by John Butcher
The Superintendent of Public Instruction’s May 10, 2023, memo scheduled posting of the 2022-2023 student performance results to the Build-A-Table tool on August 17. Those data have not been posted.
It’s not that they don’t have the information. The SOL data, in particular, are collected as they are produced by the online testing. Richmond had data in time to produce for the August 21 Board meeting a 40-page report on progress v. last year.
Note added 8/31: As of last night, Richmond Public Schools took down the report, which broke the link above. Makes one think there was a phone call from VDOE. In any case, I have a pdf of the report. Shoot an email to cranky1{at}duck{dot}com if you’d like a copy.
The report starts with a division v. state overview. (See chart above.)
Yet it seems that the customers who are paying for Richmond’s schools, especially the parents, are not to have direct access to public data that are available to this school board. No telling about parents in other divisions.
We could speculate that the Superintendent (or the Governor) is embarrassed by the minuscule improvement in the state averages (overall average of change by subject, +0.8%) and is slow-walking the release. But, unless somebody at VDOE is incredibly stupid, that hypothesis would seem to be falsified by the release of the state averages to Richmond, which published them.
Another hypothesis could be that the Administration is planning a release of the data in conjunction with proposed legislation for the special session next week. But, unless somebody at VDOE is incredibly stupid, that one also would seem to be falsified by the release of the state averages to Richmond.
2d Note as of 8/31: Richmond’s takedown of their report supports the “incredibly stupid” explanation.
Or we might notice that this is the first time in 23 years the release has not been supervised by Charles Pyle, the former Director of Communications.
What is clear is that they are sitting on the data you and I paid for.
Your tax dollars at work.
Republished with permission from Cranky’s Blog.
