Keep the Achievement Gap?

An interesting piece by Washington Post Education Columnist Jay Mathews caught my eye today, titled Forget About the Achievement Gap.

Why don't I like talking about the achievement gap? Because we use the term in a way that suggests narrowing the gap is always a good thing, when that is not so. Here are some ways the gap could narrow: Low-income scores improve but high-incomes scores don't; low-income scores don't change but high-income scores drop; low-income scores drop but high-income scores drop even more. In each of those cases of gap-narrowing, something bad is happening.

In case you weren't aware, the Achievement Gap Mathews refers to is the persistently lower academic performance of kids who are poor or who identify as Black or Latino. I've written about this before here and here. Mathews' vehicle for this exploration is a study called High-Achieving Students in the Era of No Child Left Behind published a month ago by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The study concludes that

Gaps are narrowing because the gains of low-achieving students are outstripping those of high achievers by a factor of two or three to one. The nation has a strong interest in developing the talents of its best students to their fullest to foster the kind of growth at the top end of the achievement distribution that has been occurring at the bottom end.

Mathews concludes:

Why not curtail all this achievement-gap talk? Let's focus instead on the progress of every child, no matter if she or he starts the year two grades behind classmates or two grades ahead. All children deserve a chance to climb as high as they can.

This is an interesting topic for Loudoun County families, so many of whom are well educated and affluent and expect the best education available for their high-achieving offspring. We also have a significant number of our neighbors struggling to get by on little education of their own. Some of their kids do very well in school, and others struggle.

Maybe it is because I'm not a professional educator or academic that Mathew's approach utterly baffles me. By suggesting scenarios where "low-income scores improve but high-incomes scores don't" he links achievement and income and posits that income and achievement necessarily move together. This may be a historical reality, but it should not be a future assumption. He even treads dangerously close to social darwinism by tying his statements to the "best students" phrasing of the report to his own "high income" grouping.

There will always be a top tier and a bottom tier. People have different abilities. Nobody desires to hold back the top tier until the bottom tier catches up. But it is our moral responsibility to try to create a world where the tiers are no longer passed down through generations.

The Washington Post Got it Wrong

In another post today about the recent clash between the School Board and the Board of Supervisors over the Rouse property, I called a particular story published online yesterday and in print today a case of "abysmal reporting" by the Washington Post. Here's why:

Problem #1:
The story in print reads:

"...the county's assessor had estimated that the land was worth dramatically less, $2.6 million."

The online story was corrected to say:

"the county had assessed the land at dramatically less, $2.6 million."

Do you see the $3.1 million difference between the two statements? No, you don't, because the Post failed to report what Leesburg Today and the Loudoun Times Mirror did, that:

According to a memo by Burton, the county assessor said the land is worth only $5.7 million. (Times Mirror)

and

"[County Assessor Todd] Kaufman's evaluation of the land placed the value at approximately $5.5 million." (Leesburg Today)

Problem #2:
The story in print reads:

Supervisors also said they were troubled that the district's offer included a $2 million bump to sweeten the pot for the owner.

The online story was corrected to say:

Supervisors also said they were troubled that the district's offer included an additional $2 million.

Do you see the difference here? The story in print implies that LCPS just tossed in an extra $2M as a favor to the owner. As it is the corrected version does nothing to explain the reason that there is a $2M "premium" on the purchase price, which is explained in my Rouse Property post.

Problem #3:
The story in print reads:

They ordered the school district to return to the owner and renegotiate the price.

The online story was corrected to say:

They asked the school district to return to the owner and renegotiate the price.

See the difference? Ordered vs. Asked. In case you were wondering, the School Board does not work for the Board of Supervisors. We work for the citizens who elect us.

Problem #4:

"County officials also have been frustrated with the cost of the schools being built by the district."

If we take at face value that "County officials" (though we don't know who they are or whether they constitute a meaningful group because this has no citations) may be frustrated, but let's remember that LCPS builds it schools for less money per student and per square foot than any other school district in Virginia. The Post should have noted this.

Problem #5:

"The acrimony comes despite a concerted effort by the supervisors to ease tensions between the two bodies."

