Category: Education (K-12)
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Welcome to Richmond, Mr. Kamras
by James C. Sherlock Richmond Mayor Stoney tweeted today urging the school board not to fire Superintendent Jason Kamras at the emergency board meeting tomorrow night. Which means, of course, that they plan to fire him. If they do, it will not be because of the terrible SOL scores. It will be because the Richmond…
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Virginia’s Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS) for School Discipline – How is it Going?
by James C. Sherlock The means that Virginia has chosen to maintain classroom discipline, called Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), is controversial. That controversy exists within the federal Department of Education (DOEd). That organization’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has claimed for years that traditional methods of discipline are racist in outcomes and thus…
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SOL Winners and Losers
by James A. Bacon There are hundreds of ways to slice and dice the recently released Standards of Learning (SOL) data measuring the academic achievement of Virginia’s public school children in the 2021-22 school year. Let’s start with the simplest: which school districts performed the best and which performed the worst? Here are the 15…
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2022 SOL Data: Economically Disadvantaged Gap Widens
by John Butcher 2020 was the first spring since 1998 without SOL tests in Virginia. Then came 2021, when participation in the testing was voluntary. The VDOE press release said, “In a typical school year, participation in federally required tests is usually around 99%. In tested grades in 2021, 75.5% of students took the reading assessment, 78.7% took…
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The Latest SOL Results: Virginia Schools Still Playing Catch-Up
by James A. Bacon School closures during the COVID-19 epidemic have had a prolonged negative impact on Virginia students’ Standards of Learning (SOL) test scores. Pass rates for English, math and other subjects took a hard fall during the 2020-21 school year when many schools switched to remote learning. Scores climbed part-way out of the…
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Is There Any Limit on School Kids’ “Right to Read”?
by James A. Bacon Tell us, Hannah Natanson and Lori Rozsa, are you OK with the graphic novel Gender Queer, shown above, being allowed in public school libraries, as it is (or was) in Fairfax County? My sense from your article in The Washington Post today is that you would have no objection to stocking…
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Denial’s Role in Opposing Teaching Credential Reforms
by James C. Sherlock Teaching is an honorable and irreplaceable profession. We have a major shortage of teachers. One of the ways to deal with that long term is to open up the pathways to teaching. One of the programs that has been around forever in Virginia is Troops to Teachers. Bringing people with voluntary,…
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Progressives in Virginia In Position to Overrule Parental Objections to Invasive Child Gender Dysphoria Treatment
by James C. Sherlock The Virginian-Pilot, in an editorial, bemoaned Governor Youngkin’s endorsement of a policy that would require schools to tell parents about their kids’ transexual identity expressions at school. It’s as though the potential consequences of such a policy have never crossed his mind. The sure consequences of opposing that policy were not…
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More Money for Schools, More Parent Protections. Where Are the Higher Expectations?
by James A. Bacon The Youngkin administration has been relatively quiet on the subject of K-12 education since May when it released a blistering report on the perilous condition of Virginia’s public schools. Then Friday, a week before the scheduled release of the latest Standards of Learning test scores, Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera provided…
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Be Careful with Survey Results, Especially About Education
by James C. Sherlock I am a prolific reader and analyst of statistics about education. I find it constantly necessary to sort the wheat from the chaff. Chaff is the term I have chosen for this article, not the one I use in private. The results of the latest Education Next Survey of Public Opinion (2022…
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Just Report It… Unless You’re a Conservative Parent
by James A. Bacon The Washington Post is still fulminating about the Youngkin administration’s “toxic” school tip line. By inviting parents to send “reports and observations” on divisive material taught in schools, writes the editorial board today, the administration could intimidate teachers and send “the message they should tread carefully, particularly on instruction involving race,…
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Yup, Teacher Shortages Worst in High-Poverty Schools
by James A. Bacon I have long contended that the teacher shortage is most acute in Virginia’s high-poverty schools where student discipline is the worst, but I didn’t have the school-by-school data to back up the proposition. Now the Richmond Times-Dispatch has published data for Henrico County comparing vacancies in the school system’s five districts.…
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Get Weapons Out of Schools – Start with the Schools Most Threatened
by James C. Sherlock When we talk about getting weapons out of schools, most Virginians don’t have any concept of how many are found in schools every year. Or think they are all in high schools. Or likely both. When they do find out, eyes glaze over thinking of the cost and difficulty of fixing…
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Rent-A-Cops in the Schools Now?
by Dick Hall-Sizemore The Halifax County School Board is planning to hire a private firm to provide security at all county schools, in addition to school resource officers (SRO). That is the world brought to us by a gun-crazy society with its no-compromise embrace of the Second Amendment, aided by a compliant Supreme Court. As…
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Parental Rights Trump Kids’ Rights to Privacy
by Kerry Dougherty In their relentless quest to slam Governor Glenn Youngkin, Virginia’s rabid lefties are now apoplectic because he believes parents ought to be notified if their troubled son is dressing as a girl at school and changing his name and pronouns. How dare Youngkin say parents are entitled to know such things about…