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On July 4, 2000 A. Barton Hinkle had an illuminating Op/Ed piece in the Times-Dispatch about the high cost of the Richmond Schools. He had found the census data on school costs. You can get those data on the web.
As we point out elsewhere, the Richmond scores on the Stanford 9 test are getting worse while the statewide and nearby county scores are improving. The SOL data show a similar pattern: Richmond scores are far behind the statewide scores (in fact, second worst in the state), and are declining or increasing at substantially lower rates than the (improving) statewide scores (we were 24 points behind the statewide average in '98; in '00 we had dropped to 29 points behind).
In terms of cost, our second-from-worst SOL performance is the sixth most expensive:
DIVISION NAME $/Pupil 00 Avg SOL Expend. Rank SOL Rank FALLS CHURCH CITY 9989 82 1 5 ALEXANDRIA CITY 9699 59 2 93 ARLINGTON 9667 71 3 36 CHARLOTTESVILLE CITY 8486 55 4 109 SURRY 8312 57 5 103 RICHMOND CITY 8093 39 6 128 LEXINGTON CITY 7920 88 7 1 BATH 7895 67 8 57 CHARLES CITY COUNTY 7852 43 9 127 STATE AVERAGE 6002 68 NORFOLK CITY 5928 57 36 99 PORTSMOUTH CITY 5621 47 63 125 HENRICO 5542 77 67 13 DANVILLE CITY 5433 52 81 115 SUFFOLK CITY 5334 49 93 120 CHESTERFIELD 4995 76 117 15 PETERSBURG CITY 4898 36 124 129 HANOVER 4721 78 128 10 Here are these data in graphical form:
Here Richmond is the yellow square. The green points are, from the left, Hanover, Chester, and Henrico. The red points, also from the left, are Petersburg, Suffolk, Danville, Portsmouth, and Norfolk. Note that Norfolk, which has an urban population similar to ours, has SOL scores half again ours at a cost $2,000 less.
One place the money goes in the very expensive districts is administration (data here from the Census, confined to districts with >5,000 enrollment):
We are second only to Arlington in terms of the % of administrative expense, and it is buying us failure.
We have more data on this scandal.
Last updated 02/24/02
Please send questions or comments to John
Butcher