Category: Poverty & income gap
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Smaller Class Sizes Not the Answer
Parents and educators commonly believe that smaller class sizes provide a superior education. It seems logical: Smaller classes allow teachers to provide more individual attention to students. But the evidence supporting this intuitive view is surprisingly thin. A new study by the Campbell Collaboration, which promotes social and economic change through evidence-based policy, which calls…
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Market-Based Social Justice: Roll Back Zoning Restrictions on Housing Supply
Unaffordable housing is a problem for more Virginians today than it was during the 2000s housing bubble. Median rent has increased at three times the rate of incomes since the end of the recession, says Hamilton Lombard with the Demographics Research Group at UVa on the StatChat blog. Among Virginians earning between $35,000 and $75,000…
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“Government Failure” in the Housing Market
Something is seriously out of whack here. The Richmond Redevelopment and Housing Authority (RRHA) has a vision — a commendable one, I might add — of demolishing the city’s six public housing projects to end concentrated pockets of poverty, crime, substance abuse and social dysfunction. But it turns out that the price of developing new…
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Virginia’s Not-So-Crazy Rich Asians
Once the victims of discrimination, Asians now are prospering in the United States. The median income in 2017 for Asians in the United States was $83,500. That compared to a national average of $60,300 — a 38% differential. In Virginia, Asians’ incomes, and the income gap with other Americans, was even greater: $101,500 compared to…
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Some School Districts Do a Better Job Educating Poor Kids than Others
I’m playing around with Datawrapper, which provides cool ways to display data– don’t quite have the hang of it, but making progress. Anyway, my inaugural effort shows the considerable variability between school districts in pass rates for English Standards of Learning (SOL) tests. We all know that the socio-economic status of a student is a major predictor…
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Getting Virginians their Lives Back One License at a Time
L.C. lived with a relative in Amelia County, raising her daughter and driving to her job at a Richmond-area hospital. She frequently loaned her car to the family member. Unbeknownst to her, the relative racked up frequent toll violations. The charges quickly added up — $0.75 per toll, plus $25 administrative fees for not paying…
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Failing Richmond Schools Doubling Down on Failing Policies
The Richmond Public School System is in crisis, roiled by two independent audits and the publication of new state data showing that the administration is hobbled by rampant inefficiency, there are deep and pervasive achievement gaps between white students and black and Hispanic students, and the high school dropout rate is the highest in Virginia.…
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The Catastrophic Effects of Henrico Schools’ War on Discipline
Sometimes I ask myself, do I write too much about race on Bacon’s Rebellion? I lament the nation’s descent into racial identity politics — am I contributing to the trend by dwelling upon the topic so much myself? Then I encounter a report like “A Review of Equity and Parent Engagement in Special Education in…
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Metrics, Reality, and Virginia’s New Accreditation Standards
Tomorrow the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) will release the first public school accreditation ratings calculated according to the 2017 Standards of Accreditation. The new standards are designed to measure how well schools are educating Virginia’s school children, giving credit to schools that are showing progress even if they fall short of the standards. VDOE…
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ACLU: The System, Not Female Prisoners, Guilty
You find what you look for. When you look for statistical evidence of discrimination and injustice, you will find it. In a corrections system in which 85% of prisoners are male, for example, the ACLU of Virginia finds evidence of “widespread and discriminatory suffering” imposed upon women. You see, while women constitute only 15% of…
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Distracting from the Big Issues at W&L
Washington & Lee University is the latest in a growing line of higher-ed institutions to engage in navel gazing and self-flagellation over its historical role in slavery and racial oppression. While honesty and candor in such matters is always called for — it is all too easy to sweep uncomfortable legacies under the rug —…
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More Bureaucracy Won’t Help Virginia Schools
Among the most dismal of the Standards of Learning (SOL) results released last week by the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) was that only 72% of 3rd graders had achieved reading proficiency — down 3% from the previous year ans 12% from a decade previously. The usual suspects will respond to the news with the…
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The Political Economy of Dental Care
No sooner has Virginia enacted one vast new entitlement, Medicaid expansion, than the drumbeat begins on the next. No matter how much money government dedicates to health care, food, housing, education, transportation, legal aid, or whatever, there is always someone who is getting the short end of the stick by comparison. Always. And the answer…
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Full Conformity Raises $3.6B In First Five Years
Assuming the Virginia General Assembly conforms the state’s tax rules to the IRS code as it exists now, adopting intact the recent federal changes, the state will reap an additional $3.6 billion in revenue over the next five years. Almost $2.5 billion of that will come from personal income taxes, with an additional $1.1 billion…
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Stay Put, Young Man, Stay Put
The Commonwealth Institute for Fiscal Analysis has published a useful reminder of how job and wage growth has bifurcated in Virginia — jobs and wages have increased smartly in Virginia’s major metro areas since the recession but have lagged markedly in non-metro Virginia. The trends, which reflect the larger urban-rural divide nationally cannot be reversed,…