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The Education Department has posted the 2010-11 SOL scores for each school, each school division, and the state in a series of computerized reports on the Web. These scores should not reflect the "adjustments" that inflate some of the accreditation scores by as much as 18 points. Nonetheless the numbers in many cases have been fudged (see the data here and here and, especially, here).
Less Cheating Means Lower Scores As I demonstrated here, Richmond has been misclassifying students as "disabled" and shoving them into the VGLA, which Richmond grades, in order to boost its SOL scores. Buchanan County got caught doing that two years ago and immediately took an SOL hit (please recall that five and six point drops are HUGE):
The County did not recover in 2011.
The scores of the kids with disabilities explain the overall drop:
Notice those 95's in 2009. The students with disabilities were scoring better than the general population! That suggests cheating of the rankest sort. Last year, the General Assembly passed HB304, which forced the Superintendent to pull her head out of the sand and become "concerned" about the large numbers of students taking the VGLA. Of course, she did not fire the Buchanan Superintendent, much less the Superintendent in Richmond or any of the other jurisdictions with obviously cooked VGLA populations. She did require "training" in divisions with VGLA populations of 25% or more. HB304, in contrast, required an annual justification that includes evidence that every student considered for the VGLA meets the criteria for inclusion. The effect was dramatic. The Richmond English (reading) SOL score dropped by three points; math dropped by six. Indeed the State English and math scores dropped by a point each. Here are the data for Richmond, the State, and some nearby divisions. First the raw English reading scores and then the English scores of students with disabilities:
Notice first the general drop in scores in 2011 (except for Charles City where something anomalous happened). Then notice that the Richmond English scores were running six to seven points below the state average while the Richmond scores for students with disabilities were (and still are) three to four points above the state average. Stir all that together and out pops the same conclusion as that from the other data: Richmond has been abusing its students and using the VGLA to artificially boost its SOL scores. And the reduced VGLA numbers have reduced the overall score but Richmond continues to be an easy grader of the VGLA. And the State has been letting Richmond get away with it: The Superintendent and the Board members whose terms started before HB304 are guilty of malfeasance; the Governor should fire them all. Here, for completeness, are the the math data:
[Notice the Charles City scores: All students running ca. five points below the state but kids w disabilities running some ten points above. Either they are doing a terrific job for their kids with disabilities or they are cheating big time.] In terms of overall drop (reading + math), Richmond is in a two way tie with Halifax for fifth from worst. Appomattox wins with a sixteen point total drop. Here are the reading and math scores by year of the six worst overall performers:
Recall that Buchanan County is not on this list because they got caught out a year earlier. As a refreshing contrast, here are the eight divisions that showed the largest overall improvement this year.
Note again that something funny happened at Charles City to dramatically improve the reading scores while the math score dropped sharply.
Lower Scores Mean Lower Ranking For the 2011 English test, Richmond's 80% pass rate puts it in a four-way tie for 7th from the bottom, down from 19th last year, 1.8 standard deviations below the mean Division score:
The entire list is here. The Richmond 76% pass rate on the math test places it fourth from the bottom, down from 20th last year, 2.1 standard deviations below the Division mean.
The decreased scores, along with the increasing standards under the No Child Left Behind Act, lead to tanking AYP performance.
The data also provide a picture of Richmond's progress, or lack of progress, toward improving its performance. Here are the SOL numbers for Richmond, the State, the nearby suburbs, and Norfolk for the past eight years:
As you see, the changing state average (improving except for 2011 and the bump from the obviously tougher math test in and after 2006) provide a moving target. We can remove the movement by looking at the scores relative to the state numbers:
On the English reading test, Richmond is right where it was seven years ago: eight points below the state average. On the math test, Richmond is at minus eleven, four points below its performance seven years ago. As to the 2014 deadline under the No Child Left Behind Act, the 2011 score decreases leave both the State and Richmond falling behind as to the goal.
The change in the math test in 2006 makes extrapolations problematic. Well, given that all extrapolations are problematic, let's say "even more problematic."
If we toss out the data from the years prior to the change, the extrapolation still looks bad for Virginia and especially bad for Richmond.