This one phrase manages to be at once unsupported, biased and wrong. As written, one would believe that the poor, mild mannered supervisors are a put-upon bunch. At the very least the Post should note that members of the School Board have also worked to bridge the gap. In any case, while a few Supervisors have put forth an effort to improve the working relationship (Burton and Buckley get special credit here), some have actively aggravated the situation. There is certainly no "concerted effort."

Problem #6:

Also Tuesday, the board voted to take an inventory of the available properties across the county that might be suitable for schools."

As accurately reported by Leesburg Today:

"In anticipation of the summer discussion Miller presented an item at the board meeting requesting an inventory of land parcels appropriate for school uses located in the Dulles Suburban Policy Area."

Problem #7

"The hope, they said, was to provide more information to Loudoun residents and to the board, which they said is often informed about land purchases at the last minute."

The truth is that the Board of Supervisors only started paying attention at the last minute. This contract was signed by the School Board in March and engineering studies sent to County Staff in April. This is worth noting, don't you think?

March 11th: "The School Board approved authorization to sign a contract for the purchase of a parcel of land for a middle school (MS-6) and high school (HS-8). This land is 173.69 acres at the intersection of routes 621 and 617."

April 22nd: "The School Board approved conveying the findings of the engineering study of the 174-acre tract known as the Rouse property to County staff so that bond funding can be directed to the appropriate LCPS land acquisition account."

I'm a fan of this country's commitment to a free press, and generally I think our local reporters do a good job with the resources they have. Against that backdrop, this is an example of exceptionally bad journalism and the damage that can do to the public's ability to critically assess the job that its representatives are doing.

Special Education changes

Parents Protest Special Education changes is an interesting article in the Loudoun Times Mirror this week about last week's local hearing regarding changes to state regulations for special education (see previous post). Prior to the hearing I received a lengthy analysis by the LCPS Special Education department of the extensive change proposal, in which the department agrees with some changes and opposes others. Regarding the hot issue of parental input into continuing IEP services, the most intersting part of the article was this:

Mary Kearney, director of special education for Loudoun County Schools, said the county also does not support the removal of the requirement for parental consent. "We believe parental involvement in all aspects of their children's education promotes a better education," she said.

On this very same topic, if you have a child with special education needs, you may be interested in a workshop being offered on Tuesday by the LCPS Parent Resource Center called Being an Active Member of Your Child’s IEP Team. There is a session for parents of pre-K students from 9:30-11:00 AM and one for parents of school-age kids (K-12) at 7pm. The PRC holds these sessions monthly throughout the school year.

Learning a Healthy Life

The Loudoun Times Mirror ran a series of articles just before Christmas profiling Belmont Station Elementary and issues of student nutrition and health. With the Washington Post's article on school lunches that I wrote about on Monday and the upcoming Health, Safety & Wellness committee meeting on school safety for children with food allergies, I thought it was a good time to revisit these great stories.

The story titled The Healthy Snacks School is an interesting case-in-point about how each of Loudoun's 72 schools (soon to be 75) operates independently in many ways. Consider the following:

This is the Healthy Snack School, and everyone seems to be on board with Principal Patricia McGinly's program. Students are starting to read labels. They detected corn syrup in the cafeteria's chocolate milk; now McGinly is on the hunt for a brand that shuns the offending ingredient.

Note that there is no system-wide directive here, no new policy. There is just the principal deciding that this will be an area of emphasis at her school. I emphasize this to parents repeatedly: If you want something done, don't start by lobbying the Superintendent to change the rules for every school, start by convincing a principal to change the approach for one school and let the success of your pilot program spread to other schools. That's the way almost every new program at LCPS comes about, even for those implemented by the senior administrators.

Despite the reporter's assessment that "everyone seems to be on board with" the program, my guess is that not every parent at Belmont Station likes these new rules. This can't be an easy culture shift, and I'd be interested to learn more about the growing pains.

Emphasizing the importance of study before implementation, the story called Learning To Eat profiles the study by a local researcher of the impact of various educational practices on students in four schools (the students volunteered to be a part of the study).

A 24-week study of the effect of teaching nutrition and offering structured exercise programs at four Loudoun elementary schools led researcher Karen Gabel Speroni to conclude that school nurses might use their position as "role models and spokespersons to foster increased activity and improved nutritional education in their schools and communities."

