Author: sherlockj
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Civil War within the Northam Administration on School Reopening Guidelines?
by James Sherlock Steve Haner wrote a very important essay today about the new workplace guidelines about to be published by the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry(DOLI). In a similar vein, the progressive warriors in the lower levels of the Northam administration are trying to offer stricter school reopening guidelines than the Governor. States this…
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School Opening Variances Are a Civil Rights Issue
by James C. Sherlock I want to offer my thanks to those that have written here that they don’t want any Virginia schools to open this fall. (The terms open and closed in this essay will refer to in-person instruction.) That provides clarity. All will agree that in-person instruction is superior to remote instruction for…
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State Board of Health Regulations are Fundamentally Flawed
by James C. Sherlock The Northam administration has a robust program for regulation review. It is time to use it to totally overhaul Virginia’s healthcare regulations. Healthcare facilities and providers in Virginia are subject to dueling regulations — one set for state licensure and another for Medicare/Medicaid certification. Virginia’s regulations in these cases are not…
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How to Think or What to Think? The Culture Wars Come to K-12
by James C. Sherlock I was challenged after my last posting to give examples of the capture of the most prominent educational schools by critical theory activism. Critical theories of education posit that educational systems are either complicit in oppression or that these systems are a powerful mechanism for ensuring that social inequality persists.…
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Marxist Critical Theory and Education
By James C. Sherlock Perhaps my biggest concern for our society is that Marxist critical theory ideologues have taken over the Graduate Schools of Education. From Jim Bacon’s post earlier: “The new cultural elite is envious and would like to reappropriate much of that wealth for redistribution as it sees fit. Even more alarmingly, the…
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(Almost) Free Money
By James C. Sherlock Steve Haner’s superb column on the state budget turned attention to federal aid to state and local governments. It is worthwhile to review where the feds get that money. James T. Agresti, CEO of Just Facts (chart above), has written recently hat U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio is four times the historical average…
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K-12 Schools Need Legal Immunity for COVID-19
by James C. Sherlock In May we saw several states pass laws that gave businesses immunity from COVID-19 claims. We need similar but expanded protection for public and private schools, their school boards, superintendents and all of their employees. In North Carolina, for example, immunity protection granted businesses was sweeping. That immunity does not bar…
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Roanoke County and Education in the Age of COVID
by James C. Sherlock I subscribe to the Roanoke Times because I find it by far the best regional newspaper in Virginia. It produces local reporting that the rest of us can only envy. I was drawn to two stories in the past week. The first, on June 21 by Alison Graham, revealed only 2/3…
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Open the Schools
By James C. Sherlock I have written here multiple times about the terrible and disproportionate effects that school shutdowns are having on poor children in Virginia. The public school is an enterprise that has no admission standards. We do it that way on purpose, to try to give every American child as much opportunity to…
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Incompetent, Dangerously Incompetent, and the Virginia Department of Health
By James C. Sherlock It is very hard to recommend a career in politics these days. Elected officials are at the mercy of the competence of bureaucracies they did not create and over which, under civil service protections, they have little control. Yet never have we needed dedicated, smart and effective political leaders more than…
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Virginia’s Recover, Redesign and Restart 2020 Manifesto – Legal Status
by James C. Sherlock Recover, Redesign and Restart 2020, discussed yesterday here, was presented as a set of “guidelines,” but the Governor’s manual for re-starting public schools this fall amidst the COVID-19 epidemic included a mandatory reporting provision clearly designed to intimidate schools and school boards. Let’s look at the legal status and implications of…
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Virginia Department of Education’s Manifesto on School Reopenings
By James C. Sherlock I have only a brief experience as a middle school teacher in Fairfax County back in 1966/67 and several years as a volunteer remedial math instructor in middle school in Virginia Beach in this decade. I am not a graduate of a school of education. So I have just read with…
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Back to School?
by James C. Sherlock Remote learning leaves behind the poorest children. Please check the map above for a state near you.
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An Enormous Bill is Coming Due in Virginia
by James C. Sherlock We had a long discussion in this space earlier about whether the Virginia Supreme Court Order of March 16, 2020, that suspended writs of eviction and residential unlawful detainers was constitutional. The June 8 extension of the original order was especially troubling because by that order the courts were open for…
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Statement of the Virginia Apartment Management Association on Supreme Court Order Suspending Evictions and Access to Courts
by James C. Sherlock I sought and received from the Virginia Apartment Management Association a statement on Monday’s Virginia’s Supreme Court order IN RE: FIFTH ORDER MODIFYING AND EXTENDING DECLARATION OF JUDICIAL EMERGENCY IN RESPONSE TO COVID-19 EMERGENCY. It took only an hour for Patrick McCloud, the CEO of VAMA, to generate the response quoted…