next level.’ That would be a compelling story to tell.”

Disclosure: Andrew Rotherham served on the Virginia Board of Education from 2022 to 2025. He also sits onThe 74’s board of directors.

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He played no role in the reporting or editing of this article.

The 74 contributor Chad Aldeman worked as a consultant on Virginia’s new accountability framework. He played no role in the reporting or editing of this article.

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