Category Archives: Education (K-12)

School discipline in the days before students told teachers to go f— themselves.

As Virginia lawmakers brainstorm ways to prevent school shootings, recommending more funding for mental health and school resource officers, they continue to ignore the breakdown in school discipline that is causing the decline last year in Standards of Learning in schools across the state. They are fixated on hypothetical calamities while remaining oblivious to the very real disaster unfolding before our eyes.

If I’m right about what’s happening in Virginia’s public schools — school discipline is worsening under “restorative justice” disciplinary regimes, and the quality of classroom instruction is deteriorating as a direct result — SOL scores will continue to erode. And the decline will be concentrated in lower-income schools populated disproportionately by African-Americans where discipline problems are worst. White supremacists could not devise a more clever, insidious way of keeping African-Americans ignorant and poor than the social-justice regime imposed by the ACLU and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Maintaining school discipline has always been a challenge, especially as the family structure has broken down among Virginia’s lower-income groups, creating generations of neglected, defiant, and poorly supervised youths. Relying heavily upon suspensions and even arrests, the Zero Tolerance disciplinary regime that prevailed until recently may well have been harsh and arbitrary. But it did have one positive benefit — it removed the disrupters from the classroom. Teachers could get on with the job of teaching.

The new therapeutic approach may or may not be helping the bad students — there’s not enough good evidence to know — but it is definitely distracting teachers from doing their jobs. As evidence, I proffer the thoughts of a former Henrico County school teacher who blogs under her pen name, Christine S., on the Unbarbaric Yawp blog.

Christine S. loves teaching and loves her students. After quitting her job at an unidentified school to have a baby, she has no plans to return to teaching any time soon. She doesn’t think society sufficiently appreciates what teachers do, and she believes administrators and parents fail to give teachers the trust and confidence they deserve — sentiments that are commonly expressed and are no secret to the rest of the world. But her most compelling post addresses the new realities of school discipline, which have gotten very little attention. She makes several key points:

Discipline takes time. Under restorative justice protocols, more of the disciplinary burden now falls upon teachers. Instead of booting trouble-makers out of class — or school — teachers now are called upon to deal with student’s misbehavior on the spot through coaching and reasoning. She writes:

It takes time to address it in the moment. It takes time away from learning. It takes time (that frankly I don’t always have) during my planning period or before/after school.

I appreciate that experts, Central Office, administration, and parents want teachers to be the first point of contact for discipline issues. Teachers SHOULD be the first point of contact, for sure! Instead of immediately writing a student a referral to the administrator, teachers should have conversations with kids, come up with a behavior contract, assign a detention of their own, or do whatever other steps they deem appropriate.

But in order to do that, teachers need TIME. When I taught, I had one 90-minute planning period every other day. I often had meetings before school, during lunch, or after school (or I was a coach and had practice after school).

I really didn’t mind calling parents or writing up behavior contracts or having a kid in my room for detention. But I needed time to do this. A planning period every day would’ve been so helpful for discipline (and other things, of course). Or teacher workdays that are ACTUALLY teacher workdays (teachers nowadays have so much professional development and few actual workdays, which many who are not in education don’t realize).

And one reason that sometimes my discipline wasn’t followed through, on MY part as the teacher, is because I simply did.not.have.time. I guess I could’ve made time — at the expense of grading assessments, making copies, tutoring, sponsoring clubs, coaching…

Teachers spend 80% of their time on 20% of the students. Writes Christine S.: “This is the most frustrating part of discipline issues for me: I literally spent the majority of my time addressing the same handful of students all year long.”

They have a right to an education, but at the expense of all of my other kids? I don’t think so. But as a teacher, sometimes my hands are tied. The system is flawed. The disruptive student who is making poor choices gets to stay in class, and no matter what I try or who talks to him or how many behavior plans we go over or how many times I call home, the student’s behavior doesn’t change, and class is ruined for 25 kids who actually want to learn.

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School Superintendent Jason Kamras at Boushall Middle School. Photo credit: Richmond Times-Dispatch

I don’t normally have much good to say about Richmond Public Schools, but the system deserves credit for this: The school board found $350,000 this year to finance a “bathroom blitz.” With significant assistance from community volunteers, the school system made tremendous progress this summer bringing school bathrooms into a state of cleanliness and good repair.

The school system was able to improve about two-thirds of the 44 schools’ bathrooms by the beginning of the school year, and will continue work on the others this fall, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. 

