Bacon's Rebellion

Democracy Thrives in Sunlight

Challenge Accepted

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sherlockj
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by James C. Sherlock

I posted a column here based upon government data, specifically the chronic absentee rates of Fredericksburg schools in 2020-21.

The data, not my reporting of it, have been challenged by multiple colleagues as unreliable. They expressed their belief that the data were such outliers that they must have been transcribed improperly by the data entry techs or some other technical issue.

They were so strong in that challenge that the conversation could not move past that point of contention.

My initial reaction to the Fredericksburg data, part of a larger study I am conducting, was doubt as well. So, before publication I re-aggregated them from the individual cohort level at each school and found them internally consistent.

Thus if the data are wrong, they represent an extraordinarily meticulous series of data errors for every racial and gender cohort in each of four schools.

But in response to the challenges of those colleagues, I have taken the article down and submitted it to VDOE for verification of the data and comment.

I expect them to be confirmed.

I will republish the article either way. And we can move on with the conversation either way.

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Comments

20 responses to “Challenge Accepted”

  1. vicnicholls Avatar
    vicnicholls

    Cognitive dissonance. Another reason the US is in the state it is in.

  2. LarrytheG Avatar
    LarrytheG

    When the data is so whacked out as to cause disbelief, probably needs to be further verified before making it a centerpiece of a generalized article claiming its a big problem in general and that one case the “worst” case.

    Fredericksburg has some actual real problems. Look at the SOL scores. AND look at their dropout rate. They have a large number of section 8 housing – kids of low-educated, low-income parents and they don’t do any better with them than Richmond or even Henrico does in it’s low-income neighborhoods.

  3. Dick Hall-Sizemore Avatar
    Dick Hall-Sizemore

    You would probably get a quicker, and more accurate, response if you asked the Fredericksburg Schools central office to verify it. If the data on the DOE website is accurate, perhaps the school district could provide some sort of explanation for the awful absentee rate.

    1. James C. Sherlock Avatar
      James C. Sherlock

      Not going around VDOE on data they published. Not good for relationships.

      1. Lefty665 Avatar
        Lefty665

        Going to the source of the data could be informative. F’burg might have known why the numbers turned out the way they did since they were submitted to VDOE and be pleased to share the knowledge.

        But of course that would involve actual reporting and that does not facilitate jumping to conclusions. It is not your cup of tea.

    2. Lefty665 Avatar
      Lefty665

      540-372-1130
      Marceline Catlett Superintendent, ex: 2614
      https://www.fxbgschools.us/

      1. Nancy Naive Avatar
        Nancy Naive

        Well, what’d she say?

        1. Lefty665 Avatar
          Lefty665

          Dunno, I figured nobody was working on a holiday and that someone with better education credentials would be better a inquisitor.

        2. Lefty665 Avatar
          Lefty665

          Here’s an article that addresses F’burg City school problems and accepts the chronic absenteeism report as correct.

          https://fredericksburg.com/opinion/columnists/its-time-for-fredericksburg-to-face-the-real-problem/article_e8a89687-7a94-56ba-a7fe-fb6170952c30.html

          Look at JABs report on aggregate SOL numbers. It shows F’burg City schools as 6th from the bottom. They’re right down there with Richmond, Petersburg and Danville.

          It may just be that F’burg City schools really suck.

          The Superintendent is a F’burg native and has been part of the city school system for 40+ years, starting as a 6th grade teacher. Her education is thoroughly Virginia (to add fuel to that fire), Virginia State, UVa, VPI. She has post graduate certs from Oxford, Harvard and Howard.

          The Deputy Super has a more varied career where it is reported that he actually accomplished some things for school systems. It seems possible he was brought in as a fixer.

          It looks like the real story is that the VDOE graph is right and that it is just the tip of the iceberg of a F’burg City schools debacle.

          I’ll eat my crow for assuming that the absentee numbers were so egregious that they had to be wrong. Sometimes things are as bad as they seem.

  4. Nancy Naive Avatar
    Nancy Naive

    Clearly a Seinfeldian contest.

    1. Stephen Haner Avatar
      Stephen Haner

      Without the humor.

