by James C. Sherlock
Crime, especially violent crime, is a constant topic in private conversations and in public politics, and thus here on Bacon’s Rebellion.
Comments on BR crime-related articles turn quickly to race, often without basis in fact.
I will offer below the actual crime statistics by race from 2021, the latest available year, in an attempt to cure that.
Then I will write about the causes.
I will almost certainly be called a racist. Continue reading
Posted in Budgets, Children and families, Civil Rights, Crime , corrections and law enforcement, Culture wars, Democracy and Western Civilization, Demographics, Education (K-12), Efficiency in government, General Assembly, Governance, Government Oversight, Health Care, Housing, Land use & development, Law enforcement, Mental illness and substance abuse, Parental Rights, Politics, Public corruption, Public safety & health, Race and race relations
Tagged James Sherlock
by Kerry Dougherty
Lemme make sure I understand this: Virginia’s ACLU, that left-wing organization that sat on its derriere during Gov. Ralph Northam’s unconstitutional closure of churches and businesses, is suddenly active again.
Its lawyers want Virginia’s convicted felons to automatically get their voting rights back, even if they haven’t made restitution to their victims or paid their court costs. No matter how heinous their crimes or how repentant or unrepentant they are.
The priorities of this group are fully on display: they’re more worried about rapists and child molesters and carjackers being able to vote than they ever were about people of faith who simply wanted to attend worship services, or ordinary decent Virginians who simply wanted to earn a living during Covid.
Some of us waited in vain for those who claim to hold the U.S. Constitution dear to stand up to the dictatorial Gov. Northam, but the civil liberties crowd sat those battles out.
Yet now that a Republican governor is doing what the Virginia Supreme Court has ordered — that is, to review every felon’s request for a restoration of rights individually — they’re back in action.
The great defenders of civil liberties. For criminals, anyway.
Continue reading
by Arthur Bloom
I want to tell you why I like The 1619 Project. It has nothing to do with the history, all of which is known to any well-educated Virginian. Of course, these things are fundamentally propagandistic exercises, any leftist worth his salt would tell you that too. But it was symbolically very important. Here’s what it did: The New York Times shifted the locus and timeline of the American Founding from Plymouth Bay to Virginia, where it belongs.
It’s a common gripe of Virginians that when most Americans today think of the Founding, they tend to think of pilgrims in black-and-white, with buckles on their shoes, even though we were there first. The 1619 Project is helping to rectify this situation. I’m holding out for a 1607 Project. Give it time, the actual Jamestown fort wasn’t even rediscovered until around 25 years ago.
The New York Times was engaged in some powerful voodoo, not to be trifled with — if you look at everything through the lens of race you won’t see it — but it’s very real. Catholic education molded Nikole Hannah-Jones, and she went on to strike a hammer blow against Yankee cultural power. The Empire of Guadalupe rises.
This was necessary, because if the affirmative action lawsuit at Harvard is successful, Harvard will become even more Chinese, and its prestige will fall. Our people won’t go there anymore. That’s why I’m rooting for Conservative, Inc.’s devious plan to turn Harvard into a Chinese enclave, it’ll be the greatest thing they’ve ever done. These two things are mortal blows to the cultural prestige of Massachusetts. And as Massachusetts falls, Virginia rises.
Continue reading
by James C. Sherlock
For those who support local control of schools no matter what, I will offer you a “what” to consider.
For those who are nervous about even discussing why some jurisdictions in Virginia have failed to ensure “an educational program of high quality is established and continually maintained” for Black children, that works for Black children no matter their circumstances, you are reading the wrong article.
Twenty percent of Virginians are Black, as were 22% of our public school students in 2022.
Virginia lost 4% of its Black public school student registrations in the last three years, compared to 2.6% of all students including Black students. Black chronic absenteeism statewide jumped from 13.1% to over 25%. All student chronic absenteeism including Black students was 20%.
Ten jurisdictions with at least 2,000 Black students at the start of that period lost higher percentages of their Black students than the state average. Some much higher.
Those ten lost 8,668 Black student registrations. The entire state lost 10,674. Chronic absenteeism of black students in those jurisdictions increased in line with statewide increases.
Without even bringing up school quality, this is unacceptable if we care about the futures of Black kids.
We have to get them in school. I say “we” because it will be a long-term disaster for both these children and Virginia if we don’t.
Lots of different things have to be done to get them there, which is where school quality comes in. But I will share some of the raw numbers. Continue reading
by Tyler O’Neil
Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, on Tuesday, joined fourth graders at Fort Monroe outside Newport News, Virginia, hosting an event teaching about the history of the fort, where Black slaves fled during the Civil War to become freemen at what became known as “Freedom’s Fortress.”
