Category: Education (K-12)
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Virginia Model Policies on Protecting Students Show Differences in Constitutional Focus and Interpretation
by James C. Sherlock There is lots of interest, and not a little headline hyperbole, concerning the change in Virginia’s model policies designed to assure all children appropriate treatment at school. Two different world views are apparent in the titles: the Northam administration’s Model Policies for the Treatment of Transgender Students in Virginia’s Public Schools (Northam…
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Lessons from One of the Worst Middle Schools in Virginia
by James C. Sherlock I wrote last time about school climate surveys. Yawn. But perhaps not in this case. I am going to use the results of a 2019 climate survey of Fredericksburg’s only middle school, Walker-Grant, to make a point. The results of that survey of students and staff were absolutely brutal. Especially the…
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Youngkin Unveils New Trans Policy for Schools
by James A. Bacon The Youngkin administration has issued a new set of model policies designed to uphold the “privacy, dignity and respect” of all students and parents in Virginia public schools, replacing a policy put into effect by the Northam administration in 2021. The new policies strike me as eminently reasonable. The guidelines make…
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What is a Good School, How is One Measured and How do Poor Schools Improve?
by James C. Sherlock I wrote yesterday about the dumpster fires that were Fredericksburg Public Schools during and immediately after the pandemic. They completely fell apart. It is not clear how and whether the children, with whose well being, development and education those schools and their parents were charged, will ever recover from the experience.…
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College “Equity” and the Student Pipeline Problem
by James A. Bacon It’s sad to see that my friends at the Partners for College Affordability & Public Trust (once a sponsor of Bacon’s Rebellion) have embraced the “social justice” paradigm for higher education. I whole-heartedly endorsed their mission when it focused on containing the rising cost of college attendance generally and advocated increased…
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Fredericksburg Schools Need a New Superintendent
by James C Sherlock Note: I took the unprecedented step of taking a column down ten days ago. I did so out of an abundance of caution in response to an outpouring of disbelief among colleagues and the readers about the 71% chronic absentee rate posted by Fredericksburg Public Schools in 2020-21. Many insisted the number…
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Truancy Morass
by John Butcher In a follow-up to his post on chronic truancy in Virginia, Capt. Sherlock writes, “We have decided, with laws reflecting our decisions, that children must attend school.” (Emphasis in original). If only it were that simple. Va. Code § 22.1-254 provides: Except as otherwise provided in this article, every parent, guardian, or…
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School Attendance Is a Right and an Equal Opportunity Issue
by James C. Sherlock I wrote a column yesterday on chronic absenteeism in Virginia’s schools. The article has generated confusion among some readers about the obligations of parents and those of the state in getting children to school. Some wonder if absenteeism is even the problem that the data say it is. And what about ……
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Virginia Public Schools and Learning Losses – Part 2 – Chronic Absenteeism
by James C. Sherlock Woody Allen is quoted as saying that seventy percent of success in life is showing up. So it is with school. Absenteeism is the most correctable scourge of Virginia public schools. It is not the teachers’ job to get the kids there. But unexcused absenteeism is something other adults can fix pretty…
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Virginia Public Schools and Learning Losses – Part 1 – Winners and Losers
by James C. Sherlock This article is the first in a series about COVID-associated learning losses in Virginia public schools. The contribution I hope to make is to measure learning losses and correlating factors in each of 132 school divisions horizontally against its own pre-COVID learning assessment results. That is different than comparing Richmond to Falls…
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Another Way to Crunch the SOL Numbers…
For simplicity’s sake in recent posts about the 2021-22 Standards of Learning (SOL) results, I’ve used the pass rates for English reading tests as a proxy for all five subjects, including English writing, math, science, and history. Perhaps a better way to rate the performance of Virginia school districts would be to compute a composite…
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School Board Races: The Next Best Hope for Our Children
by Craig DiSesa and Nancy Smith “I’m just gonna have to step in. You need to stop saying, as a Board member, we are giving pornography to minors. … It does not happen!” That was the reaction of Virginia Beach City Public Schools Superintendent Aaron Spence to School Board member Vicky Manning’s assertion that there…
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Can We Learn from the Lexington Outlier?
We can learn a lot from outliers. They draw attention to variables and correlations we may not have considered before. In researching the previous post, I came across this anomaly: in the City of Lexington, economically disadvantaged Blacks passed their Standards of Learning reading tests at a higher rate (83.3%) than Blacks who were not…
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Where Black Students Outperform Whites
by James A. Bacon A major concern arising from the latest Standards of Learning (SOL) data is the fact that the racial divide between Asians and Whites on the one hand and Blacks and Hispanics on the other has gotten wider over the past three years. This disturbing trend has occurred despite unprecedented efforts to…
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Education Schools Redux
by James C. Sherlock Dick Hall-Sizemore went to great lengths in an article to rebut one of my own. He attempted to disprove the two major assertions in my article: The ed schools have had control of education policy in the Commonwealth and nationally for a very long time. They have in the process made…