Category: Education (K-12)
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Why Aren’t Children Learning in Petersburg Public Schools?
by James C. Sherlock Why aren’t Black children, on average, learning in Virginia public schools? You have heard and perhaps internalized all of the excuses. Cue the historical/social/cultural/economic theories. They are all interesting. And exhaustively pursued. And irrelevant. Black children in many Virginia urban public schools are not being taught properly in environments conducive to…
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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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Junior ROTC – Important to Students, High Schools, Society and the National Defense
by James C. Sherlock Richmond Senior High School (RSHS) is a 1,200-student grades-10-to-12 school in the Sandhills Region of North Carolina. Its mission, vision and belief statements genuflect at none of the shrines of progressive dogma. Not a single one. Minority enrollment is 57% of the student body (majority Black), which is higher than the…
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And They Wonder Why Teachers Are Quitting
by Dick Hall-Sizemore Last year, a Loudoun County teacher refused to abide by the school board’s policy regarding the use of pronouns when referring to students. The school board made the mistake of suspending him because he publicly criticized the policy. Although the courts rightly overturned the suspension on the basis that he was punished…
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Can Threat Assessment Teams Function in Schools Practicing PBIS?
by James C. Sherlock Last I read, Attorney General Miyares’ Loudoun County special grand jury is still empaneled. There is another matter worthy of investigation in the cases of the rapes of two school girls in Loudoun County high schools. That is the matter of the threat assessment teams (TATS) in each school. The special…
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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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What JLARC’s Education Report Got Right and What It Didn’t
by Matt Hurt On November 7, JLARC released the Pandemic Impact on Public K-12 Education. In this report, the challenges of educating students during the pandemic were outlined, and policy prescriptions were provided to mitigate these issues in the future. From the perspective of an educator, the report adequately addressed some issues, but failed to…
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Public Education and the Management of Change
by James C. Sherlock Peter Drucker’s famous five questions should always be asked by and of government. What is the mission? Who is the customer? What does the customer consider valuable? What are the results sought and how are they to be measured? What is the plan, to include both abandonment and innovation? So, in…
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The JLARC Report and Virginia’s Unexecutable School Discipline System
by James C. Sherlock The Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC) report Pandemic Impact on Public K–12 Education 2022 collected and made available a lot of valuable information. One issue escaped their analysis and recommendations — school discipline. The authors reported student conduct as the number one concern of school teachers, and then failed to address it…
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What Do We Do When Teachers Quit En Masse?
by James C. Sherlock What makes teachers want to teach? The satisfaction that comes from helping children and adolescents learn and grow into productive, mature adults. It is amazingly powerful. What is required for them to choose to teach? Enough money to live comfortably and a safe, supportive working environment. So that is three: teaching…
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The Church Lady’s Worst Nightmare
In his latest Rob Is Right video, Rob Smith gives his spin on the deliberately provocative After-School Satan Club at B.M. Williams Primary School in Chesapeake. I’m not sure I agree with him in the final analysis — free speech extends to those with whom we disagree, even to those we think are raving…
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Why Not Virtual Instruction for Routinely Disruptive or Potentially Dangerous Students?
by James C. Sherlock So, let’s examine a theoretical. A kid gets thrown out of a high school for a suspected rape. The (ex-) superintendent places him in another high school awaiting trial. He rapes again. What’s wrong with this picture? OK, lots of things. But let’s examine just one solution that can have wider…
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Grand Jury Report on Loudoun Schools Raises Threat Assessment Issue – Again
by James C. Sherlock Update Dec. 7 at 7:33: LCPS Superintendent Scott Ziegler was fired yesterday by the school board. That does not begin to resolve the issue of threat assessment. The University of Virginia Threat Assessment Team (TAT), with knowledge of a threat, failed to intervene before tragedy in the case of the student…
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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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Student Mental Health Crisis Explained – By The Washington Post
by James C. Sherlock The Washington Post, in a lengthy article, “The crisis of student mental health is much vaster than we realize,” wrote about the mental health crisis facing our school children, especially adolescents. Nationally, adolescent depression and anxiety — already at crisis levels before the pandemic — have surged amid the isolation, disruption…