The Youngkin event came two days after Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times’ “The 1619 Project,” claimed that Youngkin “does not want children to learn that history.”
“The 1619 Project” author spoke on Feb. 19 at the McLean Community Center in a one-hour speech for which the Fairfax County Public Library system paid her $29,350 and the community center paid her an additional $6,000. She acknowledged that her project rewrites history and urged her audience to support reparations to Blacks for slavery and to “subvert” America’s economic system, which she claimed is beset by institutional racism. She also suggested that the Confederates understood the Constitution accurately, establishing the United States as a “slave nation.”
Hannah-Jones spoke about the central role Virginia plays in the history of American slavery, stating that the “entire legal architecture of what is race, who’s black, who’s not, whose children will be born enslaved, whose children will be born free, it all is created in Virginia.”
“Massive resistance to Brown v. Board, the strategy is born here, and yet you have a governor who does not want children to learn that history even as they still sit in segregated classrooms,” The 1619 Project author claimed. She has previously criticized Youngkin’s efforts to remove critical race theory (a lens encouraging students to view America as institutionally racist) from school curricula, saying he aims to provide a “sanitized” history for “White kids.”
Yet two days after Hannah-Jones attacked Youngkin, the governor was teaching Virginia’s children about slavery, according to footage of the Fort Monroe event obtained by The Daily Signal.
“We just covered in that lesson over 400 years of history, and it’s really important history, starting in 1619, where the first Africans were brought to this country as slaves, and it was a terrible, terrible, terrible beginning,” the governor said after Jess Meadows, education programs manager at the Fort Monroe Authority, led students through a lesson.
Continue reading
Posted in Civil Rights, Culture wars, Education (K-12), Race and race relations, Uncategorized, Virginia history
Tagged Tyler O'Neil
Daniel Gecker Esq., President of the Virginia Board of Education. Appointed to the Board of Education by Governor Terry McAuliffe and reappointed to a four year term by Governor Ralph Northam. Date of expiration of appointment – June 30, 2023
by James C. Sherlock
Progressives, in the fullness of their dogma, oppose the entire Bill of Rights.
The Bill of Rights is specifically structured to limit the powers of government, which progressives find not only unsuitable, but unimaginable.
In the Golden Age of Progressivism in Virginia, 2020 and 2021, they controlled the governor’s mansion, the General Assembly, the Attorney General’s Office and all of the state agencies.
With total control, they took flight.
They have always known what seldom occurs to conservatives not prone to offend the Bill of Rights.
With total control of state government, progressives can enact and have enacted laws, regulations and policies that violate both the federal and state constitutions.
They know it will take a decade or more for courts to push back. Meanwhile they can call opponents “haters.”
After which the worst that can happen is that nobody is held accountable. Except the taxpayers.
I just exposed unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination in the University of Virginia’s hiring process. that was implemented starting in 2020.
The same fertile progressive imagination is also present in the Board of Education’s new (in 2021) Standard 6. “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Equitable Practices performance indicators” (starting on page xv) in “Guidelines for Uniform Performance Standards and Evaluation Criteria for Teachers“(Guidelines). Continue reading
University of Virginia Counsel James Iler
by James C. Sherlock
The University of Virginia engages today in in-your-face viewpoint discrimination in hiring.
The counterfactually named University of Virginia Office for Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights (EOCR) declares itself responsible for:
Recruitment and Hiring: facilitating and monitoring faculty and staff recruitment and hiring and training faculty and staff regarding applicable laws and best practices for search and hiring processes.
Indeed.
EOCR has turned viewpoint discrimination into a science by “considering contributions to inclusive excellence” in hiring. Do yourself a favor. Open that page and click to open each section.
EOCR helpfully offers hiring officials and search committees phrases as “examples of what could be added” to job applications at UVa.
[Faculty] Candidates should also describe how their courses, research, and/or service have helped, or will help, students to develop intercultural competencies or otherwise advance excellence through diversity, equity, and inclusion within the institution.
Those requirements are not viewpoint-neutral because diversity, equity and inclusion as practiced at the University of Virginia are not viewpoint-neutral. The UVa DEI bureaucracy, including EOCR, is authoritarian, and proud of it.
EOCR actively tries to screen out applicants who may disagree with the University’s thought police approach to DEI. In that pursuit, they don’t just require commitment to DEI going forward.
The applicant must demonstrate previous activity.
That makes UVa a government DEI spoils/patronage system, defined as a practice to reward active supporters by appointment to government posts.
If only the University had a legal department. Continue reading
Posted in Civil Rights, Courts and law, Culture wars, Freedom, Individual liberties
Tagged James Sherlock
by James C. Sherlock
I offer for your consideration the text of a draft Intellectual Freedom Protection Act proposed this morning by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).
