Author: sherlockj
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Virginia Local Ability-to-Pay Calculation and State Contributions to Public Schools — Some Surprises
by James C. Sherlock Some things are very important that the average citizen knows little to nothing about. For example, a complex state computation, the Composite Index of Local Ability to Pay, determines how much state money per student goes to your school district to maintain an overall state ratio of 55% state and 45%…
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An Expanded View of the Extraordinary Chesapeake Schools
by James C. Sherlock Yesterday I wrote about the six school districts in South Hampton Roads. At the request of a reader, I expanded the data for Chesapeake. The data show a white minority (43%), multiracial school system that in 2018-19 (last year before COVID disruptions) exceed state SOL passing averages for every major racial…
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First Get Kids in School, Then Offer Educational Theories, Then Pilot Them, and We Might Believe You
by James C. Sherlock The wisdom of Occam’s razor has seldom been more fully realized than in modern educational theory. Friar William of Ockham in the 13th century proposed that simpler theories are preferable to more complex ones because they tend to be more testable. And usually more accurate It has been true a long…
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North Carolina AG takes on Hospitals That Fail to Publish Shoppable Prices
by James C. Sherlock Attorney General Josh Stein of North Carolina, fresh off killing the Sentara-Cone merger, on his very busy day yesterday had an Assistant AG send a letter to North Carolina hospitals. It demanded that hospitals comply with federal hospital pricing transparency regulations that require that hospitals make publicly available a machine-readable file containing a…
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North Carolina AG Investigation Quashes Sentara/Cone Health Merger
by James C. Sherlock In the big merger equivalent of “spend more time with our families,” Cone and Sentara issued a joint statement on June 2 that they “have jointly decided not to move forward” with their planned merger. “As this work progressed, we realized that each of our communities and key stakeholders require support…
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Sentara, Cone Health Call Off Merger
From Virginia Business: “Sentara Healthcare and Greensboro, North Carolina-based Cone Health mutually called off a merger Wednesday, according to a statement by the Norfolk-based health care system.” The Sentara Healthcare Board of Directors and the Cone Health Board of Trustees came to the mutual agreement to end affiliation plans late last week, according to the…
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Some Northern Virginia Schools Get Failing Grades on Black Student Literacy and Numeracy
by James C. Sherlock We spend a lot of time here documenting the raging debates at Northern Virginia school board meetings over Critical Race Theory in schools. Raging is the right word. Yet those same school systems fail to educate the kids they claim to care about most. Consider what we see from VDOE…
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An Agenda for High Quality Primary Care
by James C. Sherlock I have written columns here and in various newspapers across the state for a number of years supporting health enterprise zones (HEZ’s) in underserved areas of Virginia. I drafted and Republican Attorney General candidate Jason Miyares sponsored legislation of that title in the General Assembly. It lost. Like night follows day,…
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Martinsville and the Reversion – Part 2
by James C. Sherlock Dick Hall-Sizemore yesterday gave us a rather bloodless, bureaucratic, and relatively positive description of the upcoming shotgun marriage between Martinsville and Henry County. He could not seem to understand the angst on the part of Henry County. I’ll try to help him out. It was good to have the historical perspective…
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The One-Sided Decision in the Reversion of Martinsville – the Start of a Trend?
by James C. Sherlock The Martinsville Bulletin, perhaps the best remaining newspaper in the state for local coverage, published a must-read article on the reversion of Martinsville from city to town and joining Henry County. Overview Martinsville’s current city logo, above, was perhaps prescient. Martinsville has been hemorrhaging population, losing more than 18% in the…
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Math and Reading Remediation Coming to Richmond Public Schools
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…
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Teachers’ Unions Frightened by Implications of Remote Learning
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.…
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The Complexity of Richmond Public Schools
by James C. Sherlock Yesterday I wrote a column about the broad and deep failures of the Richmond Public School (RPS) system in educating the children in its care. Today I will present RPS’ organizational structure, budget and headquarters staffing for managing the complexity of the system. I suspect RPS’ level of complexity is similar…
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Richmond’s Disastrous Public Schools Expose Hypocrisy of State Equity Policy
by James C. Sherlock I am, tomorrow, going to report a hopeful note about the City of Richmond Public Schools (RPS). It will relate the story of an impressive woman who is working hard to turn around the absolutely horrendous reading and math capabilities of RPS students. But in order to put her challenge…
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UVa President Ryan on UVa Religious Studies Professors Attacking Evangelicals
by James C. Sherlock University of Virginia President Jim Ryan was kind enough to read my column detailing the unacceptable behavior of two Department of Religious Studies professors. There are two “counts” I charged against them: First, slander. All speakers trashed all white evangelicals as racists and “confederates” who are sorry the South lost the Civil…