Author: Robin Beres
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Poverty and Performance in Virginia Schools
by John Butcher A recent study out of Stanford looked at 11 years of district-level National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) data by race and economic disadvantage from all public school districts and concluded that racial segregation is strongly associated with the magnitude of achievement gaps in third grade and the rate at which gaps…
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RVA 5×5 – Holiday Briefing
by Jon Baliles It’s Friday! Which means this newsletter would normally be filled with stories and analysis about what is happening in the RVA region (not all of it good), with an honest and insightful take (so far as that is possible). For instance, this week we could have stories about: A non-profit that presented…
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The War on Merit Takes a Bizarre Turn
by Asra Q. Nomani For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college admission prospects and earn scholarships. This episode has…
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Another Takeaway from the Special Grand Jury Report in the Circuit Court of Loudoun County
by Kathleen Smith Earlier this month, the special grand jury’s findings in the Circuit Court of Loudoun County were released to the public. The special grand jury had been impaneled by Commonwealth’s Attorney General Jason Miyares to investigate accusations regarding Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) and its handling of a student disciplinary case. After reading…
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Crossing the County Line
by Joe Fitzgerald They’re the exaggeratists. Maybe the Exaggerati. They take the smallest thing and blow it up to a crisis. Their eye is not on the sparrow, but on its feathers. And heaven help the sparrow whose feathers don’t decently cover her. In the city this year the Exaggerati went door to door speaking…
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Now It’s a Party: Local Elections May Be Decided in June for a While
by Joe Fitzgerald It looks like 12 percent of people voting in Harrisonburg’s Nov. 8 City Council election cast a vote for only one of the four candidates instead of the two they could have voted for. But that number needs more asterisks on it than a home run record. Single-shot votes are difficult to…
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Alumni Free Speech Alliance to Safeguard VMI Campus Free Speech
The Cadet newspaper and The Cadet Foundation were honored, by unanimous acclimation, to become full members of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance (AFSA). By this honor, Virginia Military Institute (VMI) cadets, alumni, faculty. and staff at VMI now join a prestigious collection of alumni groups representing Ivy League and other major institutions of higher education…
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Ranked-Choice Voting in Virginia? Not Yet (Except Maybe Primaries)
by Ken Reid A ranked-choice voting system (RCV) is an alternative electoral process that allows people to vote for multiple candidates on a ballot in order of the voter’s preference. RCV has been adopted in at least 60 jurisdictions across the nation, including statewide and federal elections in Maine and Alaska. Should Virginia counties and…
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Indictments For Loudoun County School Officials
by Kerry Dougherty Looks like Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares just turned up the heat on Loudoun County. When he was elected, Gov. Glenn Youngkin signed an executive order calling for an investigation into what happened in Loudoun County Public Schools, where an alleged predator in a skirt reportedly got a pass for raping one…
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RVA 5X5: A Five-Part Series of Stories
by Jon Baliles STORY #1 — The Pot Overfloweth There have been a lot of stories this week about the $21 million surplus announced by Mayor Levar Stoney and what he is asking City Council to endorse and how to disburse it in a budget amendment vote scheduled for a Monday evening vote. “The growth…
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RVA 5X5: Enrichmond and the City’s Radio Silence
by Jon Baliles I won’t do a “Top Stories of 2022” list for this newsletter, but if I did, one of them would surely be the collapse of the Enrichmond Foundation and the radio silence on all fronts concerning its finances, the groups that depended on it, their assets, and the two historic Black cemeteries…
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Richmond’s Metzger Bar and Butchery Denies Service to Christian Non-Profit
by The Republican Standard Staff On Wednesday evening, an hour and a half before a reserved Family Foundation gathering in a private room, Metzger Bar and Butchery denied entry and service to the pro-family group, solely based on their political opinions and religious beliefs. “It is alarming and disgraceful that this restaurant has a political…
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Fathering While Black
by Asra Q. Nomani and Debra Tisler STAFFORD, VA — “They are not taking my baby girl!” cries Sean Jackson, the black father of a beautiful girl, Amoria Adams, 10 months old, holding his beloved daughter. This week, a school board member from Fairfax County, Va., Karen Keys-Gamarra, put in motion a judge’s order that…
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Virginia Board of Education: Stay the Course
Standards and Curriculum Framework are Both Needed – Not One Without the Other by Kathleen Smith In November, the Board of Education put off the approval of the Virginia History and Social Science Standards again. The Board members seemed quite perplexed as they were asked to approve only the Standards without the Curriculum Framework –-…
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We Don’t Pay Virginia Beach Cops Enough
by Kerry Dougherty On Monday, Virginia Beach Police Chief Paul Neudigate did something unusual: he released a video showing the fatal shooting of 28-year-old suspected car thief, Deshawn Whitaker, in a strip mall parking lot last week. Police are usually loathe to release dash cam and body cam footage in the immediate aftermath of…