Loudoun Public Schools – Suitable for Economically Secure Asian and White Kids Only
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10 responses to “Loudoun Public Schools – Suitable for Economically Secure Asian and White Kids Only”
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Good article and analysis.
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Jim, Let’s accept your analysis that Loudoun County schools woefully underperform for Black and Hispanic students. Isn’t that what the current woke administration already says? School district leadership says the system is structurally racist, and they’re trying to fix it. Does your analysis square with that theory or contradict it?
You attribute under-performance at least in part to the growth of bureaucracy and proliferation of expensive programs that accomplish nothing. I am inclined to agree with you that many programs are a total waste of money, but the issue is what causes under-performance, not how much money we waste to get that under-performance.
Ideally we would analyze trends over time. At one point Republicans dominated the Loudoun school board. Did schools suck for minorities back then? Have racial disparities widened or narrowed since the wokists began running the school system? If racial gaps have widened, then we could legitimately look to initiatives pursued under the banner of wokism. For example, we might conjecture that it is unhelpful to lower academic-achievement standards, relax disciplinary practices, and tell Black and Hispanic students that they are victims of systemic racism.
Did the wokists inherit a system that was grievously flawed from the get-go, or have they made matters immeasurably worse with failed prescriptions? I think we need to answer those questions before we can make much hope of fixing anything.
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Simple response. I did nothing but call balls and strikes in this work. You chose race alone, but it is clearly not the lesson of the data.
Black kids did poorly. Hispanic kids did worse. Economically disadvantaged kids did worse than both. And don’t even ask about English learners and the IEP kids.
Not sure what that as a whole has to do with slavery. It has to do with ineffective teaching. LCPS had those K-5 kids for four years before they were ever tested for reading. And they failed in droves.
I don’t especially care about Democrat and Republican squabbles. I don’t care about a woke feelings disguised as analysis. I care about getting results from the effort of teaching kids.
The left will try to avoid trying to explain why the old ways of teaching such as those in Chesapeake have worked so much better than Loudoun’s more bloated system. They simply will refuse to answer the question and the MSM will not ask it.
– I care that a significant number of schools in LCPS are horrible if the word has meaning.
– I do care that every subgroup but economically secure white and Asian kids was screwed by many of the schools in LCPS, but, of interest, not all of them.
– I care that the bureaucracy of LCPS let that happen.
– I care that LCPS leadership may have tried to hide it with false accreditation reports to the state that forwarded them to the federal government. I have asked both LCPS and the state to comment on those accreditation reports.
– If LCPS has evidence that they studied the schools in Loudoun that worked for the subgroups in question and applied those lessons to the others, they can provide it. I don’t think they will. I hope I am wrong.
– I care that neither the state AG nor the U.S. Attorney for Northern Virginia sued to stop it.The wokeists have had a huge break in the accountability provided by SOLs. It will say that whatever it proposes will work. It will blame systemic education failures on COVID for at least a decade.
Never forget, the left wants to do away with SOLs and all “high stakes testing” before their “solutions” are ever held to account.
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There are data that support the notion that if a student has an ineffective teachers three consecutive years, he/she will never catch up (Sanders). So – what you have explained is exactly that.
Second, the code really has no way to enforce this:
3. Accreditation Denied: If a school is designated “Accredited with Conditions,” and the school or school division fails to adopt and implement school division or school corrective action plans with fidelity as specified by 8VAC20-131-400 D, it may be designated by the board as “Accreditation Denied” as provided in 8VAC20-131-400 D 4Essentially, the school will always be accredited with conditions as long as the school board shows a plan that later produces no results and nothing would be done. The code was written this way for the purpose of making sure that schools with high number of economically disadvantaged students would never be in denied status as long as they continued to spend federal dollars under Title I and had a plan to show for it.
Why don’t you throw your name in the bucket for Secretary of Education??
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In this case, none of the Loudoun schools were even reported as Accredited with Conditions, which was an option in the report in question.
I simply don’t understand how they thought they were going to get away with it, but apparently they did until I filed the report above.
It appears that no person, which would require a computer program, at VDOE checks the veracity of these reports from the districts. Not surprising, but fixable with the right software.
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Jim, these are really starting to look like hit pieces. Somehow in your critique of Loudoun’s services to English Learners you managed to neglect to mention how the rest of the state fares. Believe it or not, Loudoun actually exceeds the state average here – though one would never know it from your description. It also exceeds the state average with black students and students with disabilities. It’s extremely close on the other groups (one point and three points). And let’s keep in mind that these scores record all parental opt-outs as fails. When you have a culture at certain locales to refuse the testing it will negatively impact the assessment numbers. Similarly, recent immigrant populations arriving without English skills will clearly be reflected in the school-level numbers. And due to its size, Loudoun clusters certain high need disability groups to provide better service – again, reflected in the numbers.
I’m all for accountability, but how about some honesty while we’re at it?
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Part of the puzzle is intelligence. I think that intelligence is inherited, although not exactly. I also have seen data that shows that intelligent people have higher incomes. Putting these two together, we can conclude that children of wealthy people will perform better in school, if all students are given the same opportunities. To some extent, effort can offset the differences in intelligence, but equal academic outcomes might be impossible. We can be consoled that all kinds of people are needed to run the world.
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Better is different than pass/fail.
I will acknowledge that some kids have mental acuity advantages over others. But that, to me, does not suggest that thousands of kids like those in Loudoun cannot be taught to read and multiply at the most basic levels by the spring of the third grade after four years in school. Loudoun is simply not doing it right.
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Loudoun has been using the Lucy Calkins program to teach reading for quite some time–a program that may work for (or not overly hinder) children already well positioned in reading. It does not, however, successfully instruct those who may need more. The failures of this program are widespread, both within Loudoun and well beyond, and finally getting some much needed visibility and attention.
Currently there’s an effort underway to evaluate the literacy shortfalls in Loudoun County and hopefully move to a better program.
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The should check with Success Academy and its Robinson Center. They do it every day.
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