Superintendent’s Dilemma

Editor’s Note: Today marks the first day of the 2019-2020 academic school year across the Commonwealth. Pity the students of the City of Richmond and the City of Petersburg Public Schools, their teachers and families as everyone returns to school to “take another whack at”getting the school divisions and individual schools accredited.  

Given that the leadership at the Virginia Department of Education (VDOE) has failed for the past 15 years to get Petersburg school division accredited and has for the last five years failed to get Richmond accredited, VDOE clearly needs some help.   

I recently ran into Dan Gecker, president of the State Board of Education, at a social function and had to ask him what he and his colleagues intend to do to remedy this situation.  

I asked him how many more years, how many more children’s academic lives will be sacrificed on the altar of standardized testing, cheating and lame excuses for failure before the adults with the power to change this situation figure out the right answer?

Said Gecker, “We are going to keep at it.  I have faith that with persistence we will get there.”  Then he flipped the question back at me:  “What would you do? What is your answer?”

I assured him that I would ask people who know far more than I do what they would do to help Richmond and Petersburg’s public school systems deliver the kind of education our children deserve and need to be successful in life.  So, folks, how about it?  What needs to happen? What would you do to fix these schools?   ~ Carol A.O. Wolf   

By John R. Butcher
August 30, 2019 by cranky 

The Petersburg experience – fifteen years of state “supervision” that has produced declining, basement-level SOL pass rates – raises interesting questions about Richmond and its recent embrace of that supervision.

I. Where we are

Richmond’s SOL performance has long been comparable to that of Petersburg and other failed divisions. In recent years, that performance has deteriorated.

Note: Economically disadvantaged (“ED”) students pass the SOL at rates about 20% lower than their more affluent peers (“Not ED”). Thus the SOL averages punish divisions with large ED populations, e.g., Richmond. The data below, then, analyze the ED and Not ED pass rates, not the averages.

Here are the Richmond data for the last six years, presented as pass rate differences from the State averages.

There are some ups but the overall pattern is down. 

It’s disgraceful that any school system, much less the one in the state capitol, would do this to its schoolchildren.

II. Memoranda of Understanding Have Failed to Help Petersburg

As set out in detail here and here, Petersburg has labored since 2004 under four different Memoranda of Understanding (“MOUs”) issued by the Board of Education. Those edicts have left Petersburg foundering with declining pass rates.

III. Richmond’s MOU Is An Exercise in Bureaucratic Busywork

The Richmond MOU is long on coordination and meetings and consultations and technical assistance. It is short on specific fixes for Richmond’s awful schools. 

The Tell is in what the MOU does not say: “If you haven’t fixed those schools by date x, we’ll sue you.”  That is because the Board of Education does not know how to fix Richmond’s broken school system (Sept. 21, 2016 video starting at 1:48).  They don’t know what to tell a judge that Richmond should be made to do, so they don’t even contemplate exercising their authority to sue.

IV. Our Superintendent Faces a Tough Choice

In light of the Petersburg experience and the vacuity of the Richmond MOU, our Superintendent has to be wondering whether to squander his limited resources on MOU window decoration or direct those resources to fixing our schools.  

Fearless Predictions: 

• If our Super follows the MOU course, he will join the parade of failed Richmond superintendents. 

• If he tells the Board of Education to fashion its MOU into a kite and go fly it, that Board will back down.

V. Open Question: 

Even if our Superintendent ignores the MOU, can he fix our schools?