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The Cranky Taxpayer |
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Lousy Schools |
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The Richmond Schools say they are "The Capital Choice in Education." In fact, most Richmond schools should be required to post the same notice as the entrance to Dante's Inferno:
RPS did a sloppy audit of the Fox elevator procurement and
a sloppy, unlawful
second try at
that procurement. Cranky won his
Freedom of Information Act suit against the School Board. The school staff at Oak Grove Elementary
cheated in the 2005 SOL testing. The Richmond
SOL scores continue to lag and the Richmond
SAT scores are a disaster. The
alternative assessment scores are
fraudulent. Despite the aid of the state's
crooked accreditation system and the
state's jiggering the SOL scoring, 12.5% of our schools are not
fully
accredited. Richmond has one of
the seven Virginia schools
facing Year 5
sanctions for English
and one of three facing Year 5 sanctions for math under the
No Child Left Behind Act.
We have the only Year 6 schools in both English and math. One reason Richmond's school children
don't score well is that they don't come to
school and the State Board of Education is enabling
Richmond's violations of the
truancy laws. One reason some of our kids don't come to school is that
they have been suspended for not
coming to school(!). Some others have dropped out. Another reason for the awful scores,
perhaps, is the disorder in our schools.
Another is that the School Board and the
school administration themselves are doing a terrible job. Yet
another is that the Richmond school
system encourages cheating by the teachers.
Another, it seems, is that some Richmond teachers are so inept that they
cannot provide correct answers to students
they are helping to cheat. To get those awful results,
we pay $2,502 per kid more than Norfolk and $2,147
more than the State average (not counting debt service). Most of the extra money is disappearing
into the instruction budget, mostly in
the elementary and
middle schools, where it is
doing no good. As of '02,
we also were
paying for 592 unused seats (4%
of the total) in elementary schools and
2859 unused seats (19% of the
total!) in middle and high schools. The internal audit of the Exceptional Education program disclosed that the Board and the Superintendent were not in control. The State, as seems to be its habit, did nothing.
Indeed, the Richmond schools deliver the scholastic equivalent of capital punishment to our kids at a remarkably high cost. If the schools can't do a decent job, at least they should be able to do the same lousy job for a lot less money. Fame!
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Last updated
08/13/09 |