Meet Brian Davison, dad who became ‘Enemy #1’ for Virginia's infamous Loudoun County school board
In the recent past, Virginia’s Loudoun County has always been in the news but mostly for the wrong reasons. Last year, it was reported that a schoolgirl was sexually assaulted by a classmate inside a school bathroom. Investigative reporter Luke Rosiak revealed how the school district tried to cover up the incident and lied about it.
In his new book ‘Race to the Bottom: Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education’, Rosiak has disclosed that the rape case was not the only incident where Loudoun’s teachers' unions and school boards got together to hide their failures. Earlier, they collectively tried to defame a parent and prove him a “criminal” after he tried to uncover “statistics that showed which teachers were succeeding, and which were failing”.
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Who is Brian Davison?
In his book, Rosiak states that according to Loudoun county educators, Brian Davison “is a violent lunatic, a physical threat, someone who should be in jail.” However, the journalist himself describes him as 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.”
Rosiak says Davison understood that the schools were using the wrong method to evaluate themselves. They were reportedly using students’ scores in state exams to show how good or bad they were. “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,” the author noted in the book.
However, when a new metric – “student growth percentile” (SGP) – was introduced, schools were required to “look at growth trajectory instead of plain scores,” which resulted in isolating “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.”
The new method received appreciation from the Obama administration and, in 2009, it was made mandatory for “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.” However, things took a turn in 2014 when Davison requested “for a copy of the growth scores under the Freedom of Information Act.” The plea was denied by almost all school districts in the state.
“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,” Rosiak noted. So in October 2014, Davison sued the Virginia Department of Education, pressurizing it to release the growth data while becoming their “Enemy #1”, as one school board member noted.
The father was not only reported to police by a school board member named Debra Rose, who is also a former congressional staffer for the House Judiciary Committee, but the school’s principal, Tracy Stephens, also “issued a notice that she said made it a crime for him to come to the school for any reason.” However, victory came for Davison in 2016 when a judge “ordered the state to hand over the data and pay Davison $35,000.” But the teachers' union’s request to withhold the teachers’ names was accepted by Virginia’s Supreme Court in 2017.
Rosiak concluded that the involvement of “Davison 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.”