Category Archives: Education (K-12)

A Rejoinder on the TJ “Fall”

Posted on April 26, 2024 by | 29 comments

Before folks got carried away with sarcasm and “I told you so,” it would have been best to examine a few facts regarding the ranking by U.S. News and World Report of the Thomas Jefferson School for Science and Technology (TJ):

  • The ranking fell to fifth last year. The data for that ranking pre-dated the change in the admission process for TJ;
  • The changes in the admissions process were adopted in 2020 and were first effective for the class entering in the fall of 2021. Those students would be juniors this year.

Next, it is worthwhile to examine the criteria used by U.S. News:

  • College readiness (30 percent)– proportion of a school’s 12th graders who took and earned a qualifying score on Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) exams in the 2021-2022 academic year;
  • College curriculum breadth (10 percent)—percentage of a school’s 2021-2022 12th graders who took, and the percentage who earned qualifying scores on, multiple AP or IB exams;
  • State assessment proficiency (20 percent)–standardized tests measuring student proficiency in subjects related to mathematics, reading and science. Data was “based on 2021-2022 state assessment data” (Emphasis added);
  • State assessment performance (20 percent)—This score is calculated based on the total assessment scores compared with what U.S. News predicted for a school with its demographic characteristics in its state. As the magazine explains, “In all 50 states, there is a very significant statistical relationship between the proportion of a student body that is Black, Hispanic and/or from a low-income household – defined as being eligible for free or subsidized school lunch – and a school’s results on state assessments. Schools performing best on this ranking indicator are those whose assessment scores far exceeded U.S. News’ modeled expectations.”  This year’s score is based on 2021-2022 data;
  • Underserved student performance (10 percent)—“This is a measure assessing learning outcomes only among Black, Hispanic and low-income students.” As with the others, it is based on 201-2022 data;
  • Graduation rate (10 percent)—Percentage of students who entered in the 2018-2019 school year who graduated in 2022.

Conclusion:  the fall to 14th in the rankings is attributable to the students who entered TJ before the change in the admissions process took effect.  It cannot be said to be the result of “lowering of standards” in the admissions process.

At this point, it is worthwhile to add some perspective.  The rankings can be volatile. In 2018, the school was ranked 10th, and in 2019, 4th, followed by three straight years as no.1, and a no. 5 ranking last year before this year’s ranking of 14.  As the top data analyst at U.S. News noted, the smallest differences can affect rankings.  “At these top schools, everyone graduates, everyone’s proficient in their state assessments, everyone’s getting a qualifying score on APs,” he said. “So we’re really splitting hairs on the number of AP exams of qualifying scores or the number that earns the highest performance level on math, science and reading.”–RWH

 

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Posted in Culture wars, Education (K-12)

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TJ High School Falls From 1st to 14th Place

Posted on April 25, 2024 by | 25 comments

Score a big victory for “equity.” The Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, ranked the top high school in the country by U.S. News & World Report two years ago, has fallen to 14th place, tweets the Coalition for TJ.

TJ had been the center of an admissions controversy after progressives, who found it scandalous that 70% of the school’s students were of Asian ethnic origin, rejiggered its admissions criteria to make it more demographically diverse. The revised policy, which did succeed in increasing the admission of Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, survived legal challenges that went as far as the U.S. Supreme Court.

But not to worry. By selecting only the highest-achieving kids, TJ had been perpetuating gross inequality with other high schools. Insofar as its standards have been modified and its rankings have tumbled, the inequality gap with peer schools has diminished. Some observers expect TJ’s rankings will fall and the gap to shrink even further as older students admitted under the ancien regime graduate and are replaced by students admitted under the new, more equitable standards. Continue reading →

25 Comments

Posted in DEI, Education (K-12)

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Some Rural Localities Hit With Big Jump in Local Composite Index

Posted on April 23, 2024 by | 28 comments

Credit: Cardinal News

by Dick Hall-Sizemore

For all those readers who complain that Northern Virginia gets screwed by state funding formulas, Dwight Yancey of Cardinal News has provided an eye-opening rejoinder. Many rural counties have been hit disproportionately hard by the new calculations for the local composite index used to determine the local share of the costs of basic aid for schools.

