Category: Education (K-12)
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Complete and Total Incompetence & Negligence
by Jon Baliles There can be no more fitting title for this post than this jaw-dropping, migraine-inducing story from Tyler Lane at CBS6 about the repeated warning signs about fire safety that were not only missed — but flat out ignored — by Richmond Public Schools (RPS) officials in 2020 and 2021, which culminated in…
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Media Gins up Anemic School Walkouts
by Kerry Dougherty You could almost hear the local media panting Tuesday morning. There were rumors that some Virginia high school students were going to walk out of school to protest the new parental rights policies of the Youngkin administration. You know, the Department of Education regulations announced earlier this month that support the principle…
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VEA’s Failing, Flailing Excuse for a Report
by James A. Bacon The Youngkin administration threw down the gauntlet last week when it issued the latest public school-accreditation data. Despite unprecedented learning losses during the COVID epidemic, the percentage of Virginia public schools meeting the accreditation standards fell from 92% pre-COVID to 89% post-COVID, a decline of only three percentage points. Commented Superintendent of…
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Virginia’s Student “Growth” Model Stunts Achievement
by Matt Hurt Virginia’s system for accrediting public K-12 schools has engendered some concern since the release of school accreditation data on September 19. While students exhibited lower proficiency during the 2022 school year than in 2019, as measured by Standards of Learning test scores, the percentage of schools meeting the requirements for full accreditation…
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Addressing the Spiral Effect in Learning Loss
by Dr. Kathleen Smith During the COVID-19 pandemic educators did what they had to do in a short amount of time (five months in the case of Virginia) with little resources (extra funding came long after September of 2020) to keep kids learning through the 2020-2021 school year. A wholesale shift to remote and hybrid…
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Schrödinger’s Schools? Are Virginia’s Schools Good Or Not? Yes.
by Andrew Rotherham In the tiresome debate about our schools, here in Virginia and nationally, questions like “Are schools as good/bad as people say?” dominate. These are the wrong kind of questions. The big story of American education is variance — in everything from funding to outcomes. School performance is mixed overall and here in…
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Youngkin Admin Questions Value of School Accreditation Standards
by James A. Bacon A Virginia Department of Education press release issued yesterday contained a vitally important message: Virginia’s school accreditation standards are failing to do their job. Despite unprecedented learning losses during the COVID epidemic, the percentage of Virginia public schools meeting the standards fell from 92% pre-COVID to 89% post-COVID, a decline of…
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The Social Emotional Learning Establishment Seeks Progressive Reordering of Society
by James C. Sherlock Social emotional learning is based on a good idea. The underlying concept is to train adults (teachers and staff) in child psychology with a goal of shaping learning environments that optimize development of children to societal standards of behavior. To teach them how to act. The rub: who decides on the target…
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Some School Divisions Successfully Mitigated COVID Learning Losses in Math
by James C. Sherlock Congratulations are in order. Some school divisions, spread around the state, did a terrific job in mitigating mathematics learning losses during COVID. I picked math for its baseline importance in school and in life and the relative inability for students to advance in that subject without instruction, compared to reading and…
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Parents’ Rights Are On The Virginia Ballot. Again.
by Kerry Dougherty Good news. Virginia’s Democrats have taken the bait. So far at least four liberal school districts in the commonwealth have declared that they will defy Virginia’s Department of Education model policies on parental rights that were unveiled late last week. You know, policies that contain “radical” ideas such as these: “Parents have…
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Prioritize Joyful Teaching and Learning in Virginia Public Schools
by James C. Sherlock Sometimes things are so right in front of you that you look past them. I have been studying public education in Virginia for more than 15 years. The policy face of the teaching and learning is — there is no other word for it — depressing, at least to the degree…
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School Climate Surveys Better Indicators of Learning Climate than Current School Quality Profiles
by James C. Sherlock I spent some time yesterday discussing the Virginia Department of Education’s revisions to school climate surveys. If VDOE returns to the valid, older survey, results could be applied profitably to updating the Learning Climate section of the department’s School Quality Profiles. Right now, that section contains only historical artifacts of the…
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Political Damage to Primary Instruments of Improvement in Virginia Schools
by James C. Sherlock We need all the help we can get assessing Virginia schools and producing actionable information to make them better. The Standards of Learning exams show the results of poor learning, but do not identify actionable causes. Directed to choose an additional measure of school quality by the federal ESSA (Every…
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Another COVID Impact: Bad School Data
by Matt Hurt In a September 14th post, Jim Sherlock referenced some data points that were collected during the pandemic. Specifically he brought up the topics of chronic absenteeism and how the graduation rate didn’t seem to correlate with SOL scores. My intent here is not to refute any specifics; it is to inform readers…