      1. Nancy Naive Avatar
        Nancy Naive

        The difference between comedy and tragedy is distance. If you’re close enough to see the blood…

  5. Lefty665 Avatar
    Lefty665

    F’burg reported 70.5% of students were chronic absentees. The City of Richmond reported 15.5% chronic absentees and Falls Church 2.9%. We would expect F’burg to more resemble Falls Church and for Richmond to be the big outlier. Clearly the statistics for chronic absentees are questionable.

    Be interesting to see how the reporting questions were worded, what the data sources were, what F’burg got so wrong and Richmond fudged.

    https://schoolquality.virginia.gov/divisions/fredericksburg-city-public-schools#desktopTabs-6

    “Thus if the data are wrong, they represent an extraordinarily meticulous series of data errors for every racial and gender cohort in each of four schools.”

    Extraordinarily meticulous has nothing to do with it. They were all simply calculated using the same methodology from the same data. In F’burg it is either the calculation method or the underlying data that sucks. It is not a clerical error in transcribing a couple of reported numbers.

    Garbage in, garbage out lurks.

    1. Stephen Haner Avatar
      Stephen Haner

      I used GIGO in my reply on the post he deleted. 🙂 Let’s see what turns up…

      1. Lefty665 Avatar
        Lefty665

        Yeah, good call.

        That’s why in 40+ years of data processing we always had someone familiar with a report topic but not involved in producing the report, take a look before we issued anything. We called it a “sanity check”. Every now and then they’d flag a really funky result and we’d go back and see what was up. Occasionally the results really were funky. Far more often there was something screwed up in the data, the software, or most often the liveware.

        F’burg likely has one school database with all the variables in it. They just select the variables they want, race, gender, school, etc, and run the report. If the constant, as in the VDOE graph, is chronic absenteeism (over 10%) and they have 180 days of school, over 18 days absent makes someone chronic. A simple keying error like 1.8 instead of 18 when setting up the report program would make the numbers really funky, like 70% instead of 7%.

    2. James C. Sherlock Avatar
      James C. Sherlock

      Richmond always – fudges. When I run the reverse algorithms I ran for Fredericksburg to build Richmond aggregate numbers from their cohort numbers, or, like I did with Fredericksburg, compare what they report to the feds with what they report to the state, the results never come close to matching. They are ridiculous.

      1. Lefty665 Avatar
        Lefty665

        Disappointing, but not a surprise.

    3. James C. Sherlock Avatar
      James C. Sherlock

      For that we would have to believe that the principals of four different schools were in on the plot. And sat there silent while the one school showed 81% chronic absenteeism on its state school quality report. Which are accessed by realtors.

      The Department of Education can tell me that if the data are accurate or not.

      Those data have been posted for ten months. I just ran across the Fredericksburg numbers in a bigger project I was building. If someone tells me the data are wrong, especially very wrong, that will be a very much bigger story now 10 months on from when they were posted.

      1. Lefty665 Avatar
        Lefty665

        For that we would have to believe that the principals of four different schools were in on the plot.

        A plot? Are you paranoid on top of everything else? Remember, just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean nobody is after you 🙂

        What seems obvious is that the same methodology was applied across the data. That is the simplest explanation for the consistency. That requires no paranoid conspiracy and plot to send bogus and bad numbers to VDOE. Either the methodology sucked or the data sucked. It may even be remotely possible most of F’burg’s kids were absent more than 10% of the time, but that is almost as unlikely as a plot to report almost 3/4 of F’burgs students as chronic absentees.

        What makes you think that VDOE can tell you how accurate the data is? They can tell you if the charts accurately reflect the data they were given. There is nothing that makes them magically capable of validating the underlying data or F’burg’s reporting.

        If someone tells me the data are wrong, especially very wrong, that will be a very much bigger story now 10 months on from when they were posted. Or, it may say more about how seldom anyone pays any attention to those pretty interactive graphs for a small city. That likely includes VDOE who produced them.

        Which are accessed by realtors. OMG, REALTORS, the ultimate arbiters! Who would have thought the plot could have escaped their eagle eyes? The world turned upside down.

        Have home sales in F’burg plummeted due to absenteeism reporting? Has Sherlock uncovered a plot by the school system to torpedo real estate values in F’burg? Stay tuned for more jumps to conclusions and judgemental assumptions in “The Strange Case of the Principal Who Didn’t Bark”.

  6. Kathleen Smith Avatar
    Kathleen Smith

    When I was at the department, there was a group of us that looked at the day before being published. We looked for anything not usual, like this.

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