Category Archives: Attendance

Mental Health and Virginia Public Schools – Part 1 – Progressives, School Closures and Child Mental Health

Posted on February 7, 2023 by | 28 comments

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.

Continue reading →

28 Comments

Posted in Attendance, Children and Families, Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Culture wars, Demographics, Discipline and Disorder, Education (K-12), Governance, Mental illness and substance abuse

School Discipline – Part 5 – How and When Democrats Broke Virginia Public Schools

Posted on February 4, 2023 by | 74 comments

by James C. Sherlock

We read earlier today that the eminent developmental theorist Urie Bronfenbrenner has written:

The more we study human development, the more it becomes clear the family is the most powerful, most humane and, by far, the most economical way of making human beings human.

That truth, however, does not account for the degree that families have broken down in America in the last 60 years, which is, unfortunately, a lot.  The Pew Research Center reported in 2019 that the U.S. has the world’s highest rate of children living in single-parent households.

So we try to impart in school what some children are denied at home: humanity.

The federal government, Virginia government and local school boards have killed a lot of forests with laws, regulations and guidelines (and spent a very large fortune) trying to accomplish that.

I will provide here overwhelming evidence that Ralph Northam and the new Democratic majorities in both houses of the Virginia G.A. in 2020 did catastrophic damage to the schools’ ability to maintain order and thus safety.

The Northam-McAuliffe Board of Education in 2021 finished the job just in time for students to return in progressive-run divisions from as much as a 15-month COVID hiatus from schools.  No conservative-run division was out nearly that long.

So they created a perfect storm based on progressive dogma. At the most vulnerable time in our schools’ history.

They actually discouraged in law the reporting by school principals and teachers to police of cases of assault and battery in schools.

They never considered for a minute the easily foreseeable victims of the changes.

Ask Abby Zwerner about her school’s positive climate. Continue reading →

74 Comments

Posted in Attendance, Children and Families, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections and Law Enforcement, Culture wars, Discipline and Disorder, Education (Early Childhood), Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), General Assembly, Governance

Tagged

School Discipline in Virginia – Part 4 – The False Legend of PBIS Effectiveness

Posted on February 3, 2023 by | 56 comments

Catherine P. Bradshaw
Senior Associate Dean for Research & Faculty Development Professor, UVa School of Education and Human Development

by James C. Sherlock

To discover the origins of the legend that Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) is effective, we have to dig into the interlocking government and ed school interest groups that fund and publish “studies” that validate their views.

The goal of the ed schools is always to capture the attention, funding and approval of the federal Department of Education (DOE) of their new bright ideas.

The method is to use DOE’s own seemingly limitless grant money and its bureaucracy’s predisposition to progressive causes to fund studies conducted by progressive “educators” that prove progressive theory.

Where is the anti-trust division of the Justice Department when we need it?

The legend of PBIS effectiveness is perhaps most founded on a famous study conducted in Maryland, the results of which were reported in 2010. The abstract claimed that the schools in the trial experienced significant reductions in student suspensions and office discipline referrals compared to the control group.

That worked until the Department’s Institute for Education Sciences What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) took a look at that study more than a decade later and found that while the study design and execution met scientific standards, it offered:

  • “No Statistically Significant Positive Findings”; and
  • that the evidence for that finding was strong.

Oops.

Many of Virginia’s school divisions have gone down the PBIS rabbit hole and continue to do so at great cost both in time and money and in opportunity costs, i.e. the ability to try interventions actually proven to work.

We’ll trace that 2010 report.

We will find that the study’s leader, now a professor at the University of Virginia’s ed school, is now on the inside of IES, chairing a What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) practice guide on positive behavior support.

Yeah, my take is the same as yours.

The swamp is eternal. Continue reading →

56 Comments

Posted in Attendance, Culture wars, Discipline and Disorder, Education (Early Childhood), Education (K-12), Teacher Education

Tagged ,

Educational Expectations

Posted on February 2, 2023 by | 73 comments

by Matt Hurt

Since the Region VII superintendents initiated the Comprehensive Instructional Program in 2014, we have annually identified our top five most successful teachers of our most at-risk students in each SOL-tested course. In their classes, at least 50 percent of students were economically disadvantaged, and they also had a significant number of students with disabilities. Despite that, their SOL pass rates were very high, even higher than many teachers’ pass rates who had few economically disadvantaged students and no students with disabilities. When asked, all of these teachers have conveyed a common theme: they expected their students to pass the SOL test, and the teacher believed it was his/her job to ensure that happened.

