Save Our Schools

New Rule Will Allow States and Agencies to Release More Student Data

2011-12-11T23:12:00.001-05:00

By Kelly Field

Chronicle of Higher Education

The Education Department will issue a final rule today that will make it easier for states to track students' academic progress and evaluate education programs.

The rule allows state and local education officials to share student information more widely without violating federal privacy law. It also makes lenders, guarantors, and other agencies with access to student records subject to the law, known as the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974, or Ferpa.

Supporters say the changes will help researchers measure the effectiveness of government-financed education programs. They say Ferpa has hampered such research because states and schools have been unsure about what information they can legally share.

But privacy advocates say the rule undermines longstanding student protections. They expressed disappointment that the department did not adopt many of their proposed changes to its draft rule, which came out in April.

"The department has regrettably decided to go down the path of a data free-for-all in the name of accountability," said Barmak Nassirian, an associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

In a statement, the Education Department said the new rules would strengthen its enforcement powers, helping the department "hold those who misuse or abuse student information accountable." It is also publishing guidance on protecting student privacy under the new rules.

Factoids, Anyone? RPS Legal Habit Costs More than $1,000 a Day

2011-12-01T21:22:00.006-05:00

If only the Richmond Public School Board (RPS) and RPS Superintendent Yvonne Brandon, were capable of honesty and possessed of enough maturity to admit to making mistakes -- instead of relentlessly making-up excuses and blaming others for their failures -- Richmond citizens just might stand half-a-chance at having a public school system that can achieve some substantive and sustained academic and financial improvements.

However, remarks made by RPS School Board chair Kim Bridges and vice-chair Dawn Page in a recent Richmond Times-Dispatch story about the exorbitant legal fees RPS pays to a private law firm, the likelihood that the Board and/or Brandon will ever find the IQ, EQ or political will to do that, is roughly akin to the odds that Santa and all his reindeer will slide down my chimney on Christmas Eve.

Bridges, given to flinging true (but irrelevant) factoids when pressed by reporters or irate citizens, stunningly outdoes herself in the RT-D story by reporter Zachary Reid. Rather than admit any error or lapse of judgment on her part, the board's or the administration's, Bridges manages to twist the truth and blame the families who had to sue the School Board for handicapped accessible schools. More than 20 years after the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law by former President George H.W. Bush, RPS proceeds at a snail's pace implementing the terms of a Settlement Agreement the board unanimously approved in 2007.

The cost of defending this lawsuit has been covered by the School Board's insurance policy with AIG. Hired by AIG, lawyers William Bayliss and Edward Dillon from the firm of Williams and Mullen have been the legal team on the frontline. Since this cost is covered by the AIG policy, there is no rational basis for Bridges or Page to claim that the ADA was a factor in the board's decision to pay the Harrell and Chambliss law firm a base retainer of $32,500 per month -- a whopping 269 percent raise -- that works out to more than $1,000 per day, or $390,000 per year. Click here to read the contract that shows Harrell and Chambliss lawyers are paid $32,500 per month, that's $390,000 per year or, for a 365.25 day year, $1,067.76 per day(!) or $1,494.87 per work day... (with a hat-tip and a high five to John R. Butcher for his chart and excellent assistance on this)!According to Bridges:

"We're the only ones in the region navigating a systemwide (handicap-accessibility) settlement with hundreds of projects, overseeing a charter school and implementing best authorizing practices, proposing improvements to the state charter law, examining the use of historic tax credits for school renovations, or determining the use of per-pupil funds for the charter's construction loans, just to name a few examples," she said. "These are not issues facing Henrico, Hanover or Chesterfield, so I wouldn't expect them to spend time or money figuring them out."

Whether one characterizes her comments by the more genteel nomenclature such as "spin," "nuance," or "plain ignorance," it is clear that Bridges (and her handlers at RPS) hope that some mumbo-jumbo finger-pointing at the ADA, the Patrick Henry Charter School and Paul Goldman's praiseworthy work on changing historic tax credit law to benefit school districts in Virginia and across the nation will somehow absolve them of the responsibility for wasting so much money on legal fees.

Bridges is so desperate to deflect criticism that she willingly tosses aside any hope of regional cooperation when she takes this swipe at our neighboring public school systems: "These are not issues facing Henrico, Hanover and Chesterfield, so I wouldn't expect them to spend time or money figuring them out." Ouch.

But, given the tough economic times we are all in and the significant fact that our neighbors have found ways to reduce the amount of money they spend on legal bills, it behooves the Richmond School Board to at least give some lip-service to the possibility that they care how much money they throw out the windows of the 17th-floor of Richmond City Hall.

Rather than perform any cost analysis or critical assessment of the legal services provided by Harrell and Chambliss, Bridges and Page are convinced that the firm deserves to be paid more than $1,000 a day, every day, including weekends, national holidays, school vacations and teacher planning days.

Were the board ever to undertake a serious and detailed analysis of the legal services provided in order to make a data-driven decision, they might ask why it is with two lawyers paid by AIG and one on staff, what part of $1,000 per day does RPS need to spend to "navigate" its long-delayed compliance with the ADA? Were the board ever to undertake a serious and detailed analysis of the legal services provided in order to make a data-driven decision, they might ask why it is that:

(1.) "We're the only ones in the region navigating a systemwide (handicap-accessibility) settlement with hundreds of projects ... (a.) Had the Harrell and Chambliss lawyers been doing their jobs properly, they would have informed the School Board back in 1990 (when Congress first passed the law) and in 1992 (when the law came into effect) that the school system's buildings needed to be brought into compliance with the Virginia Disabilities Act (VDA) and the American Disabilities Act (ADA). Such proactive legal advice would have thus eliminated the need for a group of RPS parents and children to file a lawsuit in U.S. District Court in 2006 on behalf of family members and children with disabilities;

(b.) as noted, when that lawsuit was filed, the School Board's insurance policy with AIG kicked in and William Bayliss and Ed Dillon with Williams Mullen law firm were assigned by the insurance company to handle the legal defense once the School Board paid a $25,000 deductible to AIG; (c) the School Board also currently pays a lawyer -- Valarie Abbott-Jones -- to serve as the ADA coordinator. Abbott-Jones is tasked to work directly with the plaintiffs and the board to ensure that the terms of the Settlement Agreement are met;

(2.) "....overseeing a charter school and implementing best authorizing practices, proposing improvements to the state charter law..." What part of $1,000 per day do they need to spend on trying to kill off Patrick Henry School for Science and Arts charter school, the first elementary charter school in Virginia that is doing a terrific job and whose only fault is that it is embarrassing RPS;

(3.) " ... examining the use of historic tax credits for school renovations ..." Oh, my ... even stupider than paying Harrell Chambliss more than $390,000 a year, basically to answer the phone and attend two board meetings per month, is the decision to pay them to research the use of historic tax credits for school renovations. Given the number of lawyers in this town who are experts on historic tax credits and who would have gladly provided the research pro bono simply for the chance of getting any legal work that might come as a result, the Board and administration wasted not only money, but valuable time on this.

Had the board and administration bothered to listen to Paul Goldman when he first appeared before a committee discussing this idea back in 2007, their support could have helped him push the idea further along. As it stands today, Goldman deserves high praise for persisting in this effort, despite a lack of interest from RPS or the City of Richmond. In a November 22 e-mail, Goldman noted;

The RTD story yesterday revealed, for the first time, that the Richmond School Board apparently paid money - I am not sure how much - to analyze an idea that is now part of the Warner/Webb/Cantor school bill before Congress, backed by Governor McDonnell, Tim Kaine and George Allen. I speak of the Historic School Tax Credit bill to fix a glitch in the IRS code, SB 1685, introduced in October. Yet to my knowledge, the School Board hasn't publicly done anything to help enact something that could save Richmond $several hundreds of millions of dollars, all money then available to for other pressing education needs. Since they defended their excessive use of outside lawyers as being necessary, here is a case in point that can be exhibit # 1. Or have they communicated to Richmond Congressman Bobby Scott and the state's two Senators privately? They need to come forward and explain what they paid, what they got, and what they did with the analysis afterward.

In this regard, Goldman is absolutely correct. What did they pay, what did they get and what did they do with the analysis afterward?

And, lastly, Bridges her colleagues and Brandon apparently need a remedial history lesson on what happened following former Mayor L. Douglas Wilder's failed and flawed attempt to evict the School Board out of City Hall. Early on in the ADA matter,Wilder demanded that since Harrell & Chambliss represented both the City of Richmond (in certain matters) and the School Board, the firm could not represent both the city and the School Board. The partners at Harrell & Chambliss obviously did the math and determined it was more to their advantage to represent the City than it was to represent the School Board. Consequently, on the night of the Grand Eviction, the School Board was represented by State Sen. Henry Marsh [D-Richmond].

Thus, in the spirit of true cooperation, the Richmond City Council offered to have Brian Buniva, the private attorney they retained, represent the School Board at no charge to the School Board in the legal matters that resulted from the eviction. This was an offer that the School Board couldn't refuse and it should serve as proof that the Richmond City Council and School Board can find ways to work together to consolidate resources that will drive more precious tax dollars into the classroom instead of into the bank accounts of lawyers.

Richmond schools spend most in region on legal costs

Text Mon, 21 Nov 2011

The Richmond school system spends significantly more per student on legal fees than the other three large school districts in central Virginia.

Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch

Richmond's legal fees over the years

Text Mon, 21 Nov 2011

Richmond legal fees

Source: Richmond Times-Dispatch

Aha! The Sour Cream Solution to Richmond's Graduation Rate Troubles

2011-10-14T03:48:00.023-04:00

The graduation data released Tuesday by the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) reminds me of an old Isaac Bashevis Singer short story:

"Once upon a time the little village of Chelm found itself facing a problem: the holiday Shavuot was coming up and the town was suffering from a shortage of sour cream, a customary ingredient of the Shavuot feasts. The Wise Elders convened an emergency meeting to address the problem. They sat around, brows furrowed, pondering, proposing ideas, but to no avail. Finally, the Wisest Elder of them all announced: "I've got it! From today forward, water shall officially be called 'sour cream' and sour cream shall be called 'water!" The other Elders agreed that this was a brilliant solution and were rather chagrined that they had not thought of it themselves. Thence followed much rejoicing from the grateful townsfolk, and although there were some reports of water shortages, the Elders decided they had already solved enough problems for one holiday and that they would deal with that one at another time."
  ~ Adapted from Isaac Bashevis Singer's Stories for Children

Thus it was then in the little village of Chelm, so it is now in Richmond and in urban centers throughout Virginia. Except, in the Cities of Richmond and Petersburg, it is worse. Much worse, because what is at stake is not how we define "sour cream," or "water," but how we define what constitutes a bona fide graduation from a public high school and how the diploma earned can be used to unlock doors that Virginia's children need to go through in order to succeed in life.

To be sure, the "Elders" at the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) and Richmond Public Schools (RPS) Superintendent Yvonne W. Brandon and the members of the RPS School Board will claim with perfectly straight faces that they mean no harm by this semantic ledgerdemain. But, that sort of a statement is as hypocritical as it is delusional. Imagine the car full of drunk adults who should know better colliding with a school bus of young children. Of course the drunk adults should have known better than run the risk of driving while impaired, but they truly "meant no harm."   Right, folks.

But, harm is done to children in our schools every time the scores on tests are "adjusted" or "massaged" to make it appear that our kids are doing better in school than they actually are.  Study the charts on the right-hand side of this page and you will know why the recent graduation numbers are not to be believed.

Harm is done when hundreds of children are misdiagnosed with learning disabilities in order to make the school system's "scores" appear better and to mask the poor teaching the students are stuck with because their parents do not have the means to send them elsewhere.

Harm is done when it appears that the very people we are trusting to tell us the truth about how our children are being educated respond with a complicated Byzantine calculus instead of a straight-forward and simple answer.

Harm is done when we accept the state's 44 percent graduation rate for children with disabilities and Richmond's 17 percent graduation rate for children with disabilities as good enough.

Harm is done when Virginia education officials puff-up the numbers to the point that there are huge discrepancies between what they claim and what the federal education officials say.
Given the pressure that No Child Left Behind has brought to public education, all states are charged with improving their respective high school graduation rates.  The solution to the graduation problem will not be solved by cheap number games that insult the intelligence of anyone trying to improve public eduation in Virginia. Nor will the problem be resolved if we keep handing out pieces of paper that are virtually meaningless to children who deserve better.

In Virginia, it appears that the "Elders" at VDOE found an easy solution. Instead of simply counting the number of regular and advanced high school diplomas awarded as the Federal Graduation Index does, they decided to create "modified," "special" and "general achievement" diplomas and to declare that these "diplomas" would count the same as a standard or advanced diploma when it comes time to calculate graduation rates for the state and for the 132 school divisions within Virginia.

Graduation problem solved! Never mind that the requirements for these "diplomas" are not the same as for the standard or advanced diplomas. Never mind that those "special diplomas" can't even get a kid into the U.S. Army, much less into college.

Based on the numbers Virginia uses to calculate the on-time graduation rate, Virginia's graduation rate has improved! We have plenty of "sour cream" -- so what if we have a "water" shortage! So what if others question Virginia's definition of a diploma or their method of calculating a graduation rate? Two years ago, Education Week claimed that Virginia's graduation rate decreased. The Associated Press reported:

"Virginia officials are disputing a report that says the state's high school graduation rate dropped over a 10-year period. The report conducted by the publisher of Education Week says Virginia had a 73.4 graduation rate in 1996, compared with 69.2 percent in 2006. The statistics used by Editorial Projects in Education were the latest available to compare states. Nationally, graduation rates rose 2.8 percent to 69.2 percent. Virginia Department of Education spokesman Charles Pyle said the estimates are flawed because they don't account for student mobility or ninth-grade retention. The state's own available statistics show graduation rates went from 74.3 percent in 1998 to 73.8 percent in 2006. Starting in 2008, Virginia bases its calculations from ninth grade to graduation."

Shame on anyone who makes excuses for the unexcusable lazy education that is doled out to our children. Shame on RPS School Board chair, Kim Bridges, for her treacly and tricky answer to R-TD reporter Jeremy Slayton. Bridges tells him that she is "disappointed" by the numbers considering that: "Each one of our students is a precious and valuable individual, and we don't want to lose any of them and have them lose the opportunities that having a diploma will give them."

Oh, what a happy day it will be when she and her colleagues understand that prior to handing out diplomas, RPS needs to figure out how to give these kids the education they deserve. Until then, it appears RPS and the officials at VDOE will continue to serve us that watery sour cream that they hope will fool some people into believing that our schools and our children are fine when we all know better and our children deserve better.

2011-10-08T15:44:00.001-04:00

Got a Revolution?

2011-10-06T00:40:00.000-04:00

Money for Nothing ...

Good lawyering can get you out of trouble, great lawyering can keep you
from getting into trouble and bad lawyering .... well, bad lawyering
can cost you money and make you look bad.

Consider, for example, the letters that a lawyer from the firm of
Harrell & Chambliss, representing the City of Richmond School Board,
recently sent to architects and contractors concerning handicapped
accessible ramps that the School Board claims were improperly designed
and poorly constructed at Ginter Park and Woodville Elementary Schools.

The letters, which threaten litigation and offer a settlement, were
sent to Robert Comet at BCHW Architects, Ronald Worley with Worley
Associate Architects and to Langston Davis of Davis Brothers
Construction Company, Inc.

The School Board's lawyers are not supposed to model the deficiencies
of RPS students with fundamental math and writing skills. One doesn't
need to be an attorney, an English teacher or a math major to notice
the glaring problems with these letters. Click here to see for
yourself.

Adding injury to insult, the RPS School Board pays Harrell & Chambliss
a whopping $32,500 per MONTH retainer for such work. Perhaps even
worse, the lawyers fail to recognize that their client is the School
Board -- not RPS administrators.

Lawyering 101 teaches to aim high with an initial demand in a
settlement negotiation and back up that demand with irrefutable facts.
But the RPS lawyers fail to note that the architects and contractors
were already paid $6,752 to design the Ginter Park ramp and $41,746 to
construct it, as well as $11,985 to design the Woodville ramp and
$31,899 to construct it.

Aside from writing an incoherent and inaccurate business letter (note
that Mr. Worley is not an employee of BCHW or of Davis Brothers
Construction Company), filled with gross mathematical errors ($3,500 is
NOT 50 percent of $7,500 nor is $2,400 50 percent of $5,800), the
lawyer neglects to cite any authority for the duty, failure or cost of
the ramps, which are part of a 2006 U.S. District Court Settlement
Agreement requiring RPS to bring the buildings into compliance with the
1990 Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The letter makes no attempt
to explain the basis for the calculation for remuneration.

If the contracts for the work were clear and the work is not to
standard, why does the lawyer representing the School Board begin
negotiations by essentially offering to accept a small fraction of what
it will cost to fix the problem (i.e., redesigning, demolishing and
rebuilding the ramps).

Further, neither RPS Supt. Yvonne Brandon nor members of the board were
copied on the correspondence. The only RPS official copied on the
letters was Valerie Abbott-Jones, the ADA coordinator for the school
system. Why weren't Dr. Brandon and board members informed of this
settlement offer?

Did Dr. Brandon approve this without bringing it to the School
Board?

Did School Board Chair Kim Bridges approve this letter without
consulting or informing her colleagues on the board?

Did anyone read this letter for accuracy before it was sent?

Were the plaintiffs in the ADA matter informed of this settlement offer?

And, finally, how much did Harrell Chambliss lawyers have the nerve to
bill RPS for these letters and why haven't they and Abbott-Jones been
fired?

A Year Later .... RPS Ramps to Nowhere

2011-05-15T08:39:00.445-04:00

What will it take to get U.S. District Court Magistrate Hannah Lauck and U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson riled up enough to tell Richmond Public School (RPS) officials to stop playing games with the public's money and the court's patience?

RPS officials and their lawyers learned of the ramp problems at Ginter Park and other schools more than a year ago when Chris Dovi at Richmond Magazine http://richmondmagazine.com/?articleID=3457354a99698071f409ab09112b3bb3, John Butcher at The Cranky Taxpayer http://crankytaxpayer.org/Schools/disabled_parking_money_fountain.htm and I first reported on the district's perennial lack of compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) requirements.

Despite a U.S. District Court Order, a Settlement Agreement and RPS' expensive and "best" efforts to fix the problem, the ramp remains uncorrected.

In an effort to be fair, I contacted Andy Hawkins, RPS' (relatively) new Chief Operating Officer (COO) more than a month ago and quietly informed him that ramp (still) leads to nowhere, unless you count the school cafeteria as a final destination.

I described to him that once inside the building, a person in a wheelchair is confronted with a set of stairs leading to the first floor and a set of stairs leading to the basement. That's it. Period. No way up. No way down.

Hawkins promised to "look into it" and to fix the problem. He did neither.

