Across the States
Bill Would Expand Assessment Options
It’s time for Virginia homeschoolers
to have more options for year-end
assessments!
Because of a recent surge in local superintendents making unreasonable demands on families regarding their year-end assessments, Home School Legal Defense Association Senior Counsel Christopher Klicka has obtained Delegate Scott Lingamfelter's sponsorship of an HSLDA-drafted bill that creates three new annual assessment options.
In addition to the two currently existing assessment options, House Bill 1183 would add the following three options by which homeschooling parents may satisfy the homeschool statute's annual assessment requirement:
- A letter from a person licensed to teach in any state, or from a person with a master's degree or higher in an academic field, stating that the child is achieving an adequate level of educational growth and progress;
- A portfolio containing a sample of the child's work in math and language arts each quarter that demonstrates the child is achieving an aequate level of annual educational growth and progress;
- A report card or transcript from a college, community college, college distance learning program, or home-education correspondence school.
Additional assessment options will give families more freedom and reduce the potential for conflicts with officials.
Virginia is currently one of the more limited states for assessment options. Parents have only one clear option: submitting standardized test scores.
There are many reasons families may not want to be limited to the standardized-test option. One reason is that standardized test results do not always accurately reflect a child's progress. For example, the 20th percentile could be an excellent score for a particular child, but the law currently considers any score below the 23rd percentile to be failing.
Most states give multiple options for year-end assessments. States as diverse as Colorado, Florida, Maine, Washington, and West Virginia allow for a variety of assessments. In fact, all of the assessment options created by H.B. 1183 are already offered by other states. Adding these options merely puts Virginia more in the mainstream.
Our thanks go to Delegate Lingamfelter for sponsoring a bill that will expand freedom for homeschooling families in Virginia.
As this article goes to print, H.B. 1183 has passed the House by a wide margin and is awaiting action in the Senate.
— by Scott A. Woodruff
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