Guidelines

I am one member of a five person board. The opinions I express on this forum are mine only, and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of the Escambia County Staff, Administrators, Employees, or anyone else associated with Escambia County Florida. I am interested in establishing this blog as a means of additional transparency to the public, outreach to the community, and information dissemination to all who choose to look. Feedback is welcome, but because public participation is equally encouraged, appropriate language and decorum is mandatory. Although this is not my campaign site for re-election--sometimes campaign related information will be discussed, therefore in an abundance of caution I add the following :








Tuesday, June 7, 2016

But What Does Today's Document Dump from the Federal DOE on Absenteeism, Access to Counselors, and Disciple--- Mean?



The Office of Civil Rights within the Department of Education has released a large compilation of data today, data that was collected from more than 16,000 public school districts nationwide for the 2013-2014 school year.

The first look report can be read here.

Initial articles about this data are all negative, like this piece of tripe from the Washington Post.  And this garbage from the LA Times

To read these articles apart from perusing the report independently might lead a reader to believe there are no successes whatsoever for the massive yearly expenditures we are making in public education as a nation.

The report itself sheds some light on some interesting, albeit rarely discussed topics, such as the following:

--Asian students represent nearly 5% of the schools' populations, but only 1% of suspensions.

--Latino and Asian Boys and Girls, as well as Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, are NOT disproportionately expelled from schools.

--English Language Learners are NOT disproportionately expelled from schools.

--White Boys make up 26% of schools' populations, but 35% of the expulsions without continuing educational services.

--American public school students reached an all-time high percentage of on-time graduations in


 2013-2014, with 82% of students graduating within 4 years.

--About 6.5 Million Students attend schools where more than 50% of the teachers are absent more than 10 days per year.

--95% of High School Students have access to a school counselor.

The report instead forcefully reiterates the data about disparities in suspensions among some races, with no substantive discussion of why this phenomenon exists nationwide.

As is usually the case, the unstated, subtle insinuation that comes in the wake of this new report will be that the"system" creates this disparity and must be "fixed."  Topics not discussed within the report are the offenses which lead to these statistics, lack of personal responsibility, social dysfunction, and fatherless households prevalent in some populations--- to name just a few of the big contributors to this problem.

Nope, it is the system that must change in response to behaviors that are abhorrent.

This is precisely what is wrong with liberalism and  the liberal view of how to fix the public school system......ignore the real problems and mollify those that make unfounded accusations based upon statistical anomalies caused by social dysfunction---then blame the hard working teachers that want to help kids and demand more money!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thank you and your wife for the great work you all are doing. I am sorry that negative people are so quick to bring bad news to good people, but I am thankful for the good work that is done by the Bergosh Family.

Anonymous said...

Where are you getting those stats from?

Jeff Bergosh said...

Anon 1--thank you for the kind words about my family. We all try hard.

Anon 2--check this link for the stats

http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/2013-14-first-look.pdf