The study even had conclusions for the School Board, according to the story:

She recommended to the school board, at the conclusion of her study, that choice may not be the best path to health. Better, she suggested, to put out the "best choice" tray – the child can still choose between the two main entrees, but everything else will already be on the tray. The diner will not have the option of passing up the fruit and the vegetable.

I don't recall seeing the study or its conclusions, I hope that we will have a chance to review both in an upcoing Health, Safety & Wellness Committee meeting.

Finally, because health isn't all about the food, there is another story about innovations in physical education, again profiling Belmont Station as a host to a pilot program.

The children at Belmont Station get to work out with balance balls, exercise ladders and other equipment that helps them develop their core muscles. This program enables exercises to be tailored to each student's ability level. "This way, they all look like they're doing the same thing, and it doesn't single out kids," Jones said.

With limited time in the school day and ever-increasing pressure to improve academic performance, one of my favorite questions to ask is "how can we increase cross-discipline programs?" (Director of Instruction Peter Hughes is probably really sick of hearing me say that by now). The story cites a perfect example of this:

"We try to make anything fun and integrate academics whenever possible,” Comins said. An example, he said, was when they create a dance where the steps correspond to the water cycle. By remembering the dance, they remember academic material.

I applaud the parents, students and principal of Belmont Station Elementary for striving and innovating, not waiting for changes to be implemented at the top but instead setting an example for all the schools around them. I also applaud the Times Mirror for focusing on these important school issues.

Top Students, Top Schools

Recently I had a meeting with moms in my area, and the first topic of conversation was how difficult it was for the top HS Seniors they knew to get into their first-choice schools. Today's Washington Post includes a front-page article about exactly this topic, which is apparently a problem for many students in the region.

The thrust of the article is that Northern Virginia graduates more than it's share of exceptional students, who compete against each other to be the regional representatives to Virginia's top public universities.

College applicants from Northern Virginia are facing unusually stiff competition -- increasingly from one another. The region, with an extraordinary concentration of high-performing schools and students, might have to adjust long-held assumptions about the power of scores and grades in college admissions.

According to a former TJ guidance counselor:

"many Northern Virginia families overlook that large numbers of students in the region have high test scores and good grades. Many of them, she said, are in competition with each other. The top state undergraduate institutions, such as U-Va., the College of William & Mary, Virginia Tech and JMU, also "cannot take all of their students from Northern Virginia," Bloomquist said. "They have to leave room" for students from other parts of the state.

Penguins Popping Up in the Press

With each passing day, Superintendent Hatrick's decision to pull the book And Tango Makes Three from sixteen Loudoun County school libraries gains more attention from near and far. This morning brings stories from both coasts.

The Loudoun Times Mirror published a story about New York-based National free-speech groups weighing in on the decision.

Now, national anti-censorship groups have sent a letter to Schools Superintendent Edgar Hatrick III condemning his decision regarding "And Tango Makes Three."

"No one is being forced to read 'And Tango Makes Three,'" states the letter from the New York City-based National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression. " But restricting student access violates the rights of children whose parents want their children to be taught tolerance and respect for diversity."

And while this is a local decision, the LA Times editorial published today makes clear that from coast to coast, this is a national issue and we are being closely watched:

The book certainly sends a message that two-father families exist, and quite happily. That's simply the truth, whether or not some people would like to ban gay ornithological unions. Too bad that, even though two committees favored keeping the book, the superintendent pulled it from all elementary shelves in the school district.

It takes common sense and sometimes bravery to nurture tolerance at school. There are teachers, school counselors and even students doing this every day. Leaders would be better off supporting their efforts than putting more requirements on their shoulders or forbidding true stories of acceptance.