Therefore, more than a month and A FULL YEAR since since Dovi, Butcher and I first reported on the parking, access path and ramp problems at Ginter Park, the situation remains the same. It is noteworthy, however, that COO Hawkins is a quick learner and has apparently mastered the age-old RPS practice of breaking promises and not returning telephone calls.

So, while waiting to hear back (ahem), I spot-checked the ramps at two other schools:

1) Ginter Park Elementary School: http://maps.google.com/?q=3817+Chamberlayne+Avenue%2C+Richmond%2C+Va+23227

The original design for the ADA entry was intended to serve the bus drop-off area and remote parking, but the slope on the ramp is (still) too steep and the asphalt area leading to the ramp exceeds the maximum allowable slope as established by the U.S. Department of Justice. [http://www.access-board.gov/adaag/html/adaag.htm] The landing by the door is not level as required.

The ADA parking has been moved from the farthest distance from the building to a spot closest to the school, however the access path and ramp do not meet ADA.

2) Woodville Elementary School: http://maps.google.com/?q=2000+North+28Th+Street%2C+Richmond%2C+Va+23223

The ramp, as originally designed was to replace the steps on the left side (looking from the street toward the building) of the front walk. Apparently, someone did not like this concept (I can only guess here) because it broke up the original symmetry element of the design. The architect (or someone) then moved the ramp to the center location. This change retained the symmetry and looks good on paper, but the dimensions were apparently not changed to keep the ramp at the max or less allowable slope (the flag pole gets in the way).

3) Binford Middle School: http://maps.google.com/?q=1701+Floyd+Avenue%2C+Richmond%2C+Va+23220

The identified ADA entrance is on the West Main Street side of the building tucked into the corner (you can see the striped spots on the aerial view). One doesn't need be an expert to see that this ramp and access path do not meet the maximum allowable slope.

To be sure, parking, access paths and ramps are the most crucial elements of the RPS ADA projects thus far. Yet, for some inexplicable reason, RPS officials and School Board members seem to want to merrily and blithely bob and weave along apparently unaware that the intent of the federal court order and settlement agreement was and is to bring the school system into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG).

If they think that by having an architect design the plans and a private sector construction management company monitor the ADA remediation construction, they are absolved of their Constitutionally vested duties. They are wrong. See Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III's opinion in Bacon v. City of Richmond to see why. http://pacer.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinion.pdf/061347.P.pdf

· Since, the Ginter Park ramp non-compliance issues were brought to the attention of RPS and the School Board more than a year ago, one can't help but wonder why corrective action has yet to commence.

· Issues: Who pays to rectify the problem, the Architect, the Contractor, or the Construction Management Company? This is a legal issue that absolutely should have been addressed by RPS attorneys and by NO MEANS should RPS spend a single taxpayer penny to correct the problem.

· What do the architect, contractor and construction management company have to say regarding these issues?

· Did the rchitect bring the issues to the attention of the contractor when they learned of the failure from Dovi, Butcher and this blog? If so, what was the contractor’s response?

· All of these notices / responses should have been in writing; Are they?

·Lastly, but by no means least, does the ADA Coordinator know the mathematical equation to determine what the slope of a ramp (triangle) is?

·Does the ADA Coordinator know what ADAAG stands for? Did the ADA Coordinator check the slope personally prior to approving the Contractor and A&E payments? According to her job description, she should know both of theses items and a whole lot more.

· Are RPS Board members aware of these issues and do they have an active role in rectifying the problems?

· Do they even care?

Poor Teaching for Poor Children

2011-05-03T23:11:00.000-04:00

(Originally published in Education Week Magazine).

By Alfie Kohn

Love them or hate them, the proposals collectively known as “school reform” are mostly top-down policies: Divert public money to quasi-private charter schools, pit states against one another in a race for federal funding, offer rewards when test scores go up, fire the teachers or close the schools when they don’t.

Policymakers and the general public have paid much less attention to what happens inside classrooms—the particulars of teaching and learning—especially in low-income neighborhoods. The news here has been discouraging for quite some time, but, in a painfully ironic twist, things seem to be getting worse as a direct result of the “reform” strategies pursued by the Bush administration, then intensified under President Barack Obama, and cheered by corporate executives and journalists.

In an article published in Phi Delta Kappan back in 1991, Martin Haberman, a professor at the University of Wisconsin, coined the phrase “pedagogy of poverty.” Based on his observations in thousands of urban classrooms, Haberman described a tightly controlled routine in which teachers dispense, and then test students on, factual information; assign seatwork; and punish noncompliance. It is a regimen, he said, “in which learners can ‘succeed’ without becoming either involved or thoughtful,” and it is noticeably different from the questioning, discovering, arguing, and collaborating that is more common (though by no means universal) among students in suburban and private schools.

Now, two decades later, Haberman reports that “the overly directive, mind-numbing, ... anti-intellectual acts” that pass for teaching in most urban schools “not only remain the coin of the realm but have become the gold standard.” It is how you’re supposed to teach kids of color.

Earlier this year, Natalie Hopkinson, an African-American writer, put it this way in an article on theRoot.com called “The McEducation of the Negro”: “In the name of reform ... education—for those ‘failing’ urban kids, anyway—is about learning the rules and following directions. Not critical thinking. Not creativity. It’s about how to correctly eliminate three out of four bubbles.”

Those who demand that we close the achievement gap generally focus on results, which in practice refers only to test scores. High-quality instruction is defined as whatever raises those scores. But when teaching strategies are considered, there is wide agreement (again, among noneducators) about what constitutes appropriate instruction in the inner city.

The curriculum consists of a series of separate skills, with more worksheets than real books, more rote practice than exploration of ideas, more memorization (sometimes assisted with chanting and clapping) than thinking. In books like The Shame of the Nation, Jonathan Kozol, another frequent visitor to urban schools, describes a mechanical, precisely paced process for drilling black and Latino children in “obsessively enumerated particles of amputated skill associated with upcoming state exams.”

Not only is the teaching scripted, but a system of almost militaristic behavior control is common, with public humiliation for noncompliance and an array of rewards for obedience that calls to mind the token-economy programs developed in prisons and psychiatric hospitals.

“The children of the suburbs learn to think and to interrogate reality,” says Kozol, whereas inner-city kids “are trained for nonreflective acquiescence.” (Work hard, be nice.) At one of the urban schools he visited, a teacher told him, “If there were middle-class white children here, the parents would rebel at this curriculum and stop it cold.”

Among the research that has confirmed this disparity are two studies based on data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress. One found that black children are much more likely than white children to be taught with workbooks or worksheets on a daily basis. The other revealed a racial disparity in how computers are used for instruction, with African-Americans mostly getting drill-and-practice exercises (which, the study also found, are associated with poorer results).

Well before his brief tenure last year as New Jersey’s commissioner of education, Bret Schundler (then the mayor of Jersey City, N.J.) expressed enthusiasm about the sort of teaching that involves repetitive drill and “doesn’t allow children not to answer.” This approach is “bringing a lot of value-added for our children,” he enthused in The New York Times Magazine. Does his use of the word “our” mean that he would send his own kids to that kind of school? Well, no. “Those schools are best for certain children,” he explained.

The result is that “certain children” are left farther and farther behind. The rich get richer, while the poor get worksheets.
To be sure, the gap is not entirely due to how kids are taught. As economist Richard Rothstein reminds us, all school-related variables combined can explain only about one-third of the variation in student achievement. Similarly, if you look closely at those international-test comparisons that supposedly find the United States trailing, it turns out that socioeconomic factors are largely responsible. Our wealthier students do very well compared with students in other countries; our poorer students do not. And we have more poor children than do other industrialized nations.

To whatever extent education does matter, though, the pedagogy of poverty traps those who are subject to it. The problem isn’t that their education lacks “rigor”—in fact, a single-minded focus on “raising the bar” has served mostly to push more low-income youths out of school—but that it lacks depth and relevance and the capacity to engage students. As Deborah Stipek, the dean of Stanford University’s school of education, once commented, drill-and-skill instruction isn’t how middle-class children got their edge, so “why use a strategy to help poor kids catch up that didn’t help middle-class kids in the first place?”

Rather than viewing the pedagogy of poverty as a disgrace, however, many of the charter schools championed by the new reformers have concentrated on perfecting and intensifying techniques to keep children “on task” and compel them to follow directions. (Interestingly, their carrot-and-stick methods mirror those used by policymakers to control educators.) Bunches of eager, mostly white, college students are invited to drop by for a couple of years to lend their energy to this dubious enterprise.
Is racism to blame here? Or could it be that, at its core, the corporate version of “school reform” was never intended to promote thinking—let alone interest in learning—but merely to improve test results? That pressure is highest in the inner cities, where the scores are lowest. And indeed the pedagogy of poverty can sometimes “work” to raise those scores, but at a huge price. Because the tests measure what matters least, it’s possible for the accountability movement to simultaneously narrow the test-score gap and widen the learning gap.

According to Deborah Meier, the founder of extraordinary schools in New York City and Boston: “Only secretly rebellious teachers have ever done right by our least advantaged kids.” To do right by them in the open, we would need structural changes that make the best kind of teaching available to the kids who need it most.

And we know it can work—which is to say, the pedagogy of poverty is not what’s best for the poor. Even back in 1992, a three-year study (published by the U.S. Department of Education) of 140 low-income elementary classrooms found that students whose teachers emphasized “meaning and understanding” flourished. The researchers concluded by decisively rejecting as unhelpful “schooling for the children of poverty ... [that] emphasizes basic skills, sequential curricula, and tight control of instruction by the teacher.”

Remarkable results with low-income students have also been found with the Reggio Emilia model of early-childhood education, the “performance assessment” high schools in New York, and Big Picture schools around the country. All of these approaches start with students’ interests and questions; learning is organized around real-life problems and projects. Exploration is both active and interactive, reflecting the simple truth that children learn how to make good decisions by making decisions, not by following directions. Finally, success is judged by authentic indicators of thinking and motivation, not by multiple-choice tests.

That last point is critical. Standardized exams serve mostly to make dreadful forms of teaching appear successful. As long as they remain our primary way of evaluating, we may never see real school reform—only an intensification of traditional practices, with the worst reserved for the disadvantaged.

A British educator named David Gribble was once speaking in favor of the kind of education that honors children’s interests and helps them think deeply about questions that matter. Of course, he added, that sort of education is appropriate for affluent children. For disadvantaged children, on the other hand, it is ... essential.

Copyright © 2011 by Alfie Kohn

Alfie Kohn is the author of a dozen books on education and human behavior, the latest of which is Feel-Bad Education ... and Other Contrarian Essays on Children and Schooling (Beacon Press, 2011). He lives (actually) in the Boston area and (virtually) at http://www.alfiekohn.org/.

Justice Comes 'Round ...

2011-05-02T11:04:00.000-04:00

Judge Denies Motion to Dismiss SPLC Suit Seeking Equal Education for Special Needs Students in New Orleans

2011-04-29T09:45:00.002-04:00

A federal judge today denied the Louisiana Department of Education's motion to dismiss a lawsuit brought by the Southern Poverty Law Center on behalf of thousands of New Orleans students with special needs.

These students are denied access to New Orleans public schools and often pushed into schools unable to provide them with the educational services they are due under the federal Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), the Rehabilitation Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

"Today was a great day for the thousands of New Orleans students and families who continue to struggle for access to even the most basic public education services," said Eden Heilman, lead SPLC attorney in the case. "The court has recognized that these students allege serious violations of federal law and will allow them to have their day in court. We hope the state of Louisiana will see the importance of removing the barriers to public education that currently plague New Orleans. We welcome an opportunity to work with the state to craft a plan to ensure compliance with federal law."

Also, lawyers for the plaintiffs asked the court to prevent the Louisiana Department of Education (LDE) from continuing its harmful practices while the lawsuit proceeds. The LDE has fallen far short of identifying students with disabilities, accommodating them so that they receive the same quality of education as non-disabled students, and ensuring disciplinary protections for disabled students. Among other requests, the court was asked to require the LDE to implement broader outreach efforts to identify students with disabilities and to educate the students and their parents about their rights under the law.

The decision to let the case go forward "represents a critical victory for these families, who have been tireless advocates for their children," said Brenda Shum, senior counsel for the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who also argued the motion. "These families give a face and voice to the unintended but devastating consequences of the state's abdication of their responsibility to ensure that students with disabilities have access to equal and meaningful educational opportunities in New Orleans."

The SPLC's co-counsels in the case are the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the law firm of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, the Community Justice section of the Loyola Law Clinic in New Orleans and the Southern Disability Law Center.

Curiouser and Curiouser ... RPS Violates Open Meeting Law Openly

2011-04-11T15:41:00.033-04:00

Since I had to be in Richmond City Hall last Monday to pay our real estate taxes, I dropped by the School Board meeting on the 17th-floor to witness some of our tax dollars in action. As I sat there at a "school board work session," I understood how poor Alice must have felt when she fell down the Rabbit-hole and kerplopped smack-dab into the middle of the Mad Hatter's Tea Party.

Although the meeting started at 4 p.m.-- a time when most people are either still at work or chauffering children about -- it seemed for one brief shining moment that the Board chair, Kimberly Bridges might have the good sense and business etiquette to allow Internal Auditor Debora R. Johns to present the "Audit Report and Review of the Capital Improvement Process" without interruption, prior to answering questions from board members.

But once Bridges (despite having just asked that board members save their questions for the end) interrupted Johns to ask her own question, the meeting soon degenerated into a free-for-all of nonsensical disorder, replete with the chair, board members and even the Superintendent all talking at the same time and doing their utmost to prevent board member, Kim B. Gray (2nd District), from managing to ask any coherent questions, much less get any honest answers.

Gray was clearly in no mood to play. She has relentlessly tried for the past year to get her colleagues and RPS Superintendent Yvonne Brandon to adhere to School Board Policy 3-3.4:

"Capital expenditure contracts shall be approved by the School Board. The division Superintendent or his/her designee shall execute such contracts upon School Board approval."

More's the pity then that Gray's colleagues and Brandon were so emotionally invested in venting their anger and frustration with Gray for standing her ground that they apparently preferred to interrupt (repeatedly) and speak to her in those twitchy, frosty tones women use when speaking with disobedient children and recalcitrant males.

Rather than simply pause a moment and ask Internal Auditor Johns why it was her professional opinion to recommend that the School Board comply with School Board Policy 3-3.4 or, much less, deign to discuss any of the other significant findings and recommendations of the audit, Bridges and her clique did their best to personalize their dispute and distract Gray from the matter at hand.

At first, several board members, including chairman Bridges, claimed the policy had been changed. But, when Gray challenged the chair and the Superintendent to produce the documentation and approvals required for such a policy change, Bridges demurred and said the board had decided by "consensus" to change the policy. Brandon then chimed in and said the matter had been discussed in closed session and that the board not only changed the policy "by consensus," but assured her that she didn't need to honor the board's policy.

Reminiscent of the "Mad Hatter," Bridges nodded her head and said, "Right."

Brandon, sounding very much like the "Queen of Hearts," and using similar logic, intoned: "There was no attempt to blatantly not follow the policy."

Exasperated, Gray sharply responded: "If there was a consensus, there should have been a vote."

P. Andy Hawkins, RPS Chief of Finance and Operations spoke up and tried to help matters by explaining that to bring the contracts forward for board approval would be very "inconvenient" for the administration. Apparently the administration experiences no such "inconvenience" when it comes to spending more than a quarter billion dollars a year. Hawkins assured the board that he was working with the plant services and facilities management on major reorganization efforts. Plant Services director Andrew Davis simply shrugged his shoulders and said he was "not aware" that the policy existed at all.

The solution 5th District Board member Maurice Henderson proffered for this problem was simple: "We just need to change the policy" so that it is consistent with the current practice of having the superintendent present a list once a month saying what contracts had been signed.

Gray's response was more weary here than critical as she attempted to explain that changing the policy would be essentially to "lower the bar of expectations and [it] would ignore the fact that School Board policy had been violated." Still, Board members Adria Graham Scott and Chandrah Smith agreed with Henderson. "What we've been doing is successful," noted Scott.

"How do we know what other policies and laws are being violated?" Gray asked. "Do we get to pick the laws we like and ignore the ones we don't?"

At this point (and I swear I am not making this up) board members Chandra Smith (6th District) and Dawn Page (8th District) actually took turns loudly accusing Gray of "being disrespectful" to the Superintendent.

Gray immediately rebuked them. "This board and superintendent are being disrespectful to the children, families, teachers and taxpayers of the City of Richmond." She added that the board's failure to hold the superintendent accountable was "a dereliction of duty and oaths of office."

After the work session recessed and the board reconvened in City Council Chambers, Gray asked for more information about Superintendent Yvonne Brandon’s earlier reference to a closed meeting that took place months earlier. According to Brandon, it was during that meeting that the School Board allegedly allowed her to sidestep the rules that require the school board to vote on all capital improvement contracts.

As Gray asked for clarity, Bridges was quick to try to shut down the question: “I’m being advised that we’re not to discuss a closed session meeting.”

Never mind that it’d already been discussed -- by the superintendent no less -- in open session in front of an array of reporters and bloggers.

Gray’s rejoinder was quick and directed to the School Board's lawyer, Nicole Thompson, from the law firm of Harrell & Chambliss: “Are policy discussions allowed in closed session?”

The meaning of the question was clear. If the board had made the change that Brandon claimed -- and that Bridges had affirmed -- then they may have violated the state’s open meeting laws. It seemed a perfect time for the Harrell Chambliss attorney to hop in and sort things out. And, she seemed to start out on fairly firm footing:

“If it has to do with one of the aspects that are allowed in closed session,” she said.

Gray wasn't letting it go: “What exemption would this policy... fall under?”

At this point, Thompson floundered: “If it has to do with legal, it could have to do with that. … it would depend on whatever contract you are speaking of. Depending on what the contract is, it can be discussed in closed. In general, if something is discussed in closed, it is supposed to stay in closed.”

Too bad the matter discussed in closed session did not have a thing to do with any specific contract, but rather with general policy.

By the end of the evening, I wanted to get my money back. Seriously.

FOR MORE News:
Check out Chris Dovi's stories on the blog at Richmond Magazine:

Next UP:
How much does Richmond Public Schools pay out to lawyers?

Leave No Child Behind

2011-04-08T03:31:00.000-04:00

By Marian Wright Edelman

The federal government should be the engine of equality, not the locomotive of inequality. With the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Congress has the opportunity to fundamentally transform American education and set it on the path towards equality and excellence for all children.

When ESEA was last reauthorized by Congress in 2002 with overwhelming bipartisan support, the Bush administration called the new law the "No Child Left Behind Act" (NCLB)—a play on the Children Defense Fund's trademarked mission statement to "Leave No Child Behind."

To many, the rhetoric of the new law's title promised to match the reality: it aimed at measuring the progress of every child, in every school, every year; data would be broken down to identify racial/ethnic and socioeconomic achievement gaps. Schools, districts, and states would document and track the academic performance of all groups of students including students with disabilities who were not counted at all for so long. Every child was to be held to high standards and supported. Surely, no child would be left behind.

