by John Butcher
We’ve been hearing about the post-COVID declines in scores on the National Assessment of Educational Process (NAEP) tests. The NAEP database offers some (in fact, an abundance of) details.
Here, as a small sample, are the 4th and 8th grade reading and mathematics data for the nation and Virginia.
First, reading:
by Andrea Epps
It’s no secret that I was thrilled to watch Glen Sturtevant’s name replace Amanda Chase’s on the election night ticker. However, this isn’t about my disdain for Chase, nor my approval of Sturtevant; I don’t even know him.
This is about simple math and what I believe to be a last-ditch effort at a con job by a professional.
I’m sure not many people expected Amanda Chase to do the right thing and concede with grace. No, most of us expected some post-primary cry of foul. I did expect, however, that her foul cry would be based on something that made sense, and it doesn’t.
Since Tuesday, Chase has hit the airwaves and social media with the claim that the early voting in Chesterfield County was rigged. This accusation is ridiculous on its face to anyone who knows about elections in Chesterfield. The registrar’s office has been run like a Swiss watch for years, but even that doesn’t matter in this case. (more…)
by James A. Bacon
In the spring of 2022 University of Virginia alumnus Warren Lightfoot emailed Rector Whitt Clement, a fraternity brother, to share the experiences of a friend and friend’s daughter during a university tour. Among other negative observations about UVa, reported Lightfoot, the student tour guide had made a point of noting that the university was built on land taken from Indians, that it was built by slaves, that its plans were “stolen” from slaves, and that the University had caused little but harm to the residents of Charlottesville over 200 years. “Needless to say, my friend and his daughter were unimpressed, shocked and offended,” recounted Lightfoot, who, as a former student tour guide himself, had been proud of the institution he represented.
Clement thanked his frat brother for the email. “I have heard similar, but less disturbing, accounts. I am going to look into this — totally unacceptable.”
True to his word, Clement talked to Greg Roberts, associate vice provost of enrollment and undergraduate admission. The Office of Undergraduate Admissions coordinated with the independent, student-run Student Guide Service to brief prospective students about the university. Typically, officials with the university would meet with prospects and their parents, and then turn them over to guides for tours of dormitories, student amenities and Thomas Jefferson’s architectural masterpiece of the Lawn.
Reporting back to Lightfoot, Clement reiterated his concerns. “I have expressed my dismay about this tour guide and am told it is an isolated event and that the guide is gone. This episode is totally unacceptable. Even if the tour guide program is part of student self-governance, which I am told is the case, then they must do a lot better job in self-selection and with the content of their tours; otherwise, serious intervention and changes would be in order in my opinion.”
But by August 2022 nothing had changed. Frustrated by the lack of concrete action, Lightfoot got back in touch with Clement to say that “the nonsense with the student guides has not stopped at all.” (more…)
by Joe Fitzgerald
Two recent signs of the deterioration of journalism. One is this comment from President Biden to a gaggle of reporters:
I hear some of you guys saying is, ‘Why doesn’t Biden say what a good deal it is?’ Why would Biden say what a good deal it is before the vote? You think that’s going to help me get it passed? No. That’s why you guys don’t bargain very well.
The second is this, from Harrisonburg Patch, a news aggregator:
A 33-year-old teacher at James Madison Middle School has been accused of soliciting inappropriate pictures from a student, leading to criminal charges against him. The alleged incident involved the teacher requesting pictures from a student at the school where he was employed, according to the police. The teacher has been arrested.
The first is obvious. Biden mocked the press corps for its reporting skills, and the press corps reported it as a Biden idiosyncrasy instead of as a failing on their part. The second, a little less so. The algorithm saw James Madison and thought Harrisonburg, even though the school is in Maryland. And it showed up in my email as a local story, which is a little jarring considering my wife, Deb, chairs the School Board.
(more…)
by Kerry Dougherty
Virginia’s November elections for control of the General Assembly may be the most important in a generation.
Will Virginia become Berkeley east? Or will it return to being a sane, moderate commonwealth?
Great news! Tuesday’s primaries saw the GOP cut loose its clown candidates, while Democrats embraced theirs.
A look at this week’s primary results are an excellent sign for those on the right who support reasonable restrictions on abortion, school choice and parents rights.
