Category: Poverty & income gap
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BRT to Nowhere?
by James A. Bacon There’s a whole lot of fuzzy thinking going on. People in the Richmond area are so enamored with the prospect of building a Bus Rapid Transit route through the city that they are saying the most astonishing things. Bus Rapid Transit can be a great idea if done correctly. But it…
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Now VSU Is in Trouble
by James A. Bacon Enrollment at Virginia State University in Petersburg is down by 550 students this year, and the historically black university is facing a $5.3 million shortfall, including a $2.4 million reduction in state support. “I think Virginia State is in trouble,” Terone B. Green, who serves on the board of visitors told…
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Race, Culture and SOLs
by James A. Bacon Here we go one more time… Does cultural background influence the likelihood of Virginia students passing the Standards of Learning tests, or do disparities in results between racial/ethnic groups reflect only the disparity in resources allocated to different schools? Over the past week, I have been arguing that cultural background is one critical differentiator,…
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The SOL Debate: Bringing Asians into the Equation
by James A. Bacon And the debate goes on…Yesterday, in “Yes, Virginia, Culture Does Matter in School Performance,” I argued based on the statewide pass rate for the Standards of Learning that disadvantaged Hispanic school children who had proficiency in English actually out-performed disadvantaged white school children (and black as well). I hypothesized that the difference could be attributed…
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Yes, Virginia, Culture Does Matter in School Performance
by James A. Bacon I was planning to give readers a break today from graphs and scatter charts relating to Virginia’s 2014 Standards of Learning tests. Then I read a quote in the Times-Dispatch this morning by Michel Zajur, CEO of the Virginia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Zajur was lamenting the high Hispanic drop-out rate…
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Update on the Debate over SOL Performance
by James A. Bacon There has been a lively discussion in the comments section of previous blog posts regarding the interpretation of the 2014 Standards of Learning (SOL) data. The debate has largely focused on explaining the gap in the average SOL pass rate between white students and black students. Broadly speaking, there are two…
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A Better Route
by James A. Bacon The GRTC Transit System, like most municipal bus systems, provides a one-size-fits-all transportation service. Whatever the route, time of day and level of demand, GRTC runs a standard city bus capable of carrying nearly 60 seated and standing passengers along fixed routes. Everyone pays the same fare ($1.50 on local routes),…
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What Can We Learn from Virginia’s Educational Outliers?
by James A. Bacon One last set of graphics shedding light on the SOLs… Occasional contributor John Butcher graphed the correlation between 9th-grade reading pass rates and the percentage of economically disadvantaged (ED) children in Virginia’s school divisions. The big-picture conclusion: The percentage of economically disadvantaged children is the dominant variable accounting for a division’s SOL performance,…
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When the Gender Gap Meets the Racial Gap
by James A. Bacon When remarking upon disparities in educational outcomes, most pundits focus on the racial/ethnic gap between Asians and whites on the one hand and blacks and Hispanics on the other. That’s no surprise, given the distressing size of the gap and the dismal implications of that gap for the prospects for forging a…
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Plumbing the SOL Racial Gap
by James A. Bacon Jim Weigand, also known on this blog as Hill City Jim, responded to my call yesterday for a crowd-sourcing of the Standards of Learning data to better understand the key drivers of educational performance. Why do some school systems show SOL pass rates that are so much higher than others? Clearly, the…
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Identifying the Education X Factor
by James A. Bacon The 2014 Standards of Learning (SOL) scores are in, and it appears that Virginia’s school divisions made decent improvements in mathematics over the past year while losing ground marginally in reading, writing, science and history. Bottom line: Virginia students tread water another year. Here are the percentage pass rates across all grades and schools…
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What Price Happiness?
by James A. Bacon After learning that Virginia cities report some of the highest levels of personal satisfaction in the country (see “Happy“), I have been thinking a lot about what creates happy communities. In the hope of gaining a better understanding, I recently finished reading Dan Buettner’s 2010 book, “Thrive: Finding Happiness the Blue…
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The View from Federal Court’s Media Room
By Peter Galuszka The media corps is just starting to amble into small room granted by the U.S. District Court, albeit with tight rules. No cell phone calls outside the cramped quarters in the hallways. No slouching in the corridor with your laptop on the floor hoping your cellphone hot spot still works. If you…
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Maureen McDonnell and Sexism
By Peter Galuszka Sitting for hours listening to former Gov. Robert F. McDonnell testify in his federal corruption trial makes one wonder exactly what his values are, especially as they relate to women. His entire legal strategy is to “Throw Maureen Under the Bus” – namely his lawyers and those of his co-defendant wife Maureen…
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“The State Cut our Funding” — the Excuse that Never Stops Giving
Students attending Virginia’s four-year colleges and universities will pay an additional 5.2% in tuition and fees compared to last year, according to the latest State Council of Higher Education in Virginia (SCHEV) data. Tuition leaped 6.8% but that was partially offset by a modest 2.3% increase in mandatory fees, covering such things as student health, transportation,…