My friend, John R. Butcher, has a new post over at Cranky Taxpayer, analyzing 20 years of VBOE failure. Check it out!

Petersburg: Paradigm of VBOE Fecklessness, 2024 Update

Posted on September 1, 2024

By John R. Butcher

by cranky

Despite twenty years of “supervision” by the Board and Department of Education, the Petersburg schools marinate in failure. 

Documents on the VBOE Web pages show the following events as to Petersburg:

“MOU” is bureaucratese for “Memorandum of Understanding,” which in turn is an edict to which the Board can point in order to claim it is doing something about lousy schools. The MOU process demands a Corrective Action Plan (“CAP”) that sets forth “specific actions and a schedule designed to ensure that schools within [the affected] school division meet the standards established by the Board.”

In the case of Petersburg, the MOU/CAP process has produced grand opportunities for paper-pushing but, as the 2024 data indicate,  no halt to ongoing decline in the performance of the city’s schools.

Notes: 

Virginia’s economically disadvantaged (“ED”) students underperform their more affluent peers (“Not ED”) by ca. fifteen to twenty percent, depending on the subject. The SOL average pass rate thus is lowered for the divisions with larger ED populations. To avoid the biased overall average, let’s look at the underlying averages for the ED and Not ED groups.

The 2022 and later Reading results were boosted, no telling how much, by the adoption of a “less rigorous” grading scheme. There was no SOL testing in 2020. Participation in the 2021 testing was voluntary. So, the ‘22 and later data are the only post-pandemic numbers with a claim to measuring anything beyond individual performance. And, as to the reading tests, that claim is adulterated. 

Here, then, are the recent Reading pass rates for Petersburg and the state.

Petersburg’s 2022-2024 Not ED pass rates remained below the state rate for ED students.  As well, both of the 2024 Petersburg rates continue a failure to even begin recovering from the effects of the pandemic.

46.5% of Petersburg’s Not ED students and 58.8% of the ED flunked the 2024 Reading tests.

The Math tests enjoyed their scoring boost in 2019, so the 2022 and later numbers are a more accurate measure of the pandemic effect than are the reading data. Notice the larger decreases.

At Petersburg, the 2023 increases were partially canceled by decreases in 2024. The ‘24 failure rates were 56.7% for Not ED, 67.4 for ED. 

You read that right: Over half of Petersburg’s more affluent students and over 2/3 of the ED flunked the Math tests in 2024. 

The 2024 Writing data for Petersburg are hard to believe, but they are what VDOE reported. If those numbers are valid, they are a ray of hope in a dungeon of despair.

As to History and Social Science, Petersburg showed nice improvement from ‘22 to ‘23 and mixed, albeit still dismal, results for 24.

Finally, the Science tests.

Despite twenty years of “supervision” from the Board and Department of Education, Petersburg wallows in failure.

Va. Code § 22.1-8 provides: “The general supervision of the public school system shall be vested in the Board of Education.”

Va. Code § 22.1-253.13:8 provides:

The Board of Education shall have authority to seek school division compliance with the foregoing Standards of Quality. When the Board of Education determines that a school division has failed or refused, and continues to fail or refuse, to comply with any such Standard, the Board may petition the circuit court having jurisdiction in the school division to mandate or otherwise enforce compliance with such standard, including the development or implementation of any required corrective action plan that a local school board has failed or refused to develop or implement in a timely manner.

The Board has yet to sue any school division, even Petersburg, under the authority of § 22.1-253.13:8. Indeed, any such suit would fail: To get the injunction, the Board would have to tell the judge what Petersburg (or Richmond or . . .) could do to meet the standards. The Board manifestly does not know what that might be.

So we are left with Petersburg’s schools harming their students and an incompetent state agency charged with improving the situation.

Postscript:

The traditional cheer for the (also awful) Richmond schools has been, “We beat Petersburg.” 

In the post-COVID period, Petersburg is working to provide recent evidence for that claim, as if any self-respecting adult would make it.

What Do They Learn When They’re Not In School?

