Are Poor Rural White Wise County Evangelicals More Antiracist than the Wealthy, Urbane Citizens of Loudoun?
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47 responses to “Are Poor Rural White Wise County Evangelicals More Antiracist than the Wealthy, Urbane Citizens of Loudoun?”
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Thank you for another profoundly disturbing report. Hoping it may garner enough attention to produce action.
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How do you reconcile this with the fact that Loudon and Fairfax school districts are ranked 4&6 while wise is 15th?
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My suspicion is per student expenditures in Loudon far exceed those in Wise. Also suspect parents’ and teachers’ education attainment levels mirror this.
Have no data to support that but might be an interesting comparison. One might expect the gap to be even wider than 5 to 15 but for efforts in Wise to excel.
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The linked spreadsheet has the figures to which you refer and many more.
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Wise – 97% graduation rate – $10,056 per student per year
Fairfax – 86% graduation rate – $16,186 per student per year
Loudoun – 92% graduation rate- $17,344 per student per yearData source is http://www.niche.com, which ranks the schools as noted by Mr. O’Keefe, in his previous comment.
Wise County schools have higher student proficiency ratings in both math and reading (94 & 86) than either Loudoun (86 and 84) or Fairfax (85 & 81).
It makes me wonder what criteria niche.com uses, and what weights they apply to those criteria, when assigning their rankings.
Wise County schools do rank significantly lower than Loudoun and Fairfax where “diversity” is concerned. To me, though, “diversity” should not receive very much weight when comparing the quality of schools, since a given school district has no control over its “diversity”. Wise County schools are also rated lower than the other two for “college prep” which would rightly be weighted fairly heavily.
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The folks at niche.com are so precious.
As you indicate, Wise County schools educates the kids who live there, who are white by a huge majority. They are also some of the poorest kids in the state.
College prep is important for kids who want to go to college. CTE is equally important to those who don’t.
I suspect Wise County high schools don’t have their own Olympic pools for home swimming meets either. Was that rated?
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But they also speak English as their first language. Any comparison between NoVa and non-NoVa schools has to account for English As a Second Language.
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The folks in Wise may speak English, but it sure sounds different than English in other parts of the state.
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Thanks. Believe the UVA extension in Wise might help in that will raise the college prep numbers. Maybe also make teacher continuing ed more available.
Also bet you’ll get some blowback from the SJWs on “diversity” should not receive very much weight when comparing the quality of schools, since a given school district has no control over its diversity. I agree, of course.
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niche.com? That organization combines “reviews and data”. I used the official data posted by VDOE. Someone else will have to reconcile it.
Jim Sherlock has done the basic work of diving into the details of the data to develop the comparisons. It is hoped that someone at DOE or the Secretary of Education’s office will take note and try to figure out what some jurisdictions are doing right that other jurisdictions can use to their advantage. It could be smaller schools. Perhaps there are different family cultures. Perhaps the teachers are better motivated. If so, why? Obviously, it is not primarily a resource issue. The implicated localities and the state agency should be looking for answers.
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Smaller schools with more neighborhood cohesion. My guess is that the teachers in Wise County live in the same areas as their students and their students’ parents. Teachers in NoVa rarely live in the collection areas for where they teach.
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That is so true! I taught for many years in Loudoun. No chance I would have lived in Loudoun the land of my birth. Too expensive. Fauquier was so much cheaper.
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I think you are right. I also think that the care and professional approach that Wise takes with its CTE programs is a big factor.
BTW, Loudoun recruits teachers heavily in Jefferson County West Virginia, right across the Potomac. The recruiting is successful because Loudoun pays $20,000 a year more than Jefferson County. You can imagine how well that is received by Jefferson County schools and parents.
Loudoun, of course, does not care. Sort of a Droit du seigneur attitude. They believe West Virginia citizens should just be richer if they want to keep their teachers.
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Devastating to narratives…
Fascinating deep dive.
Thank you for the analysis.
