You're going to find this hard to believe - but good grief man, teacher's unions are more concerned with covering their own asses than anything else. Say it ain't so ...........
How a dad became ‘Enemy #1’ to teachers in Loudoun County
March 7, 2022
How a dad became ‘Enemy #1’ to teachers in Loudoun County, Virginia
By
Luke Rosiak March 6, 2022 10:26pm
Updated
Virginia father Brian Davison had a legal fight with the Loudoun County, Va. school district to get data on how students were actually performing. Photo by Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post via Getty Images
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?
“Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education” by Luke Rosiak follows Davison’s story of uncovering the truth about his school district.
This simple change isolated the effect of schools and teachers on a yearly basis. The metric acknowledged that, for reasons outside the control of teachers, not everyone performed at the same level at any one point in time. But it was firm that every child — with the right guidance — could and should improve.
When it came to kids who were so far behind that they were not going to get a passing score no matter what, the new metric removed the incentive to simply write them off as lost causes. By the same token, it gave teachers a reason to challenge gifted children — who under the old metric would contribute to positive statistics merely by getting a passing score.
Using this “student growth percentile” (SGP) statistic to illuminate the performance of schools and teachers made so much sense that it was unsurprising when in 2009, the Obama administration began requiring it of school districts as a condition for receiving their share of nearly $54 billion in stimulus funding, the best-known component of which was called Race to the Top.
In the ensuing years, Virginia repeatedly received the money after submitting applications attesting that “prior to submitting this request, [schools] provided [to teachers] student growth data.”
In 2013, Virginia legislators made it state law that at least 20% of a teacher’s performance evaluation must come from the SGP scores of her students.
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.
Nothing about the metric was inherently negative to teachers. Good teachers would benefit from a job-evaluation rating that bothered to look at results. And once top performers were identified, underperformers might learn something from them. But that is very different from the status quo. For the 2013-14 school year, Loudoun County rated 98.3% of its teachers as “accomplished” or “proficient.”
The proficiency rate of students was not nearly so rosy.
Anyone else might have given up when the school system said no to his request, but the military veteran was determined. In October 2014, Davison sued the Virginia Department of Education to force it to release the growth data, offsetting costs by giving himself a crash course in law and doing some of his own legal work. And he became, as one school board member called him, “Enemy #1.”
Davison attempted to get Loudoun County School district’s “student growth percentile” data in 2014.
Loudoun Times
After Davison raised questions at a school-board meeting, board member Debra Rose, a former congressional staffer for the House Judiciary Committee, requested that a sheriff’s deputy remove him. The officer did not.
In March 2015, Rose’s husband summoned police to their home, where “Ms. Rose advised that Mr. Davison has not made any specific threats directed towards her, but he has made her feel extremely uncomfortable.” The police took no action.
In May, her husband called police again to tell them that Davison “is posting links on [an Internet] forum to [Ms. Rose’s] campaign Web site which displays herself and her family members including her children.” The officer responded, according to his police report, that “this may not be a crime because this certain post is a link of his wife’s campaign Web site.”
Rose called Davison’s elderly father to try to shame him. She e-mailed his employer five times.
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.
School officials were used to parents advocating to get preferential treatment for their own children, but they were not used to anyone asking bigger questions.
“Many of your comments were wholly unrelated to your children. This is frightening to our staff,” Stephens wrote.
School board member Debra Rose reported Davison to the police.
The day the no-trespassing order was posted to Davison’s front door, 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. The police told the principal that Davison was entitled to pick up his children, but, according to the police report, Stephens demanded, “I want him arrested!”
When that did not work, she reported Davison to Child Protective Services as a suspected child abuser.
It was not children she was concerned about. The complaint said Davison “exhibits agression [sic] and hostility toward LCPS leadership during public meetings.”
Stephens faxed 62 pages of information to the agency, which has the power to take children away from their parents. They consisted almost entirely of Davison’s comments on school policies or officials’ apparent violations of them. Tacked on the end were two claims that purportedly showed child abuse: 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.”
A legal victory
In early 2016, Davison complained about the school board’s ethics on an official’s Facebook page, and the official blocked him. He sued again — acting as his own attorney — and won in federal court, leading to a legal precedent that later prevented President Donald Trump from blocking people on Twitter.
In April 2016, he got his real victory. The judge ordered the state to hand over the data and pay Davison $35,000. The teachers union sought to block the release of teachers’ names, appealing twice.
The Loudoun school board intervened for the same purpose, claiming that growth data counted as “confidential portions of teachers’ personnel files” — even though Davison’s whole point was that they had never used it to evaluate teachers, or even downloaded it from the state.
In 2017, Virginia’s Supreme Court ordered that teachers’ names be redacted.
Davison plunged in to the anonymized data. Unlike test scores, the numbers had no correlation to socioeconomic factors. They showed that poor and minority children can and do make improvements all the time — and that some teachers were getting better results than others.
Davison finally received the redacted data in 2017.
Danielle Nadler/Loudoun Now
For example, in Richmond, Va., one teacher had five students in 2014 whose increase in reading put them in the 99th percentile of similarly situated students, eight students who placed nearly as high, and only one student whose growth was below average.
Another teacher in the same district had the reverse, with 16 students in the bottom 3% of growth compared to students that started at similar levels.
A mark of quality
SGP scores are remarkably reliable at revealing teacher quality. Economists who studied 18 million SGP scores over 21 school years found that even when a teacher transferred to a different school, her performance stats remained similar. In Virginia, a teacher ranking in the bottom fifth one year was most likely to be at the bottom again the next year, and had only a 3% chance of moving to the top.
Ensuring that kids get a high-SGP teacher has real-world benefit. A 2011 study by the economists, including Harvard’s Raj Chetty, found that “when a high-value-added teacher enters a school, test scores for students in the grade taught by that teacher rise immediately . . . And the gains don’t stop there: The students who learn from that teacher are more likely to attend college, earn more [as adults], and are less likely to have children as teenagers.”
What got Davison involved in education was his enthusiastic support for an Obama directive. But what he subsequently discovered was an institutional pathology in which schools cared more about preserving permanent paychecks for bad employees than they did about helping children learn. In which they were willing to go to great lengths to ensure that parents couldn’t see whether they were actually doing the important job they were entrusted with.
In short, that the problem was teachers unions.
“Schools do not exist to employ teachers. They exist to effectively educate kids,” he said.
That was a position everyone except special-interest insiders was likely to agree with, and parents did. In 2018, the countywide PTA, which held official status with the school system and had its Web site and meetings hosted by it, elected Davison as its president.
The school system refused to accept the election and said the organization would be dissolved.
Fourteen months after Davison filed his lawsuit, in December 2015, the Republican-controlled Congress passed a massive, bipartisan education law called the Every Student Succeeds Act. Buried in it was a provision forbidding the government from asking or incentivizing states to use student-growth data to evaluate teachers. The change came following lobbying by the unions.
Excerpted from “Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education” by Luke Rosiak, a fellow at the Government Accountability Institute. Reprinted with permission by Broadside Books/HarperCollins. 