FIRE is the leading American voice supporting academic freedom, free speech and due process. In doing so they defend democracy itself.
They are what the ACLU was before that organization abandoned the field as an impartial supporter of civil liberties to pick a side.
FIRE defends left and right equally.
I have below eliminated the preamble of the draft law for brevity. Lawyers can find the legal precedents referenced in the preamble here. Continue reading
What would MLK say?
by James C. Sherlock
It’s Black History Month. Even in Richmond.
As a contribution, I am going to review the facts on the ground in Richmond — in its most crime-ridden neighborhoods and its worst public schools.
Which are overwhelmingly Black. And co-located.
In a city with a Black mayor and a Black school board. And a Black Commonwealth’s Attorney, Colette Wallace McEachin, who, since 2019,
has helped to make Richmond a safe, just and equitable city for all, including victims, witnesses and offenders.
Her office offers many alternatives to incarceration for most non-violent offenders.
She really wrote that. And she has “worked toward dismantling “the school to prison pipeline.” Excellent news.
But, in the real world, Richmond schools and many neighborhoods are beyond tragic.
That doesn’t mean order cannot be restored. Or that poor Black children from dangerous neighborhoods can’t learn.
NYC charter schools have proven for years that Black kids from the very same type of disadvantaged, dangerous neighborhoods that some of the Richmond kids call home can succeed at the highest level.
It just means the Richmond kids from tough neighborhoods don’t learn.
We are going to look at what are measured as the 10 most crime-ridden neighborhoods in Richmond, where the kids from these neighborhoods go to school, and the performance of those schools.
And see what we see.
It is a nightmare. Continue reading
By James C. Sherlock
Credit JAMA Pediatrics, April 6, 2020
We have arrived today at a situation in which huge percentages of Virginia children and adolescents exhibit mental health problems.
Both sides of the political divide acknowledge the problem.
It’s existence is not up for debate.
Both blame the soaring pediatric mental health issues, a problem before COVID, on COVID school shutdowns that caused children to lose foundational developmental experiences that depend in part on socialization in schools and in part on interpersonal relationships with friends, both of which were profoundly interrupted.
Both sides acknowledge that minorities suffered worse than white kids.
That is where the agreements end.
Conservatives blame the disparate mental health impacts largely on easily observable inappropriate responses to COVID insisted upon by progressives and executed for far too long in progressive-run school divisions — in which minority children are mostly educated in America and in Virginia.
Progressives, by dogma never acknowledging agency in any problem, have actively tried to blame those same disparate impacts on institutional racism.
The facts are on the conservative side.
This article will show what progressives did and the results. Progressive dogma was the cause of extended school closures. Both the closures and disparate impacts happened disproportionately in progressive school divisions and progressive states.
So progressives closed the schools, closed them disproportionately on minority kids and now bemoan the outcomes of those closures as artifacts of systemic racism.
It reminds one of the story of the young man who killed his parents and asked the judge for leniency because he was an orphan.
It takes some combination of denial, an assumption that people who hear those claims are idiots, and Olympic-level audacity.
Racism, unless it was progressive racism, had nothing to do with it.
by James C. Sherlock
Updated Feb 1 at 8:13:25 with a correction to IES assessment of PBIS.
Newport News Schools PBIS Capacity Assessments – Courtesy Dr. Jaruan M. Ransome, Program Administrator, Student Conduct & Discipline
Newport News Schools first implemented Virginia Tiered Systems of Supports (VTSS) and its discipline component, Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), in the 2017-18 school year.
That year Newport News Schools was in Cohort 3 of VDOE’s VTSS program, which provides support at the division level through grant funding and technical assistance. PBIS is implemented in every Newport News school.
In April of 2022, for the second time, those schools were rated by the state as “fluent” in the implementation of VTSS/PBIS.
Good to know. I mean that.
That means that there can be no confusion as to what has gone wrong in Newport News Schools. The behavioral and educational chaos there represents some combination of system failure and individual failure.
But the point is that was always going to happen in many schools, especially those in the toughest neighborhoods.
PBIS is dangerous by design.
It can work, but in trying to trade some safety for a lot of equity, it too often gets neither.
And even its proponents have found out that without safety and order, nothing else about the schools can work.
by James C. Sherlock
I believe a major approach to address both education and health care in Virginia’s inner cities is available if we will define it right and use it right.
Community schools.
One issue. Virginia’s official version of community schools, the Virginia Community School Framework, (the Framework) is fatally flawed.
The approach successful elsewhere brings government professional healthcare and social services and not-for-profit healthcare assets simultaneously to the schools and to the surrounding communities at a location centered around existing schools.
That model is a government and private not-for-profit services hub centered around schools in communities that need a lot of both. Lots of other goals fall into place and efficiencies are realized for both the community and the service providers if that is the approach.
