I teach in Falls Church City Public Schools, and I came to this question through a recent school board meeting on the division’s performance data. All students ranked in the top three divisions statewide in reading, math and science. But economically disadvantaged students trailed by nearly 30 percentage points: 29 in reading and math and 30 in science. The presentation compared those declines with state trends, found the division roughly on par, and emphasized its “highest pass rates in Virginia.”
Being on par with the state is the wrong benchmark. A better comparison is with other high-performing divisions. Among the ten highest-scoring divisions in each subject, achievement gaps range from 2 to 30 percentage points. Excluding Falls Church, the other top-performing divisions that appear across all three categories — Reading, Mathematics, and Science — average gaps of about 10 points.
Wise County Public Schools stands out. It ranks in the top three in all three subjects, and 60 percent of its students are economically disadvantaged. Its disadvantaged students trail the division average by just 3 points in reading, 2 in math and 5 in science. Louisa County, where 44 percent of students are economically disadvantaged, is in the top ten in all three subjects, with gaps of 6, 7 and 10 points. At the other end, Loudoun County’s reading gap is 21 points, second only to Falls Church’s.
Spending does not appear to explain the differences. Virginia Public Access Project data rank Falls Church third in instructional spending at $18,367 per student, while Wise County spends $11,160, ranking 84th. New Kent County, a top-ten math division, ranks last at $9,188. Poverty does not explain the gaps either: Wise County serves one of the state’s largest shares of economically disadvantaged students while maintaining some of its smallest gaps. Geography may play a role: the smallest gaps cluster in Southwest and Southern Virginia, while the two largest are in Northern Virginia.
There are caveats. These are one year’s pass rates; rankings do not explain causes; and many top-ten divisions are small and less diverse than Northern Virginia divisions. Some gaps are also smaller because overall pass rates are lower than Falls Church’s. But that does not fit Wise County, whose overall pass rates are within one or two points of Falls Church’s. Its disadvantaged students pass at 87 percent in reading, 88 in math and 80 in science, compared with 62, 62 and 57 percent in Falls Church. In a division where nearly two-thirds of students are disadvantaged, that subgroup is hardly a statistical footnote.
I asked administrators in several divisions what they do differently and was directed to Matt Hurtt, who leads the Comprehensive Instructional Program, a network of Virginia divisions that learn together through improvement cycles. His message was that poverty is not destiny. Administrators described teacher-led classrooms built around explicit, content-rich instruction in reading, math and science. I know of no statewide effort to document those practices. That is the gap worth closing.
Virginia has already made a bet that points in this direction. The Virginia Literacy Act moved the state toward science-of-reading instruction, and University of Virginia modules highlight Scarborough’s Reading Rope: skilled reading requires word recognition and language comprehension, including background knowledge and vocabulary. The modules cite research supporting explicit instruction and promote the “I do, we do, you do” sequence. Daniel Willingham and E.D. Hirsch similarly argue that comprehension and critical thinking depend on content knowledge. Children from print-rich homes acquire much of that knowledge before school; others rely more heavily on classrooms to supply it.
If that logic holds for reading, it raises broader questions about math, science and how Virginia school divisions approach instruction. Arlington Public Schools, for example, piloted an “instructional hierarchy” in math at six schools this spring, emphasizing fluency through explicit instruction before alternative strategies. This runs counter to the broader trend toward student-centered, inquiry-based classrooms that emphasize “21st-century skills” over content knowledge. Education professor David Steiner argues that this gets the relationship backward: skills are downstream of what students know. Cognitive load theory also suggests that open-ended, inquiry-driven tasks can overwhelm novice learners who lack sufficient background knowledge.
Three steps would help. First, the Virginia Department of Education should publish gap comparisons among high-performing divisions, not only against the state average, so that a 30-point gap is not characterized as “on par.” Second, the state should fund a classroom-level study of divisions with the smallest gaps, documenting curriculum, instruction and teacher training. Third, before more divisions replace externally benchmarked tests with local measures, school boards should consider what is lost. Locally scored measures are less reliably comparable across divisions, and those comparisons are what exposed these gaps.
A division can top state rankings and still fall short for the students who depend most on its classrooms. Virginia now has the data to see which divisions are closing gaps. It should find out how.
Jaime Osborne, Ed.D., is a teacher in Falls Church City Public Schools. This piece reflects the author’s own views, not those of the school division.
