Tag Archives: James Sherlock

by James C. Sherlock

I have questions in my own mind about the quality of Virginia public schools.

In search of answers I invested several weeks full time in building into a spreadsheet what I consider some of the critical metrics among both Virginia public schools in general and ten different school districts that I chose.  

For each of those districts I recorded data on: 

• demographic groups by racial cohort, economically disadvantaged, and English learners;
• school investment; 
• chronic absenteeism; 
• SOL reading and math performance of each demographic group in each district; and  
• Compared them to state averages in each metric.

I chose and paired the ten different school districts (of 133) in an attempt to get a cross section of urban, suburban and rural districts in Northern Virginia, the Richmond area, Southwest Virginia, Hampton Roads and Southern Virginia.

I used the 2018-19 school year, the last year before COVID, to provide a baseline for learning losses and what those schools need to do going forward.  

The data reveal enormous problems with the basic building blocks of education.  Continue reading →

by James C. Sherlock

I write about education in Virginia.  

I think VDOE is going down the wrong rabbit holes in some of its programs, but I want to be able to see what the data says.  

There are vast troves of state and federal government education data, but I have been frustrated by the lack of useful visualization tools for assessing the true academic performance issues in our K-12 schools.

So I have built one. Hardly perfect, but it works.  And no, you have not seen this one before from me in a previous post. I had to change and expand it to make it work the way I wanted.

It now does.  I offer it to VDOE for free. Continue reading →

by James C. Sherlock

The City of Richmond School Board tonight has as an agenda item its strategic plan “Priority 3 – Safe and Loving School Cultures” tonight at 6 PM.

Meeting Jun 07, 2021 – Richmond City School Board Meeting – 6:00 p.m. Category New Business Subject New Business. Type Procedural Goals
Priority 1 – Exciting and Rigorous Teaching And Learning
Priority 2 – Skilled and Supported Staff
Priority 3 – Safe and Loving School Cultures
Priority 4 – Deep Partnership with Families and Community
Priority 5 – Modern Systems and Infrastructure

That is where Superintendent Jason Kamras’ proposal last summer to remove school resource officers (SRO) from the schools in which they currently provide security is the biggest issue.

Some teachers in those schools are concerned about their safety and the safety of the children if Kamras’ proposal is adopted. So inevitably are some of the parents. Other parents and teachers support the change. Non-profit lawyers of course support it. Continue reading →

by James C. Sherlock

I spent the past couple of days writing about thousands of human tragedies playing out in Richmond Pubic Schools (RPS), their complexity and the large bureaucracy responsible for fixing it.  

Half of the Black kids in fourth grade in RPS schools could not read in 2018-19.  Nine year olds. Half could not multiply. Discipline problems were severe. Ten percent of black RPS middle schoolers who started school in the fall of 2018 were arrested for in-school violations of the law. Large numbers of kids, 13% on the average day, were absent. Now two school years interrupted by COVID.

Someone has to start somewhere. RPS is starting with a program to mitigate deficient student reading and math skills. Continue reading →

by James C. Sherlock

Well, never mind.

Mayor de Blasio announced Monday that New York City schools will be all in person this fall with no remote options.

Surprised?

If you haven’t been keeping up, the teachers’ unions have discovered that a lot of their members are replaceable by remote instructional content from commercial sources.

A lot of schools nationwide tried it this year and found it was not only better content, but way cheaper to pay for these services from commercial vendors than to pay their own teachers to provide it.

The National Guard won’t be able to keep many formerly stay-at-home teachers from their classrooms next year.