The General Assembly Adds New Requirements for Teachers that Virginia Schools Do Not Have and Cannot Hire
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24 responses to “The General Assembly Adds New Requirements for Teachers that Virginia Schools Do Not Have and Cannot Hire”
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At best the bills will get a wink and nod. This will suffice for due attention.
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“Who, exactly, is going to actually use 2,140 detailed floor plans? And for what?”
The law enforcement agency responding to a tactical (e.g., school-shooting, SWAT) situation at the school? This was a critical screw-up when the police responded to Columbine High School shooting and ended up going to the wrong entrance because they weren’t aware that the school had been recently renovated and the cafeteria had been moved. The police ended up clearing the wrong side of the school for 30 minutes before they ended up finding the wounded and killed students.
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You and I expect the local fire and law enforcement agencies already have the plans. That is what they do.
The division superintendent shall collate and submit all such school safety audits, in the prescribed format and manner of submission, to the Virginia Center for School and Campus Safety and shall make available upon request to the chief law-enforcement officer of the locality the results of such audits.
Why does the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice Services need them? And do you really think they will be used?
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Expansion planning?
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I have zero expectation that the local fire and law-enforcement agencies have gone around to every school and created site and floor plans for every building. I also have zero expectation that the local police department of sheriff’s office is going to know about every school renovation project.
According to the 2020 School Safety Audit Assessment from DCJS, 17% of school districts reported that first responders did NOT have electronic copies of floor plans available to them.
DCJS needs them to actually verify that the local school board has completed them?
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I know, I posted the 2020 report for your review. Do you think there is going to be 100% compliance with the new law? Not a chance in hell. There is no penalty for ignoring it. Look at how well Richmond responded to the required school personnel vacancy report.
And yours is quite a different proposition than the bill that required all the plans be sent to Richmond in addition to the local police.
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Your question caused me to revise the article to provide extensive information on this bill in the text. Thanks for pointing out the need.
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The last one is the one that I love. First of all, how is the school supposed to know which students do not have broad band access? If access is defined in terms of whether broadband is available, that is fairly simple. But, what about those students whose families cannot afford broadband? They don’t have access. Lastly, and most appropriate to this discussion, what is DOE and DHCD supposed to do with this information?
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Send the students an email with a “read receipt”.
For example:
In Gmail, compose your message.
At the bottom of the Compose window, click More. Request read receipt. If you don’t see this setting, it means you either don’t have a work or school account. …
Click Send. You’ll get a notification email when your message is opened.If you don’t receive a receipt…
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Worked for me a few years ago when I was in a disagreement with a county department head who was denying receiving my emails. When I showed the judge the read notification that included time received, time opened and time viewed the county asked for a recess. When they came back the department head changed his testimony and withdrew his sworn lies. The judge found for me.
Upshot is that read receipts can be remarkably effective.
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I was joking, the result of one received at work that said,
“If you do not recieve this…,” but yes, they are effective. But, you can and should set your email handler to catch them before sending them so you can stop the receipt from being sent.-
Yup, Dept head who fancied himself a tech maven learned that lesson the hard way.
Respond if you don’t get this… ok:)
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Uh… okay. Wait. No. Uh…
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I strongly disagree. Sign HB319 on literacy even though it may have warts and barriers to implementation, I don’t have enough information to have an opinion on the shortcomings.
Failure to teach all kids to read is the most fundamental issue facing our schools and society. Until we change that our educational system and our society are not going to get better. This bill shows that the GA is aware of that and is attempting to address it.
This bill may come under the heading of do something even if it is wrong, but do something! It is at least pointed at the right issue.
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I agree with the need and said that the law was well intended. That does not forgive thee authors either being ignorant of or ignoring the workforce shortages.
“Do something” in this case would be investing state funding to ensure that all schools have the currently required numbers of reading specialists and that the pipeline for more is opened.
The GA needs to do that before layering on more requirements for those specialists that they currently do not have and cannot hire.
Graduate certificates for reading specialists in Virginia are currently offered at UVA, Longwood and Liberty. Fund all the state schools of education to offer the certificates.
