Not long ago, Albemarle County Public Schools (ACPS) were the envy of Virginia. The district's mission statement at the time was “to establish a community of learners and learning, through relationships, relevance, and rigor, one student at a time.” And, results showed they were doing a good job of it. In 2017, ACPS’s annual State of the Division touted: “The academic achievement of Albemarle County public school students continued to rank among the nation’s best,” citing a national organization that ranked ACPS third in all of Virginia. Since then, the district's performance has plummeted. The same organization that ranked ACPS the state’s third best district in 2017 now ranks it ninth. ACPS has declined in nearly every metric, bottoming out last year with its worst state testing pass rates in decades. 

The steady decline of ACPS has caused flight from its schools. While the county’s population is booming, enrollment in public schools has declined or stayed flat since 2018, as families who can afford to pursue other options are doing just that. Even ACPS's former board chair removed her children from public schools after leaving office. 

Abandoning What Works

The obvious question is: why? How could a school division drop so far so quickly? 

While evidence suggests many possible causes, the simplest explanation is this: we stopped doing what was working. ACPS has all the elements of an outstanding school system: exceptional teachers, employees, and families, along with funding that averages more than $18,000 per student, among the highest in the state. 

Under the leadership of the current superintendent, though, the ACPS administration has dismantled proven education methods that propelled the division to third in the state, and replaced them with practices that are, at best, unsupported, and, in some cases, debunked. The stated objective of the upheaval is a worthy one: to close the achievement gap and help students from disadvantaged demographics. The result has been the opposite: growing the achievement gap and harming the very children the administration intended to help. 

Take for example “unleveling.” For decades, ACPS tailored instruction in core subjects to children's stages of learning, just as is done throughout much of the country. ACPS grouped children at similar stages of learning into the same classes. This allowed teachers to focus their instruction on the stage of learning of the children in their classroom.  The division has now abandoned that approach, and instead forces children across wide stages of learning into the same class. Until recently, for example, Language Arts classes in middle schools had three levels per grade. Under ACPS's plan, those levels are gone. All children in each grade, regardless of their stage of reading, are in the same Language Arts classes. 

When teachers and parents learned of unleveling, many were alarmed. Some teachers called it “disastrous.” How could teachers manage classes of children with such wide ranges of stages of learning? Would they need to “teach to the middle,” harming both advanced and less advanced children? In light of these questions, parents wondered if there might be evidence that the new approach would not cause the harm some expected. Were there studies? Pilot programs?

A Disregard for Evidence

Parents began their inquiries with principals and other school officials, who said they were not aware of any evidence about the effectiveness of unleveling, or harm it could cause. Parents then asked school Board representatives, who likewise said they were not aware of any such evidence, and suggested parents contact the ACPS administration itself.

There, the administration said that they understood the concerns of parents, and that ACPS does have evidence that unleveling would not harm children, citing a 1992 study from The Elementary School Journal. And yet, instead of demonstrating the safety of ending advanced classes, the study, Assigning Average-achieving Eighth Graders to Advanced Mathematics Classes in an Urban Junior High, evidences the effectiveness of the classes. Incredibly, to support their plan to end advanced classes, ACPS relied on a study that shows the value of those classes.

In the absence of any evidence from ACPS, parents researched the issue. While the evidence is sparse (as this summary reflects), studies by researchers like 2021 Nobel Prize winner David Card and others have concluded that advanced classes particularly benefit disadvantaged students, and that unleveling (aka “detracking”) can harm the very children it purports to help. See Does Gifted Education Work? For Which Students?; School Choice and the Distributional Effects of Ability Tracking. The risk of unleveling harming its intended beneficiaries finds support in the few districts that have experimented with it, like New York City and San Francisco, where achievement gaps widened after unleveling. In New York, far fewer Black and Latino children pass entry tests to advanced schools today than they once did, such as Brooklyn Tech. As the NY Times reported:  

To understand this decline involves a trek back through decades of policy choices, as city officials, pushed by an anti-tracking movement, rolled back accelerated and honors programs and tried to reform gifted programs, particularly in nonwhite districts. Black alumni of Brooklyn Tech argue this progressive-minded movement handicapped precisely those Black and Latino students most likely to pass the test.

Parents shared all of this evidence with the full Albemarle County School Board, and expressed concern about ACPS implementing unleveling without an assessment of harm to children, contrary to evidence of unleveling harming its intended beneficiaries, and without engagement from teachers, children, or parents. The Board declined to act. 

Meanwhile, children's learning is suffering, as classes have become more difficult to teach. While state test scores are not perfect indicia of learning, they can provide some evidence of where things stand, particularly over time. Have state testing pass rates of Black students improved during the current superintendent’s tenure?

