Luke Rosiak’s new book, Race to the Bottom, blames public schools’ problems on special interests that put ideology before education. Rosiak, who broke the story of how Loudoun County, Va. school officials lied about a bathroom rape, writes in the New York Post about a data-loving dad who was dubbed “Enemy #1” in Loudoun after seeking statistics on teacher effectiveness.
Brian Davison, an operations research specialist, had two children in Loudoun schools back in 2014. He learned that state law required at least 20 percent of a teacher’s evaluation be based on the “student growth profile (SGP)” of their students. (Elsewhere, it’s known as “value-added” data.) Teachers don’t like the idea because it can show teacher effectiveness — not just who’s teaching high, middle or low achievers.
Davison asked for a copy of the growth scores from Loudoun and other districts. When districts said “no,” he sued the Virginia Department of Education.
One school board member called him, “Enemy #1,” reports Rosiak.
A school board member and her husband called police on Davison multiple times for making her “feel extremely uncomfortable” and for posting links to her “campaign website which displays herself and her family members including her children.” (Police refused to take action.) The board member emailed Davison’s employer five times, writes Rosiak.
After Davison tried to raise testing issues at a PTA meeting in September 2015, the school’s principal, Tracy Stephens, issued a notice that she said made it a crime for him to come to the school for any reason.
. . . Stephens called the police on him while he waited off school property to pick up his kids. She refused to allow his children to join him.
Police refused to arrest him. Then, writes Rosiak, the principal reported Davison to Child Protective Services as a suspected child abuser:
One day, his daughter could not play kickball because she was ‘sent to school in rain boots.’ Another day, a teacher said she saw Davison’s children with him and ‘both of the kids had straight faces.”
This didn’t work either.
Davison won his suit in 2016, and got access to the value-added data — with teachers’ names removed — in 2017. He found evidence that some teachers are highly effective in influencing students’ progress, while others are not.
But by then the Obama-era federal law requiring districts to collect value-added data (to get Race to the Top funding) had been repealed by the Every Student Succeeds Act, writes Rosiak. In response to union lobbying, ESSA bans “asking or incentivizing states to use student-growth data to evaluate teachers.”
Angry parents — many of them Asian immigrants — passed out copies Rosiak’s book to a meeting of the Fairfax County (VA) School board Thursday night, he reports for Daily Wire. They called board members “racist” for changing admissions rules to an elite magnet school to limit the number of Asian Americans. A federal judge threw out the changes as discriminatory. The board plans to appeal.
“You are all in this book,” Asra Nomani told school board members. “All of you have failed us.”
“We, the Asians, don’t matter to you . . . We’re supposed to be the good, obedient Asians, that’s what you expect of us, don’t you. Especially women,” Nomani said.
The crowd of Asian moms chanted again: “Racist, racist, racist.”
One shouted, “Evil!”
“Your equity plan didn’t think about the Asians, did you. We were on the wrong side of brown for you,” Nomani said.
The board recessed, but Nomani and other parents remained. She read aloud from a chapter of Race to the Bottom about the Fairfax County school board.