But it soon became clear that NCLB's titular promise was merely a rhetorical fig leaf covering up new ways for our nation's schools to leave millions of children behind. NCLB's narrow focus on "high stakes" testing and its overreliance on sanctions that punish struggling schools encouraged states to lower standards, districts to narrow the curriculum, schools to push at-risk children out of school by suspending or expelling them prior to test day, and teachers to teach to the test. No child -- regardless of background -- benefits from mindless test preparation day in and day out at the hands of often overwhelmed, underprepared, and poorly supported teachers.

Under NCLB, most children in America have been left behind.
U.S. students, who once led the world in academic achievement, are behind their counterparts in other countries, performing in the "average" or "below average" range on the most recent (2010) Programme for International Student Achievement (PISA ). The latest National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results are equally discouraging: more than 60 percent of students in grades four, eight, and 12 are unable to perform at grade level. More than 25 percent of all high school students drop out or do not graduate on time. For minority students the results are far worse: 80 percent in grades four, eight, and 12 cannot perform at grade level, and more than 40 percent later drop out or do not graduate on time. Many students who do graduate lack the skills necessary for college or entry-level jobs in civilian and military life.

Our country is falling behind in the globalized, competitive economy as well. Citing our comparatively poor graduation rates and weak academic performance, Stanford Professor Linda Darling-Hammond predicts that America's workforce will not qualify for many U.S. jobs in the very near future. In The Flat World of Education (2010), she writes: "If these trends continue, by 2012, America will have 7 million jobs in science and technology fields, 'green' industries, and other fields that cannot be filled by U.S. workers who have been adequately educated for them."

If NCLB is not changed and changed soon, the outlook for America and America's children is grim indeed.

Fortunately, we do not need to "wait for Superman" to turn American education around and provide all America's children a high quality education. The 112th Congress can and must save the day by enacting a bipartisan reauthorized ESEA that strengthens the law's focus on accountability and does away with its disabling sanctions, replacing them with incentives for states and districts to dramatically improve student learning.

The administration's Blueprint for Education Reform provides a framework for a reauthorized ESEA that does just that, and the Children's Defense Fund urges Congress to use the Blueprint as a starting point.

To ensure that the new law truly leaves no child behind, Congress will need to go beyond the Blueprint and include provisions for education excellence for our most vulnerable children: children in concentrated poverty, children in need of full-day kindergarten, children at risk of dropping out or being pushed out of school, children in juvenile detention, and children in foster care. These children are most at risk of dropping out of school and into the cradle-to-prison pipeline which leads to dead-end lives, costing their families and communities heartache and costing the nation billions of dollars.

NCLB was enacted with overwhelming support, and its framers dreamed of a law that would give every child an even start with a good education as a foundation. But the law's unintended consequences have undermined our children's learning and America's standing in the world. Now, in 2011, it is time to turn American education around and make the dream a reality. Join us in urging Congress to act now to reauthorize ESEA in a way that truly leaves no child in America behind.

"About Damn Time" for Long Overdue Middle School Reform

2011-02-13T12:34:00.002-05:00

Richmond Public School Superintendent Yvonne Brandon recently proclaimed in her "State-of-the-Schools" speech, that RPS would be focusing on middle school reform. As one long-time RPS parent succinctly noted: "About Damn Time."

Two years ago, I published the following column in the Richmond Times-Dispatch that welcomed her on board and suggested that she show some leadership by focusing the district on middle school reform.

Check it out and be sure and let Dr. Brandon and Mayor Dwight Jones know that there is more to middle school reform than simply building new schools. Reform of the rigor and content of curriculum choices for our middle schools is critical to any true improvements that will create real choices for Richmond families.

And, please let them know there is more to building new schools than simply bricks and mortar. Scott Burger reminds me that during the last campaign season, the Sierra Club Falls of the James group cosponsored a candidates forum with the Crusade for Voters. That night, every single School Board candidate promised to support more green building and energy conservation for schools. "We need to make sure we hold them to that," he says. "Don't get me wrong. The designers for the four new City schools are doing green things with the buildings, but we need to make sure officials know we expect even more."

According to the Church Hill People's News, The City of Richmond’s Office of Special Capital Projects, along with Richmond Public Schools, will host a community meeting to provide updates and gather additional input on the construction of the new Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School on February 16, 2011 at MLK from 6-8 p.m. If you cannot attend the meeting, please send your comments to me at this blog and I will make sure they reach the proper people.

Unless we want to end up with school buildings that use four to five times the amount of energy as the old buildings, it is critical that citizens weigh in on this issue. To see an example of what is possible, click here.
*******

Here's a To-Do List for Superintendent

By CAROL WOLF TIMES-DISPATCH COLUMNIST

Published: February 17, 2009

John Simpson, the award-winning former Norfolk Public Schools superintendent and national expert on urban education, didn't pull any punches when he interviewed Richmond School Board members during the search for a new superintendent:

"Why would anyone want to live in Richmond and be superintendent of Richmond Public Schools?" asked Simpson, one of the consultants hired.

"First, sell the city, and then sell the challenge," I answered. "As in, Richmond really is a beautiful and exciting place to live. But, the most exciting thing that needs to happen is that we need to get our schools right.

"The next person who becomes superintendent of Richmond Schools better be ready to go for the glory and honor, ready to be the one who has the right combination of knowledge, power, and grace to make real the promises that have defeated other superintendents, our city, and our region for the past 50 years."

Considering Simpson's reputation, I posed another question.

"So," I asked with a wink and a smile: "Do you think you're ready?"

"Tempting," he answered, "very tempting . . . but, I'm retired. However, I promise this: I know what you need and we'll find the right person."

Despite concerns about the lack of transparency in the Richmond School Board's hiring of Yvonne Brandon as superintendent, I believe Simpson delivered.

Six years of observing Brandon work convinced me that she has the brains and backbone to go for the glory and honor of successfully serving our children and our city. A 32-year career educator relentless in her drive to give children and teachers the means necessary to improve RPS' Standards of Learning scores, she knows scores alone will not make a successful school district.

She knows multiple measures of success must be met: increased academic opportunities and enrollment, improved SAT scores and graduation rates, coupled with decreased suspension, drop-out, and truancy rates.
TO THOSE concerned she won't bring change to city schools because she's spent too long in a system oft-criticized for being about "whom you know" instead of "what you know," I simply ask she be given the chance to prove herself. To that end, I suggest a short list of priorities for the next 100 days:

Work with Mayor Jones, the City Council, and residents to achieve serious middle school reform. The closing of Chandler Middle School for failure to become accredited presents a perfect opportunity to expand middle school choices and simultaneously make significant progress to ensure our schools comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

If Richmond Community High School were to relocate to the Chandler building, RPS could easily add a middle school component to Community's curriculum and provide an additional rich and rigorous middle school choice for Richmond families.

Another easily attainable reform would be to add a middle school component to Franklin Military Academy. If the concept works for Benedictine High School, why shouldn't public school parents have that choice? Franklin (and its expanded middle school) could even be moved to the Chandler building and Community relocated to Franklin's current location. Franklin is fully ADA-compliant and Chandler is nearly so. Still, each building must be upgraded to provide state-of-the-art technology for 21st-century learning opportunities. Similarly, Henderson Middle School is nearly compliant. Were Brandon to accept City Councilman Chris Hilbert's offer to find money for a middle-years International Baccalaureate (I.B.) program at Henderson, we would have yet another choice middle school.

Both Henderson and Martin Luther King Jr. Middle Schools are accredited and have successfully used single-gender classes to improve academic performance. It would be unfair to both just to relocate Chandler's children without similarly upgrading each building and curriculum choices.

Either close the Community High building for possible sale by the city -- or hold on to the property and renovate it using historic tax credits, much like tax credits were used to renovate the old Maggie Walker High School and transform it into a regional governor's school.

A regional state-of-the-art middle school could then be housed in the Community High building. Partnership possibilities abound with its proximity to the University of Richmond. Similarly, Binford Middle in the Fan and Open High in Oregon Hill each could be renovated and reopened with an emphasis on the creative arts, enhanced by each school's partnership possibilities with nearby Virginia Commonwealth University's outstanding arts and dance schools. The Maggie Walker Governor's School is proof of many things, but most relevant here is that it's possible to successfully renovate our schools by leveraging state and federal historic tax credits. It is further proof that if we offer a rich and diverse curriculum, we'll attract students from various private and surrounding county schools.

NET RESULT: five additional middle school choices for Richmond families. Community and Open, consistently ranked among America's best high schools by U.S. News & World Report, receive rehabilitated buildings and parents receive additional middle-school options for their children. Franklin begins a middle-school program. Henderson receives a long-awaited I.B. program.

How will we afford it? The national economic crisis makes the idea of dropping anywhere from $12,000 to $17,000 per year for private or parochial school impossible for many families. By providing additional options, we can achieve economic diversity and avoid creating mega-middle schools warehousing far too many children who live at or below the poverty line.

So, Superintendent Brandon, I hope you're ready -- because never before have so many been so ready and willing to be a part of the solution.

Carol A.O. Wolf served six years (2002 to 2008) on the Richmond School Board representing the city's 3rd District. She can be reached at Wolfies@aol.com.

Slow Learners? Mayoral Takeover of RPS School Board a Done Deal?

2011-02-08T14:48:00.003-05:00

When will U.S. District Court Judge Henry Hudson and U.S. District Court Magistrate Judge M. Hannah Lauck decide they have heard just about enough excuses and double-talk from the Richmond Public School (RPS) Board and RPS Superintendent about the district's slow crawl to compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act?

Perhaps the news RPS administrators simply "decided" to terminate its contract with the construction management firm overseeing the work to bring city schools into compliance with the settlement agreement will prompt Judge Hudson and Magistrate Lauck to demand some straight answers and action from the Richmond School Board.

How is it that RPS administration has the authority to terminate the contract without a vote of the School Board when the decision to hire McDonough Bolyard and Peck required both legal consultation and an official board vote?

Given that monthly meetings between plaintiffs, RPS officials and U. S. District Court Magistrate Judge Lauck have emphasized a cooperative and communicative approach to getting the work accomplished, how is it that the decision to terminate the contract was made without any consultation with plaintiffs or Magistrate Judge Lauck?

Given that no request for proposals (RFP) has been posted, how will the extensive work planned for the next year be accomplished without MBP or another entity in place?

When the Consent Decree in the ADA matter was entered, it was conditioned upon money being available to cover the construction costs. Since then, the City of Richmond has announced plans to spend more than $100 million building new schools and Mayor Dwight Jones has announced that 40 percent of that money will go to minority contractors.

City official, Tammy Hawley, tells Chris Dovi of Richmond Magazine that the Mayor's office is prepared to takeover the oversight of the construction to satisfy the settlement agreement. Yet, the Mayor's budget only proposes $3.1 million in the next budget cycle for ADA compliance.

The School Board has -- thus far -- exercised no decision concerning the Mayor's plan to build new schools. How is their silence on this matter not a derelection of a Constitutionally-vested authority of the School Board that the members of the board have authority over the building and management of the school facilities?

Is this a Mayoral takeover of Richmond Public Schools or is it simply a "rollover" of the School Board and evidence that the members of the Richmond School Board have failed to fulfill their sworn duties?

Let Us Now Praise (not-so) Famous Men and Women ...

2011-01-26T12:09:00.982-05:00

Our friend and colleague, John Butcher, is featured in Style Weekly's cover story this week about "The Instigators."  The article, conceived and written by Style's Arts and Culture Editor Don Harrison and Style newcomer, Vernal Coleman, features mini-profiles of several Richmonders who work to hold officials accountable -- C. Wayne Taylor, Rick Tatnall, Mo Karn and the Wingnuts and, of course, the inimitable Mr. Butcher.

This is a "Style Power List" that deserves to be expanded and repeated. The entire Style staff, and especially photographer Scott Elmquist, deserve praise for the project that explores how individuals can and do make a difference in our community. And, of course, Harrison's work as co-editor and author of the award-winning "Save Richmond" blog, is inspiration and proof to all that it is possible to fight City Hall and the power brokers in this town who would like us all to believe that we are powerless.

More's the pity, however, that there wasn't sufficient space to include details about the accomplishments these "Instigators," a motley crew for sure, have had in their quest to shed light on the ways Richmond officials do business and spend our taxpayer dollars. I know some of Butcher's accomplishments and would like to know more about the accomplishments of others featured in the article.

Among the most charming and disarming characteristics of "the cranky" Mr. Butcher -- a former chemistry professor at Hampden-Sydney and a University of Virginia Law School-trained litigator -- are his sense of the sublime and his stone-serious intellect. He is a no-nonsense fellow when it comes to defining a problem and determining the most effective way to solve it. Add to that, his encyclopedic knowledge of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and his dispassionate ability to wield it as a sword hacking away at the bureaucratic obfuscation designed to keep the curious at bay.

Butcher's track record is not simply a saga of "Sound and Fury," but a tale of action and accomplishment. Were it not for his encouragement and expertise, we would have never been able to blow the whistle on the unscrupulous way that the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) was allowing school superintendents across the Commonwealth to jack up their SOL scores by misidentifying students as having disabilities.  We posted the results of our investigation on our respective blogs, The Cranky Taxpayer and Save Our Schools, published a two-part series on the Bacon's Rebellion online journal and sent our data and research to reporters at Style Weekly, The Washington Post, The Virginian Pilot and The Richmond Times-Dispatch.

We sent the same information to every member of the General Assembly and to the Virginia Secretary of Education, Gerard Robinson. Despite Richmond’s improved, but still low scores for all pupils, we found the system’s children with disabilities scored higher than the state average for kids with disabilities. Yet come graduation, only 32 percent of Richmond’s students with disabilities graduate. We showed how Richmond had classified 28 percent of its black male pupils as disabled.

And, our efforts helped change the law. Richmond citizens Arthur Burton and John Lloyd took our information to Delegate John O'Bannon III, (R-73rd District) a physician specializing in neurology. O'Bannon shared their concerns about the blatant abuse of the system and patroned House Bill 304 during the last legislative session. Despite Virginia Department of Education efforts to block it, the bill sailed through the General Assembly. The bill unanimously passed by both the House and Senate was signed into law by Gov. Bob McDonnell.

Legislators and even some officials at VDOE acknowledged privately that HB304 was the direct result of the investigative work Butcher and I did and of our efforts to publicize the problem.  Several legislators also said our evidence was so overwhelming it convinced them that elementary and middle schools in Richmond, and across Virginia, were essentially cheating by using the Virginia Grade Level Assessment (VGLA) to inflate pass rates.

When VDOE realized HB304 would pass and that it would include language directing VDOE to eliminate the VGLA, State Supt. Patricia Wright finally took action and announced that VDOE would be phasing the VGLA out.  She acknowledged that one unintended consequence of the high-stakes testing was that many school divisions dramatically increased their use of the VGLA. An analysis by the Virginian Pilot found that "nearly 23 percent of eligible students in Portsmouth taking the alternative and just over 12 percent of eligible students in Chesapeake taking it. Statewide, about 11 percent of eligible students take the VGLA." Whereas, when Butcher crunched the numbers, he found that in Richmond 76 percent of the eligible students at Bellevue Elementary used the VGLA for math and 75 percent of Overby-Sheppard's eligible students used the VGLA for reading assessments. To see the complete Richmond listings, scroll down the far right hand column on this page. The data for the charts was provided by Charles Pyle at the VDOE.

We have already seen that requiring the Buchanan school system to stop cheating on the VGLA has produced dramatic drops in their SOL scores. We can look forward to the same thing in Richmond and the other cheating jurisdictions as the scrutiny cuts their cheating.

Click on the links below to read about other matters we've researched:

Richmond now admits it was cheating on the VGLA;
John blows the whistle on VCU's coverup of the VGLA scoring;
We reveal that VDOE turns a blind eye to the ethically challenged practice of allowing various school superintendents to report the SOL scores from the regional Maggie Walker and Appomattox Governor's School at the wrong schools in order to boost SOL Scores. Again, we sent our information to bloggers, reporters, parents, politicians and concerned citizens.
Sadly, the deceptive practice continues. Dr. Bob Holsworth* on his Virginia Tomorrow blog posted an article, "Free Maggie Walker," that decried VDOE's condonation of the practice. Holsworth noted a Richmond Times-Dispatch story by reporter Holly Prestidge, but kindly acknowledged the research John Butcher and I published on our respective blogs months prior. Kiel Stone, who edits the Bacon's Rebellion blog and Valerie Catrow at RVANews.com each deserve shout outs for bringing this issue into the open. Even the folks on the Richmond Times Dispatch Editorial Page agreed with us that Maggie Walker deserves better!
Incredibly, Richmond continues to lament its lack of money while it simultaneously continues to squander money despite repeated audits in 2007 , 2008 , 2009 from Umesh Dalal, City of Richmond Internal Auditor and Inspector general reports that conclusively show RPS spends money like a drunken sailor on leave while demonstrating little to no familiarity with the requirements of the Virginia Public Procurement Act (VPPA).
Butcher's analytical abilities and knowledge of the VPPA have proven to be valuable assets, both during the six years I served on the board [2002-2008] and since. As the sole member and chair of a subcommittee tasked to find money to bring our city schools into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), we closely followed the RPS (mis)managed money trail. After Zachary Reid at the Richmond Times Dispatch reported problems with the procurement process to design and build elevators in two Richmond schools, I asked for Butcher's take on the issue. Armed with data and legal analysis he provided, I then asked RPS administration to investigate whether the district had violated the Virginia Public Procurement Act (VPPA).
Their response was to have the RPS internal auditor do a sloppy audit of the Fox elevator procurement. When that audit didn't pass the smell-test, RPS then took even sloppier unlawful second try to get it right. Disappointed and dismayed, I pushed Supt. Yvonne Brandon and the School Board attorney to ask for Commonwealth Attorney Michael Herring's opinion.
After Herring read Butcher's analysis, he determined the matter merited review. His comment at the time was priceless: "[The goal is to] "determine if a person was intentionally trying to circumvent the statutes and was hoping to enjoy some pecuniary gain, or whether it was just a case of laziness and stupidity," Herring said. "If you've read the audit, you know it's clearly one or the other." Herring ultimately determined that the procurement problems happened NOT for pecuniary gain or to circumvent the law. Therefore ....
John won his Freedom of Information Act Suit against RPS, but Richmond Circuit Court Judge Melvin Hughes was so dismayed and disgusted by RPS' efforts to withhold documents that he ruled in favor of John and in favor also "permanently enjoined" RPS to comply with the Virginia Freedom of Information Act ("FOIA") in its responses to any future requests from plaintiff for public records."
VDOE admits that Richmond has been encouraging cheating by the Teachers.
And, there is so much more to tell. Click here to visit CrankyTaxpayer.org and see for yourself.