Put simply, Democrats gave the boot to more moderate, bipartisan members of the state legislature to nominate wacky, far-left candidates. Republicans rejected the far right and nominated common-sense conservatives who were endorsed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin. In fact, every one of the 10 candidates endorsed by Youngkin won their races. (more…)
by James C. Sherlock
Merriam Webster:
Pred*a*tor: (noun) one who injures or exploits others for personal gain or profit.
The most medically vulnerable of us reside in skilled nursing facilities (SNF).
Nobody plans to be there, but that is where about thirty thousand Virginians find themselves at any one time. People who are moved from hospitals to save money for the insurers but are too sick or injured to go home yet.
They are supposed to get the skilled nursing the name suggests. Many don’t.
Most are covered by Medicare. The rest by Medicaid or private insurance. It could be any one of us tomorrow.
These patients are at risk by design in some of these SNF’s. Put in danger by a perverted business model, a model that shows that returns can be juiced into double digits by stripping staff. The facilities can then be flipped in a couple of years at a profit based upon increased cash flows.
We will track their investments using government data. We will see a ritual, system-wide understaffing. We will also see that the government accumulated and publishes staffing data but there is no evidence they use it for anything.
There are nursing homes in Virginia, for example, that provide less than 30% of the registered nurse hours per patient per day that CMS assesses they require. Weekend statistics are worse. Nothing happens.
Today there are large systems not one of which is staffed to CMS norms.
There are real people who are harmed by those calculated violations. Exceptionally vulnerable people are regularly denied at least their dignity, often their health and sometimes their lives.
The owners injure and exploit patients for personal gain or profit.
They are predators. (more…)
by Joe Fitzgerald
In “A Pirate Looks at Forty” Jimmy Buffett describes the dilemma of one for whom the cannon doesn’t thunder: “My occupational hazard being my occupation’s just not around.” He could be describing journalists as well.
Journalism and piracy aren’t the only occupations disappearing, of course. The Chronicle of Higher Education and other pricey academic newsletters report regularly that universities are turning out more English and history doctorates than there are jobs to accommodate them. The magazine isn’t as worried about the loss of journalism jobs, possibly because journalists aren’t their audience. A site search of The Chronicle turns up 59 mentions of “journalism major,” mostly in job listings, and 268 mentions of “English major,” including this one:
Becoming an English major means pursuing the most important subject of all — being a human being. We’re sorry. Something went wrong.
I’m allowing for the possibility the search engine’s comments may be involved in that response. Still, something has gone wrong. The Daily News-Record is running stories about the Warren County sheriff to fill space with seemingly local stories. Six Virginia dailies will soon publish only three days a week, and by mail. The kid that started out delivering papers and wound up as a reporter will have to go back to the lemonade stand for spending money.
(more…)
by James A. Bacon
The Woke Revolution’s takeover of K-12 schools, the criminal justice system, higher ed, the media, the military, the C-suite, museums, and other cultural institutions has been highly visible, playing out in blogs and the media for all to see. The conquest of the healthcare system has attracted far less attention, though arguably it is the most consequential. After all, human lives are at stake.
Many U.S. medical schools have embraced the idea that American healthcare is systemically racist, that White physicians and other providers are infected with racial bias, that racism accounts for the disparities in health outcomes between Blacks and Whites, and that the only antidote to racism is “anti-racism,” warns Stanley Goldfarb, author of Take Two Aspirin and Call Me By My Pronouns: Why Turning Doctors into Social Justice Warriors Is Destroying American Medicine.
Goldfarb bases his critique on his own experiences as a nephrologist at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, an extensive review of the academic literature on racial disparities, and his role as founder of Do No Harm, a nonprofit formed to combat racial essentialism in medicine. Wokeness, he argues, is profoundly destructive. By misdiagnosing racial disparities in health outcomes, the anti-racism movement focuses attention on a nearly non-existent problem and distracts from real causes and solutions.
The predictable result: woke medicine will harm African Americans and other marginalized groups it purports to help. In that regard, it is similar to woke K-12 education, where the racial achievement gap is getting worse; woke criminal justice, which leads to more African American homicides; woke colleges and universities, where African Americans feel less sense of acceptance and belonging than in years past; and woke everything else, the poisoned fruit of which is grievance, resentment, and alienation. (more…)
By Steve Haner
Renewable energy donor Clean Virginia Fund was the biggest winner in Tuesday’s Democratic primaries, going head to head against Dominion Energy Virginia in several nomination contests and often winning. Senior incumbent Democrats with strong Green New Deal voting records went down to defeat, because good wasn’t good enough. (more…)
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
It was an interesting night last night as the results of the primary elections around the state were posted. (Results based on information on the Virginia Dept. of Elections website.)