Then pay the bills with state funds for those who want those certificates and give time off to accomplish the work.
Then write this bill.
The legislation as written is fundamentally a feel good exercise until the real world workforce issues are solved.
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Makes sense. Can they now fix it by applying money to create the needed workforce? Spending money is something the GA excels at.
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There is certainly room for improvement in our educational system, specifically concerning the disparate outcomes we produce with regards to race, socioeconomic status, and zip code. However, Virginia does fairly well overall compared to other states in the union, usually ranking in the top ten in many metrics. When an organization has issues like this (high overall performance, but specific areas in need of improvement) it is not wise to make broad significant changes. It’s usually best not to throw the baby out with the bath water, but that’s exactly what we’re doing now.
We need tweaks to the system applied with precision. Unfortunately, the further away from the classroom the mandates originate, the less precision can be applied. For example, the tweaks necessary should be carried out with a surgical scalpel, but the only tool available to the Governor’s office or the general assembly is a 14 pound sledge hammer.
Jim is exactly right in his premise. The teacher pipeline has been trying up for years before the pandemic, and teachers (new and veteran) are leaving the field in droves. It’s all well and good to sit around and complain about teachers, but keep it up and they’ll solve that problem for us- there won’t be any such creatures left to complain about.
Right now, the general assembly are arguing over whether to provide our teachers with a 4% or 5% raise. The annual inflation rate is over 8% now, so either option would result in a de facto pay cut in real terms. Virginia ranks approximately 8th in the nation in median household income, yet 33rd in teacher salary. This problem not only affects teachers, but other public sector employees as well.
So, if we don’t want any teachers left in the classroom, please let us continue to pile on additional mandates and make their pay less lucrative. That’ll show them!
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Wrong, wrong and more wrong. If by doing “fairly well compared to other states” you mean not teaching kids to read more than average that’s not a goal I would aspire to.
“There is certainly room for improvement in our educational system, specifically concerning the disparate outcomes we produce with regards to race, socioeconomic status, and zip code.”
That is right out of the now defunct VaDoE “equity” goals. VaDoE included “ability” as a criteria that it wanted to reduce predictability of outcomes based upon. You forgot that one.
Woke racism is both profoundly demeaning to black people and actively prevents us from addressing the real issue at the core of our problems.
That issue is that we do not teach all kids to read. Kids who cannot read have painfully few prospects for leading honest decent lives regardless of race, zip code or any other criteria. We have now demonstrated that for several generations.
Kids who come from predominately poor homes, often chaotic, often single parent headed by young poorly educated women, are way behind the 8 ball when they get to school. Unlike kids from less impaired homes, these kids too often cannot read when they get to school and too often do not know the alphabet, the prerequisite to reading. Too often they not only never catch up, they fall further and further behind every year. That is a guaranteed recipe for failure regardless of race or zip code.
“We need tweaks to the system applied with precision.” No! What we need is to recognize the issue and to apply a blunt instrument that starts pre-school and teaches all kids to read.
“So, if we don’t want any teachers left in the classroom, please let us continue to pile on additional mandates” and if we want continued chaos and dysfunction in our society with a growing cohort of illiterate people who are unable to function productively just keep tweaking and fail to mandate and fund teaching every kid to read.
Teachers have been sorely underpaid for years, and standards to filter out the poor performers among them have been lacking. With high inflation this year, and probably for the next several years, real incomes will continuously go down for us all. Welcome to the club teachers, and perhaps consider joining in working to change the profligate fiscal policies that got us here.
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According to the 2019 NAEP results (latest results available), Virginia ranked 8th in the nation on 4th grade reading proficiency (the earliest grade assessed). Given the fact that we rank so highly, I would not recommend drastic changes in what we’re doing. In fact, I do have some concerns over the Virginia Literacy Act the General Assembly just passed. That is an example of Virginia following the lead of Mississippi in reading, the state that ranked 40th on this same test in 2019.
