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In
Virginia, better attendance correlates with better
SOL scores. Unfortunately, the city of Richmond
has the fourth worst attendance of the Virginia school divisions.
Richmond also is flagrantly violating the Virginia
law that requires it to respond
to truancy. The State Board of Education,
which is charged with the enforcement of that law,
is enabling Richmond's violations.
Better Attendance
Correlates with
Better
SOL Scores
The
Virginia division average SOL
scores correlate nicely with the division
average attendance. Here, for example, are the
English pass rates for 2004-05 as a function of
attendance:
Richmond
is the gold square on this graph; Norfolk is the
red diamond. As you see, Richmond is performing
above the average value predicted by its
(appalling) attendance rate.
The
straight-line fit of the data suggests that
increasing average attendance by 1 percent
correlates with a 3.25 point increase in the SOL
score. The R2 value tells us that
attendance explains about 30 percent of the
variance in the scores.
The
math SOL scores show a similar pattern.
It
also turns out that individual Richmond
schools with better attendance enjoy higher
SOL scores than those with worse attendance.
Of
course, these correlations do not prove that high
attendance produces high SOL scores. There could
be a third factor that causes kids both to attend
and score well. Even so, it makes sense that the
kids who are not in school are likely to score
worse on the SOL tests. One might hope that
specific attendance improvement will be written
into all our Principals' performance objectives.
Fourth Worst
Attendance
The
state
data include the end of year daily attendance
by school division. Here are the attendance rates
(percent), ranked from lowest to highest:
Richmond,
the yellow bar on the graph, is fourth from the
lowest at 92.2 (up from 91.9 the previous year).
Norfolk is the red bar (at 94.5); the green bars
are Chesterfield, Henrico, and Hanover (95.0,
95.3, and 96.8). The winner there, with 98.7
percent, is Lexington.
Here
are the bottom ten:
|
Division
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Total
|
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Petersburg
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91.1%
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Warren
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91.9%
|
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Brunswick
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92.0%
|
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Richmond
City
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92.2%
|
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Sussex
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92.2%
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Norton
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93.2%
|
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Tazewell
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93.2%
|
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Nottoway
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93.2%
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Caroline
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93.3%
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Buckingham
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93.3%
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Violating
Virginia Law
The
Richmond Public Schools' Web
page has a table of the number and percentage
of elementary, middle, and high school students
who were absent 10 or more days. The table is
titled "Truancy Rates" so we'll infer
that these are 10 or more unexcused absences. The
table runs from 1999-00 through 2004-05. Here is a
summary of the data:
The
2001-02 data look to be anomalous. Aside
from that year, notice the consistent pattern of
more than a third of the high school students
missing school for 10 or more days.
If
we believe these data -- the low numbers in
2001-02 and the bogus
SAT data on the Richmond Web site surely
invite skepticism -- there is even more shocking
information to be had by comparing them to the
truancy data on the State
Web site.
But
first, some background.
Virginia
law requires each school division
(through an attendance officer or, where there is
none, through the superintendent) to create an
attendance plan for any student with five unexcused
absences and to schedule a conference with the
parents after the sixth absence. The law does not
merely permit this conference; it says the school
"shall" schedule the conference.
The
conference shall be held no later than
fifteen school days after the sixth absence.
Upon the next absence by such pupil without
indication to the attendance officer that the
pupil's parent
is aware of and supports the pupil's
absence, the school principal or his designee shall
notify the attendance officer or the division
superintendent, as the case may be, who shall
enforce the provisions of this article by either
or both of the following: (i) filing a complaint
with the juvenile and domestic relations court
alleging the pupil is a child in need of
supervision as defined in § 16.1-228
or (ii) instituting proceedings against the
parent pursuant to § 18.2-371
or § 22.1-262.
(emphasis and link to the AG's opinion
added).
That
is, if the student continues to be truant, the
school is required to file a CHINS petition
or to initiate proceedings against the parents. However,
if you'll follow the links you'll see that the
(required) conference is part of the prerequisite
notice to the parents: No conference scheduled, no
petition or proceedings.
In
light of that, let's compare the Richmond data on
students truant 10 or more days and the state data
on number of conferences scheduled after the sixth
absence, keeping in mind that 10>6:
The
truancy (magenta curve) and conference (green
curve) numbers are on the left axis. The
number of conferences (six absences) as a
percentage of the number of truants (10 absences)
is the black curve, with the numbers on the right
axis.
