Accreditation

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The State Department of Education has published the 2008-09 accreditation data on its web site. 

As a reminder: There are four stages of accreditation.  Here are the short forms I use (with my interpretation of the euphemisms):

• Fully Accredited (passing)

• Warning (failing)

• Denied (failed)

• Conditional (failed and has not been fixed)

The official definitions are here.   In short, "Warning" means the school flunked but for fewer than three years running.  "Denied" means the school flunked for three years running.  "Conditional" indicates a new school (not the case in Richmond) or a school that is being "reconstituted."  The Ed. Dept's "Terminology" page tells us that a school being reconstituted is one for which accreditation has been denied, i.e., a school with a history of at least three years of flunking.
 

Richmond Still in the Cellar

Richmond increased the number of accredited schools from 10 for '02-03 to 41 in 2006-07.  For 2007-08 (based on the 2006-07 testing), Richmond dropped back to 39 schools with full accreditation.  Hill and Henderson were the only middle schools not in trouble.  Then, for 2008-09, Binford, Thompson, Brown, and King gained accreditation:

That left Boushall and Chandler still unrecovered from failing and Blackwell, Elkhardt, and Oak Grove still on warning.  (Notice that Oak Grove, which was not rated in 2006-07 because of massive cheating by the school staff, flunked both of the following years.)

Please recall that the State cooks the accreditation data so that a school must be really terrible to not be fully accredited.  Yet, here we are with almost three times the state rate of Warnings and almost six times the rate of Conditionals:

Or, in terms of a graph:

Dropouts Keep the Numbers From Being Worse

Richmond saves itself from doing worse only by driving out almost almost half the kids who enter the ninth grade:

Ongoing Problems with NCLB

The No Child Left Behind data paint an even less rosy picture of the Richmond situation than the accreditation numbers.  Here is the status of the Richmond and Virginia schools as to English

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Last updated 09/27/08
Please send questions or comments to John Butcher