Tag: John Butcher
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Counting Parents
In this post John Butcher, author of CrankysBlog, explores the relationship between K-12 academic outcomes, as measured by Standards of Learning (SOL) test scores and single-parent households. His conclusion: the data imply “a strong relationship” between the two. — JAB by John Butcher The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Kids Count Web site includes Virginia household single-parent percentages by race…
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Where Have All the Students Gone?
by John Butcher The estimable Jim Bacon recently posted on declining enrollments in many public schools. He used VDOE data comparing the fall division enrollments (aka division “memberships”) in 2021 with those in 2019. Those data showed the largest drops in “rural, non-metropolitan” areas. Of course, most Virginia school divisions are in such areas. Highland County, with the smallest enrollment in…
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2021 SOLs Don’t Tell Us Much of Anything
by John Butcher 2020 was the first spring since 1998 without SOL tests in Virginia. Then came 2021, when participation in the testing was voluntary. The VDOE press release says, “[2020-21] was not a normal school year for students and teachers, in Virginia or elsewhere, so making comparisons with prior years would be inappropriate.” The first line of…
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2020 Teacher Salaries
by John Butcher It’s Spring and the data in the lower half of the 2020 Superintendent’s Annual Report have sprouted. Table 19 reports on salaries in some detail. As well, it provides an overview report of division average salaries of “All Instructional Positions” (classroom teachers, guidance counselors, librarians, technology instructors, principals, and assistant principals). Here…
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2019-20 School Year Attendance
by John Butcher It’s Spring! The Narcissi are standing tall and promising blossoms. The Croci are in flower. Data are sprouting in last year’s Superintendent’s Annual Report. Table 8, “Number of Days Taught, ADA, ADM,” gives us an early measure of the impact of the pandemic-related shutdowns on school attendance. The City of Richmond’s end-of-year count of days…
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Counting Teacher Licenses: An Exegesis on Bureaucracy
by John Butcher An earlier post discussed the remarkably large number of unlicensed teachers in Richmond City public schools, as reported in the 2018 USDoE Civil Rights Data Collection. An email from the Richmond public schools chief of staff responded that only four of about 2,100 Richmond teachers now are unlicensed, unless you also count 38…
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Watering Down the SOLs. Again.
by John Butcher If you want to boost the pass rates of the Standards of Learning exams, you have three choices (aside from the one perfected at Richmond’s Carver Elementary): Improve teaching, make the tests easier, or relax the scoring. On the 2019 revision of the math tests, the Board of “Education” chose the last…
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More Data on SW VA’s Breakout School Performance
by John Butcher We have seen that the divisions in SW Virginia (“Region 7” in the VDOE system) formed their own organization, the Comprehensive Instructional Program (“CIP”), that brought nice improvements in student performance. While we wait to see whether the Board of “Education” will punt on the 2021 SOL testing, I’ve been looking over the 2019 data (there…
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Money Don’t Buy You Learning
by John Butcher It’s December. The Generous Assembly is about to return and the demands for more education funding (see Executive Summary at p.4) resound throughout the Commonwealth. The data would suggest that these demands are misplaced. VDOE won’t post the 2020 expenditure data until sometime this spring and there were no 2020 SOLs, so we’ll…
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Bring Back SGPs (Student Growth Percentiles)
I suspect John Butcher was writing tongue-in-cheek when he headlines his latest post on Cranky’s Blog, “Why Do the New Tests Punish the Poorer Kids?” As shown by the graph (left), when the Virginia Department of Education introduced new Standards of Learning (SOL) tests reflecting higher standards a few years ago, average test scores dropped…
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More Money for What?
by John Butcher The tug-of-war between the School Board and City Council over school funding enters a new era of speculation: Will the recent election results produce more funds for Richmond schools? That overlooks the more fundamental question: What is the School Board doing with all the money it now is spending? The most recent…
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School Accreditation Process Violates State Law
Some unfortunate Virginia Department of Education administrator will be tasked with the job of poring through the public responses to proposed rules for granting and denying public-school accreditation. I would pay good money to watch his hair catch on fire when he reads the comments submitted by John Butcher, author of Cranky’s Blog. Here’s how…
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It’s Performance, Not Poverty
by John Butcher The popular sport in the Richmond “education” establishment has been to blame the kids for the awful performance of our schools. We particularly hear about our less affluent (the official euphemism is “economically disadvantaged”) students. We have some data on that. Again. Here are the average reading pass rates by grade of the economically disadvantaged (”ED”) and non-ED…
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Failing to Fix the Unfixable
Cranky (aka John Butcher) is on a tear these days, most recently exposing the Virginia Board of Education’s ineffectual effort to fix the City of Richmond’s broken school systems. The Richmond’s schools are in turmoil. According to the state board, 27 of the city’s 44 schools are not fully accredited. The school board has booted…
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Mo’ Money Is Not the Answer
by John Butcher It’s been a while since I sent Jim a bang per buck analysis of school performance. Now that the 2016 SOL data are out, I’ll try to get back in the groove. In the past I have plotted the raw division SOL pass rates vs. the annual disbursements per student. But comparing…