Time to Bring On the Bigger Dogs ...

Short of a reprieve from Governor Bob McDonnell or a last-minute assist from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Barack Obama, it appears that the City of Richmond's first and only proposed charter school -- The Patrick Henry School for Science and Art (PHSSA) -- is DOA. By the end of the next School Board meeting, it could be all over but the shouting.

Even if the school had all the money it needs to hire a staff, purchase proper educational materials and satisfy the demands of Virginia charter school law, the stalwart group of true believers in the PHSSA appear to be on a collision course with a school system that is perversely using its own flagrant violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act to kill the competition it fears, thus denying hope and change to yet another generation of Richmond schoolchildren.

Sadly, this is nothing new. Ever since the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, the City of Richmond School Board has had far more candidates for "Profiles in Cowardice" than for "Profiles in Courage." This ugly tradition, like many others in this former Capitol of the Confederacy and birthplace of Massive Resistance, continues unabated into the 21st-Century.

Having witnessed former Richmond School Board Chairman George Braxton lose his temper and accuse the ADA plaintiffs -- face-to-face -- of being more concerned about improving "crappy" schools than building yet-to-be-funded new schools, I was sure I had seen the most shameful behavior of a Richmond School Board chairman against parents who simply wanted to have their children educated and treated equally in our schools.

That was before I read the recent letter sent by the new chair of the board, Kimberly Bridges, to the members of the PHSSA. The passive-aggressive timing of the letter (seven months from when PHSSA is scheduled to open) and its condescending tone demonstrate disrespect equal to that displayed by Braxton, but made more offensive by a cold and calculating hypocrisy. At least Braxton could blame his outburst on the heat of the moment.

Consider this: January 17th marked the fourth anniversary of the night that the Richmond School Board unanimously approved the terms of a Settlement Agreement in which the board promised, among other things, to use its "best efforts" to satisfy the five-year agreement with the ADA plaintiffs that would (at long last) bring our schools into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. [Historical note: the ADA was passed July 20, 1990, almost 20 years ago.]
 Just how much progress have the "best efforts" of this board achieved since the agreement was signed and U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson ordered RPS to make our schools and playgrounds handicapped accessible?

Precious little. In blunt terms, after four years this board has thus far failed to satisfy even the promises for "Year One."

Worse, in a dizzying display of governmental waste, RPS has spent more than one million dollars simply having "design work" done. A sampling of some of the most outrageous and nonsensical payments include:

• $29,000 to design a ramp at Overby-Sheppard School;
• $19,950 to design a ramp at Redd Elementary School;
• $66,780 to design an accessible bathroom at Chimborazo Elementary School and move the Clinic to the gymnasium;
• $36,900 to design an accessible bathroom at Ginter Park Elementary School;
• $19,726.50 to design an accessible bathroom at Armstrong High School;
• nearly $9,000 per school to do "elevator feasibility studies" at five different schools;
• $6,500 to design a handicapped parking place at Mary Scott School;
• to see the complete list, click this link.

This is the same board and administration that spent close to a quarter million dollars fixing up Richmond Community High School, a school that it knew would be closed within a year. There was also that nasty elevator procurement mess for Community that generated plenty of media attention from Chris Dovi at Style Weekly and Zach Reid at The Richmond Times Dispatch, but no indictments. Read lawyer John Butcher's trenchant "O Come All Ye Lawyers" and "Incompetence -- Or Worse?" at his CrankyTaxpayer website for an excellent analysis of what went wrong and engineer Jonathan Mallard's take on the board's inability to construct a coherent RFP, much less an intelligent plan for fixing the schools.

All this is necessary information for one to be able to appreciate the cloying hypocrisy of Bridges' words to the PHSSA, most especially when she expresses the board's "great concern" that it not be placed in a position that would cause it "to violate the consent decree [sic]."

Mind you, I am so relieved to see the board is concerned about obeying the law. By my rough accounting, RPS has received approximately $11.4 million dollars for ADA compliance work since 2006, spent over a million on design, and, save a new elevator at Fox Elementary, taken no significant steps to actually make any school handicapped accessible. What happened to the other $10+ million? Also, no one seems to recall that the board promised to post an online accounting of all monies received for ADA work and how those monies were spent.

Given this situation, an investigation and an audit of the ADA finances appears to be needed.

Meanwhile, I hope the good people who have worked hard to bring the PHSSA into reality will ask the School Board why it waited until now to put into writing concerns that have been discussed since the idea of using the Patrick Henry building for the charter school was first broached.

It is absolutely stupefying how this board could even attempt to claim high moral ground in the PHSSA letter, considering they have repeatedly dealt in bad faith with the ADA plaintiffs and with the court. During closed session discussions prior to signing the contract to lease this building to the PHSSA, I advised my colleagues and RPS administrators to be fully forthcoming concerning the legal requirements to bring the Patrick Henry building into compliance with the ADA. Much to the amusement of those present, the former vice-chair of the board, Lisa Dawson, dismissed my suggestion outright stating that if the charter people "want to play with the big dogs, they need to learn on their own."

