Bacon's Rebellion

  • Make Government Work Again

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Education blogger John Butcher highlights key insights from Matt Hurt’s Bacon’s Rebellion series about Virginia’s Standards of Learning assessments. Butcher, whose skepticism is amply captured in the title of his blog, “Cranky’s Blog,” finds much to admire in Hurt’s analysis and the success of the Comprehensive Instructional Program (CIP) consortium that he heads. Southwest Virginia school systems, where CIP got its start, have emitted the few rays of light in Virginia’s otherwise dismally performing educational system over the past four years.

    Butcher closes with this recommendation: “I think our new Governor should, on his first day, fire the members of the Board of ‘Education,’ replace them with people recommended by Matt Hurt, and appoint Hurt as Secretary of Education.”

    It’s not enough for Governor-elect Glenn Youngkin to drive destructive Critical Race Theory-inspired policies from Virginia’s schools. He needs to replace them with something positive and forward looking. The Comprehensive Instructional Program is one model he should consider. Hurt’s analysis is driven by data, not ideology. He is interested above all else in what works. That sounds exactly like Youngkin’s style. As Youngkin builds his team and ponders how to turn campaign promises into real-world policies, he would be well advised to pick up the phone and talk to Hurt.

    — JAB

  • What Is Going on in Portsmouth?

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    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    Are there cities that are more dysfunctional than Portsmouth, Virginia?

    Yes, of course there are.

    There’s always San Francisco where you can get an app for your phone called “SnapCrap” to allow you to report piles of human feces to city sanitation workers.

    There’s Chicago. The Windy City was recently designated the “rattiest” in America by Orkin. Lots of rodents there.

    And there’s Seattle, which actually ceded city blocks to anarchists in the summer of 2020.

    But you’ve got to hand it to Virginia’s “Old Port City,” which was once a bustling hub of commerce and charm. Now it’s competing for most boneheaded city in the U.S. where city and state officials trade lawsuits and accuse each other of vile motives. (more…)

  • Infrastructure Vote? Oh No, That’s Their Bill

    Posted on

    by

    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    Photo credit Verizon

    by Dick Hall-Sizemore

    There has long been a consensus that America needs to pay more attention to its infrastructure. Last week, the House of Representatives passed President Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure package and sent it to the President for his signature. Of the total amount, $550 billion was new money; the remainder was funding normally allocated each year for highways and other infrastructure projects.

    The bill had passed the Senate earlier in the year on a bipartisan vote, 69-30. Even Mitch McConnell voted for it. However, in the House, only 13 Republicans voted for the bill. The rest of the House Republicans were angry over the support given the bill by some of their fellow Republicans. Probably the most galling aspect was that the 13 Republican votes were needed to pass the bill after six far-left Democrats, who refuse to, and do not understand the need for, compromise, voted against the legislation. (more…)

  • Key Fiduciary Duties of School Boards and Superintendents

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    sherlockj

    by James C. Sherlock

    My frequent columns on Virginia schools bring up the same lines of arguments and agreements every time.

    I hope it will help if I explain what I expect of school boards and superintendents. I try to align my writing with those expectations.

    School boards and superintendents hold their positions first as trustees for the children, but then also for the interests of parents, school employees, and taxpayers.

    So what are their primary duties? I will write of only five:

    • provide a quality education to every child;
    • provide safe and welcoming schools, excellent learning environments and equal access to education for all;
    • listen to parents;
    • be good stewards of public funds;
    • manage professionally.

    There are more, but I will stick to those because they are missing in some Virginia schools and districts.

    While I have praised a few school systems, failures in those duties provide the underlying themes of much of my writing. I hope to write more about successes in the future. (more…)

  • Indians and McAuliffe’s Last Stand

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    SR Sidarth, George Allen’s “macaca” nemesis, today. A partner in Troutman Pepper’s Washington, D.C., office, he practices multifamily-housing-finance law.

    by James A. Bacon

    A certain KP Nayar offers an interesting perspective on Virginia’s gubernatorial election from his vantage point as the Washington columnist for Moneycontrol.com, an English-language publication serving the business market in India.

    “Indian Americans constitute only one percent of the U.S. electorate, but Virginia is a state where they have influenced state politics far in excess of their numerical strength or fund-raising clout,” Nayar writes in a column entitled, “How Indian Americans in Virginia may have derailed a second term for US President Joe Biden.”

