Fairfax County’s public school leadership is using “equal outcomes” and “equity” measures to hide low performance among its students , particularly the students who are learning English.
As a result of the Biden administration’s porous southern border policy, coupled with Fairfax County’s sanctuary policy that passed in January 2021, our local school district is flooded with newly arrived multilanguage learners, formerly labeled English language learners. In the 2023-2024 academic year, multilanguage learners accounted for 26.5% of the overall student population.
And the vast majority of those students are performing abysmally on Virginia’s standardized exams in math, science, history, writing, and reading.
With the state’s updated accreditation standards this year, where newly arrived multilanguage learners are granted three semesters of exemption from the state’s standardized test in reading instead of the 11 semesters they were previously given, we can expect to see reading scores in this group decline precipitously this year. That is saying a lot, given that 69% of Fairfax County’s multilanguage students failed the reading test last year under the more lenient standards.
To hide learning loss after the pandemic and bury the poor testing performance of the school district’s more vulnerable groups, its leadership moved to performance-based assessments in lieu of Virginia’s Standards of Learning tests in writing and history. In these assessments, teachers and principals have clear incentives for their students to pass. Such measures make it appear on paper that students know more than they actually do so that the district will look better than it actually is.
Fairfax County’s superintendent, Michelle Reid, and school board members seem to enjoy sailing on the laurels of the district’s glory days, when people moved to the area for its quality public education. But that is changing quickly as a quarter of the district’s high schools are close to losing accreditation . This is largely because they are overwhelmed with newly arrived immigrants who are not proficient in English.
Last week, Reid sent a letter to Gov. Glenn Youngkin in which she complained that Virginia’s Department of Education (VDOE) released data on the district’s students’ performance on the state’s Standards of Learning exams. Representatives from VDOE responded that the published data included only the students who opted into the standardized tests “per U.S. Department of Education requirements.”
The most interesting piece of Reid’s complaint letter is that students and their parents are provided only the “opt-in” option for the standardized tests that actually assess proficiency. When I objected to my son’s politicized, substandard performance-based learning assessment in fourth grade, no one informed me that he had the option to take a legitimate Virginia Studies standardized exam.
In all other realms where the district’s leadership wants maximum participation, such as in social emotional learning and family life education lessons, students’ participation is the default option and their parents are forced to “opt-out” the students. It is, therefore, clear that the district’s leadership’s “opt-in” policy for standardized exams in history and writing is meant to minimize student participation.
Aside from assessments that replace standardized tests, Fairfax County has also implemented “ equity grading ” to fight “institutional bias.”
In other words, to mask learning loss from unjust pandemic policies and its year-and-a-half school closures, Fairfax County’s school district’s leadership decided to give higher grades to students than they actually earned. The equity grading policy included a minimum 50% credit for missing assignments. This year, Fairfax County’s public schools further updated its grading policy to allow students to retake tests for full credit.
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And if fake performance-based assessments and grade inflation are not enough to hide the problem of the recent influx of poorly performing and chronically absent students who lack proficiency in English, the district’s leadership has passed Policy 8130 to alter school boundaries. With its redistricting initiative, Fairfax County’s leadership intends to shuffle many of these students into high-performing schools , and move students who are not chronically absent and perform well on standardized tests to schools that are on the verge of failing.
In Fairfax County’s public schools, the mission clearly is not to educate our children. Rather, “equal outcomes” means that all of our children are held to the lowest standards possible with the hope that everyone passes.
Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a contributor for the Washington Examiner, a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network.
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