Glenn Youngkin spent his term trying to make Virginia tell parents the truth about their kids’ schools. Abigail Spanberger needed about five months to start putting the lie back.
Last week her administration proposed freezing Virginia’s English and math standards — already the lowest in the nation — right where they sit, and pushing the first scheduled increase to the 2028–29 school year. After she’s gone.
In 2019, Virginia told parents that 76% of its eighth graders were proficient readers. On the national test every state takes, the real figure was 33%.
Math told the same story: 77% “proficient” on the state test, 38% on the national one.
Read those numbers again. The state handed two of every three families a grade their kid hadn’t earned — and sold it back to them as good news.
This was a fight Republicans were winning. Youngkin (R) campaigned in 2021 on closing what he called the “honesty gap” — the distance between what the state called proficient and what proficient actually means.
His Board of Education followed through. On September 25, 2025, it voted unanimously to raise Virginia’s cut scores to the national bar — numbers the board called “statistically equivalent” to what the national exam counts as proficient.
Superintendent of Public Instruction Emily Anne Gullickson called it one of the most consequential votes the board would take: that when Virginia calls a student proficient, “it truly means ‘ready for the next step.’”
The higher bar was set to take effect this fall.
Then Spanberger drew a new map. Her roadmap moves the increase to 2028–29 — past the end of her own term.
Her tell came in May. Asked whether she would keep using the national test, the governor wouldn’t commit: “a test for a test’s sake is not what I think does any value for kids.”
Translation: the national test keeps catching Virginia in the 76-versus-33 gap. So question the test.
She says the right things, of course.
I’m the proud product of Virginia public schools – and all three of my daughters will be, too.
— Abigail Spanberger (@SpanbergerForVA) April 30, 2025
I want every child in our Commonwealth to have a world-class education – it’s personal to me.
Personal enough, it turns out, to keep the lowest bar in America right where it is.
The Fairfax GOP backed honest measurement when Youngkin pushed it. Honest numbers were the Republican position. Deferral is the Democrat one.
Here is what the delay buys your family: two more graduating classes of Fairfax kids held to the lowest bar in America, told they’re ready while the national test says a third of them are.
The Board of Education takes up the roadmap June 24–25 and votes on the timeline in August.
Spanberger is term-limited; she never faces Virginia voters again. But the legislators who carry her agenda are on the ballot in November 2027 — and they can be made to explain why, in Virginia, “proficient” still doesn’t mean ready.