Currently, the highest performing region in Virginia in reading is far southwest Virginia, Region VII. They are the least well funded on a per pupil basis, have the highest poverty rate in the state, and the highest rate of students with disabilities. If they can outdo everyone else in the state given the challenges they face, then other parts of the state can certainly improve.
How would you suggest we bring more people into the teaching profession?
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There is something profoundly wrong with the statistics you quote. Ranking southwest Virginia educationally over Northern Virginia is clear evidence. Norton will not outperform Fairfax unless it is in meth usage per capita and poverty.
Rural Virginia in general and poor urban areas like Richmond, Petersburg, Norfolk and Portsmouth absolutely do not perform as you have asserted. That is a lot of kids, and a lot of kids we are not teaching to read.
Better pay is certainly one way to attract personnel. Reforming our schools of education is another.
How do you suggest we get over the tragedy of woke racism in our educational systems that causes aberrations like Charlottesville declaring 86% of its students as “gifted” to achieve racial “equity”?
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Please feel free to fact check me. Southwest is the highest performing in Math, Reading, and overall.
https://p1pe.doe.virginia.gov/apex/f?p=152:1:::::p_session_id,p_application_name:-80446405711429924,testresults
The problem with “wokeness” is that it tends to reinforce the incorrect belief that some kids can’t achieve. It’s up to the adult educators to make sure that students succeed. The former administration in Richmond consistently reduced expectations both of students and of educators, and that’s where they failed.
It’s all about high expectations, and that’s one of the secrets to Region VII’s successes.
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I will look at the regional state statistics.
I have checked your initial presentation of Virginia performing well. It turns out that is a case of much of the rest of the nation performing badly and Virginia performing marginally less badly despite having some of the lowest standards in the nation. Go figure.
Specifically in the 2019 testing in 4th grade reading 69% of Virginia students performed at basic level or above and 38% scored at or above proficient. By grade 8 basic levels were materially unchanged but proficiency levels had dropped to 33%. Grade 12 levels were unavailable.
Were I a 4th grade teacher I would be mortified that 3 out of every 10 of my students did not have basic reading skills and that fewer than 4 out of 10 were proficient. Were I an 8th grade teacher and just 1 in 3 students were proficient readers I would be humiliated and ask my teaching college for my tuition back because it had failed to prepare me to teach kids to read proficiently.
We are not teaching 3 out of every 10 Virginia students to read at basic grade level.
That the percentages are just about the same at 4th and 8th grade levels show that kids who learn to read at basic grade level continue to learn to read at basic grade level. However, by 8th grade fewer kids have learned to read proficiently at grade level.
The kids who cannot read at grade level by the 4th grade still cannot read at grade level by the 8th grade. Many of those kids are not learning to read at all. That is a profound failure and a measure that we are perpetuating an illiterate underclass that will never achieve decent lives or acquire the skills to earn an honest living.
That is a crisis for the kids and for our society. It is not some frill that needs just a little “tweaking”. It needs a “mandate”, teach all kids to read, start early in pre-K and K and provide more reading resources.
Virginia is getting a start on that which is better than nothing. Nothing is what we have had for the last several woke years of whining about “equity” and systemic racism.
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Are you aware that Virginia’s expectation for proficiency on our state accountability tests (SOL tests) were among the lowest in the nation prior to the Board of Education lowering them again (math in 2019 and reading in 2021)? Expect little, get little. The Virginia Literacy Act is doing something, but there will be a lot of negative unintended consequences that go with it. If you haven’t read it, I would encourage you to do so. It places a lot of additional mandates on Virginia educators, and did not eliminate any of the prior requirements that have been heaped upon them over the years. There are several provisions in here that have the likelihood of doing nothing more than driving folks from the field at a greater rate than they’re leaving already.
https://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?221+sum+HB319One of the big problems that we have in education in this state is that we have too many priorities. An organization can do one or two things well, and a bunch of things crappily. If the powers that be could rank order all of those priorities, and then focus on them one or two at a time, we could move forward.
The other thing is that there is a lot of good that is going on in education, but there’s no concerted effort to identify those being successful and sharing those strategies around. One of the best means by which to cause improvement is to steal the strategies of those who are getting it done.
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