Category: Poverty & income gap
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Fatherless Households and SOLs
We know that the percentage of “economically disadvantaged” students in a school district is correlated significantly with Standards of Learning failure rates. But is poverty the driver behind low test scores, or is it just correlated with a third factor that is the real driver? Over on Cranky’s Blog, John Butcher ran an interesting analysis:…
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Health Care and the Oppression Narrative
Correlation does not equal causality. That’s a fundamental tenet of statistics, but the concept apparently is so rarefied that a Virginia Mercury article based the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s County Health Rankings appears to be unfamiliar with it. The result is a headline — “In Virginia, health outcomes follow geographic and racial lines” — that has become…
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Richmond Schools Weaken Anti-Truancy Initiative
It has long been a pillar of Virginia education policy to increase the high school graduation rate. To advance that goal, several school districts have cracked down on students skipping school. The Richmond Public School system, for instance, has long employed a team of “school attendance officers” to round up truants and get them back…
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Moral Measures, Skin in the Game, and K-12 Education
Four former state secretaries of education banded together to publish an op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch today in support of Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney’s proposal to raise real estate and cigarette taxes to fund the Richmond public school system’s strategic plan. In the op-ed they made a statement that is core to liberal thought: The moral…
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What Can Educators Learn from ChallengeU?
It’s a heart-warming story: Thanks to the intervention of the nonprofit ChallengeU program, four former high school dropouts from the Petersburg school system received their high school diplomas in a ceremony Wednesday. (A fifth diploma earner could not participate.) “The event was much the same as a traditional graduation ceremony, complete with speeches and a…
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Blacksburg Tapping the Brakes on Student Housing
While the People’s Republic of Charlottesville grapples with mandatory parking (see previous post), the People’s Republic of Blacksburg is wrestling with the problem of privately developed student housing. Apparently, too many developers want in on the opportunities created by expanding enrollment at Virginia Tech. Town Council voted 7 to 0 recently, according to the Roanoke…
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Squeezing the Most from Every Health Care Dollar
Medicaid expansion in Virginia is forcing Virginia’s free clinics to make a fundamental choice. Should they participate in Medicaid or not? Accepting Medicaid payments would provide a new source of funding for clinics, which don’t charge for medical services, and would allow them to continue treating patients who qualify for Medicaid and would otherwise need…
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Killjoys versus GilJoy: Grievance Versus Opportunity
Northern Virginia progressives opposed to subsidies for Amazon are grievance-mongering nihilists who have nothing to offer but spittle and bile. Far from helping the people they purport to speak for, if they were successful in scuttling the Amazon deal — the Arlington County Board still must vote on county subsidies — they would cause only…
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The Wrong Way to Tackle Food Insecurity
According to U.S. Sen. Mark Warner, D-Virginia, more than 1 million Virginians live in food deserts. To deal with the problem, he has sponsored legislation in Congress to incentivize businesses and nonprofits to provide healthy food in those areas. And he was in Salem yesterday visiting Feeding America Southwest Virginia to talk about food insecurity.…
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Kamras Feeds a False Narrative
In a Sunday op-ed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Richmond city school Superintendent Jason Kamras opined on “institutional racism” in Virginia schools. In building his case for the existence of such injustice, he cited the supposed disparity in funding, writing: According to the National Center on Education Statistics, Virginia’s highest poverty school divisions — which serve large…
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General Assembly Acts to Curb Evictions
by Richard Hall-Sizemore Virginia has made another “top-10 in the nation” list. But this one is not one to be celebrated. Last spring, using national eviction data, researchers at Princeton University released eviction rate rankings of large cities in the United States. Cities in Virginia comprised five of the ten cities with the highest eviction…
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Senate Addresses Supply of Affordable Housing
One in three households in the state spends more than 30 percent of their income on housing, reports the Virginia Mercury. The apartment industry argues that housing will become unaffordable for even more as the state’s population grows faster than the housing supply. If I were a middle-class Virginian most of whose net worth was…
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Mapping the Opioid Death Epidemic
This map illustrates a key point in the previous post. The localities marked in blue show increases in opioid-related deaths between 2011 and 2017, and the localities shaded red experienced a decrease. While the opioid epidemic has intensified in Virginia overall, the increase (in raw numbers) has been concentrated in Virginia’s metropolitan areas. The rural…
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Opioid Overdose Deaths and Diseases of Despair
Everyone seems to agree that Virginia, like the rest of the nation, is in the grips of an epidemic of opioid overdoses. Virginia Department of Health (VDH) data show that the number of overdose deaths attributable to Fentanyl and/or heroin and to prescription opioids has increased from 637 in 2011 to 1,426 last year. The…
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Re-Examining the Role of Elite Higher Ed in American Society
by Reed Fawell III “Going to Yale Could Make You Rich, or Lonely,” by Lyman Stone, published in The Federalist on Dec. 19, 2018, exposed some surprising findings regarding the costs and benefits of college attendance. Stone is worth quoting at length: There’s a long-standing economic consensus that, for high schoolers smart enough to get…