Category Archives: teacher education

Virginia’s New School Chief: Raise Standards, Fill Teacher Vacancies

Posted on May 1, 2023 by | 20 comments

Lisa Coons. Image taken from Virginia Department of Education YouTube clip.

by James A. Bacon

Dr. Lisa Coons, Virginia’s new superintendent for public instruction, has been on the job for only two weeks, but she has clear priorities for reversing the slide in educational achievement in Virginia’s public schools: raise standards, get chronically absentee kids back into the classroom, and address teacher shortages.

Recruited from her job as chief academic officer for the Tennessee public school system, Coons filled the vacancy created by the resignation of Jillian Balow. She granted Bacon’s Rebellion her first media interview. I started with an open-ended question: What are the greatest challenges facing Virginia public schools today? Her gut response: Recruit more teachers.

“We have to get a high-quality teacher in every classroom in the state,” she said. “Remove the barriers and challenges to processing licenses. Create plenty of pathways to bring people into the [teaching] workforce.”

Raising teacher pay is one obvious strategy for reversing the brain drain from schools. Lawmakers have funded significant pay hikes for Virginia teachers, but the raises have lagged cost-of-living increases. Improving working conditions is another approach. Virginia teachers consistently cite disciplinary issues, unsupportive administrators, and lack of respect from students and parents as morale busters. But those issues are inherently local and not amenable to top-down action from Richmond. Rather, Coons is focusing on changing state-level regulations with the goal of enlarging the pool of teachers. Continue reading →

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Posted in Attendance, Discipline and disorder, Education (K-12), teacher education

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Increasing Teacher Vacancy Rates

Posted on April 17, 2023 by | 16 comments

by Matt Hurt

The teacher vacancy rate in the Commonwealth has become such a problem that the Virginia Department of Education created a database to track this problem. The Staffing and Vacancy Report found on the Education Workforce Data & Reports page of the VDOE website displays unfilled Virginia educator positions at the state, region, division, and school levels as of October of each year.

This data was first published in 2021 and reported that approximately 3% percent of Virginia’s teaching positions were vacant at that time. Historically, few hires are made after the beginning of the school year, as all willing and eligible potential teachers have already been hired by that point. Anecdotally, I am aware of and have heard many more instances of teachers leaving throughout the year, whereas in the past most would wait until summer to leave the profession.

When one compares the October 2021 teacher vacancy rates to the 2022 Standards of Learning (SOL) pass rates at the division level, that seemingly insignificant teacher vacancy rate statistically accounted for 26% of the variability in division SOL pass rates that year. In October 2022, the teacher vacancy rate across Virginia increased 26% percent to almost a 4% teacher vacancy rate. Given this increase, it is reasonable to believe that this problem will more significantly and negatively impact student outcomes this year than last.
Continue reading →

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Posted in Children and families, Discipline and disorder, Education (K-12), teacher education, Uncategorized

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Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Virginia Public Schools – The Epidemic of Risky Behaviors and Experiences in Adolescents

Posted on February 15, 2023 by | 36 comments

Courtesy YouTube

by James C. Sherlock

The 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS) Data Summary & Trends Report: 2011–2021 , was released by the CDC on Monday, provides the most recent surveillance data, as well as 10-year trends, on health behaviors and experiences related to adolescent health and well-being among high school students in the United States.

The survey was completed in the Spring of 2021.

The report writes that teen girls are “engulfed in a growing wave of violence and trauma.”

 

Illustrations courtesy of CBS

This survey is brought to you by CDC, the national sponsors of school shutdowns. Who could have imagined?

The survey did not include middle- and grade-school students, but we can assess that such conditions did not spring up full grown in the 9th grade.

Where, exactly, are the feminists? Especially the ed-school feminists? Like Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) cheerleader Professor Catherine Bradshaw at the UVa School of Education and Human Development.

PBIS in place in most schools in Virginia and across the nation in that same 10-year period by design keeps violent and dangerous students in schools.

It is what PBIS is supposed to do. So those students can be socialized.

Or not.

That survey should, but will not, put to rest progressive insistence that out-of-control violence among students and fear in American schools because of violence are figments of conservative imaginations.