By John R. Butcher

Posted on January 22, 2023 by cranky

A kind reader tells me that Table 6 in the Superintendent’s Annual Report is up with the 2021-22 division dropout count totals for Grades 7-12. Juxtaposing those data with the 2021-22 fall enrollments produces the following distribution.

The red bars, from the left are Hampton, Newport News, and Norfolk. The gold bar is Richmond. The division average is 1.68.

Here are the top and bottom dozen divisions.

 

Here is the entire list.

Related

Petersburg: Paradigm of VBOE FecklessnessSeptember 5, 2022

2022 SOL Data: First Look at RichmondSeptember 3, 2022

CIP Lights the WaySeptember 5, 2022

GOOD NEWS TODAY!

 

View this email in your browser Introducing Homeroom Announcements! Every Monday morning (starting today), Word In Black's weekly education newsletter will land in your inbox, featuring our reporting that confronts K-12 inequities, elevates solutions, and amplifies the Black experience. Meet the Experts Making College Admissions Easier for Black Kids "The Black Family’s Guide to College Admissions" sparks a much-needed "conversation about education, parenting, and race." The State of Black Education: What’s Really Going on? Fedrick C. Ingram, the secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers, says inequity hasn’t disappeared, but the challenges we’re facing won’t stop us. High Schoolers Launch Civil Rights Tour App Two Washington, D.C.-area high school students have created an interactive app that highlights the history of civil rights in the District. Education Advocates Say Chess Can Be an Integral Part of a Child’s Development According to chess experts and educators, chess can enhance analytical thinking and planning skills, elevate creativity, and improve memory. City’s 'College Choice' Program to Cover School Costs for Students in Foster Care College Choice will provide college students in foster care with a daily stipend and remaining costs of college tuition — up to $15,000 each year.

My friend, John R. Butcher a/k/a “Cranky,” has been crunching numbers again.  I’ve reposted his latest handiwork here.       Many thanks, Mr. Butcher!

 

The Best and Worst 2022 School SOLs

Posted on September 23, 2022by cranky

Returning to the 2022 SOL data, here are the top and bottom twenty schools in reading and math. 

As a reminder:  Economically disadvantaged (“ED”) students (essentially those who qualify for the federal free lunch program) on average underperform their more affluent peers (“Not ED”) by ca. twenty points, depending on the test. This renders the school and division SOL data misleading because the averages are altered by the relative numbers of ED students. The data below are broken out for both the ED and Not ED groups. 

And a caveat: Because of its suppression rules (essentially, no datum if <10 students in a group), VDOE does not report data for one or both subjects for 54 schools. 

To start, here the top twenty averages on the reading tests, first for Not ED students and then, ED.  The Richmond schools are highlighted in yellow. The blue highlights are schools in Region 7 (SW Virginia), where the Comprehensive Instructional Plan was founded. 

Then, the bottom twenty.

Next, math, the top 20.

And the bottom.

Finally, let’s average the four pass rates to obtain an overall measure of school performance.

Preview of Coming Attraction: You may have noticed the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology at 100% on all five top-20 lists and wondered why all the other Governor’s Schools are absent from those lists. Short answer: The VDOE pretends that students at all the full time Governor’s schools except for TJ are students at high schools (that they don’t attend) in their home districts. Longer answer: Stay tuned for a later post.

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Time to Play Hardball!

Déjà Vu All Over Again

by Carol A.O. Wolf

The recent dust-up concerning the fate of the Arthur Ash Jr. Athletic Center is, in the words of the great baseball philosopher Yogi Berra, "déjà vu all over again."

Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney is once again pitching a can’t lose, big deal -- this time promising a brand new mini-city complete with state-of-the-art baseball stadium, restaurants, retail shops, microbreweries, and apartments for both the rich and unrich.

Since those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it, I am obliged to offer this sad and shameful history lesson about a 2012 ‘can’t lose, big deal’ involving previous Richmond City Mayor Dwight C. Jones, the pro football team now known as the Washington Commanders, the Bon Secours Health System and the city’s Economic Development Authority.

Basically, they stole the Westhampton School property.

