Free Maggie Walker!

A shout out to Dr. Bob Holsworth* on his Virginia Tomorrow blog for weighing in on how the Virginia Department of Education allows the SOL scores of students who attend Maggie L. Walker Governor's School to revert to the "home district" school. Holsworth notes the recent Richmond Times-Dispatch story on this topic by reporter Holly Prestidge, but kindly gives a hat-tip to me for the research John Butcher and I published on our respective blogs months ago. Kiel Stone, who edits the Bacon's Rebellion blog and Valerie Catrow at RVANews.com each deserve shout outs here as well for bringing this issue into the open. And, will wonders never cease? The Richmond Times Dispatch Editorial Page agrees with us that Maggie Walker deserves better!

Much obliged, one and all.

Thanks to Butcher's expertise at crafting Freedom of Information Act requests, we were able to obtain some facts. As we all know, facts are indeed stubborn things which inevitably give rise to more complicated questions about this ethically challenged practice.

Fact: U.S. News and World Report doesn’t list it as an outstanding “high school” because the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) doesn’t identify it as “a school” on their website. Question: If VDOE does not recognize Maggie Walker as “a school,” then how is it that the “program” is legally authorized to issue diplomas?

Fact: These diplomas bear the name of Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School of Government and International Studies and NOT the name of the high school where their scores were assigned.

Fact: RPS and the 11 other districts really do take the SOL scores of students they select to attend Maggie Walker and calculate them into scores of the comprehensive high school nearest the students’ home address.

Fact: VDOE not only knows about it, but condones the practice.

Fact: Some may prefer to see this practice with a more genteel term such as “dishonest” or “unethical,” but, bottomline — it is cheating. It is cheating just as surely as it would be if a high school football or basketball coach were to bring in “ringers” from another school in order to win the championship game.

Fact: The students at Maggie Walker TAKE NO CLASSES in their respective home district schools.

Fact: To be sure, many students from the region’s top private and parochial schools attend the Governor’s School. These students have never so much as put one foot in the public school nearest their homes, nor have they ever taken an SOL until they arrive at Maggie Walker. Furthermore, the private, parochial and public schools students who attend Maggie Walker ALL receive absolutely ZERO instruction from the public high schools nearest their home.

Question: Therefore, how is it then NOT cheating to “give” the scores to the school which the Governor’s School student chose NOT to attend and which had nothing to do with the student’s performance because the student never went there?
Fact: “This makes [about] as much sense,” according to one Maggie Walker father, “as a Chevy dealer’s reporting as revenue purchases made from Toyota because the Toyota customer lives closer to the Chevy dealership."

The purpose of publishing the collective SOL results of a given school is to see how that school’s students performed, not to gauge the performance of kids who happen to live in the neighborhood but chose not to attend the school.

This practice may make VDOE and the districts that send children look “better,” to the NCLB feds in Washington, D.C., but ultimately it hurts the children in the comprehensive high schools and insults the integrity of those dedicated and hardworking teachers who (still) think it is their mission to educate our children and instill the confidence they need to meet and surpass all tests life gives them. As one RPS teacher put it:

“If you were teaching in one of the high schools and you were told that your “class” would receive the SOL scores of 10 of the top scorers at Maggie Walker, would it bother you to have them included, even though you never taught those children?”

She was equally offended when told that ALL the districts participate in this fraudulent use of the Maggie Walker SOL scores: “It doesn’t matter how many other districts are doing this. It still doesn’t make it right. It insults me as a professional that anyone from RPS central administration, or from VDOE, would think that I ‘needed’ these scores to make my school and/or students appear better than they are.”

Question: Is the misrepresentation of these scores legal? What does this do to the AYP numbers that VDOE is required to report to the federal government? Does it make a difference?
Fact: For example, in Richmond, John Marshall and Huguenot High School each received more than a 5 percent boost in the scores and number of children allegedly taking the SOLs at their schools. Thomas Jefferson received a whopping 9.76 percent boost and George Wythe received a 2.32 percent increase.

To be sure, each of the various districts that send students to Maggie Walker claim those students as part of their own ADM count and receive city, state and federal tax dollars for each pupil that is enrolled. These monies are then used to secure slots at the Governor’s Schools. The issue here is NOT THE ADM, but what happens to the SOL scores and what THAT means on both a state and federal level.
There has to be an honest way of reporting this. It makes no sense whatsoever to represent that these children are enrolled at their respective home “zone” high school, when in reality they are not! Surely, the fine minds at VDOE or in the General Assembly can help the Superintendents figure out a way to do this so their gifted students can continue to avail themselves of a more rigorous and academically challenging education.

It shouldn’t take a Gubernatorial Decree or an act of the General Assembly to ensure that the data VDOE reports is “reliable.” But, unfortunately, it will likely take an act of the General Assembly to hold the Virginia Department of Education truly accountable.

Something has to give. The way they do this now clearly reduces the accuracy that is supposed to derive from the SOL tests and NCLB accountability measures. Proper measurement is a management tool and encourages accountability. This method of measuring and reporting a school’s supposed SOL scores simply insures that the data, which VDOE and the local districts spend a fortune to collect, has very little reliability or usefulness.

Reducing that accuracy, reduces the possibility that policy makers can reach informed and wise decisions that will help improve public education. If the data are faulty, how can the conclusion be accurate? And, if the schools’ problems are intentionally disguised and distorted, how can we expect to fix them?

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*Bio Dr. Bob Holsworth is the founder and president of Virginia Tomorrow, a company that examines emerging trends in politics, society and business. He is also a managing principal of DecideSmart (http://www.decidesmart.com/). His observations on national and Virginia politics have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, the New York Times, and numerous other papers and newsmagazines. Bob has also appeared on almost all the major American television networks, the BBC and ITN in Great Britain, and Fuji Television in Japan.

Carol A.O. Wolf and John Butcher Carol A.O. Wolf served on the City of Richmond Public School Board from 2002-2008 and was considered by many to be the city’s premier advocate on behalf of Richmond’s public schoolchildren. She fought the hardest for disability rights and ADA compliance, was pushed under the bus by her fellow school board members for daring to speak forcefully on behalf of school accountability and basic common sense, and went to war with city and school administrators for failing to place valuable resources where they belong… in the classroom. Wolf was elected in 2008 by RVANews.com as the second most popular politician in Richmond (Governor Tim Kaine finished first). Wolf is a former print journalist who has worked for The Denver Post, Jack Anderson's "Merry-Go-Round" in Washington, D.C., The (now defunct) Richmond News Leader and Style Weekly. She is the mother of three, grandmother of two, and wife, still, of the finest man in Richmond.

John Butcher was teaching chemistry at Hampden-Syndey when he received The Call. As John tells it: “I had been in science for ten years. I knew about the truth. I wanted to go to law school and learn about advantage.” Upon receiving a J.D. from the University of Virginia, John joined the staff of Attorney General Marshall Coleman as an Assistant Attorney General. Over the following 23 years he wound up as the Senior Assistant Attorney General responsible for bankruptcy matters and all major litigation for the Natural Resources Section. In the spring of 2002 John looked at a calendar and noticed they had named a day for him. So he retired on April 1. John reports that he now sleeps later in the morning and none of his former clients can automatically say: “My lawyer is uglier than your lawyer.”