Outsiders cannot solve this for us, they cannot fight for us. We must do this ourselves, in our own way, from within our community, in our own words. And so, in case you missed it the first time,

I firmly believe that And Tango Makes Three
should be returned to the shelves
of Loudoun County Public School Libraries

Ours is a dramatically diverse community in the shades of our skin, the languages in our homes, the ways that we worship and the makeup of our families. We are a beautiful bowl of confetti and that is more so in our public schools than in any other part of our community. We are preparing our students for their diverse future, not our homogeneous past. Our school libraries have books about families of all kinds, books that tell kids about the different colors, languages, places, and ways to worship. They are incomplete without books that talk about different families. The State of Virginia's own Family Life Education program, in kindergarten, recognizes this need to talk about different kinds of families:

K.4 The student will recognize that everyone is a member of a family and that families come in many forms.
Descriptive Statement: This includes a variety of family forms: traditional or two-parent families-mother, father, and children; extended families--relatives other than the immediate family living in the home; single-parent families; adoptive families; foster families; fan-families with stepparents; and blended fan-families--new families formed by the marriage of a man and woman with children from previous marriages.

K.5 The student will identify members of his or her own family.
Descriptive Statement: This refers to identifying the adult and child members of the student's family.

While the state may have its head in the sand by omitting same-gender parents from its list in section K4, the state cannot deny that some kids in our community will identify two moms or two dads as adult members of their family in their finger-paintings that will hang on classroom walls. My kids and your kids are going to know these kids and see these drawings and hear about their families. As kindergarteners they don't know about sex, but they know about love, and we teach them that love is what makes a family. And Tango Makes Three is about love that exists in our children's world and if we let this book be taken from our libraries then next it will be the lesson taken from the curriculum and the fingerpaintings from the walls. Lessons about love and fingerpaintings of family are sorely needed in this world, and in Loudoun we can do our part by putting Tango back in our public school libraries.

Penguins Marching

In the days since I posted my call to Put the Penguins Back, a lot has happend. The Washington Post published a piece over the weekend, bloggers have picked it up nationwide, there is now a Facebook group devoted to the issue and tonight I read that Church Executive Magazine has picked up the story. Folks have written letters to the Superintendent and to the School Board, mostly opposing the decision to pull the book from the shelves.

If you're keeping score, we have three Board members supporting the Superintendent's decision, three Board members opposed, and three who haven't expressed their opinion yet. At next Tuesday's Board meeting I expect there will be folks coming to the dais to speak for and against, but anyone hoping for the Board to vote on the Superintendent's decison will be disappointed. While I disagree with the decision, the School Board should not make a practice of overturning the day-to-day decisions of the Superintendent outside of the normal channel of appeals, and I will not support such an effort in this case.

I continue to emphasize that an inadequate set of policies for book challenges led us to this situation, and I will post a proposal for revised policies on Tuesday February 26th for consideration at the March 4th Legislative/Policy committee meeting.

Self-Sufficiency Standard

As you may have read in this Washington Post story, I worked hard this winter to raise the salaries of our lowest-paid employees, the custodians. The story looks at what other area localities are doing that is similar, but does not go into depth about the principal of Self Sufficiency, beyond a brief quote from me:

"Everyone who works a full-time job should be paid enough to meet basic needs without help from family, friends or the government," School Board member John Stevens (Potomac) said.

This is the basic story, but I want to give you a little more background information. I'm not going to give you all the background, look up Self Sufficiency Standard or Living Wage to learn more. I'm just going to posit that this is an important principle for both political liberals and conservatives to support. Liberals should like that we're reducing the gap between rich and poor. Conservatives should like that good wages reduce the need for government subsidies. Good wages mean that people don't have to live two families to a house. Good wages mean parents can have only one job, which reduces gang activity and increases community integration. Good wages are the right thing to do, they are the smart thing to do, and as a Loudoun County's largest employer the public schools have an obligation to pay not based on the lowest amount we can get away with but on what it takes to live in our community.

It's important also to note that the standard is different depending on where you live, how many people are in your family, and how old they are. A preschooler requires higher daycare costs than a school-age child. Two-earner households can earn less per person because they share living expenses. Living expenses are much higher in Loudoun County than in Clarke County. The standard I chose was determined by the non-profit Wider Opportunities for Women, because their study is being used as a benchmark by the Loudoun Community Action Agency Board as part of its poverty symposium.

I am very pleased that the proposal passed unanimously.

Steps To Literacy

In case you missed it over the holiday weekend, the Post published a nice profile of a reading program called Steps to Literacy. The program is targeted specifically at reducing the achievement gap by ensuring that all students have a strong foundation in reading in writing.