That is not what Virginia has done in its 2019 Framework.
The rest of government and the not-for-profit sector are ignored and Virginia public schools are designed there to be increasingly responsible for things that they are not competent to do.
To see why, we only need to review the lists of persons who made up both the Advisory Committee and the Additional Contributors. Full of Ed.Ds and Ph.D’s in education, there was not a single person on either list with a job or career outside the field of education. Continue reading
Posted in Attendance, Charity and philanthropy, Children and families, Civil Rights, Courts and law, Crime , corrections and law enforcement, Culture wars, Discipline and disorder, Education (K-12), Efficiency in government, Entitlements, General Assembly, Health Care, Infrastructure, Law enforcement, Mental illness and substance abuse, Not-for-profits, Political Influence, Poverty & income gap, practice of, Psychology, Psychology, Public safety & health, Social services, Threat Assessment
Tagged James Sherlock
by James Wyatt Whitehead, V
A recent trip to study the Civil War battlefield of Fredericksburg brought me to stately Washington Avenue in one of Virginia’s most historic cities. The street is adorned with grand Victorian mansions and Kenmore, the colonial home of Fielding and Betty Lewis (George Washington’s sister). Here stands a statue to Patriot Hugh Mercer, the famed officer who led the Continentals to victory at the Battle of Princeton and died from wounds received in battle.
Not far away stands a stone monument bearing bronze plaques memorializing the January 1777 meeting of Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Edmund Pendleton, George Mason, George Wythe, and Thomas Ludwell Lee to draft the Bill Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia. I have traveled this street many times, and I knew of this famed meeting of luminary patriots, but I had never noticed this modest yet important memorial.
I couldn’t help but wonder: Had I stumbled onto the very fountainhead of religious freedom in Virginia? A brief search on my cell phone revealed that this memorial dated back to 1932. No fountain here, but I was close, for the memorial had originally been installed on George Street near the site of Weedon’s Tavern, where Jefferson and company began their earnest work. It was moved in 1977 to its current, more attractive location.
My journey next brought me to the site of Weedon’s Tavern. The building that stands there today looks like an old A&P Supermarket that is now an antique store. Old Weedon’s Tavern burned in 1807. The establishment was owned by one of Washington’s generals, George Weedon. (I have to assume Washington slept here too.) It is here that members of the Committee of Law Revisors began their task to remake the government of Virginia. Continue reading
Posted in Civil Rights, Courts and law, Freedom, Uncategorized, Virginia history
Tagged James Wyatt Whitehead
by Asra Q. Nomani
For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college admission prospects and earn scholarships. This episode has emerged amid the school district’s new strategy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” School administrators, for instance, have implemented an “equitable grading” policy that eliminates zeros, gives students a grade of 50 percent just for showing up, and assigns a cryptic code of “NTI” for assignments not turned in. It’s a race to the bottom.
An intrepid Thomas Jefferson parent, Shawna Yashar, a lawyer, uncovered the withholding of National Merit awards. Since starting as a freshman at the school in September 2019, her son, who is part Arab-American, studied statistical analysis, literature reviews, and college-level science late into the night. This workload was necessary to keep him up to speed with the advanced studies at TJ, which U.S. News & World Report ranks as America’s top school.
Last fall, along with about 1.5 million U.S. high school juniors, the Yashar teen took the PSAT, which determines whether a student qualifies as a prestigious National Merit scholar. When it came time to submit his college applications this fall, he didn’t have a National Merit honor to report — but it wasn’t because he hadn’t earned the award. The National Merit Scholarship Corporation, a nonprofit based in Evanston, Illinois, had recognized him as a Commended Student in the top 3 percent nationwide — one of about 50,000 students earning that distinction. Principals usually celebrate National Merit scholars with special breakfasts, award ceremonies, YouTube videos, press releases, and social media announcements.
But not at TJ. School officials had decided to withhold announcement of the award. Indeed, it turns out that the principal, Ann Bonitatibus, and the director of student services, Brandon Kosatka, have been withholding this information from families and the public for years, affecting the lives of at least 1,200 students over the principal’s tenure of five years. Recognition by National Merit opens the door to millions of dollars in college scholarships and 800 Special Scholarships from corporate sponsors. Continue reading
by James C. Sherlock
Why aren’t Black children, on average, learning in Virginia public schools?
You have heard and perhaps internalized all of the excuses.
Cue the historical/social/cultural/economic theories. They are all interesting. And exhaustively pursued.
And irrelevant.
Black children in many Virginia urban public schools are not being taught properly in environments conducive to learning. Black students in those schools depress the averages for Black students statewide.
Money won’t fix that if it funds more of the same. No chance.
There is a different way. Continue reading