It confirms that increasing absenteeism is linked to fear. Which progressives will also continue to deny. Continue reading →

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Posted in Attendance, Children and families, Crime , corrections and law enforcement, Culture wars, Discipline and disorder, Education (K-12), Feminism and women's rights, teacher education

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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 →

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Posted in Attendance, Culture wars, Discipline and disorder, Education - Early Childhood, Education (K-12), teacher education

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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 →

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Posted in Attendance, Discipline and disorder, Education (K-12), teacher education

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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 →

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Posted in Attendance, Discipline and disorder, Education - Early Childhood, Education (K-12), Race and race relations, teacher education

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School Discipline in Virginia – Part 2 – Positive Options Trumped by a Race Card

Posted on January 31, 2023 by | 60 comments

From social media video of school fight

by James C. Sherlock

I have found both surprise and confusion among some readers when I use the term “valid studies” in discussing the avalanche of doctoral theses and studies produced annually by schools of education.

The federal Institute for Educational Sciences established What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) in 2002 to sort the wheat from the chaff for school divisions and state education agencies before they choose a particular intervention to pursue to solve a problem.

Since I discovered WWC a few years ago, I check it in my own research in an attempt to make sure I don’t go down a rabbit hole with some study that is flawed.

On the subject of Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), WWC shows in assessments of interventions to solve problems of social-emotional learning and behavior management:

  1. strong evidence that PBIS offers no measurable improvement, and
  2. that there are alternative approaches to PBIS that do show strong improvement.

One study of PBIS, conducted in Maryland (which will come up again later), was the only one ever to meet strict WWC standards of quality and strong evidence.

Strong evidence from that trial — in 2010 — found that PBIS did not work to improve social-emotional development and behavior in K-5 children.

There were no positive findings. None.

Yet a very large number of Virginia’s largest school divisions use it anyway.

And all of them started using it after that 2010 study.

But then again, so did Maryland. Continue reading →

60 Comments

Posted in Central planning, Children and families, Discipline and disorder, Education - Early Childhood, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), teacher education

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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 →

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Posted in Attendance, Discipline and disorder, Education (K-12), Homeschooling, teacher education

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Public Education and the Management of Change

Posted on December 12, 2022 by | 14 comments

Freedom High Woodbridge

by James C. Sherlock

Peter Drucker’s famous five questions should always be asked by and of government.

What is the mission? Who is the customer? What does the customer consider valuable? What are the results sought and how are they to be measured? What is the plan, to include both abandonment and innovation?

So, in reviewing the 119-page JLARC report Pandemic Impact on Public K–12 Education 2022, we must inquire first what JLARC was asked to do by the General Assembly.

Then examine what they did with that charter.

Both were well intentioned but incomplete. Continue reading →

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Posted in Change Management, Education (higher ed), Education (K-12), Efficiency in government, General Assembly, Government Oversight, Health Care, Mental illness and substance abuse, teacher education

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Education Schools Redux

Posted on September 5, 2022 by | 32 comments

by James C. Sherlock

Dick Hall-Sizemore went to great lengths in an article to rebut one of my own.

He attempted to disprove the two major assertions in my article:

  1. The ed schools have had control of education policy in the Commonwealth and nationally for a very long time. They have in the process made the profession of education in Virginia, both in the preparation stage and the classroom teaching stage over a career, much more expensive and generally maddening for teachers and school staff than it needs be. Ed school careers have been multiplied, assured and profited immensely from the requirements they have sponsored in the General Assembly and the Board of Education.
  2. Democrats in Richmond in the interregnum years of 2020 and 2021 made major changes to the way K-12 education is conducted, and therefore must be taught, in Virginia.

He was right that I should not have mixed politics and the ed school issues.

Dick’s most heartfelt issue is my take on the Democrats’ interventions in education. The Democrats themselves are so publicly proud of what they accomplished in education in the 2020 and 2021 sessions of the General Assembly and in the Board of Education that it seems remarkable to have to prove it to a Democrat.

But so be it. I will now deal with each in turn.

This one is about the ed schools and their death grip on teacher education and promotion in Virginia. And whether they earn their costs. And what the options might prove to be. Continue reading →

32 Comments

Posted in Education (K-12), teacher education

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