I have seen many rants about the VGLA, and I hear ya! Having an admin. who pushes too many VGLA's in order to get AYP/passing rates for the school and not knowing where to begin at first are both negatives. However, I have seen it as a positive for many of my students (esp. the ones who do it for reading and math). We teach these kids along with everyone else as much as we can with push in SPED support, then we worry about doing the assessment/evidence collection piece about once or twice a week in small chunks. Being able to show what they know in little chunks is way easier for them to do than doing a long, multiple choice assessment. I use the time when I administer practice SOL tests to the rest of my class to pull my VGLA students and collect evidence. We also have a wonderful after school program at our school, which allows me to pull students for a few minutes here and there as needed to keep up with evidence collection. Our team also truly works as a team, and we make notes in the binders, passing them around as needed to team members who can help collect or collate evidence. Back to how it is great for my kids...I feel they are learning MORE than ever. I may not have pushed some aspects of the curriculum before because it felt like beating my head against a wall, but now I feel more pressure to cover everything. Therefore, I have spent more time really figuring out HOW to teach it properly so they DO get it! And they are doing great. I have 5 different VGLA's and it is TONS of work (and I complain about it a lot at this time of year), but it is worth every minute to show what my kids do know. We don't view as an automatic pass, but rather as an opportunity to show what our kids have accomplished. Our students understand this piece, and it makes them feel proud (even my fifth graders). The other students also get it, and I have never heard any negatives from any of them about the program. If it was a perfect world, I would be getting paid something extra for all the extra time and effort creating assessments, giving them individually and sorting and stickering until my brain is about to bust. Until that time I will cheerfully continue to do VGLA's as needed. What is the other option? Watching these students who can learn struggle to take a 50 question m.c. test and fail? No thanks! It's my job to make sure they can demonstrate what they've learned and feel proud about it!