Here's hoping the PHSSA folks can find some bigger dogs to help them realize their goal, and to hold the attack hounds of RPS at bay.

Unchartered Waters? Hardly

Much of what is said in Richmond about "charter schools" is "emotional" as opposed to "factual."

The links below are for your edification.
American Federation of Teachers, "Do Charter Schools Measure Up?: The Charter School Experiment After 10 Years," 2002.
Anderson, L. et al. "A Decade of Public Charter Schools," SRI International, 2002. (Requires Adobe's Acrobat Reader.)
Center for Education Reform, "Charter Schools 2002: Re-sults From CER's Annual Survey of America's Charter Schools," 2002. (Requires Adobe's Acrobat Reader.)
Center for Education Reform "Nine Lies About School Choice: Answering the Critics," 2003.
Center for Education Reform, "Charter School Fast Facts," 2004.
The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, "Charter Schools and Race: A Lost Opportunity For Integrated Education," 2003.
Ericson, J. and Silverman, D., "Challenge and Opportunity: The Impact of Charter Schools on School Districts," U.S. Department of Education, 2001.
Legislative Office of Education and Oversight, "Community Schools in Ohio: Final Report on Student Performance, Parent Satisfaction, and Accountability, 2003.
Miron, G. and Horn, J., "Evaluation of the Michigan Charter School Initiative," Western Michigan University Evaluation Center, 2000.
Miron, G., et al., "Strenthening Pennsylvania's Charter School Reform: Findings From the Statewide Evaluation and Discussion of Relevant Policy Issues," Western Michigan University Evaluation Center, 2002.
The North Carolina Center for Public Policy Re-search, "Evaluating Charter Schools in North Carolina," news release, 2002.
RAND Corp., "Charter School Op-erations and Performance: Evidence from California," 2003.
Slovacek S.P, et al. "California Charter Schools Serving Low-SES Students: An Analysis of the Academic Performance In-dex," California State University-Los Angeles, 2002.
Solmon, L., et al. "Comparison of Traditional Public Schools and Charter Schools on Retention, School Switching, and Achievement Growth," Goldwater Institute, 2004.
U.S. Department of Education, "The State of Charter Schools 2000: Fourth-Year Report," 2000. <

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?

********

*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.”

Urban Myth or Unsolved Mystery 2.0?

Originally posted April 15, 2009
Revised Jan. 6, 2010

When my son, a junior at Maggie L. Walker Governor's School for Government and International Studies (MLWGSGIS), asked why it is that his school is not listed in the U.S. News and World Report as one of the "Top High Schools in the Nation," I told him that I didn't know, but that I would be happy to find out.

I honestly believed that it had to be a simple oversight, one that could easily be explained and corrected. After all, everyone knows that Maggie Walker is an excellent school with plenty of national honors to prove it. I also saw getting an answer to my son's question as the perfect opportunity to dispel a persistent rumor that was so preposterous that I thought it had to be one of those Richmond Public Schools "urban myths."

I recall being told in hushed tones by several teachers over the years that they thought it was "downright dishonest" for RPS to take the SOL scores of the children attending the Governor's Schools and calculate said scores into the SOL numbers of the zone high school nearest the students' respective addresses.

Boy, was I ever wrong. After several conversations with people in positions to know -- and thanks to a couple of Freedom of Information Act requests submitted by my friend, John Butcher [http://crankytaxpayer.org/Schools/more_fun_with_numbers.htm] -- we managed to obtain some facts.

U.S. News and World Report doesn't list it as an outstanding "high school" because the Virginia Department of Education doesn't identify it as "a school" on their website. If VDOE does not recognize Maggie Walker as "a school" and allow it to report its accreditation numbers, how is it that the "program" is legally authorized to issue diplomas? How do we fix this?

Astonishingly, RPS really does take the SOL scores of students who take the tests at Maggie Walker and calculates them into the scores of the comprehensive high school nearest the students' home address. How is this honest in any way?

Is this misrepresentation of these scores legal?

What does this do to the AYP numbers that VDOE is required to report to the federal government? For example, John Marshall and Huguenot each received more than a 5 percent boost in the 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. The only high school that did not add in SOL scores of students at Maggie Walker was Armstrong.

Richmond isn't the only district engaging in this score legerdemain. Each of the various districts that send students to Maggie Walker claim those students as part of their own ADM count. 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 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.

What can be done to help the various superintendents part with these students in a way that could enhance the home district? Is there a way that the General Assembly can invest additional dollars or other enhancements into the Governor's Schools and thereby help more outstanding Virginia students be successful?

Why does VDOE need an act from the General Assembly to close the loophole that allows some districts to consider their regional Governor's School "a program" and others to see it as a "school"? What message do we send to our children if we allow this posting of scores to schools they have never attended to continue? What message do we send to the children that attend those schools by posting the scores of children they have never sat next to in class?

Who is willing to step up and help fix this mess for the sake of the hard-working students, teachers and parents? How do we turn this into a transparent "win-win" for all parties?