by James C. Sherlock
This weekend I read the 168-page 2020 Annual Report on the Condition and Needs of Public Schools in Virginia (the report) published by the Virginia Board of Education appointed by Governor Northam.
The report is most notable for its omissions and occasional lies.
Poverty. First the good news.
The Board reported well on one major issue affecting effective learning environments — the poverty of some students and school districts.
The content of the report on the issues related to poor kids and schools in poor districts was excellent. I strongly support the recommendations for changing the state contribution formula to give more state money to poorer districts.
Those districts cannot raise enough tax money to make up the difference between state funding and the actual needs of their schools and the children they serve. Their kids need more help, and the poor school districts have fewer resources to provide it.
“The current funding system, increasingly reliant on local funding, is inherently inequitable.”
Indeed it is.
Race. When the report segued between poor kids and black kids, however, the authors both made statements without evidence and intentionally misrepresented evidence they did cite.
Race, as the left emphasizes, is a social construct subject to redefinition at any point by anyone, yet enrollment is tracked by “race.”
The Asian “race” contains Americans of Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Indian and other countries of origin. Those countries don’t share the same religions, languages, customs or political alignments, but are lumped into a single category for the convenience of race hustlers and governments, which are becoming the same thing; neither do the countries of origin of African-Americans. Nor do recent African immigrants and multi-generational African-Americans.
But the Board could only comment on race based on such profoundly ill-defined data and yet clearly felt it must. Poverty is a much more scientific and meaningful category, yet the Board switches back and forth as if the categorizations were of equal value.
Academic Outcomes. The report attributed poor academic outcomes to systemic racism in the school system. It more provably can be attributed to poverty and many other factors outside of school control. The report offered no proof; rather it offered systemic racism as an article of faith.
Governor Ralph Northam has been in office for three years, so if the Board is right, the outcomes gap can be considered at least partially his fault.
“Systemic racism and discrimination still exist in public education, and too often, a student’s skin color or socioeconomic status predicts the quality of their educational opportunities. As education leaders in the Commonwealth, we have a responsibility to recognize and confront such racism and discrimination.”
The authors failed to mention that charter schools in New York have for more than 20 years produced academic and career outcomes with poor black students that exceeded those of white kids in the wealthiest districts in that state. If they had mentioned it, they would have had to explain why “systemic racism” had not crippled those children.
They would have had to concede that better policies and pedagogy can cure the problem for a lot of currently underachieving black children. For reference they could have used the NAACP’s request for a charter school in Loudoun County to give black children a better chance at a good education.
Discipline. The Board of Education offers systemic racism as the basis for disproportionate minority representation in school discipline statistics, not poverty, not gangs, just systemic racism.
We know that poverty tracks geographically with underperforming schools. The Board itself makes this point. We also know that juvenile gangs are an enormous problem in Virginia and nationally and that they are disproportionately concentrated in urban areas.
The word gang was not found in 183 pages of the report.
Intentionally Misleading the General Assembly. The report’s authors were so strapped to find evidence for its statements on race that they used footnotes to back up statements that, upon examination, were actually refuted by the footnoted documents.
Let’s look at the paragraph in the report that transitioned the discussion from poverty to race to see the intentional misleading of the General Assembly to whom this report is addressed.
“Research indicates that being taught by a teacher in the top quartile of effectiveness for four consecutive years would eliminate achievement gaps between black and white students. This is concerning as black students are nearly two times more likely to be assigned an ineffective teacher, and half as likely to be assigned to the most effective teacher. These inequities are reflected within different schools in single school divisions and across school divisions.”
Those statements are not only unproven by the footnotes cited, but indeed are refuted by them.
The authors actually truncated the first sentence in that statement that they copied from a footnoted study, thereby changing its entire meaning to make a point.
“Research indicates that being taught by a teacher in the top quartile of effectiveness for four consecutive years would eliminate achievement gaps between black and white students.”
The citation with that statement is Gordon, R., Kane, T. J., & Staiger, D. O. (2006). Identifying effective teachers using performance on the job. Hamilton project discussion paper. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution. .
The authors of that citation introduced raw speculation that was nowhere supported in their data, but at least they labeled it as speculation.
“Therefore, if the effects were to accumulate, having a top-quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap.”
When the authors of the Board of Education report removed the phrase “if the effects were to accumulate” and by doing so translated 2006 speculation into 2020 certainty, they clearly meant to deceive the General Assembly.
Second, the report followed that deception with:
“This is concerning as black students are nearly two times more likely to be assigned an ineffective teacher, and half as likely to be assigned to the most effective teacher.”
The citation referenced, Sanders, W. L., & Rivers, J. C. (1996), Cumulative and residual effects of teachers on future student academic achievement, University of Tennessee Value-Added Research and Assessment Center used data from a single school district in Tennessee in 1996 in grades 1-5. Yet the report turns those into current global truths, not conclusions limited to one sample.
Indeed Sanders and Rivers’ findings have absolutely nothing to do with race: That report states in bold:
“These results suggest that although the student assignment from ethnic groups to effective teachers is slightly disproportionate, the achievement within the two ethnic groups (white and black) is comparable across the five levels of teacher effectiveness. These analyses suggest that students of the same prior levels of achievement tend to respond similarly to teacher effectiveness levels.”
That is of course good news, and the Board of Education report clearly banned good news on race.
Summary and Recommendations. So the Board’s report authors took perfectly defensible data and recommendations relative to providing additional assistance to poorer schools and recruiting and retaining high quality teachers. Then they tried to link them to the Board’s unhealthy fixation on race by misrepresenting the evidence they cited.
The report cited racial differences in school discipline rates by race without a single mention of gangs.
It reported the need to put more effective teachers in poor schools, but it cited studies on teacher effectiveness data that it does not have the systems, organizational or technical, to gather and process. That need is not acknowledged in the report. They need to get started with the participation of teachers, principals and parents to set out the goals and standards of teacher effectiveness and create the systems to capture the data. When they do, it is a multi-year process to gain enough data to make such judgements.
Good teaching, classroom discipline and parental support are key “secrets” that make Success Academies, KIPP and their ilk work. And they do it as public schools. But they did not warrant a mention.
Neither did parental support itself. It is mandated by law in Virginia yet is certainly uneven and has direct effects on both student achievement and discipline. That, like many other issues, was entirely absent from this report.
I recommend that the state police and the VDOE get together and map juvenile gang activity vs. underperforming schools. With that information, the school divisions can work with their law enforcement agencies to work the problem together.
If this type of intentional misrepresentation by omission and commission is let to happen without consequence, there is no report from the Northam Administration to the General Assembly that is to be believed.
Final point. There is no mention in the report of what the Commonwealth and the school districts are going to do or even what the options are about the “lost year” of education of the children due to the shutdowns and all of the associated problems with distance learning. If we thought the shutdowns were a huge fight, wait until the Commonwealth and, God help us, the Board of Education try to deal with whether kids need to repeat the year lost.
The Governor must act to sanction those responsible.The members of his Board of Education have by this report demonstrated that they are at least incompetent.
They should apologize to the General Assembly on the way out.