The main driver in these increases has been significant increases in the total value of real estate in those counties. Many of them have become havens for folks leaving urban areas for the rural countryside, either for their primary or secondary homes. In Franklin County, burgeoning property values around Smith Mountain Lake have driven up the county’s total real property values 39 percent over the past two years, although almost half the students live in poverty. In Nelson County, the situation is much the same with properties in Wintergreen and spillover from Albemarle County driving up the county’s total property values. In Charles City County, where 64 percent of the students live in official poverty, folks buying up riverfront property have driven up the total property values by 24 percent.

The result of these changes is that the state now considers Charles City County as having a greater ability to pay for its schools that Northern Virginia localities, including Loudoun County, the wealthiest locality in the state and one of the wealthiest in the nation. In fact, 22 localities are rated as having a greater ability to pay than Loudoun and most of them are rural.

Yancey provides nice maps to illustrate his analysis.

At some point, the state—governor and legislature—will have to quit delaying and tackle the hard job of revising how the state funds local schools.

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Posted in Education (K-12)

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Public School Enrollments Still Declining

Posted on April 17, 2024 by | 27 comments

Virginia K-12 public school enrollment will decline by nearly 31,000 students, or about 2.9 percent, over the next four years, according to the demographic research group at the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service at the University of Virginia.

The fall-off is expected to be sharpest among high school students, which augurs negatively for future enrollment at Virginia’s universities and community colleges.

The Center based its estimates on the number of births in school districts, projecting forward five years to Kindergarten, and then adjusting for later grades by estimated percentages of students advancing to the next grade, school transfers, migration, dropouts, and deaths. Major uncertainties center around the impact of virtual learning and whether the exodus to private schools and home schools during the COVID epidemic will recede. — JAB

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Posted in Education (K-12)

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Fairfax Spends More, Teaches Less

Posted on April 14, 2024 by | 29 comments

by Arthur Purves

(Editor’s note: Arthur Purves, president of the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance, addressed the Fairfax County School Board on Feb. 13, 2024. His remarks, with updated numbers, are posted below.)

At church I get to ask students and parents around Vienna about our schools. The feedback is positive, and we appreciate your dedicated teachers and administrators.

However, as FCPS spending goes up, achievement goes down. Over the past 5 years, per-student cost has increased, from $16K to $21K, while SAT scores fell, from 1212 to 1181. Never in half a century have FCPS SAT scores seen such a precipitous decline.

Your crucial failure is in teaching minority students mastery of reading and arithmetic by third grade. Most of our crime is committed by individuals whom the public schools failed to teach reading. The fault is the curriculum and unaccountable administrators,not the students, their race, nor their families. Your budget does not even mention Equal Access to Literacy, which was supposed to replace whole word reading instruction with phonics. Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (K-12), Efficiency in Government, Government Finance, Taxes

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Are Nonchalant Adults Responsible For School Shootings?

Posted on April 11, 2024 by | 13 comments

by Kerry Dougherty 

Finally.

For instance, the former assistant principal at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News — Ebony Parker — has been indicted on eight criminal charges in connection with the shooting of first grade teacher Abigail Zwerner in January 2023.

This stunning act of senseless violence put Newport News in headlines around the world. After all, it isn’t often that a 6-year-old carries a loaded gun to school and attempts to kill his teacher.

The mother of the shooter, Deja Taylor, is in prison. She’s serving 21 months on federal gun charges and two years on state charges of felony child neglect.

But there is plenty of blame to spread around in this shocking case.

School officials were warned repeatedly about this boy’s antisocial and dangerous behavior. Yet he remained in a classroom with normal kids. On the day of the shooting at least one child reported that the kid had a gun and school administrators failed to take the report seriously.
In fact, according to a civil suit filed by Ms. Zwerner, who is seeking $40 million in damages, the shooter was a persistent discipline problem. He’d been kicked out of kindergarten and sent to another school after he reportedly tried to strangle and choke his teacher.

On the day of the shooting, Zwerner reportedly told Parker that the child was in a “violent mood.”

Yet nothing was done. Continue reading →

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Posted in Discipline and Disorder, Education (K-12)

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Anarchy Visits Another School

Posted on March 30, 2024 by | 33 comments

Albemarle High School. Photo credit: Daily Progress

by James A. Bacon

Teachers don’t feel safe in Albemarle High School, reports The Daily Progress. Within one recent week, a student punched a teacher in the face so hard he (or she) required medical treatment, while another student issued threats against teachers and classmates via social media and email. The newspaper reports other incidents such as a student slapping a language teacher in the face, a student throwing a chair at a teacher, and a student throwing an uncapped water bottle across the room.

