HAMPTON ROADS, Va. (WAVY) — The Virginia Board of Education has approved a new accountability system for Virginia’s public schools that will designate schools as distinguished, on-track, off-track and, on the lowest end, in need of intensive support.

Under the new metrics of the Every Student Succeeds Act, most Virginia public schools, three out of four, are off-track. Gov. Glenn Youngkin, while in Suffolk Wednesday for a groundbreaking ceremony, said the previous accountability systems were off-track.

“We had 66% of our students fail, or near fail, math and reading in elementary and middle school last year,” Youngkin said. “And yet the accreditation process said that 89% of our schools were fully accredited. There is a massive mismatch there.”

In a release outlining the new metrics, it said that “the current accreditation system is an opaque criteria that makes it difficult for students, families, and educators to understand how students were performing and where the school was struggling. In addition, operational compliance indicators are mixed into students’ academic performance. The current system rates almost all Virginia schools as high performing, with 88% of Virginia schools receiving the highest rating of ‘accredited.’ The actual results of student performance show wide differences between schools and student performance, and those differences are obscured by the current Accreditation system.

In a heated Board of Education meeting last week, one speaker listed Brown children, immigrant children, Black children and poor children as the students who will be labeled as failures under the new system.

The new accountability system splits how a school operates and how the students perform.

“The School Performance and Support Framework advanced by the board is a major step forward in making sure that every child in Virginia is counted and receives the support they need to achieve their potential,” said board member Mashea Ashton in a statement following approval of the plan. “The current system masks what is happening with our most vulnerable children. This framework is more inclusive, more transparent and much more focused on academic performance than the accreditation system it is replacing.”

Anne Holton, the former Virginia Education Secretary, daughter of late Gov. Linwood Holton, and wife of U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine (D), was the lone board member to vote against the act.

“The administration is going to be labeling schools with punishing labels: off-track or needing intensive support without sending any new support to those schools,” Holton said.

The governor, in an interview with 10 On Your Side, essentially confirmed the funding issue.

Asked whether he would shift existing funding or call for additional funding, Youngkin said Wednesday that state lawmakers had approved significant increases for education in recent budgets.

“I’m going to repeat, we’ve increased funding in the Commonwealth of Virginia by $3.5 billion just over the last three budget cycles,” Youngkin said. “We have a 40% increase in the per capita spending and investment that we’re making at the state level in our students.”

The Every Student Succeeds Act requires approval from the U.S. Department of Education.