Week Six

Let me be blunt: not very much that was interesting happened this week when it comes to my project. I’ve spent this week hard at work, trying to get my project written up and get myself ready for my presentation which is occurring in less than a week.

So, things here have honestly just been a lot of work, and not a lot of fun or interesting stuff has happened.

The most interesting thing related to my project this week is that I’ve come to have even more of a distaste for certain elected Virginia elected officials than I had before.

Allow me to explain. Over the course of this project, the role of race and the impact of systemic racism has become more and more clear to me. The racial composition of a county, in and of itself, explains a minimum of around 36% of all variations in each test, after all, and race remains significant even controlling for variables such as economics. This elected official who will go unnamed decided that it would be better to just ignore this glaring problem and instead just go around canceling Virginia Department of Education reports which were meant to report on this issue and take steps to ameliorate it.

The worst part is that this anonymous official didn’t even give any good reason as to why the report had to die, instead just claiming that the report was “inherently divisive.”

So, that’s all I’ve got for this week.