Progressive Commonwealth’s attorneys
Northern Virginia Democrats overwhelmingly re-nominated all three of the progressive Commonwealth’s attorneys elected four years ago, despite their drawing much criticism (including from this blog) and even The Washington Post endorsing the opponents of two of them. The winners — Steve Descano (Fairfax County, 55% of the vote), Parisa Dehghani-Tafti (Arlington and Falls Church, 56%), and Buta Biberaj (Loudoun County, 56$)—will face little or minimal opposition in the fall elections. Keep in mind that Biberaj’s opponent, Elizabeth Lancaster, was the attorney for the parent arrested after protesting the school board’s treatment of his daughter’s sexual assault. (more…)
by Joe Fitzgerald
A perceptive friend recently spoke to me about press releases his outfit would send to the Daily News-Record back in the day. He said they always wound up in the paper with small inaccuracies, and his perception was that the releases were handed to the least experienced reporters to teach them how to type and rewrite.
I know it looked like that from the outside, I explained, but what actually happened was that I gave them to the least experienced reporters to teach them how to type and rewrite. I was happy to be able to clear that up.
We ran Valley Briefs, Business Briefs, Real Estate Briefs, not to mention the ones in non-news sections of the paper. They piled up on my desk until a reporter needed make-work, or mild punishment, or until I got tired of looking at them. They came back and went into another pile, from whence I’d compare them to the reporter’s efforts to see if they — the release or the reporters — had improved. Nine out of 10 were improved, either in AP style or news sense or clarity, and I caught the errors in half of the remainder. That success rate may not have been as obvious to someone who saw “attorney” changed to “lawyer,” “firm” changed to “company,” parentheses changed to dashes, or John Smith changed to William Johnson.
(more…)
(First published today by the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy.)
by Derrick A. Max
Work isn’t just about a paycheck. At its core, work is about freedom, accomplishment, respect, human dignity, and even companionship. Work gives purpose and is essential to a thriving community, and thriving communities are essential to a thriving state. That is why it is not surprising to see Gov. Youngkin focus so intently on creating a job-friendly economy. In August of last year, the Governor announced and began implementing dramatic changes in the Commonwealth’s workforce development efforts. Friday’s employment numbers for May show that his efforts are paying off.
The May data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Virginia is one of only eleven states reporting lower unemployment last month and one of only seventeen states showing lower unemployment over the last twelve months. Equally as important, labor force participation rates went up — meaning people who had given up looking for work have re-entered the job market. This is the highest rate in almost a decade. (more…)
by Joe Fitzgerald
Harrisonburg police rescued a possible abduction victim one day last month after shooting the apparent perpetrator. A city press release said a domestic dispute on Old Furnace Road around 6:30 p.m. turned into an abduction. Police pursued the suspect’s vehicle to downtown, where they shot the suspect, who was apparently armed. The suspect was flown to UVa hospital and the victim was safe.
At least that’s what I got out of a Daily News Record story that included the line, “The pursuit ended in front of the Rockingham County Sheriff’s Office following an officer-involved shooting that ultimately injured the suspect.”
Journalism is dead. Or, in the same jargon as the press release, “Journalism ended following a Craigslist-involved financial loss that ultimately ate the newspapers’ lunch.”
(more…)
by Dick Hall-Sizemore
I like to do what I call “poking around the numbers.” Breaking down datasets for large entities, such as statewide data, can yield enlightening, and sometimes surprising, results.
I was intrigued by the Virginia State Police report of officer-involved shootings that Jim Bacon reported on earlier. The big increase from 2021 to 2022 led to all sorts of speculation as to its causes. I thought it might help to break down the incidents by jurisdiction.
The 2016 General Assembly enacted legislation requiring the State Police to include officer-involved shootings in its annual Crime in Virginia report. The 2017 report was the first time such data were reported. Consequently, there have been six years of reports.
For some incidents, there was more than one law-enforcement agency involved. In such circumstances, I counted both agencies. For those involving the State Police, I attributed the involvement to the State Police, rather than the jurisdiction in which it occurred. (more…)
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.
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