    The column reminds me of a refugee from Castro’s Cuba I knew in the 1970s who contended passionately that Cuba stood at the center of the geo-political universe. His Cuba-centrism was a stretch, but it contained kernels of truth. I can’t think of a single American commentator who has remarked upon the role of Indian Americans in the 2021 elections. Still, Nayar’s ethnocentrist perspective might provide insights that American commentators have overlooked. (more…)

  • Earning the Right to Govern

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon


    by Shaun Kenney

    Now that a solid week has passed between Virginia and the November elections, the sobering up can begin in earnest. With a Republican sweep that gave Youngkin 50.59% of the vote, Sears 50.72%, and Miyares 50.36%, it is clear that rhetoric caged in the spirit of a Roman triumph is a touch overstated. With a 52-48 Republican majority in the House of Delegates, what should be clear to most conservatives is that November doesn’t seal the deal.

    If we want Virginia back, we are going to have to fight for it.

    Which means the level of intensity directed against heavy-handed school boards and local administrators cannot — and by all appearances, is not — going away anytime soon. Nor are the progressives shying away from a fight on this and many other questions they have forced during their four-year reign of shame.
    Which is why governing is going to be critically important, on precisely two fronts. (more…)

  • Charter Schools Reveal Hypocrisy and Incompetence of Loudoun and Albemarle School Leadership

    Posted on

    by

    sherlockj

    Albemarle County Schools Superintendent Matt Haas

    by James C. Sherlock

    Some people are exactly who they say they are.

    Not so with the Loudoun County and Albemarle School Boards and their superintendents. They are nationally famous for projecting moral superiority. They arrest lesser mortals for objecting in their presence to the policies they impose.

    The public charter schools in those two counties provide ongoing rebukes to their faux-elite, hectoring wokeism.  

    They offer charters at enormous public expense only to parents wealthier and whiter than the district as a whole. And none to poor and minority communities.

    Yet even with enormous budgets and small classes they can’t get those select student bodies to outperform academically the rest of their districts.

    We are thus witness to an absolutely perfect storm of hypocrisy and incompetence.

    We have seen this movie before in Virginia. Loudoun and Albemarle County public charter schools are exactly what they seem. (more…)

  • Is Virginia Exporting Its Human Capital?

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Source: Virginia Economic Development Partnership, by way of State Council of Higher Education for Virginia Insights.

    by James A. Bacon

    Researchers at the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) are asking a question with profound implications for Virginia’s higher-education policy. Is Virginia exporting more college graduates than it is importing?

    The answer, conclude Tom Allison & Susan Hankins in the latest Insights post, is, “Maybe. Enough to get our attention.”

    The issue is politically sensitive because SCHEV has declared as a matter of state policy the goal of making Virginia the “best educated state in the country” by 2030. That goal makes eminent sense if demand exists for students with advanced degrees, especially STEM degrees. But if the demand doesn’t exist for all the credentialed young people churned out by Virginia’s colleges and universities, and if graduates migrate to states with more job opportunities, then Virginia winds up subsidizing human capital development for other states. (more…)

  • Herring Intervenes to Protect Hospital Competition… in Pennsylvania

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    by James A. Bacon

    It’s encouraging to see that Mark Herring has taken a forceful action against an “anticompetitive hospital merger” in his final days as Attorney General. Too bad the targets of his judicial intervention are in New Jersey, not Virginia.

    Herring has joined a bipartisan coalition of 26 attorneys general filing an amicus brief in federal court in support of a lower court ruling that would stop a merger of Penn States Hershey Medical Center and Pinnacle Health. As a press release from Herring’s office explains, states have a strong interest in ensuring the affordability, accessibility, and quality of health care.

    “The public interest is best served by protecting vibrant competition in local healthcare markets,” asserts the press release. “States have experienced a wave of consolidation in healthcare that has resulted in higher prices without any substantial improvements in quality for consumers.” (more…)

  • No Indoctrination to See Here, Move Along Now — Albemarle County Edition

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Source: Henley Middle School (Albemarle County)

    by James A. Bacon

    A disturbed parent of an Albemarle County middle school student has directed me to materials used in classroom presentation as part of the “Courageous Conversations about Race,” initiative at the Henley Middle School website.

    “We’re unique among school divisions and, for that matter, organizations of any kind, for having adopted an anti-racism policy,” says Albemarle County school superintendent Matt Haas in a video to parents. “To me, and I hope to you, our anti-racism policy is more than words on paper.”

    The anti-racism policy mission statement says, “Personal and institutional racism have historically existed and continues to exist in the Division. Combating racism in our schools is a legal and moral imperative.”

    Combating racism is a moral imperative. I share that goal. The question is how. Do we help or hinder the effort to eliminate the significance of race in our society by creating formal anti-racism policies, updating anti-racism policy evaluation reports, conducting anti-racism policy orientations, asking people to engage in navel gazing about their status as racially privileged or oppressed, and setting up an “Anonymous Alerts” system to “report instances of racism?” — in sum, by preoccupying ourselves with race every single waking minute of the day? (more…)

  • Vaccine Decisions Belong to Parents. Period.

