Virginia’s Sub-standard Standards

I applaud your efforts to alert the public to the fact that Virginia's efforts to close the gap in academic achievement are unambitious to say the least. Unfortunately, it is worse than what you wrote. The reason has to do with the fact that percentages are not the natural unit of analysis for questions like this and that solely looking at the percentage of people above a certain threshold on a test can produce some very counter-intuitive results. The unit of analysis should be the standardized scores of the tests, not the percentage of students passing the test. For example, to move a whole population from a 50% passing rate to a 60% passing rate requires an improvement of only about 0.25 standard deviations (assuming the distribution of test scores are approximately normal). To move a whole population from an 85% passing rate to a 95% passing rate requires a much bigger improvement (0.61 standard deviations). Thus, the same amount of improvement in passing rates is not directly related to the underlying improvement in academic proficiency. Applying this reasoning to the numbers given in your article, moving the white Virginian students from a 68% passing rate to a 78% passing rate requires an improvement of 0.304 standard deviations. Moving the black Virginian students from a 45% passing rate to a 57% passing rate requires an improvement of 0.302 standard deviations. Now, the difference between 0.304 and 0.302 standard deviations is negligible, probably just rounding error. Nevertheless, it means that the goals for black students are such that they will improve at the same rate as white students improve. There is thus no goal for closing the gap.