Thursday May 11, 2023
IN THIS ISSUE: The 'Failing Schools' Complaint Is Convenient, but Offers No Path Forward | Register for May 25 Debate | The cost of book banning - Western culture
The ‘Failing Schools’ Complaint Is Convenient, but Offers No Path Forward
by Martin Davis
From the governor on down to the local Moms for Liberty chapters, and in barber shops and restaurants across the country, the “failing schools” mantra continues to hold sway.
It’s simplistic, and patently false.
This does not mean, however, that there are no problems in public schools. The “failing schools” complaint, however, does nothing to help solve those problems.
So how do we get to solutions?
A responsible use of testing data can make a good starting point. (Nota bene: The politicization of NAEP data and SOL data - looking only at top-level numbers and drawing broad conclusions - is not responsible use, as I’ve noted often. For one example of such misuse, see Mark Taylor’s blatant distortions here,)
One of the best in the state at taking test data and using it to advance learning is Matt Hurt, Ed.D., who serves as director of the Comprehensive Instructional Program in Wise, Virginia. The CIP program has been notably successful in Southwest Virginia, because Hurt has gone deep into test scores to measure not success and failure writ large, but to identify strengths and learn from those, then find shortcomings and figure out how the successes can inform improvement. (Look for an interview with Matt in coming weeks.)
I do not have Hurt’s expertise, but my discussions with him over the past couple years have forced me to think outside the box when looking at SOL data, and take a what-works-first approach, before finding the problems.
Who’s really struggling?
In our community, all three public school districts (Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania, and Stafford) have been subjected to the failing-schools cry. Fredericksburg, however, has faced the harshest criticism.
Certainly the district’s poor top-line scores suggest there are issues that need to be addressed. But is it right to call the district failing? And if it is, what solutions are being put forward to correct the problem?
“Choice” is a common response, because there’s a belief many share that competition raises all ships. I’ve actively resisted that notion over the years because with education, we’re dealing with human beings, not widgets. There’s no way to mass-produce success, because children and young adults in particular are balancing learning with the very real issues they face in their day-to-day lives.
One need look no further than the setbacks people generally agree beset students following up to a couple of years of distance learning. From academic declines, to mental health issues, and increased addition to cell phones and other technologies.
But even before COVID hit America’s shores, we knew that socio-economic inequalities were a major contributor to student achievement or academic struggles.
Turning to 2021-2022 SOL data, I did a quick analysis of how 8th graders and 11th graders performed on the SOL writing test in our area’s three school districts using the VDOE’s Build-a-table tool that allows users to slice-and-dice data in a number of ways.
Knowing that poverty negatively affects student achievement, I ran 8th- and 11th-grade passing rates on the SOL English writing test first for all students, then filtering out disadvantaged students, and then disadvantaged and English Language Learner students.
The results for Spotsylvania follow:
Looking at the pass rate for all students, one quickly sees that some schools do much better than others.
Riverbend High School has the best rate among all students at 80.99%; Freedom Middle School leads the pack for 8th graders with a rate of 66.8%.
At the other end of the spectrum, Spotsylvania High School is the worst-performing high school at 70.12%, and Thornburg Middle School the worst-performing for that group at 46.01%.
Run the same test without the scores of economically disadvantaged students, however, and take a look at what happens.
The pass rate for students jumps, sometimes significantly. (16 percentage points at Chancellor Middle, 14 at Battlefield Middle, and 7 at Spotsylvania High School).
Clearly, these schools as a whole are not failing. They are, however, struggling with educating economically disadvantaged students.
The same pattern appears in Stafford County.
(Nota Bene: Only middle school scores were run for Stafford.)
As in Spotsylvania, we see modest to significantly better performance with economically disadvantaged students are taken out of the equation.
And now, let’s look at Fredericksburg City Schools.
There are far fewer students in Fredericksburg than in the surrounding counties, but the same patter emerges. (I’ve contacted VDOE to ask why James Monroe High School scores are reported only as less than, or more than, 50%. As of press time, I’ve not received a response.)
True, the students not counted as disadvantaged are passing at a lower rate than those in the surrounding counties, but we cannot simply assume the teachers are not as good, or the programs used are not as good. While we can’t exclude that possibility, the city faces issues around student financing that the county schools don’t face. The scores also don’t explore social issues that may be unique to the city that you don’t see in the counties.
What to Do?
This analysis is a start, but to be valid it requires the expertise of someone like Matt Hurt to go deeper and explore precisely what these numbers are telling us. And it’s important that we demand our schools provide that level of analysis.