To those who seek to disparage our work and wonder what our "agenda" really is when we write about VDOE and the problems of public education in Richmond, the answer is simple: We live here. As long as Richmond's schools fail to use our considerable tax dollars to provide educations that help ALL our children, our city and the entire region suffers. And, if the schools' problems are intentionally disguised and distorted by cheerleaders coached to sing "happy-songs" in unison, how can we honestly expect to fix the system?

No matter how daunting it can be to educate urban school children, poverty is not an acceptable excuse to absolve school administrators and elected officials at any level of not trying their best or of outright lying to the people who pay their salaries. Nor, is it acceptable to brand children with disabilities simply to improve a school system's pass rate. Such actions deprive school systems of the usefulness of true measures of performance and to skew the use of resources in public schools. Worst of all -- this hurts our children.

So, my heartfelt thanks to John Butcher for helping bring attention and needed change to the way public education is administered in Virginia. And, my thanks to the good people at Style Weekly who took the time to recognize him and other (not-so) famous men and women in our community.

Many thanks to Style Weekly for publishing this ...

2011-01-11T13:47:00.048-05:00

Overboard

Rather than criticize the School Board’s subservience to the administration, both a university report and the Times-Dispatch reinforce it.

by Carol A.O. Wolf

As one of nine members of the Richmond School Board, one faces a threshold choice. You can choose to be a cheerleader for the administration. Or you can actually do your job — look behind the administration’s news releases and public spin, demand information and ask difficult questions about performance and the use of public funds.

It’s so much more pleasant and less time-consuming to be a cheerleader. That’s why there are eight of them on this board.

The School Board’s repeated failure to carry out its statutory role of overseeing — not just cheering on — the administration, makes all the more disappointing a recent University of Virginia report on the board.

Portraying outspokenness as a lack of civility or team spirit, university researcher Ron Broadbent’s report goes out of its way to attack Kimberly B. Gray, the only board member who can be counted on to question the administration.

Other than Gray, no board member can be relied upon to speak honestly to the public about the strengths and shortcomings of the city school system, a system that costs taxpayers more than a quarter of a billion dollars a year while posting dismal SAT scores and failing to graduate a large percentage of its students.

In addressing alleged problems of process and improprieties of the board, the report totally misses the boat. Amazingly, both Broadbent and the Richmond Times-Dispatch story on his report failed to note the most egregious impropriety of all — Superintendent Yvonne Brandon asking Broadbent to put into writing a report critical of the board that is — by law — her boss. Thus, rather than criticize the School Board’s subservience to the administration, both the report and the Times-Dispatch story reinforce it. A missed opportunity.

Brandon had the report not only reduced to writing, but also boldly released to news media. She knew she openly could attack the one member who makes her life difficult because she effectively controls the board instead of the other way around.

School Board Chair Kimberly Bridges called the report a “net positive,” no doubt because she and the majority of her colleagues sustained little or no political damage in the news account of Brandon’s attack.

Too bad Broadbent failed to mention the overtly rude and verbally abusive behavior that Brandon and other members of the board repeatedly demonstrate toward Gray during School Board meetings.
For example, his notes on the Aug. 2 and Aug. 16 meeting criticize Gray for speaking “five different times regarding the [transportation] audit and four different times during the discussion on [a report regarding American with Disabilities Act compliance],” but fail to mention why Gray kept asking questions.

Broadbent neglects to mention in his report the nature of Gray’s questions and that the chairman and the members of the board constantly interrupt Gray. Observers at those meetings describe the manner in which the superintendent and board members ignored her questions as “appalling.”

Gray, in fact, was questioning how the superintendent could sign a construction contract to oversee the ADA improvements and pay by the hour as opposed to by particular projects without seeking board approval. Thus far, the Richmond schools have paid close to $1 million to the construction management company.

“She kept pushing to get her questions answered and they kept stonewalling her. I admire her tenacity,” recalls a resident in attendance at both meetings.

Examples abound of Gray’s efforts to bring greater accountability to the system: She opposed the clearly unconstitutional gag order that the board adopted soon after being seated, worked with parents at Fox and Carver elementary schools to craft a budget friendlier to teacher-pupil ratios than to protecting the bloated school administration, and regularly tries to focus the board’s attention on apparent waste of resources.
Gray’s is the only voice we heard asking the unpleasant questions about why sleeping children were left on school buses on days when Richmond’s temperatures hit triple digits, and why expensive computers that should have been in classrooms were left in a warehouse for months on end.

Evidently, she’s perhaps the only board member who actually reads the numerous audits and investigators’ reports and isn’t afraid to question the district’s repeated procurement violations, financial mismanagement and abuse of authority — including the wasted time, shoddy workmanship and millions of dollars of excessive construction costs involved in the schools’ slow crawl to satisfy the terms of a U.S. District Court decree on compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Altria, the company which paid for the report, has paid dearly since 2003 for School Board members and administrators to receive valuable training through the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and the Curry School of Education Partnership for Leaders in Education. One cannot help wondering what would happen if Michael E. Szymanczyk, chairman and chief executive of Altria, were to hire an outside entity to observe his company’s board of directors and then request that a critical report be written about the one director who questioned his judgment and job performance and then release it to reporters.

Instead of letting themselves be used to stifle dissent on the School Board, the good people at U.Va. and Altria could have pointed out that dissent is as American as the Fourth of July and as elemental to the health of public education as the air we breathe. Polite silence advances only the status quo, not improvement.

Any effort to bring substantive change to public education needs individuals willing to rock the boat, as well as those who can row the boat. Now that we know who rocks the boat on the School Board, perhaps someone can explain why those who are supposed to row the boat aren’t picking up their oars.

In Memoriam of the Arizona Shooting Victims January 8, 2011: Robert F. Kennedy on the "Mindless Menace of Violence."

2011-01-09T22:06:00.006-05:00

(hat-tip to Isaac Graves...)

Sit Down....sit down ... You're Rocking the Boat ....

2011-01-08T11:59:00.017-05:00

As a member of the City of Richmond School Board, one faces a threshold choice. You can choose to be a cheerleader for the Administration. Or you can actually do your job—look behind the Administration’s press releases and public spin, demand information, read relevant documents, and ask hard questions about performance and the use of public funds.

It’s so much more pleasant and less time-consuming to be a cheerleader. That’s why there are eight of them on the Board.

The repeated failure of the Board to carry out its statutory role of overseeing—not just cheering on—the Administration, makes all the more disappointing the recent Richmond Times Dispatch story about a University of Virginia report on the Richmond School Board.

Portraying outspokenness as a lack of civility or team spirit, U.Va. researcher Ron Broadbent's report goes out of its way to attack Kimberly B. Gray, the only Board member who can be counted on to question the Administration.

Other than Gray, no Board member can be relied upon to speak honestly to the public about the strengths and shortcomings of the city school system, a system that costs taxpayers more than a quarter billion dollars a year while posting dismal SAT scores and failing to graduate a large percentage of its students. For more RPS statistics, click here.

In addressing alleged problems of process and improprieties of the Board, the report totally misses the boat. Amazingly, both the RTD reporter and Broadbent failed to note the most egregious impropriety of all–-the Superintendent’s asking Broadbent to put into writing a report critical of the board that is--by law--her boss. Thus, rather than criticize the Board’s subservience to the Administration, both the report and the RTD story reinforce it. A missed opportunity.

Brandon not only had the report reduced to writing, but she boldly released it to the press. She knew she could openly attack the one member who makes her life difficult, because she effectively controls the Board instead of the other way around.

School Board Chair Kimberly Bridges called the report a "net positive," no doubt because she and the majority of her colleagues sustained little or no political damage in the news account of Brandon's attack.

Too bad the RTD didn't question why Broadbent failed to mention the overtly rude and verbally abusive behavior that Brandon and other members of the board repeatedly demonstrate towards Gray during School Board meetings.

Broadbent's notes on the August 2 and August 16, 2010 meeting criticize Gray for speaking “five different times regarding the audit and four times during the discussion of the A.D.A. report,” but fail to mention that the Chairman and the members of the board constantly interrupt her. Observers at those meetings describe the manner in which the superintendent and board members ignored her questions as "appalling."

"She was questioning how it could be that the Supt. could sign a contract with a construction management firm to oversee the ADA improvements by the HOUR as opposed to by particuar projects, without seeking board approval." RPS has paid close to a million dollars to the company.

"She kept pushing to get her questions answered and the chairman and other members of the board never, ever answered her."

Would that Broadbent -- in the spirit of accuracy and fairness -- have noted what it is that causes Gray to dissent from the group-think of her colleagues and RPS administrators. A few examples would have sufficed--she opposed the clearly unconstitutional gag order that the board adopted soon after being seated, worked with parents at Fox and Carver Elementary Schools to craft a budget friendlier to teacher-pupil ratios than to protecting the bloated RPS administration, and regularly tries to focus the board’s attention on apparent waste of resources.

Gray's is the only voice we heard asking the unpleasant questions about why sleeping children were left on school buses on days when Richmond's temperatures hit triple digits and why expensive computers that should have been in classrooms were left in a warehouse for months on end.

Evidently, she is the only Board member who actually reads the numerous audits and investigator general reports and isn't afraid to question the district's repeated procurement violations, financial mismanagement, and abuse of authority, including the wasted time, shoddy workmanship and millions of dollars of excessive construction costs involved in RPS’s slow crawl to satisfy the terms of a U.S. District Court Consent Decree on compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Altria, the funder of the report, has paid dearly since 2003 for RPS Board members and administrators to receive valuable training through U.Va.'s Darden School of Business and the Curry School of Education Partnership for Leaders in Education. Yet one cannot help wondering what would happen if Michael E. Szymanczyk, the chairman and CEO of Altria, were to hire an outside entity to observe the behavior of his company's Board of Directors and then request that a critical report be written about the one director who questioned his judgment and job performance. Now, imagine what would happen if Szymanczyk were to release that report to the media.

Would that, instead of letting themselves be used to stifle dissent on the Richmond School Board, the good people at U.Va. and the Altria Board of Directors had pointed out that dissent is as American as the Fourth of July and as elemental to the health of public education as the air we breathe. Polite silence advances only the status quo, not improvement.

Any effort to bring substantive change to public education needs individuals willing to rock the boat, as well as those who can row the boat. Now that we know who rocks the boat at RPS, perhaps someone can explain why those who are supposed to row the boat aren't picking up their oars.

New Lies about Old Lies: Why Does RPS Keep Making Stuff Up?

2010-11-03T21:46:00.306-04:00

On the heels of the recent revelations about computers sitting idle in boxes at a warehouse come now new lies about old lies submitted by Richmond Public School (RPS) officials to the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) that falsely claim International Baccalaureate (I.B.) programs in four middle schools and George Wythe High School. The board's normally lackadaisical response to this and to other issues make it abundantly clear that RPS School Board members do not understand what "responsibility," "authority," "accountability" and "condonation" mean, much less the difference between the words and why that difference matters.

Therefore, let's start with the basics.

Responsibility relates to one’s duty or mission. It is an obligation to answer for actions, to ensure that a task is accomplished. A “responsible” individual is one who gets the job done.
Authority is the power that is vested in an individual or organization to accomplish a given task or responsibility. It is the ability to act that exerts the necessary control or influence to make things happen.
Accountability is being liable for an outcome. It is not just about whether the job gets done, but also how it gets done.
Condonation is the act of condoning, especially the implied forgiveness of an offense by ignoring it.

After I received the Oct. 27, 2010 letter from the Clerk of the Richmond School Board informing me that the statements submitted by RPS to VDOE concerning the (alleged) existence of International Baccalaureate programs at George Wythe High School and Binford, Boushall, Elkhardt and Hill Middle Schools were erroneous and assuring me that the false claims had been corrected on the VDOE website, I checked.

No corrections had been made. I even asked my friend John Butcher to check -- just in case my eyes or my computer were somehow failing me. He confirmed that, indeed, no corrections had been made.

I next sent a note to VDOE spokesman Charles Pyle to see if RPS had sent a letter to VDOE admitting to the errors and requesting permission to correct them. I was attempting to give RPS the benefit of the doubt and seriously thought that VDOE mayhaps had received a letter and not yet made the corrections. After Pyle checked, he sent the following response:

"According to our Office of Information Management, Richmond Public Schools has not asked for permission to submit data corrections that would impact school-level program information displayed on the school report cards."

This is not the first time RPS has submitted false data to VDOE and lied about correcting it. In 2008, RPS was caught spinning its suspension and expulsion disciplinary data to the State Board of Education for five years. The school administration submitted data claiming just one expulsion from 2004 through 2009.

An expulsion, defined as banning a student from city schools for a 180-day school year, is not the same as a suspension. For example, in the 2007-2008 school year RPS reported 13,500 suspensions in a district of fewer than 24,000 pupils. RPS suspensions and expulsions during that time exceeded by 10,000 the number of suspensions and expulsions in the Washington, D.C. public schools, which had roughly 46,000 students — nearly twice Richmond’s enrollment.

In an amazing display of spin and denial of fact, RPS school officials refused to acknowledge any error occurred: They blamed the problem on a computer glitch.

"Technically, we didn’t report incorrect data,” Richmond Schools spokesman Alfonso Mathis wrote in an e-mail to Chris Dovi at Style Weekly, saying problems with an “internal [computer] system” meant “some of our information was being lost in the transition.”

The revised numbers show dozens of pupils expelled during each of those years, a total of 190 expulsions from 2004 through 2009. “Since our initial reporting to the State,” Mathis [wrote]: “This situation has been rectified.” (It had been not been at the time).

Both the current superintendent, Yvonne Brandon, and former superintendent, Deborah Jewell-Sherman, signed off on all information and data sent to the state. Failing to supply accurate data exposes superintendents to a variety of penalties, ranging from fines to suspension or removal from their jobs. That is, if the School Board would choose to exercise its statutory authority to hold Superintendent Yvonne Brandon responsible and accountable. Since the School Board and administration have been aware of the existence of the false information since August, their inaction on this is tantamount to condonation and perhaps could even be seen as an admission of complicity.

But, all this begs the questions of why RPS administrators would fail to submit accurate information and data in the first place and why in the world the members of School Board would repeatedly allow the administration to outright lie about a) the existence of the I.B. programs and b) not simply correct the information?

Vocabulary words for tomorrow: misfeasance and malfeasance. Board members are encouraged to look up the definitions.

I.B. or Not I.B., that is the Question ... More Lies from RPS

2010-11-02T09:44:00.165-04:00

Would that it were true that the City of Richmond Public School system has International Baccalaureate programs in five middle schools and two high schools, it would be cause for great celebration that RPS administrators and School Board members have heard the thousands of elementary school parents living in the City of Richmond who desperately want and need better middle school choices for their children.

But, it isn't even remotely true. RPS has only one small I.B. middle school program (Lucille Brown Middle School) and only one small high school program (Thomas Jefferson High School). Despite my collaborative efforts with City Councilman Chris Hilbert (and his success in providing funds to RPS) to begin to grow a middle school I.B. program at Henderson Middle School, no I.B. program is mentioned on the Virginia Department of Education website.

Worse, officials at RPS and VDOE are well aware that the information posted on VDOE's website that claims Binford, Hill, Elkhardt and Boushall Middle Schools and George Wythe High School have I.B. programs is absolutely false.

Worse still, RPS and VDOE officials have known since August that the information posted on VDOE's website is false.

Worst of all, in a letter dated October 27, 2010, RPS School Board Clerk, Angela C. Lewis, admits that "Binford, Albert Hill, Elkhardt, Boushall and George Wythe should not have been listed as having IB programs on the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) website" and further claims that "It has been corrected on the VDOE Web site."

As of November 1, 2010, the false information remains on VDOE's website. My friend John Butcher kindly made copies of the pages so you can see for yourself, just click here for George Wythe, Binford, Albert Hill, Boushall and Elkhardt Middle Schools.

Pity poor Mrs. Lewis. She cannot help it if RPS administrators and School Board members lie to her. It is her misfortune that her job is simply to do and say what she is told. Even when she is forced to lie.

Did You Know We Are Living in Exponential Times?

2010-10-15T16:33:00.000-04:00

Did You Know? from Amybeth on Vimeo.

Dubious Distinction Award Goes to City of Richmond Public Schools!

2010-10-06T08:27:00.018-04:00

The City of Richmond Public Schools system is now Number # 1 for percentage of VGLA assessments per ADM! Buchanan County, which led the list last year, is at 3.6%, just above the state average, this year. What happened, of course, is that they got caught cheating.

Unfortunately, the Buchanan Superintendent who admitted he had "encouraged the use of VGLA as a mechanism to assist schools in obtaining accreditation and in meeting AYP targets" still has his picture on the Buchanan County Schools Web page and, presumably, still has his job. But then, you already knew how feckless and pusillanimous VDOE is.

These data also let us measure the effect of the Buchanan (and, probably, Richmond next year) cheating: In English, the Buchanan score dropped four points from 2009 to 2010. The math score dropped six points. Indeed, if the the VGLA cheating had continued, we could expect the scores to have continued to rise, so the effect of the reduced VGLA participation probably is larger than the 4 and 6 points from that crude calculation. ~ Hat-tip to John Butcher for the graph and the analysis above.

Do the Math!

2010-10-01T15:24:00.006-04:00

Hat-tip to John Butcher for passing this along! ;)

Even If Your Mother Tells You She Loves You, Check it Out!

2010-10-01T10:35:00.012-04:00

The news that City of Richmond's public schools are (finally!) accredited, as well as 98 percent of the public schools in Virginia, was certainly good news, but it was also cause for serious pause.

Rest assured, I most certainly appreciate that Richmond Public School (RPS) Superintendent Yvonne W. Brandon spoke for many when she told The Richmond Times-Dispatch: "Our kids will reach a level of recognition, like no other year before, that they can stand proud, shoulder to shoulder with any child in the state of Virginia and proclaim that we can do it ...That means a lot to me."

But, what it means isn't exactly clear. So, for the sake of all the kids who desperately need public school systems in Richmond and across the Commonwealth to deliver on the promise of providing a quality education for all children, it is critical that we determine what this news really means (and does not mean).

Significantly -- and woefully -- missing from both VDOE's and RPS' recent announcements of their respective milestones was any mention of House Bill 304, a bill patroned by Del. John O'Bannon III (R) during the last General Assembly session and signed into law by Gov. Bob McDonnell. HB304 was the direct result of an investigation John Butcher and I did last year that revealed, among other things, that elementary and middle schools in Richmond, and across Virginia, were increasingly using the Virginia Grade Level Assessment (VGLA) to inflate pass rates.

Nearly all of Richmond's schools had participation rates significantly higher than the state's acceptable participation levels, despite being warned by VDOE that participation rates higher than 20 percent of the students with handicaps were of great concern. (Richmond citizens Arthur Burton and John Lloyd deserve credit not only for being outraged by what they read, but for taking their concerns to O'Bannon and asking for his help).

