Category: Poverty & income gap
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Virginia Students Achieve SAT Gains
Some good news about College Board SAT scores in Virginia to balance out the dismal news about Standard of Learning (SOL) pass rates: Public school students eked out gains in average SAT scores in 2014, continuing to outperform their counterparts nationally. Average public school reading scores improved by three points on the 200- to 800-point…
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Good Ruling on Congressional Redistricting
By Peter Galuszka A panel of federal judges in Richmond has scrambled the carefully laid plans of legislators, most of them Republicans, to pack African-American voters into one congressional district to give the GOP an advantage in some of the state’s 10 other districts. The panel of U.S. District Court judges decreed that the General…
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Health Insurance as Driver of Income Inequality
If you want to address increasing income inequality in the United States, a good place to start would be to bring runaway health insurance costs under control. Health care costs — not globalization, automation or corporate greed — are the biggest driver in income inequality today, argue Mark J. Warshawsky and Andrew G. Biggs in the…
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Petersburg’s Renaissance
By Peter Galuszka Petersburg has been a special place for me. Years ago, when I’d pass through, I always felt I were driving onto the set of a 1950s or 1960s movie set in the South such as “Cape Fear” starring Gregory Peck and Robert Mitchum. A somnambulant ease pervades the place as does the…
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Do-Gooders Doing Bad
by James A. Bacon In a recent post, “Spotlighting the Wrong Victims,” I questioned the premise that “disparities” in arrests and suspensions of Henrico County students for school offenses represented some form of racial injustice. John Butcher, author of CrankysBlog, sheds further light on the issue. Read this post as a footnote to the original.…
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Spotlighting the Wrong Victims
by James A. Bacon Black students comprise 39% of the public school student population in Henrico County but account for 80% of all the kids arrested for offenses committed in schools. That disparity, combined with the fact that black students are disproportionately suspended from Henrico schools, is something that some people find disturbing, according to the…
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Changing the Culture of Reading
by James A. Bacon Dr. Carolyn Boone is a pediatrician who serves a largely African-American patient base in Northside Richmond. In addition to providing check-ups and vaccinations, she participates in the Virginia “Reach Out and Read” program, the goal of which is to teach the joy of reading to young children — and maybe to their…
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Values, Income and Academic Performance
by James A. Bacon Last night my wife and I engaged in an annual ritual of the school calendar. We went to Douglas Freeman High School to meet our son’s teachers and learn about the classes he’s taking. This was not a social event. We know very few Freeman families. Our motives were pragmatic. We…
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BRT to Nowhere?
by James A. Bacon There’s a whole lot of fuzzy thinking going on. People in the Richmond area are so enamored with the prospect of building a Bus Rapid Transit route through the city that they are saying the most astonishing things. Bus Rapid Transit can be a great idea if done correctly. But it…
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Now VSU Is in Trouble
by James A. Bacon Enrollment at Virginia State University in Petersburg is down by 550 students this year, and the historically black university is facing a $5.3 million shortfall, including a $2.4 million reduction in state support. “I think Virginia State is in trouble,” Terone B. Green, who serves on the board of visitors told…
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Race, Culture and SOLs
by James A. Bacon Here we go one more time… Does cultural background influence the likelihood of Virginia students passing the Standards of Learning tests, or do disparities in results between racial/ethnic groups reflect only the disparity in resources allocated to different schools? Over the past week, I have been arguing that cultural background is one critical differentiator,…
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The SOL Debate: Bringing Asians into the Equation
by James A. Bacon And the debate goes on…Yesterday, in “Yes, Virginia, Culture Does Matter in School Performance,” I argued based on the statewide pass rate for the Standards of Learning that disadvantaged Hispanic school children who had proficiency in English actually out-performed disadvantaged white school children (and black as well). I hypothesized that the difference could be attributed…
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Yes, Virginia, Culture Does Matter in School Performance
by James A. Bacon I was planning to give readers a break today from graphs and scatter charts relating to Virginia’s 2014 Standards of Learning tests. Then I read a quote in the Times-Dispatch this morning by Michel Zajur, CEO of the Virginia Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. Zajur was lamenting the high Hispanic drop-out rate…
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Update on the Debate over SOL Performance
by James A. Bacon There has been a lively discussion in the comments section of previous blog posts regarding the interpretation of the 2014 Standards of Learning (SOL) data. The debate has largely focused on explaining the gap in the average SOL pass rate between white students and black students. Broadly speaking, there are two…
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A Better Route
by James A. Bacon The GRTC Transit System, like most municipal bus systems, provides a one-size-fits-all transportation service. Whatever the route, time of day and level of demand, GRTC runs a standard city bus capable of carrying nearly 60 seated and standing passengers along fixed routes. Everyone pays the same fare ($1.50 on local routes),…