Similarly, we find the theme of high expectations rampant in our most successful schools and divisions in our high poverty areas. For example, Wise County and Norton City were the two divisions that outperformed the relationship between poverty rates and SOL performance in 2022 (as well as several years prior). This relationship accounted for 30 percent of the variation in overall SOL scores among all 132 divisions that year. The poverty rate in these two divisions is greater than approximately 90 percent of other school divisions in the state, and they are also typically the least-well-funded two divisions in Virginia when considering overall per-pupil funding. Despite those challenges, these two divisions outperformed 95 percent of all other divisions in 2022.

Figure 1
2022 Overall Division Pass Rates Compared to Federal Poverty Rates

Continue reading →

73 Comments

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

Tagged

School Discipline in Virginia – Part 3 — A Sharp Policy Turn to the Left after 2009

Posted on February 1, 2023 by | 13 comments

by James C. Sherlock

Here is the information from a slide briefing to the Loudon County school board on February 6, 2013.

“Experimentally.”

The slide itself was actually produced in 2008 by pbis.org. It seems like a bad joke now, but that was how it was presented.

Not a word about race there, but there surely is in a presentation linked by that organization now. Risk index and risk ratios? With cartoon figures of Black children? Seriously?

Did I mention that Newport News Public Schools is rated fluent in PBIS by the state ed school consortium that trains and rates PBIS schools? They probably would take issue with all of those promises.

As would most of the working staff of schools across Virginia that use PBIS.

So how did we get here? Continue reading →

13 Comments

Posted in Attendance, Discipline and Disorder, Education (Early Childhood), Education (K-12), Race and Race Relations, Teacher Education

Tagged

Virginia Community Schools Redefined – Hubs for Government and Not-for-Profit Services in Inner Cities – Part 1 – the Current Framework

Posted on January 24, 2023 by | 5 comments

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 →

5 Comments

Posted in Attendance, Charity, Philanthropy and Nonprofits, Children and Families, Civil Rights, Individual Liberties, Courts and law, Crime, Corrections and Law Enforcement, Culture wars, Discipline and Disorder, Education (K-12), Efficiency in Government, General Assembly, Health Care, Infrastructure, LGBQT, Mental illness and substance abuse, Political Influence, Poverty & income gap, Public safety & health, Social Services and Entitlements, Threat Assessment

Tagged

Chilling Revelations In The Saga Of The 6-Year-Old Teacher Shooter

Posted on January 23, 2023 by | 55 comments

by Kerry Dougherty

Excuse my language, but what the hell is going on at Richneck Elementary School in Newport News?

On Saturday, The Washington Post reported that school administrators there have downplayed threats of violence, apparently ignoring pleas for help from frightened teachers.

One account claims that the same boy who shot and nearly killed his teacher two weeks ago threatened another teacher saying he wanted to set her on fire and watch her burn.

The Post story is crammed with horrifying accounts of violent outbursts by an out-of-control child allegedly terrorizing his fellow students and teachers.

If true, there needs to be a wholesale shake-up in that school and this bleeding heart nonsense needs to STOP.

School officials must explain why they allow students who have threatened violence against teachers to remain in the classroom. Then they need to tell us why THEY deserve to keep their jobs.

Here’s a question for Richneck school leaders: Is there anything they WON’T tolerate at that dysfunctional elementary school, where a substitute teacher told The Post that the kids were so frightening that after one day she refused to go back to that particular school?
Continue reading →

55 Comments

Posted in Attendance, Children and Families, Crime, Corrections and Law Enforcement, Culture wars, Discipline and Disorder, Education (K-12), Uncategorized

Tagged

The Shooting at Richneck Elementary – Part 2 – the School

Posted on January 9, 2023 by | 42 comments

By James C. Sherlock

Richneck Elementary Credit WAVY TV 10

The shooting at Richneck Elementary was a tragedy by every measure.

I am not going to discuss the shooting itself here.

I will instead offer a summary of the school’s state quality data so we can get a sense of the environment in that school.  It is located across I-64 from Fort Eustis in a neighborhood described in The New York Times as “generally safe”.

Fort Eustis hosts General Stanford Elementary, the highest performing elementary school in the Newport News Public Schools system.  In a neighborhood generally considered extraordinarily safe.  Hooah.