RPS is not only 100 percent accredited, but Richmond is now the Number One Division in Virginia for having the greatest number of Virginia Grade Level Alternative Assessments. Click here to see John Butcher's charts illustrating this. To read other data submitted to VDOE by Harley Tomey, director of Exceptional Education and Supt. Brandon, responsive to the state's concerns about about high number of VGLA use in Richmond revealed by the most recent SOL and VGLA scores reported to VDOE.

The VGLA is an alternative test designed for students with disabilities and used since 2004 that parents and teachers told us was easier to pass than the Standard of Learning exams and several causing some parents and teachers alike to worry that its overuse was tantamount to systemic cheating on the SOLs.

Ironically, State Supt. Patricia Wright and division superintendents across the Commonwealth have Brandon to thank for our investigation and the subsequent changes that go into effect this year which significantly change how the SOLs and alternative tests are administered.

Had Brandon taken the time to discuss our concerns and been able to offer a reasonable explanation for the inordinately high alternative testing numbers we found in Richmond prior to publishing our findings, we might have let the matter drop.

But, Brandon's refusal to discuss the matter only made us dig deeper. Click here to see "Beware Their Cheating Hearts," part one and part two that we published on Bacon's Rebellion online news site last October.

Our research helped generate stories in The Washington Post, The Virginian-Pilot, Style Weekly, RVANews and The Richmond Times Dispatch, all of which, in turn, helped convince the members of the General Assembly to pass HB 304 unanimously and begin to hold educators accountable.

We weren't the only ones asking questions. On February 19, 2010, two weeks after State Supt. Wright received a serious warning letter from Zollie Stephenson, Jr., director of student achievement and school accountability with the U.S. Department of Education, and after HB304 passed the House of Delegates, Wright became "concerned about the increase in the numbers of students with disabilities participating in VGLA" and issued a terse memo to all division superintendents informing them of the acceptable participation rates of students with disabilities and further directing that those divisions with scores above and beyond those limits to investigate [and] to file a report with VDOE by April 30, 2010.

She scheduled mandatory web conferences for those divisions with participation rates of 25% or more in VGLA reading or math. At the time, the State rates in both tests were close to 20% so the criterion was a (user friendly) 125% of the State rate. Here are the participation rates at some selected divisions at that time.

This is tricky since it is hard to verify that the information reported by RPS to VDOE officials is the whole truth and not some nuanced numbers game of nonsense they want us to believe with barely a blink and nary a discouraging word. To see the data detailing the VGLA participation rates for various Richmond elementary and middle schools for the 2008-2009 click here. To view the 2009-2010 rates as reported by VDOE.

Despite Richmond’s improved, but still low scores for all pupils, we found the system’s children with disabilities scored higher than the state average for kids with disabilities. Yet come graduation only 32 percent of Richmond’s students with disabilities graduate — versus 44 percent statewide. We showed how Richmond had classified 28 percent of its black male pupils as disabled compared with 22 percent statewide, with the peer jurisdictions of Hampton, Newport News and Norfolk reporting in the 19- to 21-percent range.

Our research also revealed that Virginia more than doubled its use of VGLAs during the past three years to to more than 47,000. Richmond, a district with about 23,000 students, administered nearly 3,800 portfolios last year; Loudoun, a district of 57,000, collected fewer than 1,000.

We showed how Richmond and VDOE were gaming the system by massively misidentifying students claiming they had a disability that prevented them taking a multiple choice test (when many didn't really) and we asked why VDOE seemed to be passively condoning the excessive use of the alternative tests.

Therefore, one would think that the good people at VDOE and RPS would, as a matter of professional behavior, think it important to report out about the use of the alternative assessments at the same time they announced the most recent SOL scores.

Commencing this academic year, new participation criteria will be implemented for students with disabilities. State Supt. Wright sent a memo last April informing division superintendents that "Individual Education Program (IEP) teams and 504 committees needed to be made "aware of significant changes to the VGLA participation criteria for students with disabilities that will be implemented for IEPs and 504 plans developed for the 2010-2011 school year.

"Beginning in the 2010-2011 school year, IEP teams and 504 committees must determine the eligibility of students with disabilities for VGLA participation based on the VGLA Participation Criteria form that is attached to this memorandum. IEP teams and 504 committees must address each section of the form, including providing supporting documentation and a justification statement explaining why the IEP team or 504 committee has determined that the impact of the student's disability prevents the student from accessing the SOL assessment(s) even with accommodations. It should be noted that the requirement to include a justification statement for each student participating in the VGLA was mandated by the 2010 Virginia General Assembly."

One would think. But, they didn't. The big news here is that last year Richmond ranked number two in the state for the highest percentage of students taking alternative assessments, the city schools are now number one. And, officials there are furiously sticking with their stories that they've done nothing wrong. In a state that graduates only 43 percent of its students with disabilities "on-time," and, worse, in a division that only graduates 31 percent of children with disabilities "on-time," I submit that there is plenty wrong. The only way to "fix" this will require Richmond officials get past their emotions and professionally address the issues head-on.

Rainy Days and Leaky Roofs Always Get Me Down ...

2010-09-22T23:46:00.007-04:00

I recently witnessed the sublime satisfaction of an "everyday miracle" followed immediately by the tell-tale signs of a leaky roof, replete with stained ceiling tiles and the ubiquitous cafeteria style trashcan collecting rain water in the main office at Linwood Holton Elementary School.

But, first, the "everyday miracle."  The family of a child with a disability entering kindergarten at Holton Elementary asked me to be a support person when the child's "Individualized Education Plan" was updated. I assured the parents that Holton's principal, David Hudson, is not only an excellent principal, but one with special training in exceptional education. He is also the sort of principal we need more of in RPS, a dedicated professsional educator who places the needs of the children first and foremost.

Still, the parents were nervous and wanted me there. I am happy to report that not only did Hudson and members of his staff exemplify the very best of what Richmond Public Schools can offer children and families, but we were joined in the I.E.P. meeting by Harley Tomey, RPS director of Exceptional Education, and members of his staff, all of whom reflected the same professionalism and caring attitude that makes Hudson so good at what he does. By the end of two meetings, everyone left the room knowing they had made a difference in a young child's life.

What a pity it is that all children who need the benefit of Tomey's advocacy and expertise cannot get it. No parent should have to go through the anxiety and frustration these parents did prior to calling and asking for my help as both a disability advocate and a six-year veteran of the Richmond School Board. When will central administration become more proactive and supportive of our principals? When will they consistently provide pertinent information in a timely fashion? That said, I am thankful that everyone listened to their better angels and managed to make things right for this child and her family.

It hardly seems possible that 12 short years ago, my husband and I walked our youngest son, Dale -- a nervous and excited first-grader -- into the brand-new A. Linwood Holton Elementary School at 1600 W. Laburnum Ave. Dale, now a senior at Maggie L. Walker Governor's School for Government and International Studies, has happy memories of his years at Holton and of the teachers who made such a difference in his life.

He also remembers that the roof at his brand-new school leaked. A lot.  From Day One.   Here's where the story gets really depressing. Sure enough, when I walked into Holton last week, I was greeted not only with hugs and smiles of teachers I love and respect, but also with the sight of the stained ceiling tiles and cafeteria trashcan collecting the water in the main office area.

I stood there staring at the stained overhead tiles and the trashcan wondering why and how in the world this school system can take 12 years to get the roof fixed. Twelve years and not quite right yet.

Still, I didn't allow the leaking roof to dampen the joy I felt upon seeing Mrs. Cheryl Hughes, a speech and hearing specialist, who always understood Dale even when others didn't and by Ms. Sherry Gardner, now a math specialist, but most importantly, Dale's second-grade teacher. Ms. Gardner is the teacher Dale credits with "letting" him "learn to love learning" at school and she is the one I credit with helping me become a better parent by trusting her to teach my child.  We all marvelled over how fast the years have flown by and how "little" Dale is now taller than we are and trying to decide where he wants to go to college.

As a parent at Holton and as a member of the School Board for six years, I worked with Holton parents, fought hard behind closed doors and spoke out in open meetings about the necessity of getting the roof fixed. It seemed like such a simple thing, considering that the roof leaked from the very beginning. Who wouldn't want to protect our children, our tax dollars and the structural integrity of not only Holton, but that of Miles Jones and Blackwell Elementaries, the other two brand-new schools -- all of which leaked in nearly the same spots?

I filed a Freedom of Information Act request today to receive a copy of the settlement agreement between RPS and various entities that had a role in the construction and/or design of the schools and to find out how much the school system has paid out to various high-priced lawyers to get the roofs on the three schools made water-tight. Once I receive the information, I will report the entire soggy story as a cautionary tale to the current board and RPS parents who are currently planning to build more schools in the next two years.

There Must Be 50 Ways to Cheat at AYP ...

2010-08-12T17:20:00.002-04:00

Virginia's monumental state-wide failure to make Adequate Yearly Progress -- only nine of 132 divisions qualified -- may become even more of an embarassment if newspaper reporters in the various localities can take the time to carefully examine the data the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) is reporting.

What they may find is that divisions across the Commonwealth -- Richmond is a prime example -- are attempting to avoid AYP sanctions on Title I schools by simply declaring that the school is no longer Title I. For example, anyone familiar with the City of Richmond knows that Armstrong High School has a student population that draws heavily from some of the city's poorer neighborhoods and several housing projects. To be considered Title I, a school must have at least 40 percent of its students enrolled for free and reduced lunch.

And, according to data on the VDOE website for nutritional accounting purposes to the federal government, 89.23 percent of the students at Armstrong are enrolled, yet for educational accounting purposes the school doesn't qualify. To see the full list of Richmond's schools and their respective AYP status, visit my friend John Butcher's website. Many thanks to John for his help today. Be warned, the list will shock anyone who understands the demographics of Richmond's schools.

What can Richmond and VDOE possibly hope to gain by engaging in such lack of real accountability? Have they no sense of shame? We already know they had no problem turning a collective blind eye to the cheating that various divisions engaged in by claiming kids had disabilities in order to jack up their SOL scores. Comes now the news that the U.S. Department of Education earlier this year put an end to all states tacking on automatic bonus points special education scores.
Called "proxy percent," the rule had previously allowed schools where special-education students scored poorly to tack 15 percentage points onto Standards of Learning reading pass rates and 16 percentage points onto math pass rates. Closing that loophole caused many area schools to fail for low pass rates for students with disabilities. [The Virginia General Assembly sent a message last session to VDOE when it unanimously passed HB304 and directly that the VGLA alternative testing be phased out. More on that in my next post].

Allowing VDOE and the various divisions to get away with playing Title I games only helps weak principals, even weaker superintendents and the ensconced bureaucrats at VDOE avoid career-crushing consequences.

And, it is undeniable that it hurts the children who attend these persistently low-achieving schools.

Thank goodness the feds are fed up. Let us hope they are serious and can figure out a way to hold the adults who continue to find clever ways to cheat at accountability standards responsible for this abuse. When you cheat children of their right to a decent education and you waste tax dollars, it is way past time for us all to get fed up.

I'm inclined to agree with a comment Education Secretary Arne Duncan made in The Washington Post last December justifying the get-tough standards of the Obama Adminsitration: "After years of school improvement efforts, there are far too few examples of persistently low-achieving schools that have significantly and rapidly improved performance. We believe that, in part, this is because turning around such schools generally requires fundamental changes in leadership and often in governance and staff, changes that many [local education agencies] are reluctant to make."

Telephone calls to Richmond Public Schools and the Virginia Department of Education for comment were not returned at post time. Check back later.

NEWSFLASH! School Board Delays Release of ADA Audit (Again)

2010-07-17T12:22:00.666-04:00

Once again, the Richmond School Board is delaying the release of an internal audit concerning how the district has managed -- and may have mismanaged portions of more than $13.5 million taxpayer dollars received from city taxpayers since 2006.

The money was specifically allocated to satisfy the terms of a 2006 U.S. District Court order that RPS fix the buildings and bring the district's schools into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Virginia Disability Act (VDA). As of July 1, Richmond City Council allocated an additional $3.1 million, bringing the grand total received by RPS since 2006 to nearly $17 million tax dollars.

Never mind that one of the conditions of the settlement agreement was that all monies allocated for ADA compliance would be kept separate and distinct from other funds. Had they provided this promised transparency and done so with proper due diligence, such an audit would be unnecessary.

Never mind that the auditors have been talking about an ADA audit since as early as last March and as recently as the June 22nd School Board meeting when Internal Auditor Debora Johns assured board members that it would be finished by June 30 and presented at the board's first meeting in July. But, then the board eliminated the "first" meeting in July, thus making July 19th not only the first, but the only July meeting.

Comes now the news that the audit won't be presented this Monday, but it will be at the August 2, 2010 meeting. Exactly who or what made the decision is unclear. I recall from my tenure on the board that such a decision requires a vote of the board, but according to legally required notices posted on the RPS website, no such meeting has taken place.

Despite plenty of public relations huff and puffery that no one out of diapers would take seriously, the reality is that the board virtually ignored both the ADA (for 20 years) and the VDA (for 25 years) until forced to do something by the lawsuit filed in 2005 by parents and students with disabilities and a grass-roots organization, Citizens for Full Access In Richmond (C-FAIR). Therefore, a last-minute change resulting in an additional two-week delay ought not to matter much in the big picture.

Since this issue was especially important to me during my tenure on the board, I continue to monitor RPS' so-called ADA "best efforts." I became concerned last February when I checked the online data here and here and saw architectural design fees completely out-of-kilter with the actual construction costs.

After exhaustively checking with architects, former and current k-12 public education and government construction project experts, construction law attorneys and attorneys familiar with Commonwealth of Virginia regulations, I was repeatedly told that the industry standard is that design fees are usually between 6 to 10 percent of the total construction project.

In many cases, the design fees listed on the RPS online spreadsheets are upwards of 39 percent or more of the final construction costs. In some cases, the design fees are greater than the entire cost of a project.

Since the board clearly doesn't care if the administration submits their "homework" late, I offer the following concerns in the hope that Superintendent Yvonne Brandon will address them when -- and if -- she ever permits a credible audit to be released:

Does the work comply with ADA standards as defined by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)? Chris Dovi's story in Richmond Magazine last April makes the case that at least some of the work misses the mark and will need to be redone.
Why are we spending absurd amounts of money for architects to supposedly "design" handicapped parking places that in many instances do not comply with DOJ guidelines? For a full discussion of this issue, see John Butcher's report,"The Disabled Parking Money Fountain" at CrankyTaxpayer.com.
Why does RPS continue to issue "Blanket Purchase Orders" for big-ticket expenses, a practice that City Auditor Umesh Dalal criticized and recommended that they cease in his 2007 Audit City Report of "Division Efficiencies and Funding," pages 54-59. Dalal stated unequivocally that "... this tool, however, is not effective if an organization uses it to procure large dollar value purchases in any given year. This is because blanket purchase orders are not negotiated for volume discount." Dalal further noted that "City Auditors found that RPS is using blanket purchase orders for purchases that may be more beneficially consolidated and negotiated as contract purchases."
So, what does RPS do when seeking architects to handle what will be $25 million-plus of ADA remediation work? They ignore the City Auditor's findings and issue what are essentially renewable blanket purchase orders for the following architectural firms: Ballou Justice Upton Architects, Worley Associate Architects, Rawlings Wilson & Associates, Kelso &Easter, Inc., Crabtree, Rohrbaugh & Associates, Moseley Architects and BCHW Architects. The contracts with each firm state that "the dollars spent to the Contractor for each individual project must not exceed $200,000 and the maximum dollar amount annually must not exceed $1,000,000."

Data provided by RPS on June 14, 2010 raises more questions than it provides answers. The Freedom of Information request Butcher and I submitted on April 29, 2010 asked for the total amount of monies paid to date to the above named firms for ADA work. After repeated e-mail exchanges concerning the lack of responsiveness to the request, it wasn't until June 14, 2010 that we received anything remotely responsive.
John Butcher was able to extrapolate from that data the chart below.

Despite knowing that RPS has received money since 2006 for ADA work, the district inexplicably failed to provide complete and accurate information concerning payments it made from 2006 through 2010. Worse, the accuracy of the numbers they did provide is questionable at best. For example, a March 2, 2009 Richmond Times Dispatch article by Zachary Reid, stated that Worley & Associates was to receive the contract and that Worley estimated that the entire cost for design and construction would be at least $630,000 for the William Fox Elementary School elevator.

"Worley offered a nonbinding, all-inclusive cost of $630,000 for the construction of a three-story, 4,050-square-foot addition at Fox that would house an elevator -- a necessity to bring the building into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act -- and a stairwell," Reid wrote. His report also noted that: "Ronald Worley cautioned that his company's figure is speculative until a bid is accepted from a contractor but said the price probably will not exceed $700,000. "You just don't know until the bids are in."

And, according to the latest ADA Project Progress Report posted July 16, 2010 on the RPS website, the elevator project at Fox cost $1,147,791 with $56,215 of that amount listed as construction change order costs and $4,739 listed as pending design change order costs -- even though the project was completed nearly a year ago in August 2009.

Even more confounding are the numbers RPS provides for the costs associated with McDonough, Bolyard & Peck. MBP is a construction management company whose contract with the board states that it will provide "at a minimum" a variety of services including, but not limited to, supervising "contractor performance" and monitoring "project completion dates, to "review project progress on-site with architects/engineers and make recommendations for corrective measures when necessary," "perform field inspections and attend construction meetings during all phases of construction, including mechanical and electrical installations," and "...review drawings and specifications of various trades to assure both appropriateness of detail and that products specified meet required needs and performance standards."

When asked why the costs for MBP work do not appear on the RPS website that is supposed to include all payments made with the tax dollars allocated by City Council for ADA remediation and renovation work, RPS officials said that the money used came from the district's general CIP budget and NOT the ADA money.

However, look for yourself and you will be able to see that RPS' June 14, 2010 document response clearly shows that the MBP money is drawn from three distinctly different fund lines -- 450, 411 and 111. ALL are clearly labeled ADA.

So, perhaps in the next two weeks, RPS officials will be able to determine just what they have done with the money and if they will ever get it together and have our schools comply with federal and state law. Stay tuned.

Today is my Birthday ....

2010-04-15T15:30:00.005-04:00

Chris Dovi, who has won several first-place awards from the Virginia Press Association for his reportage, and the folks at awards-winning Richmond Magazine don't know it, but the story they posted online today is one birthday present I will always remember and treasure:

"A Cost Too Steep? Some of Richmond schools' ADA projects off track, several observers say"

Meanwhile, please check back tomorrow for a triple header of commentary that includes:

Let Us Count the Ways ..... Richmond Public Schools continues to waste millions of dollars and precious time bringing the district's schools into compliance with the ADA, despite a U.S. District Court order and both state and federal law.
Whew! McDonnell Didn't Veto It .....So, it is Official .... The true story of how four people managed to change the law and help hold the Virginia Department of Education accountable (sorta) for state-wide cheating on VGLA alternate tests.
Pity, the poor Patrick Henry Charter School ....the slow dance in the killing ground continues as Richmond Public Schools makes up one excuse after another for not honoring the contract RPS signed with a group of parents working to start a charter school.

