Tag: James A. Bacon
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Virginia Snags Another Fortune 500 H.Q.
by James A. Bacon Waltham, Mass.-based Raytheon Technologies has announced that it will establish its global headquarters in Arlington. Following the recent decision of The Boeing Company to relocate its headquarters from Chicago to Arlington, the move cements Northern Virginia’s standing as the leading defense/aerospace cluster in the United States. “The location increases agility in…
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Chart of the Day: Teacher Retirements Surging
The teacher shortage in Virginia is getting worse, and one reason is that teachers retired in accelerating numbers in the 2021-22 school year. While the Virginia Retirement System (VRS) reported 4,345 retirements per year on average between the 2016-17 and 2019-2020 school years, the number leaped to 4,881 — an increase of 536, or 12.6%,…
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Legislators Deal Huge Blow to Upwardly Mobile Poor Kids
by James A. Bacon Anna Julia Cooper School was founded as a private, nonprofit middle school in 2009 in Richmond’s poverty-ridden East End. The first-year enrollment in the middle school was 29 students. The founders offered a proposition to students’ families: the school would charge no tuition, but parents had to be committed to the…
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So, How Did UVa’s Vaccine Mandate Work Out?
by James A. Bacon Readers may recall that last August the University of Virginia “disenrolled” 238 students for not complying with the university’s COVID vaccination mandate. (Of those, 49 had enrolled at the time the decision was made. The intentions of the others were not known. Many likely had made other arrangements knowing that the…
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Commonwealth Attorney Nullification
Steve Descano has written an op-ed piece in The New York Times. Should the U.S. Supreme Court roll back Roe vs. Wade, says the Fairfax County Commonwealth Attorney, he will never prosecute a woman for having an abortion — “no matter what the law in Virginia says.” The CA provides several reasons for opposing blanket…
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The Long Odds in Playing Catch-Up
by James A. Bacon Thanks to the Standards of Learning exams, Virginians have been able to measure the calamitous effects that the shutdown of in-person instruction had on student learning in the 2020-21 school year. From this year’s SOL exams, we will find out if students have made up for lost ground — or have…
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What’s Causing Virginia’s Excess Deaths? Whatever It Is, It’s Not Just COVID
Virginia has high vaccination rates, and deaths from COVID-19 are a small fraction of what they were at the height of the pandemic. Yet “excess” deaths in Virginia — the number that would be predicted based upon projections from pre-COVID years — are running 13.4% higher than expected this year. According to Centers for Disease…
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“The Kids Are Out of Control”
Here’s more evidence that the social fabric is fraying: a high school senior was stabbed to death in a fight that spilled into an Alexandria neighborhood shopping center a couple of days ago. Just as Americans seem powerless to stop tragedies like the Uvalde school shooting, we seem impotent to halt the far more…
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Note to Readers
Baconites and Rebels, I have disabled one of the two services that had been feeding ads to Bacon’s Rebellion. I have been receiving frequent complaints about glitches in the blog, and from my own observation, the ads were highly intrusive. The ads were bringing in a not-insignificant revenue stream, but not enough to justify the…