The state scores were topping out anyhow. The max is 100 so there's not much room for the better scoring divisions to pull the average up; future improvements will increasingly have to rely on improving scores of the poorer performers. The VGLA hit decreased both scores, without suggesting any hope for future improvement. We'll see whether VDOE's techniques for boosting the scores (aka cheating, see the data here and here and, especially, here) can do anything to improve this situation. If leadership is an important factor in school (in this case division) performance, the math and English scores should correlate. This year the Virginia data show an R 2 of 62%:
 On the issue of leadership, here are the results from the first year at the Patrick Henry charter school. You may be confident that these excellent scores are a profound embarrassment to the Richmond School Board and Superintendent and that they will continue to expend every effort to kill off PHSSA.
[2d figure corrected 8/21/11]
[The following section is out of date. See the gray box below for the reason.] Turning to the cost of these results, we at last have the 2010 financial data from the Education Department.
Here are the 2010 disbursement data (with debt service and contingency reserve removed) vs. ADM for the Virginia school divisions. ("ADM" is Average Daily Membership, which is educratese for the average number of kids). Richmond is the gold square; the red diamonds are, from the left, Hampton, Newport News, and Norfolk; the green diamonds are, from the left, Hanover, Henrico, and Chesterfield. The huge enrollment out at the right is, of course, Fairfax.
More detail emerges if we expand the axis to put Fairfax and the other very large divisions off to the right:
The computer is glad to fit a least squares line to these data. The very small R2 value tells us that enrollment and $/ADM are essentially uncorrelated. More to the point here, the comparable old, urban divisions manage to spend about average amounts per kid, while Richmond spends much more. Limiting the inquiry to Richmond, the suburbs, and several comparable, old cities, we see:
or, in terms of a graph,
Restricting the inquiry to Richmond, Norfolk, and the State average:
Multiply the $3,157 per kid excess spending vs. the state by the Richmond ADM (21,466) to get the excess cost of the Richmond schools vs. the state average: $67.9 million. Vs. Norfolk, the difference is $60.6 million. If we juxtapose the English SOL scores with the expenditure data, we see:
The green diamonds from the top are Hanover, Chesterfield, and Henrico. The red diamonds from the top are Newport News, Hampton, and Norfolk; the gold square is Richmond. Looking for a trend, the computer was glad to fit a straight line to the data. The negative slope suggests that, among the Virginia school divisions, higher per kid costs correlate with lower English SOL scores. The R2, however, tells us that expenditure is essentially uncorrelated with the scores. I think that is because the quality of schools depends on the leadership, not the cost. The blue lines are the state average English SOL and expenditure/ADM. The points in the upper left are the high score/low cost divisions. The outstanding division there, with a 95 score at a cost of $9,727 per kid is Hanover. Note that Richmond is over in the high cost/low performance quarter while the peer cities are in the average cost, low performance area. This is more evidence, if any were needed, that an old city can do as well as Richmond, and at a much lower cost. The dataset is here. Here is the same graph for the Math SOL:
The winner in the upper left quadrant there is Patrick County with a 95 score at a cost of $10,093 per ADM. Don't Take My Word for It Steve Fuhrmann of Charles City points out that two studies, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, reach pretty much the same conclusion as I do: Richmond is spending a lot of money and obtaining inferior results. A 2008 study, based on 2005 data, from the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute, ranks the Virginia divisions by per student expenditure per average SOL point. The study uses raw costs except that it corrects for the higher costs of the NoVa jurisdictions. On that scale, Richmond is 7th from the most expensive, with a $160.54 cost that is over twice the $77.68 cost of the most effective division, Poquoson. A more recent study from the Center for American Progress, based on 2008 data, rated school districts for productivity after controlling for cost of living and student needs. Their interactive site shows Richmond at the bulls eye in the high cost, low production quadrant:
Cheating the Kids to get Better Scores So, in Richmond we have very high cost and lousy performance. The other Bad News is that Richmond has been inflating the SOL scores by getting rid of a third of the kids who enter high school. The enrollment pattern by grade gives away the game:
Just looking at the raw enrollments, the State enrollment at Grade 12 is down 11.4% from Grade 9. Richmond, however, is down nearly three times as much, 32.9%. In short, Richmond is culling the kids to improve their test scores. The people who pay the price for that, of course, are the kids who don't graduate:
More data on this issue here and here. These data suggest that the Mayor's 2005-06 truancy campaign (by the City [pdf], not by the School Board, of course) has had only a minor effect upon Richmond's outrageous practice of driving out the low-performing kids to improve the scores. Even more outrageous, Richmond has been boosting its scores by abusing the process for identifying and testing kids with disabilities. So there you have it: High cost and lousy scores, in spite of the cheating to boost those scores.
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