“Students are roaming halls unchecked,” a teacher told The Daily Progress in an email. “Students are regularly cursing teachers out with NO repercussions. Consequences are inconsistently applied, if applied at all.”

“I want to assure you that we take the safety and security of our students and staff seriously, and such incidents will not be tolerated in our school,” Principal Darah Bonham communicated to parents.

Perhaps Bonham is serious about “not tolerating” violence. But how did the situation deteriorate to the present condition? Continue reading →

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Posted in Discipline and Disorder, Education (K-12)

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The Letter

Posted on March 26, 2024 by | 14 comments

by Joe Fitzgerald 

“Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane.”

Depending on your age, you may think of this as the opening to the Box Tops biggest and most iconic hit. If you don’t follow pop music, you may think any song that begins with “gimme” might be from a news story about a county school board chair.

The line of course kicks off the 1967 hit, “The Letter.” Those two words are being bandied about now in reference to a document the Rockingham County School Board (RCSB) says people can’t be allowed to see.

The Letter was apparently written to the RCSB from the law firm that represented it beginning when LBJ was president and ending last week. “To the RCSB” is the certain part. It may have been from the firm, or from one attorney in the firm.

I have not seen The Letter. I have not talked to anyone who has seen The Letter.

But a lot of people seem to know what is in The Letter. If it was written to the five people on the county board, and each one of them had a single conversation about it, and each of the people spoke to . . . etc. More people have heard about what was in The Letter than have actually seen it. But the degrees of separation mean the knowledge of what’s in The Letter has been paraphrased more than once.

The single thing from The Letter that everybody seems to know is that The Letter and not the county School Board’s secret actions ended the firm’s relationship with the county board. Everybody knowing it does not make it true, but if it is not true, the School Board should perhaps show it was not fired as a client. The board could show that by releasing The Letter. Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (K-12), Government Transparency, Leadership

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Climate Change Wars Coming to Virginia Schools?

Posted on March 22, 2024 by | 55 comments

You have to click on the illustration and expand it to even see the percentage of carbon dioxide from human activity in our atmosphere. A new lesson plan in waiting?

By Steve Haner

Young Virginians are not getting enough instruction on the deadly existential threat of climate change from the news media, their favorite social media sites, Hollywood productions and President Joe Biden’s campaign stump speeches. Virginia’s General Assembly Democrats are demanding that the public schools double down with a wave of new classroom materials.

The curriculum wars at the State Board of Education and in local school board meetings may now move on to a new topic if Governor Glenn Youngkin (R) signs House Bill 1088. The bill is ripe for a veto, having received support from only one Republican legislator out of 68, but after the first 100 or so vetoes, Youngkin’s veto pen may tire. Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (K-12), Energy, Environment, General Assembly

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San Francisco’s “Algebra for None” Policy and How Virginia Avoided a Similar Fate

Posted on March 12, 2024 by | 28 comments

by Todd Truitt 

On March 5, 84% of San Francisco voters  voted in favor of a referendum for San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) to bring back Algebra for 8th graders, overturning their prior ill-fated math reform (a “no middle schooler let ahead” math policy). What does this vote have to do with Virginia?

The Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) had initially proposed a similar policy for Virginia as part of its Virginia Math Pathways Initiative (VMPI) in 2021. As noted below, VMPI cited Stanford Education Professor Jo Boaler and resources primarily using SFUSD’s misrepresented preliminary data as “empirical evidence” for VMPI’s similar initial proposal. 

San Francisco’s “Algebra for None” Policy and Its Immediate Effects

SFUSD revised its math program in 2014 based on the ideas of Boaler, requiring heterogeneous math classes and restricting Algebra until 9th grade. By 2018, Boaler and SFUSD were claiming success based upon SFUSD’s preliminary data (subsequently exposed as having been misrepresented).

