Pre-COVID Test Results Show a Failed Public Education System
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36 responses to “Pre-COVID Test Results Show a Failed Public Education System”
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Hey Jim, I’m going to look at this, and see if I can’t add VB (one of the school systems where the majority of the board hates me) and maybe Portsmouth. I’ve gotten the ear of one of the elected ones in Portsmouth and want to see how they react. I want to start pushing them harder and they know it.
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Sorry to see VA Beach board has gone all female. Think Dan Edwards will be missed.
Kempsville schools USED to be good when I my stepchildren attended them years ago. Doubtful now.
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Dan probably want retirement, he aint no spring chicken any more.
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Let me know if you have any difficulty and I’ll add them.
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You are the bomb!! I am going to get some of these people on the record about where they are at, and they can then justify spending my tax dollars on stuff that doesn’t educate.
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Fantastic work Captain! What in the world is Martinsville spending 40% of the school budget on? 40% non instructional spending seems too high.
Richmond is spending 35% of the budget on non instruction. The schools spending under 30% on non instruction appear to do better.-
It is possible to find the Martinsville school budget online. Statewide the averages are 67.5% on instruction and 32.5% on non-instruction. So yes, Martinsville is pretty far out of line.
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What we need are school boards that think in absolute terms about whether the kids are being educated, not how they compare to the rest of the state.
As I wrote, in absolute terms our school system is broken.
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Those many hours you spent on this is worth it! Revealing in so many ways. It should be forwarded to school boards and superintendents. Wise County. You really have to want to go there, one of the most isolated places in Virginia and they have set a high bar that is the envy of wealthy and populous school districts in Northern Virginia. Roanoke too seems to have distilled a winning formula. A demanding school board or a highly skilled superintendent?
My experience tells me it is often the leadership of one driven public servant that can build a coalition and part the waters of adversity.Smaller districts under good leadership seem to thrive despite that lack of investment in the school budgets. It leads me to wonder if massive districts such as Loudoun, Fairfax, and Prince William would be better served by partitioning the district into smaller ones.
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A lot of this discrepancy is attributable to economies of scale. The smaller school divisions, such as Martinsville, have certain fixed administrative expenses that end up taking up a larger percentage of their overall spending. For example, the non-instructional costs constituted 45.6 percent of the expenditures for Bath County schools; 41.8 percent for Colonial Beach; 38.3 percent for Buena Vista, 36.8 percent for West Point; and 34.3 for Highland County.
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If your goal is creating racial “equity” the place you start is ensuring that 4th graders know how to do basic reading and math. If they fall behind in those skills, they will never keep pace with the kids who can read and calculate. All the diversity-equity-inclusion rhetoric is an elaborate excuse for the failure of Virginia’s educrats.
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Simple solution. Stop wasting their time teaching the biographical history of failed despots and generals with their wars.
Spend 6 hours on math. There is no CRT with math. Once you get past the 1800s, the old white guys fade away. In fact, old everything fades away. If you ain’t done it by 25, good chance you won’t.
I was in my 60s before I heard of Greenwood, OK. I was in my 40s before I’d heard of Rose-whatever in Florida. I’m guessing there was a whole lotta bad $#!t done to Black Americans I still haven’t heard, nor did my daughter in her K-12 less than 15 years ago.
Might as well teach that Southern trees bear strange fruit. What is it youse guys always say about “not knowing history”?
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Perhaps the problem was you were educated in the US for some of your formative years.
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Never heard of this in my Virginia K-12… now that I think of it, Tuskegee wasn’t mentioned in either way.
Colfax, La., 1873: This was a direct attack on Black men getting the right to vote during Reconstruction. After Whites contested the result of the 1872 election, Black men and a mostly Black state militia holed up around the parish courthouse to protect the local government. On Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, they were surrounded by a White mob that set the courthouse on fire and shot anyone who emerged. It is estimated that 62 to 81 African Americans were killed.
Elaine, Ark., 1919: There were dozens of racist attacks and massacres across the country in the Red Summer of 1919. One of the worst was in Elaine, Ark., in which at least 200 Black farmers and their families were slaughtered. The farmers had recently unionized and were planning to bypass the unfair sharecropping system.
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About 40% of the content in US HISTORY an 11th grader will learn will be about the history of minorities. Not bad for 20% of the population.
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20%? Try 45%, nearing the 50% mark. How much of that US history involves the SW States?
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I was focusing on Virginia. https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/9e47af36aceba4436839e2bec1c9a92c0761467b6a961f8e16432e36030f14fc.jpg
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The subject is why kids are not learning to read and calculate 20 years into the 21st century in Virginia. Do you have a contribution to make?
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Yeah. The written word is the new Latin. Video and sound are the language of tomorrow. Teach them who and what we really were –racists — and sew a TI-84 into their forearm.
Hey! A good place to start — Adult Education. Teach the half of our country, who doesn’t know, what the difference between a self-guided tour and a violent insurrection is.
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“Teach them who and what we really were — racists.” A little self reflection going on there Spanky?
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Uh yep, and so are you. The difference? I ain’t proud of it.
BTW, This isn’t aimed at Biden… it’s aimed at the 6.