Blinded by the glitz of Washington team owner Dan Snyder’s PR folks and many local cheerleaders, the very people charged with protecting Richmond’s public-school children decided to sacrifice them instead.

Giddy with the thought that an NFL team might come to Richmond, City Hall denizens used the 1917 historic school to anchor the deal. The plan was to transfer primo Westhampton real estate to Bon Secours and use the money to build a multi-million-dollar, state-of-the-art training facility with pristine turf for the team.

In return, Bon Secours would build and operate a sports clinic at the team’s field and a neighborhood health clinic in the underserved East End. It took Bon Secours nearly a decade to fulfill the promise until local business leader, Steve Markel, lost patience and publicly complained. (For more on this, click here). To be sure, there was plenty of old-fashioned backslapping by the Economic Development Authority members and city officials spewing pie-in-the-blue-sky promises that never materialized for local businesses or taxpayers.

And, in a move that truly stupefied taxpayers, the city even agreed to pay the NFL team, then one of the world’s richest sports franchises valued at $3 billion, a ridiculous tribute of $500,000 a year to help offset their costs of coming to Richmond for a three-week training camp once a year.

Proving themselves to be colossally bad not only at deal-making but also basic math, the City of Richmond’s wheeler-dealers leased the Westhampton School property to Bon Secours for only $33,000 a year for 60 years, thereby cheating the schools (and the city) out of tens of millions of dollars that would have been realized had the property been sold on the open market, according to local realtors.

They did this, according to one city administration staff member, to get around the 2008 ordinance approved unanimously by Richmond City Council — clearly stipulating that payments arising from the “sale” of “school properties” would be placed in a reserve fund and “only used for either new school construction or for the capital repair and renovation of existing school properties.”

Now, a decade and millions of dollars later, Mayor LevarStoney is stepping up to the plate on this baseball deal with two strikes – the Navy Hill and the Richmond casino -- and the score lopsided against him. With his political future on the line, he is swinging for the fences.

To achieve this, Stoney has gotten the interim city attorney to throw a spitball of legal jargon to confuse the public and the media and to lend a patina of propriety to the city's latest attempt at pulling off a steal of a deal. Like the disastrous Washington team deal, this new scheme would deny Richmond Public Schools much-needed money to repair decrepit buildings.

Meanwhile, members of Team Stoney are spinning PR nonsense suggesting that school officials were upset over the Washington deal simply because city kids did not get to play on the field as much as they had hoped. In football, that’s what’s called a fake handoff.

Wrong. Seriously wrong. Just do the math, folks—a $30 million property and an ongoing obligation to pay an out-of-state billionaire $500,000 annually were exchanged for a lease valued at about $4 million, some empty promises of revenues for local businesses, and the chance for a few people to stand while watching some pro football players practice.

In this latest deal, rather than use the real estate of an actual school, the mayor wants to use school property — the 6,000-seat Arthur Ashe Athletic Center in Northside on Arthur Ashe Boulevard. A May 13 letter from interim city attorney Haskell Brown tries to justify the mayor’s scheme. Writing to the School Board’s attorney, Jonnell Lilly, Brown asserts that because the city has “title" to the Ashe Center and the land it occupies, the School Board has no say in what happens to it and, significantly, the school system is not entitled to anything from the sale.

Wrong again. Not only does the letter ignore two (!) Richmond City Council ordinances, (click here to read the 2008 Ordinance and here to read the 2013 Ordinance), but it attempts to bolster the city’s position by bizarrely citing a 1906 Jim-Crow-era decision which states "a school is a place of primary instruction, an establishment for the instruction of children; as a primary school, a common school, a grammar school.” Brown pretends that the ordinance and the applicable state statute apply only to actual schools, when in fact they apply to “school property.”

Brown’s letter blithely states that “the city built the center in 1982” and “at some point the School Board began operating the center, seemingly without any contractual arrangement or other authorization for such operation.” Brown further asserts that because the Ashe Center has been used for a variety of community events, not just school-related events, it ceases to be a school. He makes it sound like no one was paying attention and the School Board stupidly took on the city’s obligation to pay for the Ashe Center, which is really a community center.