Continue reading →

42 Comments

Posted in Attendance, Children and Families, Discipline and Disorder, Education (Early Childhood), Education (K-12), Teacher Education

R.I.P. Virginia Public Schools

Posted on January 8, 2023 by | 70 comments

Martin Luther King Middle School Richmond. Credit RCPS.

by James C. Sherlock

I have crafted and will share what I believe to be an epitaph for public education in Virginia.

All of the evidence we see is that Virginia’s public school system, counseled and cheered on by its disgraceful publicly funded schools of education, is crumbling at its foundations.

We start children in school at ever younger ages to give them a head start. We have moved supervision of child care to the Department of Education, thus rearranging the deck chairs.

Many of the adults in the system, and quite possibly many of the students, have given up on education in actual facts. Adults argue about the teaching of history as if, evidence aside, kids were going to learn it.

Displacing traditional course time, teachers are directed to spend dedicated hours to try to instill social-emotional learning that kids traditionally learned at home.

Those kids who already have those skills sit wondering what they have done wrong.

The lessons plans, unfortunately, will tell them soon enough.

But that is just the beginning. Continue reading →

70 Comments

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

Tagged

What Do We Do When Teachers Quit En Masse?

Posted on December 10, 2022 by | 86 comments

by James C. Sherlock

What makes teachers want to teach?

The satisfaction that comes from helping children and adolescents learn and grow into productive, mature adults. It is amazingly powerful.

What is required for them to choose to teach? Enough money to live comfortably and a safe, supportive working environment.

So that is three:

  1. teaching satisfaction
  2. salary and benefits
  3. working conditions

What happens when those all go badly? We are finding out.

We have far too many schools in which students measurably are not learning. Astonishingly large numbers don’t show up to school.

As for safe, supportive working environments, forget it in many schools. Feral children and adolescents attack one another and their teachers.

Teachers are disgusted and, in some cases, terrified. So are their best students. Teachers are leaving not only their own schools but the profession in ever larger numbers.

Some readers may console themselves that time will heal all wounds. It won’t in this case. As the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) reported, both the teacher retention and new teacher training curves are sloping dramatically in the wrong direction.

So, the question in the title requires an answer — immediately. Continue reading →

86 Comments

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

Tagged

Why Not Virtual Instruction for Routinely Disruptive or Potentially Dangerous Students?

Posted on December 8, 2022 by | 60 comments

Stone Bridge High School Chantilly

by James C. Sherlock

So, let’s examine a theoretical.

A kid gets thrown out of a high school for a suspected rape.

The (ex-) superintendent places him in another high school awaiting trial.

He rapes again.

What’s wrong with this picture? OK, lots of things.

But let’s examine just one solution that can have wider applicability.

Why could not that alleged (at the time) criminal, or any suspended kid, participate remotely with his classes broadcast to him?

The equipment to do so is available in public schools all over the state after COVID. It is also available in our institutions of higher learning (IHE). Continue reading →

60 Comments

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

Tagged

Student Mental Health Crisis Explained – By The Washington Post

Posted on December 5, 2022 by | 61 comments

Freedom High Woodbridge

by James C. Sherlock

The Washington Post, in a lengthy article, “The crisis of student mental health is much vaster than we realize,” wrote about the mental health crisis facing our school children, especially adolescents.

Nationally, adolescent depression and anxiety — already at crisis levels before the pandemic — have surged amid the isolation, disruption and hardship of covid-19.

Now, the Post tells us. They even hint that more federal money may not help. Which must have taken an extra couple of days of meetings before publication.

The article did not identify the “we” who were cited in the headline as not realizing this was happening. Who indeed could have guessed such an outcome?

Other than anyone older than 12 not blinded by a “narrative” that never included the children’s mental health.

Some even wrote about the issues when recommending that kids go back to school in person. Before the start of the 2020-21 school year.

In the Post story, not a word about the “leaders” in state and local governments and the teachers union strike threats that kept some Virginia public schools closed up to an extra year.

Not a word about the Catholic schools that opened across the state in the fall of 2020.

Not a word of apology for being a big part of the problem that needs to be fixed. Continue reading →

61 Comments

Posted in Attendance, Discipline and Disorder, Education (K-12), Health Care, Mental illness and substance abuse

Tagged

Virginia’s Northam Learning Gap

Posted on December 4, 2022 by | 38 comments

by L. Scott Ligamfelter

It should surprise no one. After the ill-conceived March 2020 closing of Virginia’s public schools by former Democrat Gov. Ralph Northam, it should have been evident that children would suffer academically.

