Bacon’s Rebellion readers, please hang in there. We are experiencing technical issues of uncertain origin. There are indications that the blog is experiencing a Denial of Service attack from overseas, but we’re not sure. (We could understand if certain Americans wanted to take us out– but Russians or Chinese? Do they even know we exist?)
We’re working on it. As we try one thing and then another, you may experience significant lag times in viewing the blog. We appreciate your patience. — JAB
by Dr. Kathleen Smith
In a recent article about his new book, E.D. Hirsch argues that “child-centered individualism started the slide in American education.” Although he refers to the slide in academic outcomes, in my opinion, child-centered individualism is responsible for increased school disciplinary responses as well.
As an educator in Petersburg, including the time spent as a (deciding) member of many disciplinary hearing committees, I have listened to hours of parents communicating why their child or adolescent had disruptive behaviors so serious that they warranted referral for expulsion or alternative interventions outside the accepted convention of suspension.
For decades now, schools mostly follow constructivism theory — the child is taught to construct his/her own learning. However, when a child or adolescent is left alone to “construct a response to a situation” — like what to do when someone posts something ugly about you on social media, or what to do when you don’t like the teacher telling you what to do — the “constructed reaction” often opens the door for a multitude of responses not acceptable to general society (e.g. school shootings, suicide).
by James A. Bacon
As K-12 schools open up this week, the good news is that the school-bus shortage has eased a bit. According to the Virginia Mercury, the bus driver vacancy rate is down 5% compared to last year. There’s still a shortfall that leaves school districts scrambling for bus drivers, but the situation is not as bleak as it has been.
The bigger, badder news is that teacher vacancies have gotten worse. Citing Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) data, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that Virginia public schools have 230 more vacancies than last year. That amounts to a 4.74% vacancy rate.
The shortfall comes not from a lack of funding. The 2022-24 biennial budget contained $19.2 billion for public education, a 20% increase over the previous biennium. The current biennial budget steers another $2.5 billion to schools, an additional 13% boost. Teachers are getting 3% raises this year and next.
But you can count on the Virginia Education Association to take a partisan cheap shot against Governor Glenn Youngkin.
by Gibson Kerr
Cancel culture is all about tearing things down. It is inherently destructive. It builds nothing. It creates nothing. It only destroys.
Like the Vandals who destroyed Rome, cancel culture is destroying American culture. Systematically, it targets and eliminates America’s heroes. It is fueled by anger, bitterness, envy, and vindictiveness.
It is the same mean-spirited mindset that led French revolutionaries to reject their past, create a new calendar starting with Year Zero, and execute thousands of their fellow citizens.
The widespread growth of cancel culture in America, with its unforgiving intolerance of all things past, instills a sense of terror—particularly in young people—that they too may be cancelled for expressing dissenting opinions. This leads to massive self-censorship, the absolute squashing of debate and civil discourse, and ultimately to the suppression of free and creative thinking.
Cancel culture rejects the Western and Christian notions of grace, forgiveness, and reconciliation. In its place, it promotes violence, terror, intimidation, intolerance, and retribution.
by Jon Baliles
Tyler Layne with WTVR News reported last week another disturbing story about how City Hall has been shortchanging the city’s at-risk youth and leaving a lot of state money on the table that could be helping them find brighter and better futures. According to Layne, about $1 million of available state money meant to help court-involved youth and reduce their risk of re-arrest has gone unused by the city over the last three years, despite the city experiencing an upward trend in crimes committed by youth since the pandemic.
Valerie Slater leads the nonprofit Rise for Youth , with the goal of helping youth before they get into trouble with the law and face court action for an arrest. It and other non-profits try to steer youth onto career opportunities and help them start to develop life skills. The Richmond Department of Justice Services provides some of these programs, but Slater calls the city’s overall effort “so woefully deficient.”
Every locality in Virginia participates in the Virginia Juvenile Community Crime Control Act (VJCCCA), which was set up to deter youth from getting involved in crime or re-offending, and also to divert youth out of the courts without absolving them of responsibility for their actions. The state provides funds to each locality to help provide these services and the flexibility to determine which services it wishes to provide based on the needs of its community from among 30 identified and approved programs.
According to Layne, in our region, Henrico County provided 14 programs last year, including anger management, mental health services, parenting coaching, and mentoring.