SOL Pass Rate for Black Students in Albemarle Public County Schools

                         2017          2025

Reading       57.2          46.0

Writing        57.7            42.9

Math            51.1          46.4

History        57.0            35.4

Science        53.6            42.7

Virginia DOE

A New Mission

It is important to note that, in parents’ time spent speaking with ACPS administrators, board members, and teachers, rarely did they encounter malice. Educators do not devote their lives to their careers to harm children. They share the same aim we all do: the wellbeing of our children.

Why, then, would well-meaning educators suddenly discard proven education methods? And why would they have such disregard for evidence? Repeatedly, administrators and Board members professed support for abandoning ACPS’s preferred way of teaching children for decades, while confessing to having no evidence it would work. Why?

To answer these questions, it helps to know about a change ACPS made that coincides with the start of the division’s decline. After Matt Haas became Superintendent, the very mission of ACPS changed. In place of the prior mission that focused on the learning for each individual child, the new mission focused on equalizing outcomes of all students based on their demographic. A shift from input to outcomes. The Mission Statement under Haas begins: “Working together as a team, we will end the predictive value of race, class, gender, and special capacities for our children’s success through high-quality teaching and learning for all.”

While no one would dispute this is a worthy aspiration, is it a realistic role for a school division? Sociologists might cite any number of factors and forces contributing to the relationship between children’s demographics and their school outcomes, many of which are outside the school environment. Schools can and should try to prevent those factors from impeding children’s success. But, how could a school division alone eliminate them altogether, and achieve the equal outcomes ACPS promises?

Though the challenge may seem daunting, Haas says not only is it possible, but that it is his duty as superintendent to take the action it requires. “Our imperative role in cultural change is to harness our powerful force for good and drive it toward equity,” says Haas. This, he says, requires "disrupting" existing practices and structures.

A key ACPS “objective success measure” towards the mission is for enrollment in advanced classes to “match demographics.” In elementary and middle schools, ACPS has achieved it by ending advanced classes and programs altogether. A blunt cure to enrollment disparities in such classes.

In high schools, where state law prevents the division from eliminating advanced classes, ACPS has instead capped the number of advanced classes each student may take. Unlike children elsewhere in Virginia, ACPS children are now prohibited from AP classes during their freshman year, and limited to a total of nine during the rest of high school. And, the administration plans further reductions in high school learning, reducing the opportunities for advanced classes. 

ACPS monitors its progress towards its goal with an annual chart displaying various demographics’ enrollment in advanced classes. Following metrics like these, ACPS says, “makes it possible to see where some groups are overrepresented or underrepresented.” Overrepresented? Each year the chart shows “Asian” children as vastly over-represented in advanced classes. Should “Asian” children be concerned about ACPS’s goal of ending their so-called over-representation?

What About Children’s Learning? 

Pursuit of the mission has occupied much of the administration's time and resources during Haas' tenure. Meanwhile, how has children’s learning fared?

During Haas’ seven years as superintendent, in the rankings ACPS once touted, its ranking has plummeted. And, the division’s pass rates on state tests have rarely been worse. But, even as children’s learning has declined, has the division’s disruption of existing practices nevertheless achieved its goal of closing the achievement gap?

It was more than fifteen years ago that Haas joined the ACPS administration, and it was at about that time that unleveling began in some division schools. The intent was to reduce achievement gaps that the Board and administration said were created and sustained by unequal access to learning.  With unleveling fully implemented throughout the division, we now have data to see if they were right. Has unleveling reduced the achievement gap within the division, as ACPS predicted? Or has it had the opposite effect, as research and experience have warned?  

The following chart compares the state testing ACPS achievement gap for Black children in 2010 to the gap today, by subtracting pass rates for Black children from pass rates for all children. For example, in 2010, before unleveling began, the gap on the Writing test was relatively modest. 82.6% of Black students passed the test, compared to 92.8% of all students. Since then, the gap has more than tripled. Of Virginia's 132 school divisions, ACPS now has the second-largest achievement gap. 

Gap Between SOL Pass Rates of Black Students and All Students in ACPS

                         2010             2025

Reading        11.7              29.2

Writing        10.2            32.3

History         13.3            36.8

Math            10.9               27.5

Science        14.1              27.4

AVERAGE     12.0              30.6

Virginia DOE 

To his credit, Haas accepts responsibility for the division’s test scores. “I own these results,” he has said. Calling them “unacceptable,” Haas said that they reflect the “inability of our current systems to produce the results we are seeking and clearly demonstrate the need for these systems to immediately change.”

But, if he is correct that a school division is capable of equalizing outcomes, does he not also own the near-tripling of the achievement gap during his fifteen years at the division? And, if ACPS’s current systems need “to immediately change,” how should they change?

Others may have better ideas, but given the prior success of ACPS schools, and the division’s outstanding teachers and students, one idea would be to revisit what was working under the way ACPS used to define its mission. Nothing can be done about the damage already done to county children by the administration's experiments. Before we harm children further, perhaps we could renew our focus on learning, one student at a time.

- We are county residents who want what's best for the county's children. Feel free to share this with others who may feel the same.

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