What we can say, however, is that being of lower socioeconomic status is tied to greater struggles with reading. Why?
Again, that question deserves closer scrutiny by serious data scientists who know how to interpret what the numbers say.
But we should be able to begin here.
Public schools are not failing. They are struggling with getting economically disadvantaged students to write at a level that matches their economically better-off peers.
This creates a path to improvement, and stops us from euphemistically throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Tackling the problem this way is certainly more manageable - and significantly less expensive - than pushing “choice,” which this region does not offer, and is not likely to anytime soon. (The state of North Carolina has offered charter schools for 25+ years, and still just 9% of the state’s students attend there. Translation - 90% of students attend traditional public schools.)
Traditional public schools will only fail when people want them to fail.
Unfortunately, that is precisely what some people in this region want.
It’s time they stop pointing at data they misinterpret, and get their hands dirty by helping our public schools do what we know they do well with many students - succeed.
Reserve the Date
On Thursday, May 25, F2S editor Martin Davis will cohost the 27th District Senate Debate between Democrats Joel Griffin and Ben Litchfield. The other two moderators will be Free Lance-Star alum and current freelancer Lindley Estes, as well as Nora Walsh, a UMW student and an editor with the school’s paper, the Weekly Ringer, to ask questions.
The event is being put on by the Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania, and Stafford Democratic Committees.
The event is free to attend. Register today to reserve your seat. The event will also be live-streamed here.
ESSAY: The Cost of Book Banning - Western Culture
by Martin Davis
Now that Spotsylvania County Schools has passed a still-more Draconian policy that allows a single parent to continue her relentless effort to remove any book from the school library shelves that offends her - and that list appears to have no bottom - it’s time to take stock of what’s being lost.
In two words: Western Culture.
One doesn’t need to run the checklist of books long held as sacred to the Western Canon likely to be removed to make this point. One need only look to one small book - Rainer Marie Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.”
Collected by Franz Xaver Kappus, the 10 letters that comprise this classic book has motivated countless writers by challenging them to look earnestly at why they write.
Says Rilke in the first letter:
You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give up all that. You are looking outward, and that above all you should not do now. Nobody can counsel and help you, nobody. There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to write. This above all - ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night; must I write? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative … then build your life according to this necessity….
Perhaps nothing defines Western culture - for good and for ill - than the extreme individualism that drives us. In the case of the arts, it is this individualism that Rilke is pointing the young artist toward (an individualism grounded in nature). This individualism has led to the West producing some of the world’s greatest writers and texts.
If Spotsylvania’s book banners - Mark Taylor and the Spotsy School Board and Jon Russell (and they are book banners, for what else does one call it when people remove books from libraries?) - really understood these words, they would likely ban Rilke. For Rilke’s individualism stands in direct opposition to the blind allegiance and religious group-think they support.
Fortunately, they can’t grasp what Rilke is really saying here. That requires a nimble and literate mind.
Unfortunately, they will still go after the book because of what Rilke goes on to say:
… read as little as possible of aesthetic criticism…. Works of art are of an infinite loneliness and with nothing so little to be reached as with criticism. Only love can gasp and hold and be just toward them….
… artistic experience lies so incredibly close to that of sex, to its pain and its ecstasy, that the two manifestations are indeed but different forms of one and the same yearning and delight. And if instead of heat one might say - sex, sex in the great, broad, clean sense, free of any insinuation or ecclesiastical error, then his art would be very grand and infinitely important.
“Sex.” This is the word, the idea, the act that Taylor is determined to protect our youths’ “innocence” from.
For sex in the religious worlds of Taylor and company is evil. It is immoral. And it is a roadblock to our true humanity.
That they hold this idea about sex, which is ground deep in the shallow world of evangelical thought, explains why the religion that Taylor embraces has produced little but sterility in the world of the arts.
Hence Rilke’s admonition of “sex in the great, broad, clean sense, free of any insinuation or ecclesiastical error.”
The Spotsy school leadership wants to deny the importance and beauty of sex, and replace it with the banality of shallow spirituality - the same spirituality that, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, produces “cheap grace.”
It’s a weak understanding of spirituality that has gripped strains of Christianity from its beginning. The great Origen of Alexandria (c. 185 - c. 253) was among the first to recognize and warn against the shallowness of such thought in De Principiis.
None of this bothers the leaders of Spotsylvania’s schools. And if the beauty and the strength of Western culture and art are the price we have to pay for removing books with dirty words, then this school system is willing to aid the cause.
Hold close your copy of Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet.” For as sure as they’ll come after it in schools, they’ll soon come after it in your homes.
That’s what happens when Western culture dies.