Category Archives: Education (K-12)

Virginia: High educational achievement for moderate expenditures. Source: Cato Institute. (Click for more legible image.)

Which states have the best public education systems in the country? By most rankings, Virginia scores fairly well. U.S. News & World-Report puts Virginia in the No. 12 spot. Education Week grades Virginia B-, considerably better than the national score of C. Forbes ranks Virginia 6th in the nation (7th in quality and 2nd in safety). Given all the scandals and problems we have identified here on Bacon’s Rebellion, it’s frightful to contemplate that Virginia has one of the better public school systems in the country. I shudder to think what’s happening in other states’ schools systems. But the state rankings make it clear that things could be worse… a lot worse.

Now comes a report by the libertarian Cato Institute, which places Virginia at the top of the heap. While Cato’s results undercut the Bacon’s Rebellion narrative that Virginia public schools are badly in need of reform, Cato’s methodology strikes me as valid. Continue reading →

This graph shows the low correlation between the age of the school and English SOL pass rate of the students.

City of Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney celebrated yesterday the planned construction of new school buildings to replace three of the city’s oldest, most decrepit facilities, reports the Richmond Times-Dispatch. With money raised from a hike in the meals tax, leveraged to issue $150 million in bonds, the city will build new structures for George Mason Elementary (96 years old), E.S.H. Greene Elementary (63 years old), and Elkhardt Middle School (77 years old).

There is understandable revulsion at the disgraceful physical condition of the city’s older schools, some of which have rat droppings, leaking roofs, broken sinks and toilets, and malfunctioning heating/cooling systems. Over and above conducting emergency repairs to bathrooms, the city has committed to a $225 million, 44-school modernization program over the next three decades.

An assumption underlying the plan is that there is a strong relationship between the physical condition of a school and the quality of educational outcomes. Continue reading →

Cranky, er, I mean John Butcher, continues to do the kind of statistical analysis of Virginia’s public schools that I wish we would see from our public officials. In a recent post on Cranky’s Blog, he dove deeper than ever into the relationship between economic disadvantage and SOL outcomes. And he demonstrated with greater clarity that some schools do better at educating disadvantaged students than others.

It is universally acknowledged that students classified as “disadvantaged” — qualifying for free school lunches — perform worse on average in Standards of Learning tests than do students not so categorized. Likewise, it is universally acknowledged that schools with higher percentages of disadvantaged students will tend to show lower SOL test scores than schools with fewer disadvantaged students, and that any evaluation of their effectiveness should take that fact into account. While the percentage of “disadvantaged” students accounts for roughly half the variability between schools, other factors — some of which schools and school districts can manage — also account for half.

In a graph published on Bacon’s Rebellion last week, John showed the variability between school districts. In the graph shown above, taken from his most recent post, he showed the correlation between English SOL pass rates and the percentage of disadvantaged for all schools. Then he did something particularly interesting — he overlaid schools from a specific district over the universal graph to show how that district compares to state averages.

The graph above compares average SOL scores for both advantaged and disadvantaged students statewide. It shows that the higher the percentage of disadvantaged students in a school, the worse both categories of students perform. In schools dominated by disadvantaged students, even the non-disadvantaged students do worse. Statewide, the depressive effect is roughly the same, as can be seen by the slope of the two lines.

Now, let’s look at some individual school districts.

In Fairfax County, Virginia’s largest school district, we can see that the effect of higher percentages of disadvantaged students upon non-disadvantaged students (the green line) is in line with statewide averages, but the impact on disadvantaged students (the yellow line) is particularly striking. What is going on? Do Fairfax School Board members have a clue that this is happening? Continue reading →