How a dad became ‘Enemy #1’ to teachers in Loudoun County, VirginiaBy Luke Rosiak
March 6, 2022
Investigative reporter Luke Rosiak broke the story of how Loudoun County, Va., schools lied about a bathroom rape. But it wasn’t the only time Loudoun was ground zero for how teachers unions and school boards hide their failures from parents. In his new book, “Race to the Bottom,” Rosiak tells the story of a dad who found Loudoun was covering up statistics that showed which teachers were succeeding, and which were failing, and was threatened because of it.
To hear Loudoun County, Va., educators tell it, Brian Davison is a violent lunatic, a physical threat, someone who should be in jail.
Davison is a ginger-haired 48-year-old who earned two degrees from MIT, then spent much of his career as a Navy officer. By profession, he is a nerd who specializes in “operations research,” finding ways to make organizations function more efficiently. After he had two kids, he figured he could volunteer his number-crunching skills to help their schools.
He’s not a monster. To teachers, he’s something more threatening: a mathematician.
Davison quickly realized that schools were measuring themselves wrong. They commonly reported performance was based on the percentage of students who passed state exams. This led to schools in wealthy areas looking good, and schools in poor neighborhoods looking bad. But those numbers were reflecting the economic status and parental involvement of the students in the school, not the quality of the school itself. Teachers liked it that way, because they could point out that poor numbers were not their fault, and pivot to laments about class and race.
A better metric There was no reason, though, that socioeconomics had to define schools or prevent assessing them. A focus on racial disparities was a distraction from what was obvious to Davison: First, the goal should be to make each child smarter this year than he was last year. Second, there were good and bad schools in rich and poor neighborhoods, and good and bad teachers within every school.
This could be measured with the same test data that the schools already had: You just needed to look at growth trajectory instead of plain scores. Compare each child’s state exam score from last year to his score from this year. Had he moved ahead especially quickly, merely kept pace, or started to fall behind?
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The fight begins In 2014, Davison asked for a copy of the growth scores under the Freedom of Information Act. Loudoun County Public Schools told him it did not have them. In fact, no one in the school system had ever looked at them.
He requested the data from other school districts in the state, who told him essentially the same thing. Educators were so opposed to looking at these numbers that they were willing to systematically lie, apparently ignore the law, and jeopardize vast sums of federal funding. They were doing it for the same reason the information was so important: It revealed which teachers were good and which were not.
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Source:
https://nypost.com/2022/03/06/how-a-dad-became-teachers-enemy-1-to-teachers-in-loudoun-county/
