Thursday May 4, 2023
ANALYSIS: Fredericksburg City Schools - the future and reality collide on Friday | NEWS: Read-in to Protest Suspected Policy Changes in Spotsy
ANALYSIS: Fredericksburg City Schools - the future and reality collide on Friday
City Leaders to Celebrate Ribbon-cutting on New School, and Chew Some Tums
This Friday will be a joyous day for Fredericksburg City Schools Superintendent Marci Catlett, who will take part in a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the school’s new middle school that has been years in the making.
The new school is needed to handle the city’s growing student population, but the $70-plus million price tag has been the source of contention. Most of that bitterness should melt away when the past meets the future.
Catlett’s Crew and city residents will be on a high Friday, but don’t be surprised if everyone will have easy access to a pack of Tum’s.
Fredericksburg City School students have been underperforming in the classroom for years, and Catlett is rightly feeling the pressure to raise test scores.
Test scores, as I have frequently noted, are a very poor indicator of just how successful any school is. In fact, they can distort more than they clarify. But these scores are a political reality. And to be fair, Fredericksburg’s poor SOL scores are more than a blip - they represent a sustained pattern of underperforming.
Catlett is meeting the challenge head-on with her Superintendent Round Tables and concerted intense changes in how the schools teach children and track success.
In February, Catlett and Deputy Superintendent Matt Eberhardt spoke with F2S and were feeling positive about where the schools’ students were heading coming into SOL season. In fact, their analysis showed FCPS students were on track to potentially do much better than in the previous year.
To understand why, consider the above graph, which we explained in February as follows:
The bar graph to the left above each subject area indicates the pass/fail rate on 2022’s SOL exams. In all but science, the failure rate was at or above 50%. Unacceptable by any standard.
This fall, the district gave the Virginia Growth Assessment exams as a way to measure how students this year are doing relative to 2021-22.
Unfortunately, the VGA tests have proven useless, because the state education department under the direction of Aimee Guidera and Jill Balow have yet to establish cut scores for the VGA exam. In other words, the district may know a student scored a 214, but without cut scores, they have no way of knowing if that’s a passing or failing grade.
By failing to set cut scores, “The state pulled the rug out from under us,” said Deputy Superintendent Matt Eberhardt, “so we had to step back and do our own assessment.”
The bars on the right above each subject area represent that assessment.
The administration went to the teachers and asked which students were on track to pass (green), which ones weren’t meeting the standard (red), and which ones were on the fence (yellow).
Eberhardt points out that across the board, the district is seeing a sharp drop from last year in the number of students failing.
SOL scores are beginning to roll in in area schools, and while information has not been made public at this time, people will soon know how far off, or on target, Catlett’s Crew was in its assessment.
That fact, no doubt, will be very much in the back of their minds as they cut the ribbon on Friday.
If scores do, indeed, prove to meet the expectations FCPS believes it will see, then the city will feel a lot better about the money it’s about to spend.
Should the scores fall short, however, this will not be the time to bail.
Catlett is bringing a level of transparency to what is happening in the classroom that is welcome and refreshing.
As we concluded in February:
We’ll see where the SOL scores ultimately fall. If students do indeed make progress, don’t be surprised. If scores are disappointing, don’t complain. The groundwork has been laid to turn this district around.
We stand by that conclusion, but like everyone will be watching the SOL score reports with great interest in coming weeks.
COMMENTARY: Read-in to Protest Policy Change on Agenda in Spotsylvania
by: Martin Davis
"Michelangelo's David - right view 2" by Commonists is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/?ref=openverse.
When Spotsylvania Schools Superintendent Mark Taylor appeared on America 180 last month, he was fawning in his respect for Jen Peterson - a conservative parent who has made it her mission to have any book that fails to pass her measure for propriety removed from the shelves in school libraries.
The board and Taylor are all in with her, allowing one parent to override the parental rights of every other adult in the county who disagrees with her. (I suspect that’s most parents - November will tell.)
“We are … showing support for our librarians to do their jobs, the parents, teachers, and community members that took part in the review committees in good faith, … and for the rights of students, teenagers in these cases, to have access to a wide variety of books that will expand their world views, show them compassion when they may be short on it, or simply provide an escape from their daily lives.”
-Jeffrey Kent
The list of books Peterson has challenged stood at 33 in December, and has since grown.
In a story reported in April, my colleague Adele Uphaus reported that Chief of Staff Jon Russell sent an email to school principals ramping up the threat of book bans by suggesting a coming change to school policy that would alter the review process for challenged books. And until that policy change could be put in place, he ordered principals to “accept all book challenges and pull any challenged books from the shelves.”
Ordering principals to ignore stated board policy raises serious questions. What rights does Russell have to override board policy?
That aside, the new policy Russell wants imposed is up. And it’s an attack on the arts and freedom of expression that only extremists like those who banned Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry could truly appreciate. (Don’t know that story? Read more.)