“We still have a lot more to do, but we made a lot of headway,” said Superintendent Jason Kamras.

So far the division has replaced:

• 200 paper towel dispensers
• 150 toilet paper dispensers
• 150 soap dispensers
• 260 faucets
• 170 sinks
• 20 stall doors
• 200 stall locks
• Three toilets
• 100 ceiling tiles

More than 50 bathrooms were freshly painted.

Clean, functional bathrooms are a bare minimum standard. The willingness of the school system to allow the bathrooms to deteriorate before now was disgraceful. Kudos to Kamras, who is new to the job, and to the school board for finding the money and mobilizing the volunteers to get the job done. The next step is to permanently reallocate funds to the maintenance budget to ensure that bathrooms continue to meet basic standards on an ongoing basis.

The City of Richmond doesn’t have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars building and renovating new schools. The Commonwealth of Virginia doesn’t need to issue $3-$4 billion in bonds for the same purpose. Instead, school systems need to stop deficit spending. And let’s be clear: Deferring basic maintenance is a form of deficit spending.

School officials show Sen. Bill Stanley a piece of electrical conduit removed from Christiansburg Elementary School during recent repairs. Photo credit: Roanoke Times.

State Sen. Bill Stanley, R-Moneta, wants to know if the deteriorating physical condition of many Virginia schools violates the U.S. Brown vs. Board of Education ruling against “separate but equal” schools for whites and blacks, reports the Roanoke Times.

It’s not remotely clear from the article what that landmark ruling might have to to with the situation in Virginia today other than the superficial parallel between physically deteriorated inner-city schools and better-maintained structures in suburban counties. But Stanley is determined to do something about the physical condition of Virginia’s schools, and he has been stumping the state to raise $3 billion to $4 billion for modernization.

“This isn’t merely an infrastructure issue: it’s a moral issue too,” Stanley wrote in a letter Thursday asking Attorney General Mark Herring to look into the constitutional issues arising from Virginia’s deplorable schools.

The family’s role in education may be paramount, and he can’t fix that, he said. But repairing the physical condition of Virginia’s schools, he told the Roanoke Times, is something that government can fix.

In rural and urban schools, there are trash cans positioned to collect water from leaky ceilings, tiles falling from the ceiling, children burned on exposed pipes, rats scampering through hallways.

Another day, another K-12 education scandal.

The latest news: A state investigation has found that more than 1,000 Richmond public school students received credit for high school courses they shouldn’t have, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. The lack of compliance with state standards affected more than 1,500 credit hours.

Among the six major “errors” identified in a Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) audit, which will be released later this month:

• Some students were awarded two credits when they should have received one. Most of these courses were in career and technical education classes.
• Some students received credit for taking the same class multiple times and for taking classes not approved by the state for credit.
• Some middle-school students took high school-level classes and received credit when those classes weren’t eligible for credit by the state.

Of the more than 1,000 students who earned credit when they shouldn’t have, writes the T-D, 300 are now seniors. Richmond schools have roughly 1,200 a year in the senior class, suggesting that roughly one in four students were affected.

Bacon’s bottom line: Are these just random errors, or do they reflect another example of how educrats game the system? Richmond city schools have long been criticized for having one of the highest dropout rates of any school district in Virginia, and school officials have been working to improve the numbers.

In 2107, the dropout rate was reported to be 17.08%. Stated Interim Superintendent Thomas Kranz in a press release at the time:

As we continue our work with VDOE, our expectation is that with their support we will be successful in achieving our ultimate goal of 100% On-Time Graduation Rate. We are committed to increasing our On-Time Graduation Rate by 5 percent and lowering our dropout rate for this school year.

Despite a system-wide dip in the on-time graduation rate that year, some high schools experienced improvement:

Armstrong High — 4 percentage point increase to 80.8%
Franklin Military Academy — 2 percentage point increase to 100%
John Marshall High School — 1 percentage point increase to 90.1%

There is a very easy way to determine if the errors reflect random bureaucratic ineptitude or a deliberate gaming of the system: Find out how many of the students receiving extra credits needed them to graduate on time. If the students getting the extra credits wouldn’t have graduated anyway, we may be talking about random error. But if the “mistakes” were putting a lot of students over the top, so to speak, there is a strong likelihood they were intentional.

My usual philosophy is never to attribute to evil intention what can be explained by simple incompetence. But given the prevalence of administrative cheating in Virginia schools, I’m tempted to suspend that principle and make the opposite assumption. If errors occur in the reporting of educational metrics, they aren’t accidental. Find out who benefits.

