Richmond Public Schools student Standard of Learning (SOL) scores are among the lowest in the state of Virginia this year.

But during Monday night’s RPS School Board meeting, Superintendent Jason Kamras attempted to soften that narrative with data claiming students have made strides in learning, despite recent test results.

In a 67-page presentation, John Grove, manager of data analytics for RPS, explained the school division’s measures for accountability, which include a proficiency rate and combined rate, both used in the state accreditation system, and a growth rate, only calculated and used by RPS.

He said evaluating students this way is a paradigm shift in evaluating RPS students, and the purpose of the metrics is to dig deeper into their performance beyond just SOL scores.

Proficiency scores, Mr. Grove said, are poor measures of school quality, and growth measures are truer indicators of school quality. The presentation noted “Proficiency is important but shouldn’t be the only measure to drive accountability.”

Mr. Grove said the proficiency rate measures the percentage of students who passed or scored 400 or higher on SOLs. The combined rate measures the percentage of students, grades three through eight, who have shown growth or passed the SOLs. And the growth rate measures the percentage of students who have shown growth “regardless of pass/fail status.”

When RPS calculated school-level growth and proficiency in math for the division’s elementary schools, for example, it identified J.L. Francis (76 percent), Barack Obama (74 percent), John B. Cary (73 percent), Elizabeth Redd (73 percent) and Mary Munford (72 percent) as schools with the highest rates of growth in reading. The metric compared scores from the 2018-2019 school year (pre-pandemic scores) and the 2021-2022 school year.

SOL pass rates for each of these schools were: J.L. Francis (46 percent), Barack Obama (54 percent), John B. Cary (51 percent) Elizabeth Redd (42 percent), and Mary Munford (84 percent).

“J.L. Francis and Mary Munford, absolutely different populations [in terms of their scores], one with a 46 percent pass rate and the other with an 84 percent pass rate [on the SOLs],” Mr. Grove said. “Drastically different, however using the growth rate, you can see these schools are on par and absolutely exceeding in the division in terms of growing our students.”

Using a sports team metaphor, School Board member Jonathan Young, 4th District, said while he appreciated the fact that RPS students are showing progress, they are still far behind. And in order to compete on the world stage, the focus must be on getting SOL test scores up. “Growth matters . . . but I am concerned that something is lost in moving the goalpost; and in recognizing that our students are competing against students around the world, my concern is we’ll lose something if we focus too much on the paradigm shift,” he said.

Mr. Kamras countered, “Our goal is proficiency and beyond. Let me be absolutely clear. We want to make sure we are being thoughtful and strategic about figuring out where we are getting the ball down the field, further, faster,” he said. “What do we learn from that, how do we celebrate that, and where are we not?”

Mr. Kamras distributed a survey to teachers and instruction specialists in the division on Monday asking for feedback on three curricula used in RPS classrooms — Eureka for Virginia (math), EL for Education (English Language Arts) and Amplify (science). Earlier in the evening, the public comment period lasted more than two hours as mostly RPS teachers and principals spoke in favor of the current curriculum for the division. But in prior School Board meetings, teachers such as Kieasha King have expressed frustration with implementing the curriculum in their classrooms.

“Scripted curricula take away from teacher autonomy,” she said at Monday’s meeting. “I did not become a teacher to be a robot.” A few others faulted the curricula as a core reason for the division’s inability to retain teachers, saying teachers leave the division due to frustration when attempting to implement the curricula.