You must be happy…
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2021– the Conservative solution to end discrimination. Stop teaching about discrimination… and supress the Black vote instead.
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You can teach about discrimination all day long if the kids also learn reading, writing and arithmetic. Like most right leaning citizens I think the history curriculum is pretty bad and needs revision. However, fixing that curriculum won’t fix the lack of learning in math and English.
Please be aware that the chronic absenteeism data is the data point in this analysis that is probably the least valid. Think about how this data is collected- taking roll in the classroom each morning. There’s a lot of stuff going on, and in some places accuracy is stressed more than others.
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Got it. Have you got any insight into why the Wise County SOL pass rates were so high?
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Yes sir, and I’ll try to answer that question as succinctly as possible.
We became more reliant on our data. Analysis of that data demonstrated that there were some teachers who had more significantly at-risk students who outperformed teachers who had fewer at-risk students. When we talked to those very successful teachers of very at-risk students, we found they consistently 1) made sure that they taught explicitly and exactly what the standards required students to know, do, and understand, 2) had very positive relationships with students and their parents/guardians, and 3) had higher expectations of their students (and themselves) than did their peers.
Since the data demonstrated that our at-risk students could be successful, this informed the expectations of administrators in the schools and the central office. A significant portion of the evaluation of SOL teachers and principals was based on SOL results. Kindergarten through 2nd grade teachers’ (who don’t have SOL tests) evaluations were highly aligned to student outcome measures such as PALS, division assessments, and other measures aligned to the Standards of Learning. The accepted truth in the division was that it was not up to the students or the parents/guardians to ensure students were successful, rather that success was the sole responsibility of the adults employed by the division. Basically, everyone lined up and pulled in the same direction towards better student outcomes as measured by the SOL test.
There was a significant focus on student outcomes throughout the year, not just at SOL testing time. We worked with teachers to develop interim benchmarks to monitor student progress. Expectations for student success became part of the de facto culture and data was discussed and used consistently. Teachers in many grade levels had 90 minutes of planning, and to support instruction, the school board allowed half that time to be spent daily for remediation. That board act was not necessary, because most teachers pulled students during their planning for additional instruction as needed, evidenced by their formative assessments.
Teachers were given the autonomy to meet the needs of their students to ensure their success in any way they saw fit, so long as it was legally, ethically, and morally correct. The teachers understood the expectations, and the administrators allowed them to meet those expectations in the manner that worked best for them. For example, the division ceased textbook adoptions, and instead allocated textbook funds to schools on a per pupil basis so that teachers could purchase materials that they felt would do the trick.I don’t think this is an all-inclusive list, but I do think that this covers the major points.
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Thank you, I will refer to this often.
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Hmmm, I think we’re seeing this in the vaccine-hesitant Red States already…
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/17/new-covid-study-hints-at-long-term-loss-of-brain-tissue-dr-scott-gottlieb-warns.html
Putting this comparison together involved a lot of time and work and is a useful way to analyze the results of school divisions. I commend you.
There are two additional measures that could shed some more light on the jobs school divisions are doing: dropout rate and pupil/teacher ratio.
As you pointed out, DOE has this data on its website. One can examine the results by school division and by individual schools. However, that website does not contain a tool that would enable one to easily compare divisions, such as you have done.
Obviously, the DOE staff have the capability of comparing the achievement by division, using measures of race, educational advantaged, etc. One would hope that they have done so.
With the information that DOE has, it could easily identify those schools that are doing really well, as well as those that are doing poorly. It could then take whatever it is that the well-performing schools are doing and apply it in those divisions that are not doing well.
Doing that would take strong leadership at the state level. Because the Virginia Constitution vests supervision of schools with the local school boards, the state traditionally has been loath to tell local school boards how to run their schools, except for high-level policies such as the Standards of Quality, accreditation standards, and teacher certification requirements.
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All of the in-school crime data are available as well, but I chose not to include it.
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Now THAT would have made for interesting reading. LOL.
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That discipline data is not that consistent. It is reported differently in different schools and divisions. In some places all discipline referrals are reported, and others, only egregious violations are documented.
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The data show that to be true. Unless the offense is a felony, some principals clearly won’t refer kids to law enforcement. Others will if the kid doesn’t respond to anything else and has hurt or threatened to hurt someone. I will show that when I publish an assessment and comprehensive data for each school in Loudoun County.
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And good data analysis shop could build a program that would automatically generate these data for every school system in the state in this or your suggested expanded format. They have the data. They just have to display it in a color-coded heat map as I have done.
When you see a similar design formatted to display each school, using Loudoun as a guinea pig, you will see how much more actionable that format would be for superintendents and school boards. I will post that one soon. Again, the data is already formatted at VDOE. All they need is a program to generate the spreadsheet for each division and school in each division.
Frankly, the individual school spreadsheet is the best thing they could do for the school divisions.
“Fairfax County had over 55,000 English learners composing nearly 30% of the student body, by far the highest percentage of any of the ten districts. I suspect that Fairfax County also teaches kids with more different native languages than any of the rest.”
And Fairfax has gone from being one of the top school systems in America to a mediocre system within the state.
There is a cost to being a sanctuary county.
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