by James C. Sherlock
We are told by the left that more money is the answer to better schools. That is what Virginia Democrats are running on as education policy.
I am comparing two high schools in America’s richest county, Loudoun, to control for per pupil expenditures.
In Part 1 we looked at Freedom High School in Chantilly. Breathtaking results.
Park View High School, like Freedom, is in Loudoun County. It’s in Sterling.
Park View has 1,400 students, Freedom 2,000. The demographics are different. The Park View student body is far more economically disadvantaged and heavily Hispanic.
Asian, White, Black and Hispanic kids from wealthy families at Freedom High all blew away the state assessments in 2021-22. The outcomes were far worse, even among Asian-American students, at Park View.
Those results can be explained by differences in the learning environments.
- At Park View 33% of the students were chronically absent in 2021-22; at Freedom 11%.
- Offenses, Referrals and Arrests and Suspensions reported to the government in 2017-18 (last year available) not only between the two high schools, but even more disturbingly at Sterling Middle, a feeder to Park View, were starkly different.
Loudoun County’s money has not provided a suitable learning environment at Park View or Sterling Middle.
Because of that failure, despite all of the spending, economically disadvantaged students in Loudoun test no better in math, reading and science than the state average for similarly disadvantaged students.
The lesson I take away from this is that schools can’t create learning environments and teach at schools like Park View and its feeders using the same methods they do with kids from wealthier families and expect good results.
A focus on race, ethnicity and money misses the point. The issues are discipline and self respect. Both can be taught.
Park View High School in Sterling. The student body at Park View is, rounding, 73% Hispanic, 10% Asian, 8% white, 5% Black, 2% mixed races and 1% American Indian.
Students last year were 76% economically disadvantaged.
Like Freedom, Park View has a very large staff.
- Principal
- 3 Assistant Principals
- A Student Support Admin
- A Student Activities Coordinator
- A Special Education Dean
- An Athletic Director
- An Assistant Athletic Director
- A Financial Technician
- A School Nurse
- 2 front office Secretaries
- Attendance Secretary
- 3 Safety & Security personnel
- An SRO Sheriff’s Deputy
And a huge counseling staff:
- A Director of School Counseling
- 8 additional school counselors
- A Counseling Registrar
- A Counseling Secretary
- A School Psychologist
- 2 Social Workers
- A Career Center Specialist
The ideal case load for counselors in Virginia is, in law, 250-1. With nine counselors for 1,400 students, Park View has a ratio of 155:1.
The student assessments (SOLs) at Park View have never been good. But then we look at the scores at Sterling Middle School, a primary feeder to Park View. They were, in the same year, worse than at the high school.
Both Park View and Sterling Middle are Title 1 schools, have been extraordinarily well-funded (2018-19 numbers), with Park View at over $18,500 per student and Sterling Middle at over $16,500. They had very low student-to teacher ratios of 10.1:1 each against a state average of 14.8:1.
As an old man, I find this level of staffing amazing, but good for them. They mean it to result in student success.
But, even with Loudoun County’s massive investments, assessments in reading and writing at Park View in 2021-22 were at state level. Math and science assessments were far below state results.
Chronic absenteeism in the 2021-2022 school year at Park View was 33%, far higher than the state average of 20%. Higher even than Richmond Public Schools, reported at 28%.
Park View dropout rate, at 10%, was twice the state average.
Scientific approaches to learning environments. I suspect expenditures can matter at the margins. But the learning environment in many schools with high concentrations of poor minority children must improve.
I have recommended for years that such schools emulate many of the best charter schools in general, and Success Academy, the gold standard for making scholars of poor urban minority kids, in particular.
KIPP Academy, generally acknowledged as an excellent program, but not one that produces Success Academy’s consistently extraordinary student outcomes, is reported by the Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) as providing Strong Evidence (Tier 1) of effectiveness in math and English language arts achievement.
KIPP schools also provide about 60% more instructional time than traditional public schools—through a longer school day and additional instructional days on Saturdays and in the summer. I am pretty sure that the teachers unions would not be onboard.
Success Academy gets its results in a standard school year.
Clearly for the teachers unions, thus for the left, charter school methods are anathema.
But even they can, if they will, start with the (Tier 1) results for K-4 teaching from the Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse (WWC) and cull out those from charter schools.
Results can be filtered for any and all grades, for practice guides, intervention reports and reviews of individual studies, for English Learners, Children and Youth with Disabilities, Literacy, STEM, Social Emotional Learning and Behavior, Teachers and School Leaders, and High School Completion.
And for rural, suburban and urban schools.
As a key example, filtering for social emotional learning and behavior, WWC has found only one approach:
- with studies that meet WWC standards without reservations; and
- produces a statistically significant finding of improvement in both individual behavior outcomes and social interaction outcomes among elementary school children with aggressive behaviors.
It would be useful to see that method, Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management (IY TCM), taught at our schools of education and used in our school divisions. I’d very much like to see the Commonwealth assess the ed schools to see what they are teaching.
Disappointingly, IY TCM is not listed by VDOE as a Planning Resource on its SEL web page. It simply refers to CASEL and Transforming Education for information.
Incredible Years Teacher Classroom Management is one of 85 programs reviewed by CASEL. You can get a sense of Transforming Education from its home page linked above:
The US education system is one of many structures in our nation that was designed in a way that upholds systemic racism and perpetuates the cycle of racial injustice. We believe that the system must change.
I’d also like to see VDOE assess the Standards of Learning against other WWC Tier 1 methods shown effective for individual subjects.
Bottom line. Politicians say that more money will fix poor learning results for economically disadvantaged minority children. Loudoun County results seem to disprove that.
So do other schools with similar demographics in Virginia that perform poorly while well-funded.
Supportive learning environments, centered on personal and group discipline, are the keys to K-12 education. We must fix learning environments where broken, or all the money in the world won’t produce educated students.
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