At the same time, a flood of middle class and well-off families pursued workarounds, thereby creating opportunity gaps with less advantaged kids. As a result, the City of San Francisco (not SFUSD) began funding workarounds for less advantaged kids. Meanwhile, SFUSD’s math head used the tired trope that those who opposed the inequity of its “Algebra for None” policy were only affluent parents fighting for their own children to get ahead. Continue reading →

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Posted in Culture wars, Education (K-12)

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Added Pay Won’t Make Teachers Want to Stay in Bad Teaching Environments

Posted on March 6, 2024 by | 33 comments

by Nancy Almasi

Abby Zwerner, the Newport News teacher shot by a 6-year-old student a year ago, doubts she will ever return to teaching. In addition to her lingering injuries and psychological trauma, Zwerner is suing the Newport News School District for ignoring multiple warnings that the student had a gun and was prone to violence. The local school board tried to block the suit from going forward, arguing that the teacher was only entitled to worker’s compensation. A judge disagreed, and the suit is moving forward.

While this is an extreme example, teachers across the Commonwealth and the country have been quitting in droves. Sadly, the lingering effects from the pandemic have only made matters worse. USA Today reported that teachers have joined the “Great Resignation,” as student behavior has become their number-one complaint.

One former teacher noted that emotional outbursts from students have become commonplace. She also noted that she was forced to cover for other teachers due to staff shortages — limiting her ability to connect with her students and eating into her planning time. She ended up quitting in the middle of the school year – a catastrophe for her students and fellow teachers. “It got so bad,” she said, ‘’I was very overwhelmed and stressed. I was anxious and tired all the time.” Continue reading →

33 Comments

Posted in Education (K-12), Government Finance

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RVA HISTORY: Schools Are for Learning

Posted on March 4, 2024 by | 3 comments

by Jon Baliles

The effort to save the old Richmond Community Hospital (RCH) from Virginia Union’s wrecking ball raises an interesting debate about recognizing history, remembering history, and benefitting by learning from history. Especially when one program is established that then becomes part of a bigger effort and very especially when it is used to overcome something as insidious as segregation. It is also an example of why saving monuments to black history is so important instead of sacrificing them for a revenue stream from 200 apartments.

This story, in a roundabout way, ties in with the opportunity Virginia Union has to create and model a historic preservation program like the successful program at Tuskegee University in Alabama — which is the only Historically Black College and University (HBCU) to have such a program. Doing something like that at VUU centered around the RCH as a starting point and building block could have an incalculable impact for generations of students to come.

The architecture program created at Tuskegee in 1893 (which led to the historic preservation program) was so lasting and impactful it quickly became a main contributor in educating almost 700,000 black children across the south for decades in what were known as The Rosenwald Schools. Continue reading →

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Posted in Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Education (K-12), Virginia history

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We Need More Teachers!

Posted on March 4, 2024 by | 37 comments

by Matt Hurt

Chris Braunlich (Bait and Switch: Reform Reverts to Mo’ Money) brought up many good points about some bills that propose to increase teacher salaries. However, it seems necessary to add some additional context to help flesh out this conversation/debate. It appears that many don’t fully understand the gravity of the situation.

On paper, the teacher vacancy rates seems to have stabilized from 2023 to 2024 rather than increasing as they had in years prior. The data below were obtained from the Staffing and Vacancy Report Build-A-Table on the VDOE website, the dataset for which only dates back to 2022.

Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (K-12)

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Bait and Switch: Reform Reverts to Mo’ Money

Posted on March 1, 2024 by | 27 comments

By Chris Braunlich

Some years back, I ran into a friend, a Virginia Education Association unit chair, outside the General Assembly building, there to lobby on behalf of a state-wide teacher salary increase. Continue reading →

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Posted in Education (K-12), General Assembly, Government Finance, Unions

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A Veto-Proof Local Tax Hike Nearly Approved

Posted on February 24, 2024 by | 58 comments

Virginia sales tax rates: Light blue, 5.3%, green, 6%, dark blue, 6.3% and yellow 7%. All but the localities in dark blue would be allowed to add another 1% under this pending legislation. Click for larger view.

By Steve Haner

A bill likely to produce $1.6 billion or more in local sales tax increases is moving through the General Assembly with enough bipartisan votes to block any veto from the Governor, but differences remain between the House of Delegates and Senate versions. Continue reading →

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Posted in Business and Economy, Education (K-12), General Assembly, Government Finance, Taxes

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