~ Carol Wolf

Beware Their Cheating Hearts

2010-03-29T00:53:00.004-04:00

(Originally posted 6/21/2009, Revised 3/28/2010)

Time was when teachers and school administrators had to concern themselves with the possibility of children cheating on tests. Nowadays, it is the other way around.

Some teachers, parents and even retired administrators have called to say they fear state-wide “systematic cheating” is happening on the SOLs because of a dramatic increase in over-identification and misidentification of some children as “special education.”

Children deemed in need of "special education" are eligible to take less rigorous versions of the Standards of Learning (SOL) tests. Of particular concern is the way children in grades three through eight are being tested feverishly under alternative assessments for children with disabilities, but hardly at all under the high school versions of the programs.

Many of those who called suggested that by ignoring this increase in children being labeled "special education," some upper echelon state education administrators, school superintendents and members of the State Board of Education are not only quietly condoning, but actually encouraging the practice.

Have pressure to satisfy the NCLB mandate of Annual Yearly Progress (AYP) and worries of whether a school and its district will be accredited led administrators to game the system?

Since special education and the rights of children and families with disabilities have long been close to my heart, I decided to find out if what I was hearing could be true. To begin the process of sifting fact from fiction, I asked for information from the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) and Richmond Public Schools (RPS).

I have still not received any response from RPS, other than to say they need more time to provide the requested information. I have asked for a meeting with Supt. Yvonne W. Brandon to discuss why Richmond is still a third higher in learning disabilities, double the state average in emotional disturbance and triple the state average in mental retardation. When that meeting happens, I will gladly report on it.

Once the data started flowing in from VDOE, I was so stunned I had to ask my friend John Butcher, a semi-retired attorney and a former chemistry professor at Hampden-Sydney College, to help analyze and investigate. We spent the last month-plus crunching numbers and asking questions. To see his detailed charts and analysis of what we have found so far, click here.

The many who expressed their concerns are not without justification.

To be sure, the sheer volume of tests administered to children labeled “special education” was significant enough to warrant official questions from the U.S. Department of Education (USDOE) in 2006-2007 concerning possible “disproportionate” identification of students with disabilities in 101 of 132 Virginia school districts.

The VDOE’s official response to USDOE was to say they “investigated” by asking each of the 101 districts to review their own data, and that each of the districts in question reported back that there was, in fact, not even one instance of disproportionate identification. Not one.

To say that this response strains one’s credulity, is an understatement.

It could be that educators across the Commonwealth and at VDOE have found a miracle cure for profound cognitive and physical disabilities or, perhaps, Virginia is concurrently experiencing an epidemic of afflictions that make it impossible for a child to take a multiple choice test, afflictions that mysteriously disappear when a child enters high school. But, I doubt it.

However, consider the following facts and decide for yourself.

Since 2004-2005 when Virginia began allowing school districts to administer the Virginia Grade Level Alternative Assessment (VGLA) -- a test designed for children who have a disability that prevents them from taking the multiple choice Standard of Learning (SOL) test – the number of VGLA tests administered to children in grades three to eight sky-rocketed, from a mere 2,031 to 35,962.

Richmond provided much of the fuel for that rocket.

During this same time, the number of tests administered to children taking the Virginia Alternate Assessment Program (VAAP) -- a test similarly designed for children in grades three through eight and 11, but for those who have cognitive disabilities that prevent them from taking the SOLs -- has more than doubled, from 11,152 to 23,747.

Simply adding the number of VAAP and VGLA tests administered to children shows that administrators claimed nearly 60,000 "alternative assessments" were necessary for children they said had disabilities significant enough to be excused from taking the regular SOLs.

Now here's where the miracle cure comes in: the number of children state-wide who took the VSEP, the high school equivalent of the VGLA was 253. No typo there, folks, two-hundred-fifty-three (253). True, there is an incredibly low 44 percent graduation rate state-wide for children with disabilities and only 32 percent in Richmond. Obviously, too many of the kids are dropping out and many (if not most) are being given inferior diplomas or "certificates of completion." As well, the VSEP is a high-labor effort requiring additional documentation and advance planning. Even so, something is seriously wrong with this picture.

On the state level, it is clear that the experts at VDOE and the State Board of Education know that certain school districts are abusing testing exemptions which allow children with disabilities to take alternative assessments to the Standards of Learning, but precious little is being done to correct the situation.

Not only are the data a damning demonstration of the power of an unfunded mandate with high demands and draconian consequences to corrupt good people, but more's the pity what data reveal happening in Virginia's urban centers, Richmond most especially. In 2007-08, Richmond administered over almost 3,500 tests under the VGLA, but not a single test under the VSEP.

We know there is no miracle happening for RPS 8th-graders, but there is no logical explanation for this utter lack of VSEP assessments for our high school children with disabilities.The very large number of disabilities reported among Richmond's schoolchildren and the very large number of alternative tests demand an explanation.

Suspicion grows when we notice that RPS -- AND every other district -- gets to grade the VGLA and VAAP tests, but the State grades the VSEP. Thus, VGLA/VAAP assessments provide a handy mechanism to evade the rigors of the SOL testing, but VSEP does not.

And Richmond appears to be using that mechanism with a vengeance: Although the division SOL score is far below average, Richmond's students with disabilities are performing well above the statewide average for students with disabilities.

Also in Richmond, it is indeed cold comfort to see that the allegations and rumors that have roiled around for years that African-American children, especially males, have been grossly over-identified as being mentally retarded or emotionally disturbed, appear to be true.

NCLB and Virginia's SOLs aren't simply about measuring how well our children, including those in special education, do in public school. The NCLB mandate (unfunded or not) and the SOLs are also supposed to measure how well the teacher, school, school district and state perform their jobs. The task becomes exponentially more complicated when attempting to determine how the children in special education are faring.

Unfortunately, any parent, taxpayer or hard-working teacher who has seriously attempted to hold the special education establishment, VDOE or the State Board of Education accountable knows full well how Hercules felt when he battled the Hydra.

Just ask a mother who is upset that her child has been declared mentally retarded, labeled as emotionally disturbed or branded learning disabled, when she knows the problem is not her child, but the teacher or the principal. Or ask a parent who wants and needs services for their child, but somehow can't make the system deliver on what has been promised.

Parents, teachers and even retired administrators have long complained about the subjectivity of the referral process in Richmond which unfairly labels way too many children "disabled." Virginia is not alone in attempting to game the system by reshaping the testing pool or by creating ways to exclude a child's scores from a district's or the state's AYP calculation.

But, the dramatic jump in the number of VGLA and VAAP tests will no doubt reap long-term negative results. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to see that being labeled as disabled profoundly affects a child's sense of self or that being misidentified as a child with a disability can create lifelong distrust and anger. Add to this, the humiliation and frustration that parents endure when they can't get the needed services for their children because administrators are too busy playing AYP games.

In the short-run, such over-identification and misidentification clearly reduces the accuracy that is supposed to derive from the SOL tests and NCLB accountability measures. 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?

Add to this distortion, the not insignificant problem that special education costs on average 1.6 times as much per student as regular education. That means the dramatic, and questionable, increase of children labeled with disabilities, ostensibly for the purpose of making AYP, reduces the amount of money available for the children with bonafide disabilities and for other non-disabled children.

The over-identification of minorities for special education is a national problem. It is the shame of our city, our Commonwealth and our nation.

We know that NCLB created high hurdles, imposed draconian consequences for not clearing them and then offered no tools to school systems to succeed. It is, however, not acceptable that the response has been to make liars of schools administrators at all levels, to brand children with disabilities to improve a school system's pass rate, to deprive school systems of the usefulness of true measures of performance and to skew the use of resources in public schools.

In a later entry, I will discuss what needs to happen in the long run to correct this problem. For right now, suffice to say, USDOE, VDOE, the State Board of Education and individual school districts need to stop cheating and to stop allowing cheating.

Posted by Carol A.O. Wolf at 6/21/2009 11:29:00 PM

Charter School in tough neighborhood gets all seniors into four-year colleges

2010-03-19T09:12:00.045-04:00

(Tribune photo by Heather Charles / March 5, 2010

By Duaa Eldeib Tribune staff reporter

The entire senior class at Chicago's only public all-male, all-African-American high school has been accepted to four-year colleges. At last count, the 107 seniors had earned spots at 72 schools across the nation.

Mayor Richard Daley and Chicago Public Schools chief Ron Huberman surprised students at an all-school assembly at Urban Prep Academy for Young Men in Englewood this morning to congratulate them. It's the first graduating class at Urban Prep since it opened its doors in 2006.

Huberman applauded the seniors for making CPS shine.

"All of you in the senior class have shown that what matters is perseverance, what matters is focus, what matters is having a dream and following that dream," Huberman said.

The school enforces a strict uniform of black blazers, khaki pants and red ties -- with one exception. After a student receives the news he was accepted into college, he swaps his red tie for a red and gold one at an assembly.

The last 13 students received their college ties today, to thunderous applause.

Ask Rayvaughn Hines what college he was accepted to and he'll answer with a question.

"Do you want me to name them all?"

For the 18-year-old from Back of the Yards, college was merely a concept--never a goal--growing up. Even within the last three years, he questioned if school, let alone college, was for him. Now, the senior is headed to the prestigious Morehouse College in Atlanta, Ga. next fall.

Hines remembers the moment he put on his red and gold tie.

"I wanted to take my time because I was just so proud of myself," he said. "I wanted everyone to see me put it on."

The achievement might not merit a mayoral visit at one of the city's elite, selective enrollment high schools. But Urban Prep, a charter school that enrolls using a lottery in one of the city's more troubled neighborhoods, faced difficult odds. Only 4 percent of this year's senior class read at grade level as freshmen, according to Tim King, the school's CEO.

"I never had a doubt that we would achieve this goal," King said. "Every single person we hired knew from the day one that this is what we do: We get our kids into college."

College is omnipresent at the school. Before the students begin their freshman year, they take a field trip to Northwestern University. Every student is assigned a college counselor the day he steps foot in the school.

The school offers an extended day--170,000 more minutes over four years compared to its counterparts across the city--and more than double the number of English credits usually needed to graduate.

Even the school's voicemail has a student declaring "I am college bound" before it asks callers to dial an extension.

Normally, it takes senior Jerry Hinds two buses and 45 minutes to get home from school. On Dec. 11, the day University of Illinois at Champaign- Urbana was to post his admission decisions online at 5 p.m., he asked a friend to drive him home.

He went into his bedroom, told his well-wishing mother this was something he had to do alone, closed the door and logged in.

"Yes! Yes! Yes!" he remembers screaming. His mother, who didn't dare stray far, burst in and began crying.

That night he made more than 30 phone calls, at times shouting "I got in" on his cell phone and home phone at the same time.

"We're breaking barriers," he said. "And that feels great."

deldeib@tribune.com

Seriously, folks: Good News!

2010-02-04T09:57:00.007-05:00

Since January 19th, when I first wrote about the ADA concerns confronting the Richmond School Board and the fledgling charter Patrick Henry Charter School, RPS and PHSSA lawyers have been talking and working diligently behind-the-scenes to resolve issues.

After engineer and blogger extraordinaire, Jonathan Mallard, first reported that the RPS administration had failed to include PHSSA in the budget currently under consideration and Style Weekly's Chris Dovi asked some tough questions of RPS and reported about why PHSSA had been left entirely out of the budget, School Board chair Kimberly Bridges apologized to the PHSSA group for "the oversight." She vowed to do her part to improve communication between RPS and PHSSA. (To her credit, Bridges also reached out to me to discuss my concerns about the ADA and PHSSA).

Now, comes official word that on Tuesday, RPS administrators (at last) released a "projected" per-pupil allocation of $1.3 million to PHSSA.

Still, the future is far from secure for RPS and PHSSA. Given the current financial crisis confronting all public schools in Virginia, a "projected" per-pupil allocation does not a promise make. PHSSA still faces the considerable challenge of raising at least $266,000 in the next month and need to obtain a loan to make the necessary building renovations. To see the presentation that PHSSA made to the school board, click here.

Kristen Larson, public relations spokesman for PHSSA, reports that since January 19th, Chris Dovi at Style Weekly, Jay Mathews at The Washington Post, Holly Prestidge and Bart Hinkle of the Richmond Times-Dispatch have all helped make Patrick Henry's plight more visible. A reporter from The Wall Street Journal even called and interviewed her.

Apparently, the people at PHSSA have found their own "Inner Big Dog" and mayhaps a few new "bigger dog" friends, too.

Now, if only we could get RPS to explain why and where they have spent more than a million dollars on "design costs" for ADA improvements in the district. But, more on that in a future posting.

Time to Bring On the Bigger Dogs ...

2010-01-19T22:09:00.020-05:00

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

2010-01-15T20:24:00.003-05:00

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!

2010-01-07T11:40:00.009-05:00

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?

2010-01-07T11:34:00.003-05:00

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?

Killing Them Softly ...

2009-11-18T00:25:00.008-05:00

This is the executive summary of a report -- Left Behind in America: The Nation’s Dropout Crisis -- that vividly outlines the magnitude of the dropout problem. These reports are part of an ongoing public education campaign effort to create public understanding and build the “will” to create programs and funding that supports our nation’s most valuable asset – our youth, and those of them that are most vulnerable – our children who are out of school and on the street.

It is part of our national promise to leave no child left behind. This report found nearly 6.2 million young people ages 16 to 24, disproportionately male, Black, and Hispanic have dropped out of high school and live in America today.

The report was released at a forum held at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. last month featuring national and regional leaders including the Assistant to U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan. A disturbing number of the young men and women crowding America’s jails are high school dropouts, suggesting that the destructive path to prison begins when these young adults leave school often before they officially drop out.

This pipeline to prison is disproportionately filled by young Black men ages 16 to 24. On any given day, nearly 23 percent of all young Black men who have dropped out of high school are in jail, prison, or a juvenile institute. In other words, approximately 23 of every 100 young Black male dropouts are in jail compared to only 6 to 7 of every 100 Asian, Hispanic or White male dropouts.

While young Black men are most affected, this crisis cuts across racial and ethnic lines. Male dropouts of all races were 47 times more likely to be incarcerated than their peers of a similar age who had graduated from a four-year college or university.

These startling statistics have profound policy implications in a nation facing the parallel challenges of overcrowded prisons and a dire need to raise its high school graduation rates, especially in our cities.

Dropouts just cannot make it here anymore. We can invest in incarceration or we can invest in programs to keep these young people in school and in new pathways to high school graduation and successful careers for those who have already left.

Earlier this year, the Alternative Schools Network (ASN) in Chicago commissioned Professor Andrew Sum and the Center for Labor Market Studies (CLMS) at Northeastern University in Boston, Mass. to prepare a report, Left Behind in America: The Nation’s Dropout Crisis that vividly outlined the magnitude of the problem.

The report demonstrates that incarceration is just one of the high costs these young adults, American taxpayers and our society as a whole are paying by not doing more to solve the dropout crisis.

Again, commissioned by the ASN, and conducted by Dr. Sum and the CLMS at Northeastern University in Boston, Mass, this report was released by a national coalition of education, advocacy, and social service groups including: the National Urban League, the National Education Association, Youth Build, The Corps Network, Chicago Department of Family and Support Services, City of Los Angeles Workforce Investment Board, Chicago Urban League, Illinois Council on Re-Enrolling Students Who Dropped Out of School, Los Angeles Conservation Corps, and Soledad Enrichment Action, Los Angeles.

More than half - 54 percent - of the nation’s dropouts ages 16 to 24 were jobless on average during 2008. Black dropouts experienced the highest jobless rates at 69 percent followed by Asians at 57 percent and Whites at 54 percent. Hispanic dropouts had the lowest jobless rates at 47 percent, reflecting the higher employment rate of young Hispanic immigrants. In sharp contrast, only about 13 percent of young adults with a college degree were jobless on average in the same time period.

Without a high school diploma, you cannot earn enough money to make ends meet and certainly not enough to reach the American dream of raising a family and buying a home. The mean annual earnings of the nation’s young people under 25 with a bachelor’s or advanced degree was $24,797 in 2007, three times higher than the mean earnings for dropouts of $8,358 (including zero earners).

The limited earnings potential of dropouts means many never leave their parents or relatives’ homes to form independent households. Nearly 37 of every 100 dropouts live in poor or near-poor families.

Over $292,000 is the cost incurred by taxpayers for each dropout over their lifetime in terms of lost earnings and therefore lower taxes paid and higher spending for social costs including incarceration, healthcare, and welfare.

Nearly 38 percent of young female dropouts ages 16 to 24 were mothers, the highest percentage compared to their peers still enrolled in high school or college or with high school or college degrees. Young high school dropouts were nearly 9 times as likely to have become single mothers as their counterparts with undergraduate college degrees.

All of these disparities have only been aggravated by current economic conditions. They make it very difficult for dropouts to change the course of their lives and finance and engage in future levels of schooling and training.

There is an alternative.

A national re-enrollment strategy should become a fundamental element of America’s national education agenda in the U.S. Department of Education Race to the Top program and reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind program.

Each re-enrolled student who obtains a diploma would save taxpayers over $292,000 through lower spending on social costs, such as incarceration, health care and welfare, and through increased federal state, and local tax receipts as well as higher home ownership rates and more property taxes. Dropouts are also the least likely to vote in all federal and state elections and the least likely to volunteer their time.

By contrast, adults with high school diplomas and additional education contribute major fiscal benefits to the country over their lifetime. The combined fiscal benefits – including the payment of payroll, federal, and state income taxes – could amount to more than $292,000 for each high school graduate. Such a public fiscal benefit more than outweighs the estimated cost of enrolling a student who has dropped out.

An immediate way to accomplish this would be to implement the proposed Hope & Opportunity Pathways through Education (HOPE USA) Initiative to re-enroll 480,000 dropouts every year.

HOPE USA is a $2 billion federal matching incentive grant program to spur state and local school districts to establish programs that would re-enroll dropouts in comprehensive programs to assist them in earning a high school diploma.

It is jointly proposed by the National Education Association, National Urban League, National Council La Raza, Youth Build, the Corps Network, Los Angeles Conservation Corps, Soledad Enrichment Action, Los Angeles, Chicago Department of Family and Support Services, Illinois State Council on Re-Enrolling Students Who Dropped Out of School, the Chicago Urban League and the Alternative Schools Network.

The initiatives would include small schools (80-150 students) led by experienced principals and teachers that focus on real-world learning. They would also feature summer and after-school components with year-round employment programs.

Emphasize and provide significant funding for re-enrollment of students who have dropped out of school as part of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative and the revised No Child Left Behind legislation.

