Va. third-graders to get a new SOL history test

RICHMOND

Virginia third-graders will be getting a new standardized history test.

After an outcry by some educators and legislators, Virginia Superintendent of Public Instruction Patricia I. Wright last week withdrew a plan to eliminate that Standards of Learning test. The proposal had been intended to reduce the high-stakes testing for schools and young students.

Wright said Thursday that "the issue is dead."

Instead, the state Board of Education voted to authorize development of an updated third-grade history test and to work social science and other core subject content into passages on the third-grade standardized reading test.

Wright said design of the new history test, which will be given online and based on a 2008 update to the standards, will start this summer. Students will continue to take the current history test until the new one is ready in 2011. Ninety-three percent of the students who took the test last year passed.

While Wright she said she supports the state testing regimen, it will be tweaked. "We'll be looking for ways to reduce testing burden on our teachers, administrators and students, but in a way that won't reduce accountability standards."

Board member David L. Johnson of Richmond said no issue had inspired as many e-mails and letters in the past five years than the third-grade history test. But he said he was concerned that many of his correspondents repeated the saying: "If it's not tested, it's not taught."

"These public citizens are led to the assumption that the only test given is the SOL. That is very misleading," he said. "Our teachers are teaching and giving tests all the time. To imply that is not happening is wrong," he said.

Several speakers told the board it's time to look at the entire series of SOL tests.

Alan Seibert, superintendent of Salem City Schools, said the current system, in which students are assessed at the end of the year to determine tactics for the following year, is "the educational equivalent of an autopsy." He said Virginia needs to find a way to measure growth, not just who is passing and failing.

Other speakers thanked the board for hearing their concerns that the history of blacks and Native Americans would get short shrift if the test was eliminated.

The test measures what students learn from kindergarten through third grade, including topics such as Greece, Mali, the Powhatan Indians and the contributions of Americans such as Abraham Lincoln, Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr.

Stephen R. Adkins, chief of the Chickahominy Indian tribe, said: "I believe your action will help ensure that my grandchildren won't have to respond to statements like: 'I didn't know there were any Indians in Virginia.' "

Lauren Roth, (757) 222-5133, lauren.roth@pilotonline.com