In a school district that hires hundreds of teachers each year — each with a distinct approach to instilling one of life's most critical skills — administrators thought it was important to train everyone in the same reading curriculum.

The program they selected, Steps to Literacy, covers phonetics, vocabulary, spelling, writing, word recognition, reading comprehension and fluency in kindergarten through second grade.

If you're interested to see how LCPS evaluates pilot programs, have a look at the 2004 Steps to Literacy Year 1 Program Evaluation. I found it on the LCPS Program Evaluations web page.

Gifted Discontent

Today's Washington Post includes a letter from a Loudoun County parent who isn't happy with the gifted programs that LCPS offers.

The gifted program in Loudoun County is an attempt at appeasement. The system officials do not want the parents of the bulk of the students pointing at the gifted program and screaming elitist nor do they want to try to justify large expenditures for a segment of the community.

Jay Mathews, the Post's resident education guru, calls the letter "an apt summary of the strains and stumbles that surround this issue:"

You put your finger precisely on the problem that gifted programs have throughout the country. Public school systems rarely have the expertise or the money to reproduce the kind of program you had as a child, and the number of students like you and your daughter who are ready for it is so small that it is hard to justify to taxpayers.

I wrote about the gifted programs in October as part of a back and forth with Loudoun's blogging gifted program critic, Elise at Loudoun Schools Feedback. She also talks about the Post article today in her blog, I give her credit for getting to it first this morning. Her assessment below:

This parent and teacher perspective, in our opinion, is absolutely accurate. And, while tepid and unimaginative, Jay's response is also absolutely accurate...a tremendous amount of potential will be added to Virginia's vast pool of the untapped.

To see my overall assessment of LCPS gifted programs, see my LCPS Gifted Programs post.

As with so many things, parents who feel impacted need to take ownership and take action. If you have the answers, you have a responsibility to get involved and share them with the rest of us.

• Take advantage of the resources made available on the LCPS Gifted and Talented Program webpage.
  
• Download and read the LCPS Local Plan for the Education of the Gifted.
• Talk to your LCPS School Board member about the changes you want.
• Attend meetings of the Gifted Advisory Committee (next meeting: Jan 10th, 7:00p)
  
• Speak during the public comment sessions of the school board meetings (2nd & 4th Tuesdays, 6:3opm)
• Find out if your Parent-Teacher organization offers after-school programs, and if so offer to teach a class for gifted students

The LCPS parent who wrote the letter refers to "system officials" as the cause of the problem. I'm certainly one of those "system officials," but more than that I'm just a dad and a neighbor who just goes to a lot of meetings. So are every other one of the "system officials." My interest isn't in appeasing, it's in trying to do the very best for every child in our community. We only have the funds to spend that the taxpayers give us, we only have the hours in the day that nature gives us, and so there is always opportunity for improvement. When Elise refers to "Virginia's vast pool of the untapped", I think of the many parents with the expertise and perspective and hours to give and I wonder how to tap into that.

Weekend Education News

I found lots of interesting stories in the Washington Post this weekend. First was Calls Grow for a Broader Yardstick for Schools: A look at potential No Child LeftBehind Act revisions that would look beyond Reading and Math to other subjects, and even physical education.

Advocates for "multiple measures" say that learning is too complex to be judged by annual tests and argue that spontaneity and creativity in classrooms are being lost to test preparation and drills.

On the other hand:

"Proponents of multiple measures say it will give a richer, fuller view of a school, but this isn't about a rich view of a school. It's about failures in fundamental gate-keeping subject areas."

To see what your School Board said about the issue, see the resolution passed this fall.

Next, in the Loudoun Section, is a piece on next month's vote to get seatbelts on all new school buses. Sugarland Representative Joe Guzman has pushed this issue for years but finally got traction this fall when the US Department of Transportation completed a study and issued new guidelines for the use of seatbelts on buses. There was also an interesting column by the Post's Warren Brown on the subject in November, and I wrote my own piece on School Bus Seat Belts back in August. The School Board will vote on the issue in January, so if you have a strong opinion about the subject, now is the time to make it known.

