The Blunderbuss - Poxes and problems

by James A. Bacon

Virginia’s public school officials rely upon a wide array of metrics to determine if schools are doing a good job of educating their students. Trusting in the integrity of the statistics, our political leaders use them to guide education policy and decision-making — as recently highlighted by the data-heavy critique of Virginia’s schools published by the Youngkin administration last week.

I have written about Fletcher Norwood (not his real name), a high school teacher at a high-poverty school in Virginia, and his travails in teaching kids who are unmotivated, ill disciplined and addicted to cellphones. The system he describes is reminiscent of that of Chinese provincial functionaries concocting economic-performance numbers to make themselves look good, passing them up the line, and leaving higher-ups in Beijing with a distorted view of reality. Metrics malpractice at Norwood’s school is particularly evident in the handing out of grades and the measurement of student “growth.”

Consider, for example, enrollment in the two “honors” classes that Norwood teaches. Collegevine says that most schools give honors classes an additional 0.5 grade kicker on a 1.0 to 4.0 scale in acknowledgment of the more demanding curricula. Some schools are motivated to place kids in honors classes because the weight-boosted average makes the school look better. But at his school, Norwood says, there is no discernible logic for admitting students to the honors classes he teaches.

by James A. Bacon

That didn’t take long. On Friday, the Youngkin administration issued its report detailing the perilous condition of Virginia’s public schools. Today the progressive educational establishment struck back, thoroughly rejecting the administration’s claims that educational performance is heading in the wrong direction.

The most forceful denunciations are found in The Washington Post, which not only quoted numerous critics of the report, but joined in the fray with its own “analysis” suggesting that Team Youngkin’s “use of data is misleading.”

According to the Post (quoting verbatim):

Senate Majority Leader Richard L. Saslaw (D-Fairfax) said in a statement: “To accuse Virginia’s education system of failure is an outright lie, supported by cherry-picked data and warped perspective.”

The Virginia Education Association, a teachers union, called the report “biased” and designed to “get the public to want school choice measures like vouchers.” The association shared a video of [Secretary of Education Aimee] Guidera speaking at an April panel hosted by the American Enterprise Institute, in which she promised to publish data on students’ poor academic performance to “hopefully … have those conversations about expanding choices outside the public system.”

The superintendent of Alexandria City Public Schools, Gregory C. Hutchings Jr., said the report inspired him to navigate to the NAEP website, where he discovered that Virginia students had consistently scored above the national average. “So I’m not really understanding the whole premise of this report,” he said, which “was around us performing so much lower than everyone else.”

The Virginia Mercury (in a more balanced account than the Post) also quoted the Virginia Association of School Superintendents as accusing Youngkin of presenting an “inaccurate assessment of Virginia’s public education system currently and historically.” “Again, by most measures, Virginia ranks near the top and surpasses most states throughout the country,” the superintendents’ organization wrote in the March 10 letter. On Thursday, the VASS said it was in the process of reviewing Youngkin’s new report.

If you’re looking for serious vituperation, turn to Blue Virginia, mouthpiece for the unrestrained Democratic Party id, which found the report to be “disgusting and dishonest as usual from the Youngkin administration, which continues to wage war on public education in Virginia.”

Blue Virginia also quotes state Senator Louise Lucas, D-Portsmouth: “This misguided effort based on fake news and debunked theories is an outright attack from the far right, riling up racist constituencies with lies and deceit. This report shows once again that Governor Youngkin wants to take us back to the days of Jim Crow.”

Ah, the old back-to-Jim-Crow gambit.

by Lindsey Zea

For election accountability purposes, chain of custody for ballots should be observable and publicly verifiable. So, why are two of the largest counties in Virginia, as well as other localities, planning to expand the chain of custody to include a third-party absentee-ballot processing company from Washington state that was caught red-handed ignoring the security measures built into the law?

Before 2021, absentee ballots were mailed from local registrars’ offices and processed and supervised by the registrar’s staff. In 2021, a bill (SB 1239) was passed that permits localities to hire a third-party company to print, assemble, and mail absentee ballots. Once hired, this vendor receives the name, address, precinct, district and voter ID information for individual voters. In Loudoun County, for example, the list of permanent absentee ballots that would be handed over to the private vendor would number around 15,000.

Last year, Fairfax County, the most populous county in Virginia, outsourced the printing and mailing of absentee ballots to a company called K&H located in Washington state. K&H failed to follow Virginia law. The company did not sign a legally required oath before beginning work. A public information request found that the vendor failed to comply with Virginia law and did not sign the oaths until months after the election was over.

State law says, “The printer contracting with or employed by the electoral board or general registrar to print the ballots shall sign a statement before the work is commenced…” 

Entrusting bulk absentee ballots, the most fraud-prone part of our elections, to strangers on the other side of the country is a bad idea. Some ballots are going to people who may not have recently asked for them, the chain of custody barely exists, and private voter information is being handled by a third-party company. If all that starts to look like a nightmare in the making, in real life it gets much worse.

by Steve Haner

Fourteen nights in a hospital, especially if you are fully awake and observant, is very instructive. Here are some things I want to share:

The hospitals are understaffed and otherwise under major stress, to the point that patient standards of care have changed. As nice and diligent as everyone is, nurses or technicians can be with only one patient at a time, and the charting they must do is extensive.

When the order for a vital test is placed at 11 a.m. and it finally happens at 2 a.m. the next morning, with two lonely techs running the CT machine through the dead of night, that’s about staffing. A 3 a.m. room visitor coming to conduct an ultrasound at bedside is a sign that team is also shorthanded.

A slow response on a call button is about staffing, not inattention at the desk. The days when the staff makes sure every patient gets at least cleaned up with wipes and gets clean sheets and a new gown daily are gone. It happens if you ask and happens quicker if a family member can help you.

All the people I asked blamed a staffing exodus during and after the pandemic sieges, backfilling now only slowly. Cynics might wonder if hospitals are enjoying some financial benefit from lower labor costs. I can just testify that the experience differed from previous (and shorter) hospitalizations in the same facility. Those folks they have were all gracious and easy to work with, but swamped.

The hospitals are heavily dependent on immigrants, and a viable legal immigration system and more openness to foreign credentials have to be part of the staffing solution. Screw the professional protectionist urges. Screw the Trumpian nativist nonsense.

Jesus, the friendly surgical tech who chatted me up in pre-op, had been a nurse in the Philippines. Margaret with the lovely BBC accent had been a nurse in Wales. Why do we refuse to recognize their licensing? Perhaps a full third of the personnel I spoke with were immigrants, many who had done their training here. We should accept more of the foreign training.

And then, of course, there are the doctors, some heavily accented immigrants and many probably born into families long here, but the Asian and Indian Subcontinent surnames abound. Being in a modern American hospital must be hellish for racists like that idiot mass murderer in New York. What they call “replacement” is a done deal.

by Steve Haner

by Chris Braunlich

by Jim McCarthy