Author Archives: sherlockj

by James C. Sherlock

In 2015, over 2 million U.S. students attended school on year-round schedules every year in around 3,000 schools in 46 states. Half of those were in California, four-fifths in Western states.

Hopewell school district joined them on Monday in the first district-wide implementation of a year-round public school schedule in Virginia.

Hopewell has two goals:

1. avoid the traditional summer learning losses that plague many at-risk school children;
2. provide a broader range of educational opportunities to increase the motivation of teachers and students

The Hopewell City public school district has a total student population lower than either one of a couple of Fairfax County secondary schools, so it is small enough to manage this change if leaders, teachers and parents support it.

They have that support so far.  The Governor and First Lady attended a ceremony celebrating the initiative. and good for them.

Hopewell schools and all Virginians need this to work. Continue reading →

by James C. Sherlock

We will briefly discuss here English learners in Virginia schools and the enormous impact they have. They truly offer to enrich the experience of all kids in our schools, but they need a lot of help and there are a great many of them.

There were 104,411 English learner students enrolled in Virginia public schools in 2020-21, about 8% of the total enrollment. See the breakdown by school division here.

That was down more than 12,000 from the year before, perhaps reflecting COVID-related failures to register for school rather than leaving the state. We are about to find out. 

The 2019-20 numbers represented a 44% increase in 10 years.

The huge influx of kids on our southern border this year will affect these numbers next month, but we have no idea how much because we don’t know where they have gone.

A lot of these kids, in addition to the challenges of language barriers, are also what are designated Students with Limited or Interrupted Formal Education (SLIFE). VDOE does not yet collect data on that sub-group.

It is easy to predict that those kids may have had a harder time with remote learning than native English speakers. In recognition of that problem, English learners were given priority for return to school in person in some districts. Continue reading →

by James C. Sherlock

J. D. Vance, the author of the acclaimed biographical work “Hillbilly Elegy,” is a candidate for the Republican nomination in Ohio to replace retiring Republican Senator Rob Portman.

I haven’t studied that Senate race, and don’t have a favorite, but Mr. Vance has raised an issue for our time.

He has last week called out “the childless left” for their lack of “physical commitment to the future of this country.” From the N.Y. Post:

“The left isn’t just criticizing our country … it’s trying to take our very sense of national pride and national purpose away from us,” he said, blaming figures such as Vice President Kamala Harris, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, along with AOC, for stoking “cultural wars.”

“Harris has called herself the “momala” of her two grown stepchildren, Cole and Ella Emhoff.  Booker, Buttigieg, and Ocasio-Cortez have no children.”

“Vance offered a startling solution to what he called the “civilizational crisis”: extra voting power for parents.”

“The Democrats are talking about giving the vote to 16-year-olds,” Vance said.”

“Instead, he said, “Let’s give votes to all children in this country, but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of the children.”

“Doesn’t this mean that parents get a bigger say in how democracy functions? … Yes,” he concluded.”

I don’t agree with Mr. Vance’s broad prescription for calibrated voting rights.  I don’t think he does either. In fact I believe that Mr. Vance, a Yale Law School graduate, used that statement to bring public attention to the issue rather than expecting his specified outcome. But I think it may be appropriate to consider his point in a narrower context in Virginia. Continue reading →

by James C. Sherlock

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) maintains a job board for itself and for school districts seeking personnel of all sorts. It shows about 1,6oo openings, but some of the postings are more than two years old. And the real number is somewhere around 7,000.

It is useless.

Apparently VDOE, in its striving under the whip hand of the Governor and General Assembly to regulate and oversee the minute details of school division compliance with massive changes to laws, lacks the personnel or inclination to keep its own job board up to date. Embarrassing.

So, VDOE may have no estimate what the shortages will be next month.  If it does, it is not sharing.

The current signs are not good. Continue reading →