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    by

    James A. Bacon

    by Kerry Dougherty

    This creepy promotion ought to make all of us uncomfortable. Pharmaceutical companies should back off any outreach to impressionable children and leave decisions about vaccinations where it belongs: With parents.

    Stop trying to brainwash youngsters. (more…)

  • Turbine Costs Appear on Dominion Bills in 2022?

    Posted on

    by

    Steve Haner

    Illustration of Dominion’s wind project from its Bureau of Ocean Energy Management documentation.

    by Steve Haner

    Customers of Dominion Energy Virginia will begin to pay for its planned 176 wind turbines off the coast of Virginia Beach next September, years before the first electricity is produced, if the company’s request for initial project funding is approved by the State Corporation Commission.

    As with all such projects now, the bill will be paid through a specific addition to monthly bills, a rate adjustment clause or RAC. The cost for residential customers will work out to $1.45 per 1,000 kilowatt hours, but that is just for the first rate year beginning in 2022. In a news release Friday, the company claimed eventually the “net” cost to residential users would be $4 per 1,000 kWh, but that includes assumptions about future tax benefits and future costs of the alternatives abandoned.

    The gross cost to consumers may be buried somewhere in the mound of Dominion documents that now constitute the full application. Or it may be among the items of data which the company seeks to withhold from public view.

    On Friday, the record of the case was just a few cover letters and the company’s motion asking the SCC to let it keep much of the key information confidential.  Monday up to 40 (40!) additional documents were posted on the SCC’s case file, full of some details, but reviewing a table of contents one can see example after example of information redacted, in anticipation of SCC approval of the motion for secrecy. (more…)

  • Virginia’s Changing Public School Demographics – COVID Edition

    Posted on

    by

    sherlockj

    by James C. Sherlock

    Virginia’s public schools underwent significant changes in enrollment between 2018-19 and 2020-21.

    The figures for this school year have yet to be released.

    In the three-year period ending 2020-21, Virginia public schools saw a decline of 37,775 students, a loss of 2.9%.

    The racial and social-economic demographics also changed. The numbers and percentages of Hispanic, Asian and mixed race children bucked the overall trend and increased. (more…)

  • Schools Need to Set Higher Expectations

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    This is the sixth in a series about Virginia’s Standards of Learning assessments.

    by Matt Hurt

    Persistent gaps in educational proficiency for important subgroups — minorities, the economically disadvantaged, students with disabilities, English language learners — have long preoccupied Virginia educators. One thing we have learned in our Comprehensive Instructional Program consortium regarding student outcomes is that when teachers, schools, and divisions set higher expectations, performance improves.

    The Virginia Board of Education adopted more rigorous standards and more rigorous SOL tests, which were implemented in math and reading in 2012 and 2013 respectively. The SOL pass rates dropped precipitously in those years, but began to rebound immediately in math. The reading proficiency rates declined the second year, and then improved with the advent of retesting students in grades 3-8 who narrowly failed their SOL tests in 2015. High school students had the opportunity to retake tests years earlier. (more…)

  • The Rise of the Mises Caucus

    Posted on

    by

    James A. Bacon

    Ludwig von Mises

    by Bruce Majors

    Virginia had elections this week that garnered no media coverage: internal elections for offices in the Libertarian Party of Northern Virginia.

    Voters and the media pay little attention to Libertarian and other smaller party candidates except when they poll well enough to look like spoilers. That happened in the 2013 gubernatorial election when Robert Sarvis won 5% of the vote, tilting the election, many Republicans believed, from their candidate Ken Cuccinelli to Democrat Terry McAuliffe, and in the 2016 presidential presidential campaign when Gary Johnson at one point polled in the double digits.

    Libertarians played no such spoiler role in 2021, yet in off-year elections some 150 of them were elected to local offices across the country, mainly in smaller rural and suburban jurisdictions — doubling the number of elected Libertarians. (None were in Virginia.) Perhaps more significantly, Libertarians have been redefining themselves. In the past, the party had a left-leaning streak that stressed such ideas as legalizing all drugs, opening the borders to immigration, and eliminating taxes. Over the past year, though, the Libertarian Party has experienced an internal revolution led by a group called the Mises Caucus. (more…)

Now Available

Book cover of 'Dust Mites: A Second American Revolution' by James A. Bacon, featuring astronauts planting a flag with a blue and white emblem on a lunar landscape, with Earth visible in the background.
For sale on Amazon.com

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.

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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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