We now know the extent of that damage to fourth and eighth grade students. Virginia’s Secretary of Education, Aimee Rogstad Guidera, put it aptly. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results, she said, offer a “clear and heart-wrenching” statement on the “catastrophic decline” and a “predictable outcome of the decade-long systemic dismantling of a foundational commitment to excellence in education.” It didn’t have to be. What followed was a complete failure in virtual education. In the process, children fell victim to the self-absorbed politics of teachers’ unions and a complete disregard of the medical evidence from European countries that school-aged children were not at increased threat to contract COVID-19.

Moreover, the teachers’ unions saw the COVID-19 closing as an opportunity to keep schools shuttered while they lobbied for more pay and fatter school budgets once the pandemic crisis passed. A cynical assessment? Yes. But even when high schoolers in my county of Prince William returned to classrooms in 2021, teachers remained out, preferring to instruct kids virtually even as their students sat in segmented classroom space watching their teacher on a computer screen. It was farcical, and Virginia’s parents knew it.

Enter Republican gubernatorial candidate Glenn Youngkin, who correctly characterized parental outrage in Virginia, not only for the elongated closure of public schools, but also for the “woke pandemic” spread by liberal school boards bent on indoctrinating children to be social justice warriors. Of almost no concern to these latter-day commissars was the performance of our kids and grandkids in reading, math, genuine history, and critical thinking skills. Mr. Youngkin listened to parents. In turn, they elected Mr. Youngkin because he pledged to realign educational priorities to those of parents, not woke administrators.

The governor is rightly indignant over the recent NAEP results and has committed to ensuring that Virginia children “have the tools and support structure to get back on track.” Tutors, particularly in math and reading, are needed for our fourth graders. Reading scores for this segment were dismal, tumbling from seventh to 33rd place among all states. In math, fourth grade students barely reached the national average.

Continue reading →

38 Comments

Posted in Attendance, Children and Families, Education (K-12), Unions

Tagged

Petersburg Resumes Important Actions Against City Code Violators — Homeless Needs Increase

Posted on November 22, 2022 by | 38 comments

Travel Inn was shut down by the ACE team in June. Courtesy Joyce Chu, Progress Index.

by James C. Sherlock

Sometimes absolutely necessary actions have more than one outcome.

Such is the case in Petersburg.

Joyce Chu of Petersburg’s indispensable Progress- Index last evening initiated a multi-part series on the impacts of the city’s closure due to safety violations of two motels used by otherwise homeless people.

Her first article makes a case for more government and charitable services for the people affected by the closures. Good for her. No one wants people living on the streets and everyone wants the kids in school.

She explains that the California Inn, OYO and Travel Inn motels, among a group of low cost motels right off of I-95, were

also hotbeds of crime, drug overdoses and prostitution mixed in with families with children, according to former residents and homeless advocates.

She points out that Petersburg has resumed (after a lengthy period when it did not) enforcing its zoning codes. A team called the ACE team — Abatement, Compliance, and Enforcement — is on task, run by the Fire Chief.

Code enforcement is an absolutely necessary step to revitalize the city.

So is helping those adversely affected.  -Hotel owners should be forced within the limits of the law to assist. Continue reading →

38 Comments

Posted in Attendance, Charity, Philanthropy and Nonprofits, Children and Families, Crime, Corrections and Law Enforcement, Health Care, Homelessness, Infrastructure, Mental illness and substance abuse, Public safety & health, Regulations and Government Oversight, Social Services and Entitlements

Tagged

Local Elections Dominated by School Issues – Chesapeake Edition

Posted on September 30, 2022 by | 13 comments

Chesapeake’s Oscar Smith High School’s dominant football team – Tigers indeed

by James C. Sherlock

Check out closely the citizens who are running for city councils, boards of supervisors and the school boards this time of year.

The concerns of Virginians are still focused tightly on schools.

That is the definition of the stakes in school board elections, which used to be sleepy, low-turnout affairs. But no longer.

And school issues are bleeding over into city council and board of supervisor elections.

Some candidates pick a side and say what they mean to do. Others try to finesse the issues with word salads and “edspeak.”

Take Chesapeake.

Harder to finesse.

Republican and Democratic parties and the teachers union each endorse candidates. Continue reading →

13 Comments

Posted in Attendance, Education (K-12)

Tagged