On the ever-controversial subject of sex education, the Post reports today that Abstinence Programs Face Rejection in states across the country. It does reference Governor Kaine's cuts in his proposed budget, a story I commented on back in November making the same point that is in the opening lines of the story:

The number of states refusing federal money for "abstinence-only" sex education programs jumped sharply in the past year as evidence mounted that the approach is ineffective.

The most interesting aspect of this trend is that these states aren't just opting for more comprehensive sex education, or cutting sex education from their curriculums. They are effectively saying "you couldn't pay me to teach this stuff." Some folks will say that the liberal educational establishment actually wants kids to go out and have lots of sex. This just isn't true. I'll say it again and again: Studies show that just telling kids to be abstinent isn't the best way to actually get them to be abstinent. Further, it makes them more vulnerable to pregnancy, disease, rape, abuse and other complications of sex if they do not choose abstinence or are assaulted. This is a very inconvenient fact because these same conservative critics of public schools are often the ones decrying educational programs that haven't been proven effective.

"Why would we spend tax dollars on something that doesn't work?" asked Ned Calonge of the Colorado Department of Health and Environment. "That doesn't make sense to me. Philosophically, I am opposed to spending government dollars on something that's ineffective. That's just irresponsible."

Note that the quote is from Colorado... hardly a bastion of liberalism. Ohio is, interestingly, trying to have it both ways...

"The governor supports abstinence education," Keith Daily, a spokesman for Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland (D). "What he does not support is abstinence- only education. We are asking to put the money toward abstinence in the context of a comprehensive age-appropriate curriculum."

Of course, while pro-abstinence-education groups say of their programs: "They are holistic. They include relationship-building skills and medically accurate discussions of sexually transmitted diseases and contraception," Ohio has made itself ineligible for the funds by taking this approach, showing that "abstinence plus" just ain't so. The relationship building skills are focused entirely on maintaining virginity and the medically accurate information is entirely about scaring these kids. Other medically accurate information is not included in these programs.

Another way to think of it is that just as with science and civics, we're teaching children not just knowledge that they need now, but knowledge they need for a lifetime. By focusing on Abstinence education we do nothing to prepare them for the lives they will actually lead, in which most of them will be normal people who will have sex lives just as surely as they will have careers and families. We don't send them into the workforce without a clue, why would we send them into their bedrooms that way?

Finally in my list, on Friday the Post reported on the revenue shortfalls faced by the new Board of Supervisors, and tries to portray the issue as a point of contention between our two boards. I would comment that since the School Board hasn't even yet voted on the budget, it is premature to suggest that we're bickering with the Supervisors over it. We all understand that this is going to be a tough year, and we're all going to do our best to work out the best possible budget for the kids and the county.

US News Rankings

The Washington Post reports today on US News' ranking of America's Best High Schools, including the #1 ranking of Fairfax's Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. I have a couple of bones to pick with this study, and not just because Loudoun's schools are not included in the list.

First gripe: The only way that it is possible to rank High Schools nationally is by relying on test scores, which are helpful tools to evaluate but when used for rankings in this way they become the only criteria that people use to judge the schools. Rankings such as these motivate communities to push test scores above all else, constricting efforts to transform our schools into models for 21st century flexible learning.

Second gripe: TJ and other magnet high schools should not be ranked. Consider this quote:

"Public high schools have a mission to educate a range of students. It's not enough to just focus on the best kids or to just focus on remediation for the worst kids. You have to do both," said Brian Kelly, editor of U.S. News. "This methodology is set up to allow a fair comparison of that."

Pardon me for saying so, but Brian Kelly needs to wake up and smell what he's shoveling. TJ, while a great school doing a great job, doesn't do "remediation for the worst kids." TJ selects the most academically gifted students out of nearly a half million of the most affluent high school students in one of the most educated metropolitan areas in the entire world. The TJ administration could let those kids watch Cartoon Network all day, they'd still have high test scores.

US News needs to take this week's issue, put it in the trash, and start over again.

Rethinking Restlessness & Abstinence-Only

I was struck by two newspaper stories today that you may find interesting also.

First, if your recent teacher conference about your Kindergartener didn't go so well, or if your kid is ADHD and you're worried that it will affect him forever, don't fret. The New York Times reports this morning that Bad Behavior Does Not Doom Pupils in a story that reviews two new studies of early childhood behavior. In what one researcher called "landmark findings,"

One concluded that kindergartners who are identified as troubled do as well academically as their peers in elementary school. The other found that children with attention deficit disorders suffer primarily from a delay in brain development, not from a deficit or flaw.

