Poverty is No Excuse ...

My friend, John R. Butcher, has some excellent analysis and some hardball questions on his "cranky" blog today about why Richmond Public Schools' (RPS) SOL pass rates are so awful. Check it out. ~ CW

By John R. Butcher

I earlier showed that Richmond’s dismal pass rates on the reading and math SOLs are not explained by Richmond’s large population of economically disadvantaged students. Drilling further into the data, here are the twenty-eight divisions with the largest populations of economically disadvantaged students:



If we plot the pass rates vs. the % ED for these divisions, we obtain:







The gold points are Richmond; the red are Newport News, on the left, and Norfolk. The high performer there on reading is Norton; high score on math is Highland.

To the point here, Richmond did not outscore any of these divisions on the reading tests and did better in math than only three: Brunswick, Martinsville, and Cumberland. Said otherwise, all Virginia divisions with similar to much larger populations of economically disadvantaged students are getting better pass rates in reading and twenty-four of twenty-seven and outpacing Richmond in math.