My grandfather, J. J. Kelly, Jr., was superintendent of Wise County schools from 1917-1963. I’d like to think that his work then might have helped lay the foundation for today’s results.
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Here’s an interesting article consisting mostly of a transcript of an interview with him from 1959, including a number of insights into the schools (and of his life, including meeting my grandmother) during that time:
https://vagenweb.org/wise/HSpubl40.htm
Not sure whether and how that contributes to the current discussion.
But for those with an interest in or connections to Wise County and its schools, it’s fun to read. For me, anyway. 🙂
“Are poor rural white evangelicals in Wise County more antiracist than the wealthy, urbane citizens of Loudoun?”
Probably, if by antiracist you mean someone who genuinely strives to judge people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.
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Of course that is exactly what I mean. It is the only “antiracism” that matters.
At one time, early 90s, Plano, Tx., was the darling school district within the Dallas ISD. Lots of income. Lots of young upwardly mobile professionals. BMWs. Mercs. Big houses. High achievers in schools. Also, the teen suicide capital of the country.
Money ain’t everything, nor is the lack of it always nothing.
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That is one on the core messages of my research. First time we have totally agreed in a long time. Thank you.
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So comparatively, what are the ingress and egress rates of the two counties?
Lots and lots of factors and pressures play into those numbers. When did learning stop being fun and become the ultimate measure of childhood success?
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I love Wise County. Home to Ralph Stanley, Governor Linwood, and George C. Scott! Don’t forget the birthplace of “Think and Grow Rich” by Napoleon Hill. Wise County. Named for Governor Henry Wise who was in office as secession broke out. Wise considered declaring John Brown insane and committing him to an asylum. But after meeting Brown, Wise was convinced he was of sound mind and stood by his sentence to hang. An able general during the Civil War who was one of Lee’s last stalwarts at Appomattox. I love the political graveyard.
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Sorry, Dickenson County, next door to Wise, was the home of Ralph Stanley.
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Birthplace. Most of Doctor Stanley’s life is spent in Wise.
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New super in Loudoun. Williams is long gone in Texas now. Ziegler is the new guy. And he is in way over his head. Great post Captain! Wow! Less really is more.
“One big contrast is that the Wise high schools are much smaller. Fairfax high schools average over 2300 students each. Loudoun almost 1700. Wise less than 500.”
This is probably a big contributing factor for what you are seeing. It has long been known that smaller schools tend to produce superior results academically. The advantages of larger schools revolve around extracurricular activities and advanced course opportunities and benefit the students who are predisposed to excel – for any number of reason. Smaller schools tend to compete pretty well when it comes to opportunities for scholars but they also have fewer children who fail because marginal students are less likely to fall between the cracks. None of this is news.
I must say that having fought the small schools vs big school fights here in Loudoun, it is always the fiscal Conservatives who push for bigger schools simply to drive down the capital cost per student for new construction. They try to argue that it also reduces operating per student costs… that is simply false. In the end the Conservatives usually win and ultimately as a result of over development we end up with factory schools. Of course they don’t face these problems in Wise.
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Did that debate actually happen? If so, when? And when did fiscal conservatives control the Loudoun school board? Those are real questions. I’d like to know. If you are correct, the big vs. small school discussion is worth revisiting.
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Loudoun School Board was controlled by Republicans up until 2019.
One small quibble, TJHSST is a Governor’s school and Loudoun sends kids there. If Loudoun no longer participates, that’s a recent change. There are no other Governor’s schools in NOVA.-
I have just investigated your comment. I have changed the column and the linked spreadsheet to accommodate the results.
Detailed state records at https://www.doe.virginia.gov/statistics_reports/advanced/index.shtml
list no Loudon students in Governor’s schools and have not for years. That is the reference I used.But they do list 278 students, about 1%, who go to a Governor’s STEM academy, so I’ll call that TJ and change the text and spreadsheet linked in the column. As an aside, that is not the category used by Fairfax for TJ.