Kindergartners who interrupted the teacher, defied instructions and even picked fights were performing as well in reading and math as well-behaved children of the same abilities when they both reached fifth grade, the study found.

As for kids with ADHD, the problem may not be a malfunction but instead just a delay:

The basic sequence of development in the brains of these kids with A.D.H.D. was intact, absolutely normal,” Dr. Shaw said. “I think this is pretty strong evidence we’re talking about a delay, and not an abnormal brain.”About three in four children do grow out of the problem by early adulthood, he said.

Here in Virginia, Governor Kaine is trying to balance the state's budget and found $275,000 in savings by cutting the funding for 14 non-profit groups teaching abstinence-only education. You can read about it in this Washington Post story.

Of course, the small-government conservatives who usually decry government funding of non-profits are naturally outraged:

Several social conservatives reacted angrily, accusing Kaine and Planned Parenthood of hiding his decision until after the Nov. 6 election. Sen. Ken Cuccinelli II (R-Fairfax) said he will try to get the General Assembly to reverse Kaine's decision when it convenes in January. "The longer you delay the commencement of sexual activity, you have healthier and happier kids and more successful kids," said Cuccinelli.

Actually, Cuccinelli is wrong about that according to another study published recently and documented in Sundays' Washington Post story:

Other things being equal, a more probing study has found, youngsters who have consensual sex in their early-teen or even preteen years are, if anything, less likely to engage in delinquent behavior later on.

While social conservatives would like to believe that if you only tell kids about abstinence they'll practice it, the evidence doesn't show that. The evidence actually demonstrates that kids are desperately curious about sex and that the more you tell them about it, the less likely they are to do their own research while Mom & Dad are at work. I applaud Kaine's willingness to stand strongly with the evidence. Parents who don't want public schools telling their kids about sex should be sure to take care of the responsibility themselves, and you can be sure that "don't do it" isn't a complete lesson.

These budget cuts and studies aren't likely to affect anything in Loudoun County Public Schools, which have had a stable sex education program as part of Family Life Education for umpteen years. Read all about it on the LCPS FLE webpage.

Wash Post features LCPS Stories

This has been a week of heavy coverage of Loudoun Schools in the Washington Post from a number of different angles. Here are some stories you may be interested to read...

• Lovettsville Still Debating Schools' Site: This is a very good overview of the most contentious issue now facing the School Board by the woman who is possibly Loudoun's best reporter on the beat right now, Michael Allison Chandler. Frustration about the location of a new western Loudoun high school contributed to the defeat of the only incumbent member who lost in this week's election, and now the pressure will be on newcomer Jennifer Bergel to bridge the gap between the many competing parties and interests with the innovation she has promised.
• Shaping a Wetlands Habitat: As a "green schools" advocate, this is one of the most exciting things I've seen at any LCPS school. Our facilities occupy a lot of ground space, and we should be moving away from the propensity to make all of that acreage into artificial surface cover. Incorporating hands-on ecological improvement into the curriculum is a great way to save costs, prepare our kids for the future and be good stewards
• Lingering Academic Gap Riles NAACP is another story by Ms. Chandler that is late in coming (the quote from me is two months old), but rather than say the Post is late to the party I'm going to compliment them for having an attention span that outlasts that of most media. I'm grateful for the way that it sustains the community awareness of one of those crucial issues that doesn't go away once the headlines move on to new things. I have some new developments on this front that I will write about in the coming days. There are at least 100 reader comments on this story, unfortunately they have little to do with the story itself and serve mainly to demonstrate how the issue of race in America is still an emotionally-charged tragedy.
  

In the press this week

Some stories of interest you might have missed in the local press this past week:

• Reader Q&A with Superintendent Hatrick in the Washington Post's Loudoun Extra
• LCPS Administrator salaries were published in the print edition of the Loudoun Easterner
• Washington Post Story on the Special Education Advisory Committee's report to the School Board
• Read a profile of new Loudoun Education Association President Sandy Sullivan