Oh, and one more thing. According to the T-D, Richmond is the only school district in Virginia under VDOE scrutiny. If it turns out that Richmond administrators figured out a trick for improving dismal dropout rates, their counterparts in other districts may have too. Whenever you see sudden, dramatic improvements in on-time graduation, it’s time to start digging.

In the 2013-14 school year, Virginia public school students were strapped into chairs, physically restrained, or put into seclusion more than 6,000 times, according to the Department of Education’s Civil Rights Data Collection.

That compares, reports Staunton’s News Leader, to the following national figures from the same data source:

During the 2015–16 school year, the nation’s public school students were physically restrained, mechanically restrained or secluded 122,000 times. In nearly 86,000 of those instances, students were subjected to physical or mechanical restraint, and in 36,000 were subjected to seclusion, according to the data collection.

Virginia accounts for 2.6% of the national population. Assuming that the Old Dominion accounts for a comparable percentage of its school population, one would expect about 3,172 incidents of physical restraint. Thus, the News Leader data suggests that Virginia schools are more likely to resort to physical restraints than schools in other states.

Policies have evolved since the 2013-14 year upon which the Virginia data is based. School officials told the News Leader that the Staunton, Waynesboro and Augusta County school systems have not used physical restraints in the last five years. Thirty-six school systems in Virginia use the so-called Mandt System, which trains school personnel to de-escalate situations and limit physical contact between staff and students.

Virginia schools have been criticized for the high rate at which they summon police to arrest students and for the high rate at which they suspend students, primarily on the grounds that African-American students are disproportionately impacted. The use of physical restraints has come under scrutiny since revelations of the practice used with unaccompanied minor children living illegally in the United States held at the Shenandoah Valley Juvenile Center.

In other school disciplinary news… the Wall Street Journal reports on what school systems are doing to combat the increasing rate of student absenteeism.

About 16% of students, or nearly 8 million, were considered chronically absent for missing at least 15 days for any reason in the 2015-16 school year, the latest available data from the U.S. Education Department shows. That’s up 12% from about 7 million in 2013-14, while the student population rose only 1.1% over that period. Some education officials say an upward trend continues in their states.

D.C. and Maryland had the highest percentages of students considered chronically absent, at about 31% and 29%, respectively. North Dakota had the lowest rate at 9.5%.

Click graph for more legible image. Image credit: L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs

A slim plurality of Virginians — 47% — believe that their public high schools are “doing a bad job” in providing skills that will be useful in obtaining a job, according to a poll published Sunday by Virginia Commonwealth University’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs. Forty-five percent graded schools as doing a “good job” and 8% did not know.

The negative appraisal of public schools was most intense in the “South Central” region (which includes the Richmond metropolitan area) and in Hampton Roads, and the most positive in Western Virginia and Northern Virginia, with Northwestern Virginia falling between the two extremes. In the South Central region, 62% of respondents rated public schools poorly; in Tidewater the response was 61% negative.

The poll, a random sample of 802 adults in Virginia conducted by landline and cell telephone from July 10-30, has a margin of error of 3.49 percentage points. The poll also surveyed Virginians about their attitude toward higher education, which I will highlight in a future post.

When pollsters drilled into specifics, Virginians expressed the most confidence in the ability of public high schools to do a good job producing graduates in scientific fields, such as engineering, math and technology: 57% positive compared to 33% negative.

Respondents were more ambivalent about high schools’ track record in preparing students to be “engaged citizens” and developing students’ writing and communications skills.

By age, the 45- to 64-year-old grouping was consistently the most skeptical. By education level, the “some college” group was consistently the most skeptical. By party affiliation, Republicans were significantly more dubious than Democrats and Republicans: 63% of Republicans think public schools are doing a bad job of providing useful workplace skills, compared to 38% of Democrats and 34% of Republicans.

Whites were slightly more skeptical of the value of a public school education than minorities, although the difference was not large. There was little consistent difference between the attitudes of parents and non-parents of public school students.

Bacon’s bottom line: Surveys that provide a binary choice, like this one, irritate me. Either schools are doing a “good job” or a “bad job” with no room for ambivalence, which many people undoubtedly feel. With that caveat aside, it’s an indictment of the public school system when a plurality of respondents say the schools are doing a poor job at equipping Virginia’s children with the skills they need to participate in the workforce —  a searing indictment in the case of South Central and Hampton Roads.