By Steve Haner
Virginia’s experiment with ranked choice voting may soon expand to a second locality, as the Charlottesville City Council is now considering that method for its future local elections. It is time for more people to pay attention to this voting method and decide whether they think it is a good idea.
The pros and cons are complex, and opinions are strong on both sides. Current Virginia elections allow a victory with a plurality, often far less than a majority of the votes cast. Making voters declare a second or third (or fourth or fifth) choice and continuing to count until a majority is reached is a major shift in our elections.
Former Virginia Delegate Sally Hudson, a Charlottesville Democrat, is leading one Virginia-based effort to expand the process here, Ranked Choice Virginia. Another, UpVote Virginia touts its bipartisan support, mentioning Congressman Don Beyer (D) and former Governor George Allen (R). The Foundation for Government Accountability, a national group on the other side, considers the idea a disaster.
The Richmond Times-Dispatch, a once-great newspaper, is done. You can put a fork in it.
Just before 5 p.m. Sunday a brief but fierce thunderstorm struck our part of western Henrico County, knocking down trees and power lines and finishing with a rare burst of hail. I watched amazed as the steel lamp post in our front yard swayed widely. The storm didn’t last more than ten minutes or so, but proved fatal for at least one man. About a block from our daughter’s house, on the street parallel to hers, a huge tree landed on a truck and killed the person inside.
The newspaper’s online and print edition did report this fact, but in a very brief story. The data all came from the cops. No reporter or photographer came to the scene. There is no mention of the widespread power outages, which lasted six hours at our townhome and nine hours on our daughter’s street and even longer for some, who were still out of power as of 6 a.m. A reference to the storm itself links to a weather forecast from another part of town. Embarrassing.
The storm cleared soon after 5 p.m. so there were almost three hours of daylight remaining – enough time to photograph the damage. But the online story is illustrated only with a map of the rough location where the man died, pulled from offline and copied.
What this tells this aging newspaperman is that there was no reporter or photographer on duty at all yesterday evening. Forty years ago it was standard practice at the Roanoke Times to have one or two reporters on duty in the evenings, and one photographer, usually until the final edition was put to bed after midnight, to dart out and cover stories like this — fire, accident deaths, storm damage. I did the job (we called it “night cops”) at least a few times per month. I’m not sure if Jim Bacon, officially a business writer, had to do it. But this is what a newspaper is supposed to do.
I don’t know what the RTD is now, but it is not a local newspaper.
— Steve Haner
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
Sen. Schuyler VanValkenburg (D-Henrico) is very upset about the plan to locate a Rosie’s Gaming Emporium in Henrico County. This is the facility that features “historical horse racing,” which many have equated to slot machines.
Churchill Downs, the parent company of Rosie’s, plans to open the facility in an existing shopping center, the zoning of which would allow by right the uses proposed by Churchill Downs. That is, it would have allowed them by right before June 25, when the Board of Supervisors enacted an ordinance requiring a provisional use permit for any such facility. What has got VanValkenburg and others upset and frustrated is that Churchill Downs won the “race to the courthouse.” It filed its plans with the county on June 18; therefore, the zoning ordinance in effect on that date governs. There is nothing the county can do about it.
Shortly thereafter, Henrico’s three state senators and five delegates sent a letter to the Churchill Downs CEO expressing their opposition to the manner in which the company submitted the plans and asking the company to withdraw its plans and play by the new rules. A month later, there has been no reply. Now, the senator is upset that he is being ignored. “I am extremely disappointed in Colonial Downs Group and Rosie’s Gaming Emporium for their lack of response…. It is deeply problematic when you have every local and state elected official in Henrico asking a company to submit itself to public input, transparency, and to engage in a fair process and they refuse to respond.”
Those readers in the Bacon’s Rebellion community who view the Washington Post as a mouthpiece for progressives need to read the comments of the paper’s editorial board regarding Kamala Harris’ economic plan. For those who do not subscribe to the Post, here is the summation: “Instead of delivering a substantial plan, she squandered the moment on populist gimmicks.”
by James A. Bacon
In perhaps the most interesting question posed in the Virginia Commonwealth University Wilder School’s recent poll, 809 Virginians were asked if they thought the $26,500 average tuition charged by four-year colleges in the state was “worth it.”