Expand year round and summer employment for jobless youth with a $5 billion initiative. These reports are part of an ongoing public education campaign effort to create public understanding and build the “will” to create programs and funding that supports our nation’s most valuable asset – our youth, and those of them that are most vulnerable – our children who are out of school and on the street. It is part of our national promise to leave no child left behind.

Come, Let Us Reason Together

2009-11-16T16:23:00.009-05:00

When will Richmonders decide they have had enough of the unrelenting reality show known as the City of Richmond Public Schools?

When will we get mad enough to demand that those whom we elect to represent us on the School Board, City Council and Mayor's office realize that we are their bosses? When will we inform them -- in clear and uncertain terms -- that the money they claim as "the Mayor's money," or the "Council's money" or the "School Board's money" is really the taxpayers' money?

How high do people have to be able to count in order to realize that the $150 million being discussed here tonight is not really all that much when it comes to building schools?

If the award-winning Maggie L. Walker Governor's School for Government and International Studies could be renovated and transformed into a state-of-the-art public school for $17 million dollars, why can't we use some common sense and make the best use of this money by renovating existing structures to meet the needs of 21st Century learners?

How can anyone think that they will be able to build a brand-new elementary school for $25 million when 10 years ago we spent roughly $33 million each for the three newest schools in our system -- Holton, Miles Jones and Blackwell?

When will we have leadership capable of thinking outside the box who can come up with a plan to build a new building that can be home to both a state-of-the art high school and an alternative school we can use to help children learn the behavioral and learning skills necessary to stay in school and become productive citizens?

Why can't we include a Governor's School for Career and Technical Education and a workforce training academy in this same structure that will ensure that when our children leave school, they will have a way of getting a job, making independent lives and becoming successful citizens?

When this RPS administration and members of the previous School Board voted to close schools in the Third District and in the Seventh District, there were promises made about the necessity of redistricting so we could have data driven decisions. Has this happened?

What has this board and city government done to make productive and adaptive use (or reuse) of the old Armstrong High School building, 13 Acres School, the Real School, Norrell Elementary, Whitcomb Elementary, Patrick Henry Elementary (which is a whole other story for another time) or the Westhampton Building?

How much did this board pay in legal fees and expert reports to attempt to make the roofs water-tite on the now not-so-new three elementary schools, Holton, Miles Jones and Blackwell?

How much did we waste on the Westhampton Building when we knew we were going to be closing the school? Don't even get me started on what is -- and is not -- happening with efforts to make the City's schools comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

I have heard much talk about the $750,000 Facilities Study the citizens of this city paid for on behalf of the schools. Why was no action ever taken against the makers of this report for not including any recommendations to make our schools comply with the ADA?

This board and the city administration need to get together and do some homework so the taxpayers of the city can see some creative and productive work happening. If you don't, there will be consequences for this failure when those chickens come home to roost.

The consequences I allude to here are not the stuff of lost elections, but rather the moral burden of failing, yet again, to act in the best interests of the children of this city.

Killing Them Softly ....

2009-10-30T18:01:00.005-04:00

The high price of zero-tolerance.

Today's Kids Don't Know Much about ...

2009-10-27T17:20:00.003-04:00

Remember when grandparents and great-grandparents stated that they only had an 8th-grade education? Well, check this out. Could you have passed the 8th-grade in 1895?

This is the eighth-grade final exam from 1895 in Salina, Kansas, USA. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smokey Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina, and reprinted by the Salina Journal.

[Hat-tip and thanks to John C. Travis and his wonderful mother for sending this to me].

8th Grade Final Exam: Salina, KS - 1895

Grammar (Time, one hour)

1. Give nine rules for the use of capital letters.
2. Name the parts of speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define verse, stanza and paragraph
4. What are the principal parts of a verb? Give principal parts of 'lie,''play,' and 'run.'
5. Define case; illustrate each case.
6 What is punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of punctuation.
7 - 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.

Arithmetic (Time,1 hour 15 minutes)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. Deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. Wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold? 3. If a load of wheat weighs 3,942 lbs., what is it worth at 50cts/bushel, deducting 1,050 lbs. For tare?
4. District No 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find the cost of 6,720 lbs. Coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent..
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. Long at $20 per meter?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per acre, the distance of which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt

U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton , Bell , Lincoln , Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates: 1607, 1620, 1800, 1849, 1865.

Orthography (Time, one hour) [Do we even know what this is??]
1. What is meant by the following: alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: tri-graph, sub-vocals, diphthong, cognate letters, lingual.
4. Give four substitutes for caret 'u.' (HUH?)
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final 'e.' Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: bi, dis-mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, sup.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences: cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced and indicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.

Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas ?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia , Odessa , Denver , Manitoba , Hecla , Yukon , St. Helena, Juan Fernandez, Aspin wall and Orinoco
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give the capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give the inclination of the earth.

Notice that the exam took FIVE HOURS to complete.

Get the Horse Back in the Barn ....

2009-10-26T11:13:00.013-04:00

The good news is that RPS Superintendent Yvonne Brandon realizes the city schools have a drop-out problem. The bad news is the plan unveiled on October 21, 2009 doesn't mention any effort to reduce Richmond's excessive use of out-of-school suspensions, a factor many education experts say is a major contributor to high drop-out rates.

Read this article posted on CNN by urban education expert Pedro Noguera to see why it is so critical that urban school systems find ways to combat the epidemic drop-out rate, more virulent and deadly than the swine flu pandemic.

In an effort to be a part of the solution and foster discussion, I ask that you check out the following links that offer insights into WHY students drop-out and how we can to get them back. Most importantly, these links also reveal proactive ways we can work together as a community to prevent students from leaving in the first place.

Overview of PBIS Maryland
universal PBIS model. Thus, the PBISplus Project was collaboratively developed by Johns Hopkins. University, the Maryland State Department of ...
www.pbismaryland.org/documents/PBISMarylandNew... - Similar
[ More results from www.pbismaryland.org ]

http://www.edutopia.org/student-dropout-retention-strategies #
Retention Research: Studies About Keeping Kids in School
The following reports provide valuable insight into the causes of and solutions for the dropout crisis plaguing many of our schools and communities:

"The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts "
This 2006 report, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation , is based on interviews with young men and women who dropped out of high school. The findings debunk some of the commonly held myths about why students decide to drop out of school. (For example, a majority of the young people who were interviewed had at least a C average when they dropped out, and nearly 47 percent reported that they dropped out because school was not interesting.) Embedded in these insights are useful strategies for addressing the crisis.

"What Your Community Can Do to End Its Drop-Out Crisis " Drawing on research from schools and districts throughout the country, this report provides a unique guide to tackling the issue locally. It begins with strategies for developing a deep understanding of local needs and then guides readers step by step through the creation of a comprehensive plan to assist students inside and outside of school.

http://www.maef.net/OurWork/RAMPResearchAllianceforMultiplePathways/DropoutPreventionSummit/tabid/769/Default.aspx
School-Caused Risk Factors
Ineffective discipline system
Overburdened school counselors
Negative school climate
Retention and/or suspensions used to control discipline, rather than addressing causes
Disregarding student learning styles
Passive instructional strategies
Lack of relevant curriculum
Low expectations of student achievement
Fear of school violence

Excerpted from From At Risk to Academic Excellence: What Successful Leaders Do by Franklin P. Schargel, Tony Thacker, and John S. Bell.

Still Wrong, After All These Years

2009-10-23T19:03:00.013-04:00

Dear Dr. Brandon,

I regret that I must write to you again about the false expulsion data (still) on the Virginia Department of Education website. It is truly baffling to see RPS still claiming there were no expulsions for 2004-2005, 2005-2006 and 2006-2007. Having served on the board during those years, most recently as co-Chair of the Student Disciplinary Committee, I can state with absolute certainty that this information is false.

Documents obtained by a Freedom of Information request to the Virginia Department of Education show that you wrote to Virginia State Superintendent Dr. Patricia Wright on August 6, 2009 requesting permission to re-submit expulsion data for the 2007-2008 and the 2008-2009 school years. She responded affirmatively to your request on August 12, 2009.

Given that this data was supposed to be already compiled and, per regulations, you had signed a verification certificate, why wasn't the data re-submitted immediately, instead of waiting until August 19th and 20th respectively? Would you please provide a copy of the original data that your staff maintains was lost in "transmission" and the verification certificates for the five years in question?

I would also appreciate knowing why you have not yet requested permission to submit the accurate data for the years 2004-2007?

I read with great interest Chris Dovi's article in Style Weekly concerning this issue, your Superintendent's Update of Oct.16th, the Press Release you posted Oct. 20th on the RPS website and sent to various media outlets and, of course, the response Scott Bass, Style Weekly's editor, posted on Style's website, on behalf of Style and reporter, Chris Dovi.

Various comments you have made about this "cauldron of confusion," as you put it in your Superintendent's Update and in the Press Release, prompt me to request the following:

A copy of the information you reference in the following statement: "January 2009 quality audit of the multiple sets of data RPS was required to send to the VDOE beginning March 31, 2009. This data audit revealed that the data entry software used in one of our departments was not interfacing with our Comprehensive Information Management System (CIMS)."

A copy of the inaccurate and accurate data that you referenced in this statement: "We immediately rectified inaccurate data previously submitted."

An explanation as to why the data you sent me on August 17th was inaccurate, given that you further state that " .... were able to upload additional information during the correction and verification process the state allowed after August 16, 2009."

A copy of the data report review process for all departments responsible for submitting VDOE required statistics.

And, from your August 6, 2009 letter to Dr. Patricia Wright, the State Supt. of Public Instruction:

What do you mean when you state: "This re-submission will in no way alter the "cautioned" status that schools were sanctioned."

Why did you only ask to re-submit two years of data, when there were actually five years of data that needed to be corrected?

How many schools in Richmond have been sanctioned, the names of the schools and the dates and nature of the actions taken?

Lastly, but by no means least, I must reiterate that during my six-year tenure on the Richmond School Board, we always agreed that the number one mission was student achievement. I recall the many times we discussed community concerns about RPS zero-tolerance disciplinary policies that continue to generate extraordinarily high numbers of suspensions and expulsions. I completely agree with your statement in the press release "that in order to realize progress, a student must be in school."

Similarly, if the data we collect to drive decisions is to be of good use to us in school, then it must be accurate. By allowing inaccurate data to continue to exist, the district does itself and our children harm. By not acting with dispatch to correct these errors, we run the risk of causing our children, our families and our community to distrust our information.

Your unprecedented attack on Chris Dovi and Style Weekly was particularly ill-advised, given the irrefutable facts of the matter. Dovi and Style had their facts about RPS straight -- five years of false data that no one bothered to correct until I wrote to you about it. Dovi had no reason to doubt the accuracy of the information given to him by VDOE, an honest mistake immediately corrected in a calm and measured manner the very next business-day by VDOE and Style.

As we both know all too well, Virginia's Standards of Learning (SOLs) and the requirements of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) aren't simply about measuring how well our children, in or out of special education, do in public school. The SOLs and NCLB are supposed to help us measure how well the teacher, school, school district, Superintendent and state perform their jobs. And if a school district's problems are intentionally disguised and distorted, or if no one bothers to make sure the data is accurate, how can we ever expect to be able to use data to help fix the problems and give all our children the schools they deserve?

Sincerely,

Carol A.O. Wolf

Who Do They Think They're Foolin'?

2009-07-30T22:07:00.011-04:00

Dear Dr. Brandon,
I regret to inform you that data on the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) website, falsely claim that there has been only one expulsion from Richmond Public Schools from 2004 to 2008.

Since one of your duties as Superintendent, according to the Code of Virginia, is to "ensure that an accurate record of all receipts and disbursements of school funds and all statistical information which may be required by the State Board is kept," it behooves you to correct this false information as soon as possible.

As a member of the Richmond Public School Board for six years and as the former co-chair of the Student Disciplinary Committee, I know beyond a shadow of doubt that RPS has expelled far more than "one" student during that time. In fact, a cursory examination of the minutes of the Student Disciplinary Committee Meetings -- where all students, parents and legal guardians have a right to appeal an expulsion -- reveals that from 2004-2008, the RPS School Board and administration expelled at least 100 students.

Mind you, this number does not even begin to speak to the total number of expulsions, only to those which were appealed to the School Board's Disciplinary Committee. Nor does it address the 18,722 short-term (less than 10 days) suspensions for 2007-2008. We have Chris Dovi of Style Weekly and John Butcher of The Cranky Taxpayer to thank for some eye-popping raw data and charts that show a dramatic increase in the number of RPS suspensions from 2002/03 through 2006/07 for elementary through high school.

As troubling as it is that RPS submitted false expulsion data to VDOE, it strains credulity and credibility when one notes that our district continues to write up more incidents of discipline and reports of bad behavior than any other district in the Commonwealth:

2004-2005 --22, 487

2005-2006 -- 21,280

2006-2007 -- 32,922

2007-2008 -- 29, 571

When I think about the time it takes away from instruction for our teachers, students and administrators to write up thousands of discipline reports, I can't help but wonder why we continue to pursue zero-tolerance discipline policies. It is obvious that the policies have little to no effect on improving behavior or improving the quality of education in our schools.

Other districts have addressed this challenge and have begun to keep their students in school and off the streets. Baltimore, Boston, Chicago have all implemented programs that focus on positive behavior and creative conflict resolution. It is time that we do so as well. We can't keep paying the price for not doing so.

"We've barely begun ..."

2009-07-29T23:56:00.001-04:00

After he went blind, my friend and mentor, the late Oliver W. Hill let me be one of his "readers." Several times we read Richard Kluger's 798-page Simple Justice, a history of Brown vs. Board of Education.

When he asked me to read the book a third or fourth time, I asked, "Why?" "Because we are not finished yet," he said. "We've barely begun." "And," he added, "do not ever engage in a discussion of the re-segregation of Richmond's schools they've never been de-segregated."

Mr. Hill often noted that while the unanimous decision in Brown opened the front door of the schoolhouse for blacks, the 5-4 decision in Milliken -- which made cross-jurisdictional busing very difficult -- opened the back door for white flight.

Justice Thurgood Marshall's dissent noted that poor Negro children would continue to receive "the same inherently unequal education in the future as they have been unconstitutionally afforded in the past." "In the short run," wrote Marshall, "it may seem to be the easier course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up each into cities -- one white, the other black -- but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret."

Notwithstanding his always cordial demeanor with Lewis Powell, the swing vote in Milliken, Mr. Hill observed that Powell did nothing to integrate Richmond's schools. When Powell stepped down as Richmond's School Board chairman in 1961, "precisely two black children" attended the city's public school with white students.

Richmond still suffers the effects of Milliken. The schools are not integrated, and more African-American males go to prison than to college. Despite real progress, we still have a shameful graduation rate, an abysmal dropout rate, and sky-rocketing suspension rates. We also have near total non-compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, thus denying "simple access" to our most vulnerable citizens.

Where do we go from here?

Before enacting NCLB sanctions and dismantling public education, we should revisit Milliken and consider what our nation might be like today had that decision gone the other way. Let us find a way to recapture that missed opportunity for equality.

We can begin by re-reading Simple Justice. As Mr. Hill said: "We are not finished yet. We've barely begun."

Beware Their Cheating Hearts ...

2009-06-21T23:29:00.037-04:00

Time was when teachers and school administrators had to concern themselves with the possibility of children cheating on tests. Nowadays, it is the other way around.

Down the Rabbit Hole

2009-06-01T09:11:00.013-04:00

If the SOLs were just a silly children's story -- "Through the SOL-Looking Glass" -- we could all have some cheap laughs and marvel at the clever tricks and loopholes the folks at the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) have devised to prevent the evenhanded application of SOL's as a tool to achieve accountability.

But, trying to make sense of VDOE's byzantine policies, rules and regulations concerning SOLs is no laughing matter. And, the costs -- both in terms of dollars and the common good -- are anything but cheap.

More's the pity since it appears that VDOE officials and the State Board of Education have managed to take what began as a noble effort to inject much needed transparency and accountability into Virginia's public schools, and twist it into a madding mish-mash of complicated conundrums, exemptions and waivers worthy of a "grand vizier."

A posting by "Tom" on the RVANews.com site said it best: "The purpose of publishing the collective SOL results of any given school or district is to see how that school’s students and school systems performed, not to gauge the performance of kids who happen to live in the neighborhood but chose not to attend the school. Proper measurement is a management tool and encourages accountability."

An example of just how twisted and topsy-turvy things have become in VDOE Wonderland, is revealed by the way they define what it means to be “a school.”

VDOE and the various school superintendents who constitute Maggie Walker’s Governing Board evidently see nothing wrong with refusing to recognize the Governor's Schools as official "schools," a recognition that would allow these outstanding schools to report and claim the scores their students earn on SOLS and be among those honored as “The Best Schools in America” by Newsweek and U.S World News & World Report.

Why? VDOE’s policy is that the SOL scores earned by students at the Governor's Schools are given back to the Superintendents in the various districts where the Superintendents then (incredibly) apply those scores to the public high schools nearest where the Governor's School student lives.

How is this NOT fraudulent on both a state and federal level?

Once again, "Tom" on the RVANews.com website, nailed it: “[This policy] makes about as much sense as a Chevy dealer’s reporting as revenue purchases made from Toyota because the Toyota customer lives closer to the Chevy dealership.

"VDOE’s method of measuring and reporting a school’s supposed SOL scores simply insures that the data, which all districts in Virginia spend fortunes to collect, has very little reliability or usefulness. The various superintendents contend that since they must tap their own budgets to “buy” seats at the Governor’s Schools, that they are entitled to the SOL scores of the students who are accepted to attend."

In a dizzying display of incoherence rivaling the infamous Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, VDOE’s policy makers have declared that the SOL scores earned by the children who are assigned to "disciplinary" or "alternative" schools or programs are captured in such a way that those scores do not reflect back on the school that asked that the student be sent to the disciplinary school.

Further, these “discipline” schools and programs have a different set of SOL benchmarks to meet than those administered to either students at the Governor’s Schools or to comprehensive high schools in the home districts.

Simply for discussion purposes, compare and contrast the way VDOE and the BOE view Maggie L. Walker Governor's School and the Capitol Choice Program (CCP).

The SOL scores for Maggie Walker students go back to the public high schools in those students' "home" districts. Never mind that the children at the Governor's Schools (in most cases) have never even set foot in those public high schools and will not for the four years they spend in high school. Never mind that children who attend the Governor's Schools earn diplomas from the Governor's School -- and not the school that benefits from receiving their SOL scores.

This is the place where things get even “curiouser and curiouser”.

In contrast, SOL scores for tests taken at CCP stay at CCP. Never mind that the stated goal of the CCP "program" is to return their students to their home schools. Never mind that since there are no 12th-graders officially assigned to CCP and that there has never been a formal "graduation" ceremony for CCP students, nor any diplomas given from the program.

The only sensible conclusion from this perversion of the data is that VDOE is more interested in pleasing local Superintendents than in obtaining useful -- and honest -- information from the SOL testing.