The proposed changes to policy IIA*-R includes the following change to Section G Point 6, which originally read:
The school review committee takes the following steps after receiving the challenged materials:
a. reads, reviews, views or listens to the material in its entirety;
b. checks general acceptance of the material by reading reviews and consulting recommended lists.
The proposed changes would replace 6.B with the following:
b. checks for sexually explicit content as defined in Virginia Code Section 22.1-16.8 and 2.2-2827, meaning (i) any description or (ii) any picture, photograph, drawing, motion picture film, digital image or similar visual representation depicting sexual bestiality, a lewd exhibition of nudity, as nudity is defined in Virginia Code Section 18.2-390, sexual excitement, sexual conduct, or sadomasochistic abuse, as also defined in Section 18.2- 390, coprophilia, urophilia, or fetishism. IIA*-R Page 4 The following definitions from Virginia Code Section 18.2-390 apply: i. Nudity means a state of undress so as to expose the human male or female genitals in a discernibly turgid state. ii. Sexual conduct means actual or explicitly simulated acts of masturbation, homosexuality, sexual intercourse, or physical contact in an act of apparent sexual stimulation or gratification with a person; clothed or unclothed genitals, pubic area, buttocks, or if such be female, breast. iii. Sexual excitement means the condition of human male or female genitals when in a state of sexual stimulation or arousal. iv. Sadomasochistic means actual or explicitly simulated flagellation or torture by or upon a person who is nude or clad in undergarments, a mask or bizarre costume, or the condition of being fettered, bound, or otherwise physically restrained on the part of one so clothed
There are many problems with this change. Not the least of which is that there’s an argument that Senate Bill 656, which codified the Law, makes clear ‘[t]hat the provisions of this act shall not be construed as requiring or providing for the censoring of books in public elementary and secondary schools,” according to ACLU of Virginia’s senior supervising attorney Matthew Callahan. “The automatic removal of challenged library books from circulation, preventing any student’s access, is censorship that contradicts the Law’s express limitations.”
Small Minds
The fact, unfortunately, is that the same four board members who have taken action after action to weaken the school system by chasing off teachers, silencing dissent from the dais and from the school board floor, threatening Draconian budget cuts, and refusing to engage with media or parents or constituents who disagree with them will follow suit and in all likelihood push this backwards-looking change through.
The truly sad part of all this is that they might really believe that works by Toni Morrison are pornographic. It defies reason how one mind can put one of the great pieces of American literature on the same plane as sexually explicit videos devoid of any real artistic merit streamed by millions of people every day. (Not coincidentally, the states that consume the most pornography are overwhelmingly in conservative Republican states - make of that what you will.)
It’s the same limited mindset that had parents up in arms against a principal in Florida who dared to show a photo of the statue of Michelangelo’s David to students.
That action got the principal fired, leading to evangelically oriented and unflinchingly conservative Hillsdale College, which produced the curriculum the principal used, to criticize the school for firing the principal.
Most of us see beauty and humanity in the arts. A big part of education is helping us to appreciate that beauty. Too many, like the majority school board members, can see only ugliness and sin. It’s a mark of their limited intellect and compassion.
Read-in Silent Protest
One person is taking a stand (or seat in the shade) prior to Monday night’s meeting where the policy change will be voted on.
Jeffrey Kent of the Livingston District is planning a Read-in Silent Protest from 4:30-5:30 before the board meeting. (Want to attend? Find more information here.) In an email Wednesday, he described the Read-in this way:
Participants are encouraged to be present from 4:30-5:30 and simply find a spot to sit and read a book of their choice for the hour. They have also been encouraged to display a sign, if they want, that says what they are reading. Hopefully this will be followed by participants attending the meeting and speaking out to the board and superintendent about their continued attempts to remove books from the school libraries based on the challenge of one person and the superintendent overruling the reviews of those books by parent/teacher panels, or one of the other issues that have been raised over the past year with this board.
In a conversation with F2S via text message, Kent had the following to add:
“We are … showing support for our librarians to do their jobs, the parents, teachers, and community members that took part in the review committees in good faith, … and for the rights of students, teenagers in these cases, to have access to a wide variety of books that will expand their world views, show them compassion when they may be short on it, or simply provide an escape from their daily lives.”
Kent is onto something.
There really is nothing more powerful than a book in one’s hands. And that’s what book banners know and fear.
If you go Monday, might I suggest that you bring two books?
One that you’re going to read …
… and a copy of Fahrenheit 451 to give to Kirk Twigg, April Gillespie, Rabih Abuismail, Lisa Phelps, and Mark Taylor.
The graphic novel version will suffice.
"The groundwork has been laid to turn this (Fred schools) around"??? You mean they are taxing us for another bu8ilding that will sit empty at least 25% of the year? There is no evidence this will do any good at all and the $70 million is a low ball figure that does not include costs of new staff. That money could have been used for improving teaching. Go back and ask school admin what they will do with a failing system.