It is still true that Wise sends 7% to a A. Linwood Holton Virtual Governor’s School. See http://www.hgs.k12.va.us/about_hgs.htm
I went to the state website https://www.doe.virginia.gov/instruction/governors_school_programs/academic_year/index.shtml#holton lists Loudoun as a participant in TJ.
“The following school divisions participate in the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology: city of Falls Church; and the counties of Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William.”
So I made the changes. Thanks.
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Not true. The flip did not happen until 2011. I know I taught there.
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Also, Republicans were in the majority on the Board of Supervisors during the late 90s and early part of this century, during the time when growth in Loudoun really took off.
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I never mentioned political parties.
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The debate over keeping or closing the small elementary schools of Loudoun County raged for quite some time. I believe the current standard ES size is 900 students (doubled in less than 20 years) as opposed to 200-300 for some of the oldest ES in the county. The same pattern of size growth was also applied to middle and high schools.
The latest of a long string of conservative school board members to take up this battle was former Chairman Eric Hornberger who fought annually to close the small community-based schools of western Loudoun in particular and transfer those students to the large new schools they recently built purely for his claim of saving money. He was very successful at shifting Middleburg and Hillsboro to charter status – again for supposed fiscal reasons. Thank god he is gone.
https://wamu.org/story/14/04/25/virginia_residents_score_victory_in_battle_over_loudoun_board/
This has been a battle for LC parents for some 20 years from when they first tried to close Hamilton Elementary. We hope that with the ideology shift on the SB, the threat is over. We shall see.
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There’s a lot of mucking around in the weeds here. Is this a case where Occam’s Razor applies? Has demographics been taken into account?
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“Mucking around in the weeds” is what folks say when they don’t like the data.
Of course demographics have been “taken into account”. A Black kid is Black, a poor kid is poor, a Hispanic kid is Hispanic. The results are the results. Read the spreadsheet.
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There is a saying in analysis that goes torture the data until they confess; torture them too much and they will confess to anything. My point is that if the students in Wise are predominantly while while those in Loudon are racially mixed, that might explain much of the difference. As would home life and teacher quality.
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I provide both the overall student body statistics and the components of the overall performance broken out by race, poverty and English language learners. Pick one. Wise wins.
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I thought racially mixed learning environments were the best- most conducive to learning? If you are making the opposite argument, be ready for personal attacks from the left.
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“They pay their teachers on average about 30% more than the state average — $65,676 — so that cannot be a factor. ”
Sure it can, and I beg to differ, in your analysis, it does. The State average is tertiary in a heads up match. In Loudon, a teacher makes ~50% of county median income (household?), and in Wise, it’s ~125% of county median income.
Status-wise, i.e., prestige and pay, in one county the average teacher is from the lower middle class; upper middle class in the other. Makes a difference.
One of the fastest falling job statuses in this country is in the teaching profession. In the 1970s, and for years before and after, the MOST prestigious job was a college professor, numero uno, above POTUS. Today, I doubt it’s in the top 20. A change in the business model of education that has led to the decline in effectiveness in the teachers.
Call me elitist, and in this case, you’d be right, but you want BOBs for teachers.
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You reassert a point that I made in the column about how well Wise County pays their teachers compared to the median in that County. Good for them. It does make a difference. Loudoun is welcome to make that assessment.
As Jim Whitehead and I pointed out above, though, many Loudoun teachers live elsewhere, like Fauquier and Jefferson County West Virginia right across the river where Loudoun actively and successfully recruits teachers.
I have a relative who lives in Jefferson County and was a principal there. She saw the stress that put on their ability to retain teachers.
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It’s not just income to living. In Wise, those kids see the value of college every day, not only as a way out, but a way up… and really up. Atitude counts. That person in the front of the is a top 10%’er.
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UVa Wise County is a godsend there.
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So is Mountain Empire Community College.
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Had a friend who used to teach there. Always meant to drive out to visit. Too late now. Wish I could say they retired. Thought seriously about funding a scholarship in their name. But, life happened.
Relatively speaking 60% of Wise students see a BS/BA as affluence, whereas 80% of Loudon students see it as insufficient to make what Mom and Dad make.
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