But there is a logical explanation concerning why the School Board has been paying all expenses for the center and has had exclusive management of the center for four decades now: The School Board is doing its legal duty and membersarefulfilling their oaths of office.

While Brown’s missive admits that the Center “has served … as an athletic facility for students in Richmond Public Schools,” he argues that, because the School Board has allowed the center to be used for events benefiting the community (for example, politician Bernie Sanders drew a large rally crowd there), those uses somehow disqualify it from being “school property.”

There is exactly zero legal support for that argument. Everyone has witnessed their children’s schools being used for community events as opposed to strictly student events, and neither the Virginia Code nor the cited ordinance nor any case law recognizes such non-educational uses as transforming school property into non-school property.

Most egregiously, Brown’s letter ignores a judicial decision right on point. To quote Ring Lardner, “you could look it up,” Mr. Brown. The case is Bacon v. City of Richmond, in which the city asked the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals to rule that it did not have to pay to bring schools into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) because cities really have no control over school property. The court obliged the city and held that the “School Board is the legal entity charged with the care, management, and control of school property.”

Writing for a unanimous panel and citing Virginia Code § 22.1-79(2), Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III stated that it is the duty of the School Board to “care for, manage and control” school property and “provide for the erecting, furnishing, equipping, and non-instructional operating of necessary school buildings and appurtenances.” Therefore, the city had no responsibility to pay for ADA improvements; that cost was 100% on the School Board.

In the case of the Ashe Center, the School Board uses the center as an athletic facility, an overflow facility, an event space, and an emergency relocation area —part and parcel of the “non-instructional” properties of a school district under Virginia law. 

Again, as stated in Bacon v. City of Richmond, “the City of Richmond has no power to…control the day-to-day operation of local school buildings and their services and programs.” The court concluded that the city has “bare legal title” to school property, the way the trustee of a deed of trust has bare legal title to your home if you have a mortgage. But you have “equitable title,” which is all the benefits of ownership. The trustee is not the homeowner; you are.

So, Mr. Interim City Attorney, don’t tell us that the city has no obligation when it comes to shouldering the millions of dollars of expenses for our school’s adding ramps and elevators required by the ADA, but then it has the exclusive right to sell the school district’s athletic facility and pocket all the proceeds. As lawyers like to say, “a party can’t blow hot and cold at the same time.” You can’t assert one legal position when it benefits you, and then, when it suits you better, deny that position and assert the exact opposite.

Since Stoney has affirmed his support for the legal skills of the interim City Attorney on this matter, I am betting Judge Wilkinson knows more about the law than they do.

The Arthur Ashe Center belongs to Richmond Public Schools and can’t be taken away by Stoney or by City Council. City Council -- and the citizens they represent -- must insist on upholding both the letter and spirit of the law.

Consequently, we, the people, need to play hardball and not allow our mayor (or any other interest) to cheat the School Board out of money it desperately needs to fix our children’s public schools.

 

Editor’s Note:

Thank goodness for my friend, John R. Butcher. While Richmond Public Schools Superintendent, Jason Kamras, and the members of the City of Richmond Public Schools (RPS) School Board have been busy battling one another, the mayor, City Council, the pandemic, virtual learning, missing laptops, lousy breakfasts and lunches, the fire at Fox Elementary and (whew!) how to find money to build a new George Wythe High School, Butcher has been keeping an eye on what matters most -- the students, those seen and not seen. Check out his latest data. Spoiler Alert: Not only does our school system have more dropouts than any other locality in Virginia, but we have more than three times the state average, according to data on the Virginia Department of Education website. ~ Carol Wolf

Dropped Out 2021

March 6, 2022 by cranky

By John R. Butcher

It’s Spring! In Richmond, the daffodills are blooming and the 2020-2021 Superintendent’s Annual Report is sprouting data.

The Report has the dropout and Fall enrollment data by division.  Juxtaposing those, we can calculate the division percentages of dropouts.

Richmond with 1091 dropouts, 1.85% of the Fall enrollment, is the gold bar.  The red bars are the peer cities, from the left Hampton, Newport News, and Norfolk. The blue bar is the State total. 

