School Performance & Support Framework Overview

A System Built for Virginia by Virginians

The School Performance and Support Framework was developed with the input of Virginians throughout the Commonwealth to create high expectations for every student in Virginia. Throughout its development, teachers, parents, students, and education leaders were engaged and had many opportunities to help inform the Virginia Board of Education’s process to build a transparent and clear system. Together, following nearly a year of public hearings held across the state, with ten engagements last winter and 20 this spring gathering more than 1,000 participants, as well as multiple rounds of public review and public comment periods, we have designed the system Virginians have asked for.

In January 2025, the United States Department of Education approved the Virginia Department of Education’s amendments to Virginia’s consolidated State plan under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. With the final approval of the Virginia State Board of Education’s accountability reforms, the School Performance and Support Framework regulatory process is now complete.

High Expectations for Every Student and Every School

The purpose of accountability is to build trust between schools, parents, and students through transparent, concrete, and easy-to-understand reporting. Providing necessary supports and working alongside schools in need of help are key elements of the Framework. Student academic growth and proficiency are both vital measures, but the system prioritizes getting every student to proficiency/mastery. Proficiency definitions are set by benchmarking against the demands of Virginia employers and higher education, as well as against other states who have the most rigorous definitions of proficiency in the nation.  

Components of the Framework

The Framework uses up to four areas of focus for elementary, middle, and high school.  Each component is weighted differently to meet the focus of the school.  

• Mastery incorporates all student Standards of Learning test results. It awards additional credit for students who reach advanced levels and partial credit for students who do not yet meet grade-level standards.  
• Growth uses a student’s past performance on Virginia SOL tests to measure how they are expected to learn from the start of the school year to the end. The metric then compares expected learning to actual learning at the end of the year.  
• Readiness considers measures such as chronic absenteeism, advanced coursework in middle school, and the percentage of students demonstrating they are post secondary readiness when they graduate from high school through the 3E Framework (Enrollment, Employment, and Enlistment). It also includes the percentage of students graduating with additional time.
• Graduation includes a cohort rate for high school students graduating with an advanced or standard high school diploma in four years.

Below is an overview of the weighting and the differences between the school levels.  

Overall School Performance

VDOE uses factors to determine what performance category a school falls under. The Framework does not categorize any school as failing. These factors will be weighted and combined to place each school in one of four categories: 

Resources