As
you see, Richmond scheduled fewer than 20 percent
of the required conferences in each of the past
two years and fewer than 30 percent in every year
with believable data. The state does not publish
data as to further absences or whether further
absences resulted in a trip to court in the cases
where the school had scheduled the required
conferences; for sure, Richmond could do nothing
about the >80 percent for whom they did not
schedule a conference.
Richmond's
wholesale violations of the attendance law and its
penchant for suspending
kids for truancy are consistent with its
pattern of chasing
out poor performers in order to improve its
SOL scores.
Official
Enabler
Unfortunately,
the State Board of Education is enabling this
wholesale and destructive lawbreaking by Richmond.
It's
not that they don't have the power to solve the
problem. Code §
22.1-253.13:8 authorizes the Board of
Education to obtain a court order to compel a
school division to meet the Standards of Quality
or to comply with a plan to accomplish that end.
The
2005
report of the Board of Education discloses
that Richmond has failed to meet the Board's (bogus)
accreditation standards and has filed a corrective
action plan. Indeed the Richmond plan is the
recommendations of the evaluation committee from
the Council
of the Great City Schools. Never lacking for
an euphemism, Richmond calls the compliance plan
its Balanced
Scorecard. Under that "Scorecard,"
Richmond's sole obligation as to truancy is to
collaborate
with appropriate local entities to implement a
plan to increase student attendance and access to
health services and to reduce truancy and dropout
rates.
Notice:
Nothing there about compliance with state law. All
Richmond must do is "collaborate" and
"implement a plan," while continuing to
ignore a state law the Board of Education is required
to enforce:
§
22.1-269. Board to enforce.
The Board of Education shall have the authority
and it shall be its duty to see that the
provisions of [the compulsory school attendance
statutes, Code §§ 22.1-254 through 22.1-269.1]
are properly enforced throughout the
Commonwealth.
When
I raised this issue with the Education Department,
I was not told of any attempt to discharge the
Board's duty under § 22.1-269. Instead the DOE
said that Richmond this year is spending funds
appropriated by the General Assembly in 2005 for a
pilot truancy program.
The
legislature, through the Appropriations Act,
directed the Department of Education and
Richmond to develop a plan to reduce truancy and
absenteeism in the City. . . . Mayor
Wilder approved the plan on May 23, 2005. Full
implementation of the pilot began last fall.
Mark
Emblidge, the President of the State Board of
Education, responded to my email in the same vein:
The
Board of Education will continue to discharge
its responsibilities in this area through the
division-level review process. Richmond Public
Schools’ corrective action plan, which was
accepted by the Board, addresses attendance and
its impact on student achievement.
As
you know, Richmond’s "Balanced
Scorecard" details specific objectives for
district improvement. Two of these "outcome
measures" (5.2 and 6.1) deal specifically
with improving attendance.
Those answers
both try to change the question rather than answer
it: The plan
under the Appropriations
Act identifies three target neighborhoods
(Hillside, Mosby, and Highland Park) and
establishes a service center in each. The plan
goes on for 11 pages and proposes to spend
$657,612. Nowhere does it mention or require the
City's compliance with §
22.1-258. Similarly, the Balanced
Scorecard merely sets a 2009 target for the
"collaborat[ion] with appropriate local
entities" to reduce dropouts from 15 percent
to 5 percent. The Balanced Scorecard likewise is
utterly silent about compliance with §
22.1-258.
Thus
we see that the State education establishment now
has approved two plans for Richmond's
schools. In neither did it require Richmond
to comply with the Virginia law the Board of
Education is required to enforce. Indeed, the
Education Department did not even try to enforce
this law in the target neighborhoods where the
State is paying for the pilot program. Dr.
Emblidge embellishes this nonfeasance with a
shameless statement that the State Board
"will continue" to discharge the
responsibilities that, in fact, it is diligently
ignoring.
The
State's nonfeasance regarding truancy is part of a
pattern (see the examples here
and here)
of the State educational bureaucracy's
pusillanimous tolerance for lawlessness in
Richmond .
Conclusion
Thus
we see that among the Virginia school divisions,
better attendance correlates with better SOL
scores. Unfortunately, Richmond has the
fourth worst attendance of the
divisions. Richmond also is flagrantly violating
Virginia law that requires
it to respond to truancy. The State Board of
Education, which is charged with the enforcement
of that law, is enabling Richmond's violations.
And
we get to pay
taxes to support this disgraceful and unlawful
behavior.
--
June 26, 2006
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