The Forgotten Choice: Seize the Day

2009-05-22T19:10:00.015-04:00

"Where there is no vision, there is no hope." ~ Geo. Washington Carver

One would think the professionals advising Richmond Public School Superintendent Dr. Yvonne W. Brandon would be more than familiar with the old advertising bromide: "Sell the Sizzle" (and not the steak). And, to a certain degree it appears they are nominally aware, given the recent PR-campaign blitz to sell "The Choice" (and not the system).

But, whether marketing steaks or urban school systems, there comes a point when the customer needs to take a bite of the steak or check out "The Choice." And, if they find themselves chewing the same old dried-out shoe leather, they will look elsewhere -- and have, for years.

To be sure, "The Choice" campaign tells us plenty about what RPS is today -- but, it tells us nothing about where it is headed, what it is becoming or how citizens, parents and teachers can help "be the change" we wish to see in our schools. If this PR campaign is the best that RPS can offer, then clearly, the system is in need of some "shock therapy."

What would have been impressive -- and still could be -- would be for Brandon to present a coherent and cohesive plan that is serious about reforming RPS – top to bottom. We need a plan that not only acknowledges the system’s strengths and weaknesses, but contains her vision of what must be done to help our children and our city achieve greatness.

While reasonable people can disagree on the details, one thing is certain: maintaining the status quo is not the answer.

We need to ask parents who send their children to RPS -- as well as those who don’t -- how the system can become more responsive and relevant to their needs and expectations. Further, the plan must be informed and inspired by the best and brightest of our classroom teachers and principals.

We need a plan that will make real the promises of financial reform and accountability in order to achieve equity in our schools for ALL children. The citizens of Richmond need to hear from Brandon how she intends to emphasize academics and athletics, how she intends to integrate the arts and sciences.

This plan must be relevant to the future employment needs of our children and enhance the economic potential of our region. Such a focused vision will do more to keep children in school than any sermon or political speech.

Unfortunately, "The Choice" PR campaign is not such a plan. It is, however, evidence that the change so many hoped that Brandon could bring, won't be arriving anytime soon.

For example, the Board members did not learn of "The Choice" marketing campaign until they were invited by the Superintendent to attend the press conference launching the effort. To be kind, perhaps the Superintendent and the Mayor Dwight C. Jones were just so excited about the PR campaign that they plumb forgot to send it past the School Board, the teachers or the parents.

Sadly and pathetically, the RPS administration continues to be ridiculously addicted to secret-keeping, despite promises of transparency. It is beyond absurd that even good news is apparently doled out on a strictly "need-to-know" basis.

Had the actual advertising campaign been shared with board members, PTA leadership and the teachers prior to launch, certainly someone would have asked why only one African-American male is depicted in any of the materials. Similarly, no children with disabilities are shown, nor is there even a mention of School Board’s efforts to make our schools comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act.

If RPS truly wants to "seize the day," leadership needs to look not so much at what other urban school districts are doing, but what the private, parochial and most successful county schools are doing. Consider the following:

• The whole system has not been redistricted in more than 30 years. If not now, when?

• Instead of piecemeal International Baccalaureate programs at two select schools, why not whole school Baccalaureate programs?

• Instead of simply closing Chandler Middle School and moving the teachers who have failed to get that school accredited in the past seven years to other schools, why not undertake a serious reform of middle schools as we know them now?

• Mayor Jones made campaign promises about reforming middle schools. Brandon and members of her administration and board all talk about the need to give parents additional choices. When will these choices be available?

With the noteworthy exception of School Board vice-chair Kimberly B. Gray of the Second District -- who successfully led the fight to rescind the Gag Order that the School Board unanimously approved and who has repeatedly asked for a line-item budget -- the silence of the Richmond School Board is deafening.

Mrs. Gray’s erstwhile colleagues sit there as if they are bumps on a log, saying nothing, hearing nothing and worst of all -- doing nothing. They all seem scared witless to speak up on behalf of the citizens who elected them. It appears they have quietly ceded control of the schools to the Superintendent and the Mayor and given the citizens NO SAY in the matter.

Little wonder. RPS administrators, with help from Mayor Jones and key members of the business community, have effectively managed to neutralize the elected School Board and keep it out of the decision-making loop, all with not a bleat of protest from our chosen representatives.

The new board had barely been seated when the Mayor and heavy-weights in the business community let it be known that "they" had already chosen Brandon. The six years I served on the Richmond School Board afforded ample opportunity to be impressed by Brandon's dedication and work ethic and, I confess, I was unabashedly a member of the choir singing her praises.

Those years of direct observation convinced me that her strength is instruction -- not politics. Consequently, her endorsement of C.T. Woody for Sheriff was shocking for two reasons: 1) it seemed totally out of character and 2) Brandon has been in the system long enough to know that it is absolutely against School Board policy for her to endorse any politician’s bid for office, much less Woody’s bid for re-election as Sheriff.

Given RPS' astounding number of suspensions each year that directly contribute to the number of truants and dropouts and actively feed thousands of children into the “School to Prison Pipeline,” it would behoove the School Superintendent to ask hard questions of herself and her staff about what can be done to keep our children in school and out of jail. One would think that Brandon would have sufficient challenges before her to keep her out of unnecessary political frays.

All things considered, Brandon and Jones are to be commended for showing the citizens of Richmond that they indeed do know how to "work well and play nice" with one another. They are also to be commended for finally realizing that our school system needs to market itself in order to stop the 50-year decline in enrollment.

But, they are both delusional if they think this can be accomplished by offering nothing new and by systematically leaving Board members, parents and teachers out of the process. Such an approach hasn’t worked for the past 50 years and there is no reason to believe it will today.

Can We Cure this Drop-out Epidemic?

2009-04-01T23:27:00.003-04:00

http://crankytaxpayer.org/Schools/dropped_out.htm#dropouts
John Butcher has posted his analysis of the drop-out numbers. While I am happy for the two “crown jewels,” I cannot help but be concerned about our other five comprehensive high schools. Check out the data. What do you think?How can the community help keep these children in school?

Can We Talk?

2009-03-29T11:28:00.008-04:00

The two "Kims" on Richmond School Board (Bridges in the 1st and Gray in the 2nd), could not have had more opposite responses to the recent concerns about the lack of a full line-item budget and the potential that the "Communications Protocol" violates the First Amendment.

First, the budget. Gray and her colleague, Dawn Page (8th), Finance Committee Chair, have provided their colleagues and the administration plenty of information concerning what is expected to be included in a line-item budget. Click here: http://www.tasbo.org/Budget%20Basics.ppt

Bridges, on the other hand, doesn't think any more information is really needed. And, inexplicably, the majority of board members and key administrators claim not to understand what is meant by the term "line-item budget." (If this is really true, it could explain a great deal about why it is Richmond's per pupil rate remains so high and teachers throughout the system frequently have to buy their own copy paper, among other supplies).

In response to statements from Antione Green, president of the Richmond Crusade for Voters, critical of the board's vote on the budget and "Communications Protocol," Bridges invites all Crusade members to contact their School Board members at the same time she attempts to minimize both issues by saying that she is weighing the "best approach" to deal with the "few offending words." Be sure and read the comments following the article. Click here: Crusade Admonishes School Board Articles/Archives Style Weekly Richmond's alternative for news, arts, culture

Previously, Bridges has defended the RPS administration's lack of detailed budget information by claiming that a previous board decided to eliminate the line-item budget. Both Bridges and Supt. Yvonne Brandon have said that former board member (and former Finance Committee chair), Keith West (7th), was the prime mover behind eliminating the line-item budget.

After examining the minutes of last two years to determine when this vote took place -- and not finding any evidence that it did -- I contacted West to see if he had an inkling of when the board voted. After his initial shock and laughter subsided, I asked him to send me a statement. Here it is:

"It has come to my attention that individuals are claiming that while on the school board I put forward a measure against a line item budget. That contention does not square with my recollection. What I did object to was a budget full of fluff, commentary, and excuses. I am, and have always been, for accountability in public spending. I believe that accountability would be enhanced by making as much information public as possible. That would be up to and including placing every expenditure of the schools online with tools that [would] allow citizens to properly understand the spending of their taxdollars."

Still, throughout a series of intriguing postings on the Style Weekly website this weekend, Bridges does her best to defend the administration and maintains that the board already has a line item budget -- it is just missing a few details.

Gray, who did not post anything on the Style website, but nonetheless contacted me directly, says the board and administration could inspire far greater trust throughout the community by simply providing the information that she, Dawn Page (8th District) and Adria Graham-Scott (4th District) have repeatedly requested on behalf of their constituents.

Despite defensive counter-accusations from the board members who approved the budget -- (Bridges (1st), Murdoch-Kitt (3rd), Carr (5th), Smith (6th), Coleman (7th) and Wilson (9th) -- Gray remains calm and determined to get the detail needed to make informed decisions and to ensure that citizens are treated respectfully by the board. She and Page (who both voted against the budget)insist that no one is pointing any fingers, but both believe, as Gray said: "Board members and citizens have a right to know how their tax dollars are being spent."

The following is my response to Bridges' statement that the board "already" has a line-item budget:

"To say that the board already has a line item budget, albeit one that is missing some of the "details" your colleagues, constituents and taxpayers have repeatedly asked to see, is akin to telling one's English teacher that you have read "A Tale of Two Cities" when, in actuality, all you did was read the Cliff Notes.

"I don't know how many times I need to state that the issue of concern here is NOT the so-called "Code of Ethics." The issue here is that the board is attempting to deny to any board member (and the citizens of this city who elected them), their Constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech. Further, it is threatening to have the dissenting member(s) held accountable by the board's legal counsel.

"The First Amendment is abundantly clear: "CONGRESS SHALL MAKE NO LAW...ABRIDGING THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH ... "

"History instructs us that the Constitution's framers believed that freedom of inquiry and free expression were the hallmarks of a democratic society. But, in times of national stress — real or imagined — First Amendment rights always come under enormous pressure. During the Red Scare and tumult in Russia in the early 1920s, thousands were deported for their political views.

"During the McCarthy period, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) used the infamous "blacklist" to ruin lives and careers. Similarly, leaders of the Civil Rights movement were frequently jailed (or worse) as they sought to exercise their First Amendment Rights in this nation in the struggle to end segregation and Jim Crowe.

"The Founding Fathers were indeed prescient. The First Amendment exists precisely to protect dissent from government suppression.

"No one individual or entity has all the answers. Reasonable people should be able to disagree and work together. This doesn't mean someone has to essentially take a vow of silence.

"But when the board moves to silence its own members by various punitive methods, you are crossing the line. Persuasion, not coercion, is the solution. And, as Dwight Eisenhower once noted: "May we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion."

Without deviation, without exception, without any ifs, buts or whereases, freedom of speech means ....

2009-03-27T00:06:00.002-04:00

Amazing. Utterly astounding. The fact that every member of the current School Board failed to realize that "those words" in this "Communications Protocol" are in conflict with the basic guarantees of the First Amendment, is downright stupefying.

The issue here isn't about "Codes of Ethics." We already have one. We all swore oaths of office and promised to uphold and safeguard the guarantees of both the U.S. and Virginia State Constitutions.

The disturbing issue here concerns the board's willingness to attempt to restrict and violate the Constitutional right of any board member to speak on behalf of the citizens who elected them and to deny to those citizens their right to have their school board member speak to the issues of concern.

The Founding Fathers of this nation purposefully placed freedom of speech first. They also made a place at the table for the press and insisted that not only did citizens, but newspaper reporters, too, had a right to freedom of expression in order to help keep government honest.

And, as far as "best practices" go, I submit that the Courts across this nation have long respected the "Code of Ethics" known as the U.S. Constitution. I believe the Constitution trumps any "Code of Ethics" that someone dreams up.

RPS needs to stop blaming and punishing dissenting board members and members of the media for their troubles. Rather than trying so hard to change "perceptions" about RPS and wasting energy attacking anyone or anybody who dares to disagree with you "a liar," I submit that it would be far better for the sake of the children in this city were the board to concern itself with the work at hand.

You don't like what people in the media and blogs have to say? Fine. But, that doesn't entitle you to berate and belittle those who hold differing views or to restrict their Constitutionally guaranteed right to express them.

I am not alone in this view. Judge Murray Gurfein, a Nixon appointee, understood that the press has a very important role in keeping this nation free. The following is excerpted from his Pentagon Papers opinion:

``A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press, must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the even greater values of freedom of expression and the right of the people to know."

Similarly, U. S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan noted that the dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to uphold the bedrock principle that "government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable."

Justice William O. Douglas pretty-much nailed it with this statement: "The dominant purpose of the First Amendment was to prohibit the widespread practice of government suppression of embarrassing information."

And, Justice Hugo Black was always at his most succinct and eloquent when discussing the First Amendment: "Without deviation, without exception, without any ifs, buts, or whereases, freedom of speech means that you shall not do something to people either for the views they express, or the words they speak or write.

Richmond School Board Assaults Taxpayers and U.S. Constitution

2009-03-21T10:52:00.014-04:00

Given the excesses of the AIG executive bonuses and the soiling of the U.S. Constitution after the eight long years of the Bush/Cheney Administration, I suppose I should not have been shocked by the most recent actions of the Richmond School Board. But, I was.

The news that in one single night, members of the Richmond School Board managed to approve a budget of more than a quarter-BILLION dollars without even a line-item budget, and then unanimously voted to impose a GAG rule upon themselves, is evidence, perhaps, that the greater illness afflicting this nation -- arrogance and ignorance fevered by the greed of privileged people --has infected local elected officials. (Some will certainly note that many elected officials in the City of Richmond have long been carriers of the contagion).

First, the matter of the budget. I can appreciate that the district has not had a full-time CFO/COO for more than a year. Surely, the 26 business/community leaders who signed the now infamous letter calling for an appointed vs. elected school board, could help the district find a most-needed CFO. I urge the Superintendent to reach out to them for this help.

I am certain that the members of this board, Dr. Brandon and chief legal counsel, Brad King, are all individuals who would no balk if a teacher at any of the 52 schools in the system walked up to them and asked for $261 to be used in the performance of their job, without specific details as to precisely how the money would be spent.

Imagine the eye-rolling and hand-wringing that would ensue if a teacher dared to submit a reimbursement request for $261, without the requisite documentation. And, if the teacher had the nerve to suggest that the money should be handed over sans documentation because requesting such verification was simply "micro-managing" and distrustful, chances are the teacher could end up unemployed, or at the very least referred for counseling.

Only vice-chair Kimberly Gray (2nd) and finance committee chair, Dawn Page (8th), demonstrated the common sense to vote against this budget and in so doing struck a blow for accountability. Would that their votes could serve to remind their colleagues that they were elected to represent the taxpayers and citizens of this city, not RPS administrators or their friends in City Hall.

Those who approved the $261.7 million request-- without the benefit of a line-item budget -- included Kim Bridges (1st), Norma Murdoch-Kitt (3rd), Betsy Carr (5th), Chandrah Smith (6th), Don Coleman (7th) and Evette Wilson (9th). All justified their actions by pontificating about the need to "trust" the Superintendent and how wanting a line-item budget was both just too much to ask and evidence of a desire to "micro-manage." Pity poor Adria Graham-Scott (4th) who abstained.

And, now, concerning the matter of the GAG Rule. As incredible and unconscionable as was the passing of a budget without the same degree of detail that the Chesterfield, Hanover and Henrico County Board of Supervisors insist their School Boards deliver, the RPS board's other significant action of the night -- unanimously passing the "Communications Protocol" -- was a direct assault on the U.S. Constitution and is far more disturbing.

Perhaps, they just don't know any better -- or worse, their lawyer doesn't. Mayhaps, the board never bothered to ask the lawyers to render an opinion. Incidentally, the board voted to give a hefty 61 percent pay increase in the newly-approved budget.

While this "Communications Protocol" policy was motivated by high-minded goals, certain provisions of it clearly violate the Constitutional right to free speech.

Board members have pledged "fidelity" to the idea that they will "support the decisions of the majority of the board once a decision is made," meaning that they have agreed that they will not criticize a decision -- in public, or in the media -- once a decision has been made.

Should a dissenting board member decide to break the pledge of "fidelity" to this principle, the "Communications Protocol" promises they will be held accountable by fellow board members, the Superintendent and, significantly, "the district's chief legal counsel."

Talk about creating a "chilling effect." While wrapping itself in some "pretty words" about respect and civility, what this policy really does is attempt to legally sanction actions on the part of the board to squash the First Amendment rights and responsibilities of any colleague who disagrees with the majority and who refuses to be beaten into silence.

The Yvonne Brandon I have known for the past six years is an excellent and throughly professional educator quite capable of doing the job she was hired to do.

Pity the board that thinks she needs them to protect her from criticism. I believe she does want change and has the skills to bring it about. Unfortunately, she has some board members who believe the answer to criticism is to silence the dissenters. This is not about Dr. Brandon. This policy is a blatant effort by the board to codify their own past bad behavior. It is also a revealing glimpse of the lengths some members will go to bully their colleagues and silence their critics.

Unfortunately, the "district's chief legal counsel" is a party to this legal mish-mash and really should have known better. Implicit in the statement that the "district's chief legal counsel" will hold violators of this policy accountable is the not too subtle threat of legal action.

From the U.S. Supreme Court to local courts all across this nation, decisions abound affirming the right of free speech. According to one court decision from Virginia Beach: "Debate over public issues, including the qualifications and performance of public officials (such as a school superintendent), lies at the heart of the First Amendment." That decision states that the First Amendment "protects the ability to question and challenge the fitness of the community leaders, including administrative leaders in a school system."

Further, the courts have consistently rejected attempts to curtail the rights of elected officials to speak to the issues, including qualifications, integrity and job performance of other officials. Not only does the First Amendment trump documents such as this "Communications Protocol," but in one decision (Parker v. Merlino), the court explicitly states that elected officials may not "be punished or restricted for making public statements that the majority found offensive."

Regardless of whether these board members wish to understand their legal rights and responsibilities, the courts have consistently held that individuals do not surrender their free speech rights when they become elected officials. Nor, can any arm of the government impose greater restrictions on elected officials than on the general public.

As the U.S. Supreme Court has noted:

"The central commitment of the First Amendment ....is that 'debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust and wide-open.' .... Legislators have an obligation to take positions on controversial political questions so that their constituents can be fully informed by them, and be better able to assess their qualifications for office; also so they may be represented in governmental debates by the person they have elected to represent them."

And, if the above is just too much for the School members or their legal counsel to wrap their heads around, perhaps the Ancient Code of Mothers can inform. As in, "I don't care if all your friends are __________, I expect you to know the difference between right and wrong and say something to someone to stop them."

So, Mom, I am trying. But, I need members of the community to speak out as well. If this board doesn't wise up and remember it is supposed to serve the people, it is the duty of the people to make their displeasure known. As I have said before, dissent is as American as the 4th of July and as necessary to freedom and Democracy as the air we breathe.