The yellow bar at 0.86% is Lynchburg, with a hat-tip to a reader (the reader?). The two empty slots at the bottom are Bath and Highland, both with zero dropouts.

Here are the data:

Division Name	% DO
Accomack County	0.72%
Albemarle County	0.40%
Alexandria City	0.65%
Alleghany County	0.68%
Amelia County	0.45%
Amherst County	0.43%
Appomattox County	0.27%
Arlington County	0.38%
Augusta County	0.32%
Bath County	0.00%
Bedford County	0.49%
Bland County	0.61%
Botetourt County	0.28%
Bristol City	0.56%
Brunswick County	1.06%
Buchanan County	0.17%
Buckingham County	0.26%
Buena Vista City	0.91%
Campbell County	0.33%
Caroline County	0.40%
Carroll County	0.21%
Charles City County	0.72%
Charlotte County	0.18%
Charlottesville City	0.84%
Chesapeake City	0.52%
Chesterfield County	0.69%
Clarke County	0.06%
Colonial Beach	0.17%
Colonial Heights City	0.37%
Covington City	0.10%
Craig County	0.56%
Culpeper County	0.99%
Cumberland County	0.69%
Danville City	1.25%
Dickenson County	0.16%
Dinwiddie County	0.43%
Essex County	0.34%
Fairfax County	0.64%
Falls Church City	0.20%
Fauquier County	0.32%
Floyd County	0.11%
Fluvanna County	0.65%
Franklin City	0.92%
Franklin County	0.78%
Frederick County	0.65%
Fredericksburg City	1.44%
Galax City	0.71%
Giles County	0.18%
Gloucester County	0.53%
Goochland County	0.20%
Grayson County	0.07%
Greene County	0.28%
Greensville County	0.54%
Halifax County	0.70%
Hampton City	0.25%
Hanover County	0.28%
Harrisonburg City	1.05%
Henrico County	0.91%
Henry County	0.42%
Highland County	0.00%
Hopewell City	1.48%
Isle of Wight County	0.38%
King George County	0.85%
King William County	0.65%
King and Queen County	0.24%
Lancaster County	0.92%
Lee County	0.65%
Lexington City	1.08%
Loudoun County	0.19%
Louisa County	0.54%
Lunenburg County	0.39%
Lynchburg City	0.86%
Madison County	0.06%
Manassas City	0.84%
Manassas Park City	1.20%
Martinsville City	0.55%
Mathews County	1.09%
Mecklenburg County	0.74%
Middlesex County	0.09%
Montgomery County	0.52%
Nelson County	0.44%
New Kent County	0.07%
Newport News City	0.61%
Norfolk City	1.11%
Northampton County	0.81%
Northumberland County	0.17%
Norton City	0.48%
Nottoway County	0.95%
Orange County	0.19%
Page County	0.13%
Patrick County	0.42%
Petersburg City	0.85%
Pittsylvania County	0.43%
Poquoson City	0.34%
Portsmouth City	0.79%
Powhatan County	0.12%
Prince Edward County	1.49%
Prince George County	0.47%
Prince William County	0.62%
Pulaski County	0.31%
Radford City	0.12%
Rappahannock County	0.68%
Richmond City	1.85%
Richmond County	0.24%
Roanoke City	1.10%
Roanoke County	0.38%
Rockbridge County	1.02%
Rockingham County	0.40%
Russell County	0.62%
Salem City	0.27%
Scott County	0.39%
Shenandoah County	0.32%
Smyth County	0.15%
Southampton County	0.68%
Spotsylvania County	0.77%
Stafford County	0.45%
Staunton City	0.99%
Suffolk City	0.60%
Surry County	0.62%
Sussex County	0.10%
Tazewell County	0.36%
Virginia Beach City	0.32%
Warren County	0.34%
Washington County	0.41%
Waynesboro City	0.43%
West Point	0.38%
Westmoreland County	0.20%
Williamsburg-James City County	0.44%
Winchester City	1.13%
Wise County	0.11%
Wythe County	0.21%
York County	0.19%
State Totals	0.58%