Fifty-five percent disagreed — 30% strongly.
Higher ed faces a crisis in the value proposition it’s selling. Rising tuitions are pricing out less affluent Virginians, while the perception of rampant political correctness is turning off the half of the population that identifies as conservative.
The two most important issues — by far — influencing how Virginians intend to vote are inflation and abortion, according to Virginia Commonwealth University Wilder School of Government’s latest poll. Inflation tops the list at 31%, followed by women’s reproductive rights (23%).
A second tier of issues are immigration (12%) and gun control (7%). Taxes, schools, and crime are third-tier issues.
Interestingly, a centerpiece of the Democratic Party’s rhetorical strategy — maintaining democracy and civility — didn’t register at all. Not one of the poll’s 809 respondents listed it as a top priority.
Thirty percent of those polled identified as Democrats, 26% as Republicans, and 35% as independents. As both parties play to their electoral bases in the elections, that leaves a plurality, independent voters, up for grabs. — JAB
by James A. Bacon
Last week Virginia Commonwealth University’s Wilder School of Government issued findings from its latest public opinion poll. Some of the results were interesting, which I’ll get to in another post. But one was worthless to the point of being deceptive.
Here is the question: “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: The history of race should be taught in K through 12 schools in the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
The implication is clear. Either the history of race is not taught in Virginia’s K-12 schools, or there are people who don’t think it should be. Here is the result:
What a surprise — roughly four out of five Virginians agree that history of race should be taught.
What a blow to the Youngkin administration! As the Virginia Mercury dutifully wrote in providing context to the poll finding, “Since 2022, Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s administration has been examining and revising educational content related to race and equity, which the governor branded ‘divisive’ in his first executive order.”
Just one problem.
A week ago the Youngkin administration urged Virginia’s public colleges and universities to update their time-place-and-manner restrictions on campus protests. In particular, it asked them to restrict the wearing of masks for purposes of concealment, which can be illegal under state law.
In emails to administrators Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera stressed the urgency of the situation. Classes would resume in just a few days, and more pro-Palestinian demonstrations were sure to follow.
Lo and behold, the Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Virginia have begun publicizing an “all out for Gaza” event — masks required — on August 18.
The address listed is off-campus. But the UVA Police Department surely knows that any rally could wind up on Grounds. If not this demonstration, then the next one. UVA has two days to get its policy ducks in a row or be at risk of another imbroglio like the clearing of the Encampment for Gaza in May. — JAB
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
The 2022 federal Inflation Reduction Act directed the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to prepare for Congress a report on “a potential IRS-run free direct e-file tax return system (Direct File).” After delivering the report to Congress, the IRS proceeded to develop a pilot e-file tax return system and made it available to taxpayers in 12 states for the 2024 filing season.
The response of taxpayers to IRS surveys was highly favorable, as were reports in the media (see here and here). After making adjustments to the program based on results from the pilot, the IRS announced that it would make the program, called Direct File, available nationwide in 2025.
Direct File, as used in the pilot, was limited to relatively simple tax returns. For example, all of a taxpayer’s income had to be from wages and no more than $1,500 in interest income. Also, only the standard deduction was available. In its announcement of nationwide application, the IRS stated it was examining ways to expand the number of tax situations the program could cover in 2025 and in the future. Millions of taxpayers across the country will have the option in 2025 of directly completing and filing their income tax returns electronically, at no cost, with the IRS.
Alas, Virginia taxpayers will not be in that number.
The year: 2075. The American colonies on the Moon are getting restless under Washington’s tyrannical rule….
This second edition of “Dust Mites” has a snazzy new cover, includes helpful lunar maps, and is 5,000 words tighter than the original. The sequel, “Trogs,” is scheduled for publication this summer.
Bacon’s Rebellion is Virginia’s leading politically non-aligned portal for news, opinions and analysis about state, regional and local public policy. Read more about us here.
Shake up the status quo! Your contributions will be used to pay for faster download speeds and grow readership. Make a one-time donation by credit card or contribute a small sum monthly.
Enter your email address to receive immediate notifications of new posts by email.
SUBSCRIBE
Protecting Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy at the University of Virginia
Shoot me an email and I’ll generate a new password for you.
