T.S. Eliot claimed that “April is the cruelest month,” but in this homeschooling dad’s opinion, that dubious honor belongs to August. In one of the great ironies of modern American life, we choose to send our kids back to school amid the dog days of summer, a sweltering time that would be better spent at the community pool.
Back-to-school time is also an expensive proposition. The National Retail Federation claims that between new clothes and shoes, school supplies, and electronics, the average family will fork out over $850 this year to outfit their K-12 children. Teachers have it even worse; according to Adopt-A-Classroom, the average teacher spent almost $900 out of his own pocket to buy classroom supplies in the 2024-2025 school year.
But there’s at least one group that won’t need to make hard financial decisions this month: high-level educational bureaucrats. Take Dr. Michelle Reid, the superintendent of Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS). Not only does her new contract give her a salary higher than that of the president of the United States, but she also gets a car allowance and is currently seeking a taxpayer-funded “executive protection agent” to shield her from the peasants she supposedly serves. “Queen Reid” embodies the entitled mindset of an educational establishment that refuses to learn from its mistakes.
It’s Good to Be the Queen
Recruited from the suburbs of Seattle in the summer of 2022, Reid now runs government schools for one of the wealthiest counties in the entire country. According to the Census Bureau, the average per capita income of Fairfax County, Virginia, is close to $70,000 per year, almost $25,000 higher than the national average. As a result of this prosperity, FCPS has very deep pockets; its 2025 budget is nearly $4 billion due in large part to tax increases meant to address the district’s massive administrative bloat.
Are Fairfax County families receiving good value for their money, though? While FCPS does consistently outperform the national average, there is data indicating that its performance on state standards is slipping as a result of pandemic learning loss and an enormous influx of migrant students (Fairfax County declared itself a “sanctuary county” in 2018).
Reid’s tenure as superintendent, however, has been more notable for her adherence to leftist dogma than for effectively addressing these core concerns. In 2023, she presided over a scandal regarding several schools’ failure to notify parents regarding their children’s status as recipients of commendations from the National Merit Scholarship program. Since many of these families were Asian American, these “errors” were linked to the “equity mindset” celebrated in Reid’s bio on the Educate Fairfax website. More recently, a Department of Education investigation found FCPS and four other Northern Virginia school districts guilty of failing to comply with the Title IX protections for female athletes.
In 2024, the principal of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Ann Bonitatibus, announced she was resigning after a number of scandals and after she tanked the school’s ranking as the top high school in the country. But instead of sending Bonitatibus packing, Reid promoted her to district headquarters.
Perhaps issues like these are why Reid is calling for an armed bodyguard while refusing to harden vulnerable schools. After all, it’s not like she can ask that the Trump DOJ to designate her critics as “domestic terrorists.”
A Corrupt Kingdom
It would be comforting to see Reid as an outlier, but her approach is standard operating procedure for the educational establishment. Concerned citizens need only look at the National Educational Association (NEA) to understand this.
At its Annual Meeting and Representative Assembly last month in Portland, Oregon, the nation’s largest teachers’ union “[honored] nine leaders in advancing equity, justice, and education.” The listed order of these principles reveals the true priorities of this crooked organization.
Speakers featured at the meeting included Josh Cowen, a vocal critic of school voucher programs that allow parents to rescue their children from the clutches of the establishment, and Andy Markus, a school custodian turned union shill who claimed that teachers and support staff “[had] to be political.” The low point of the meeting came from the NEA’s 2025 Teacher of the Year Ashlie Crosson, who arrogantly stated, “We recite, we repeat, we embody the undeniable truth: What’s good for educators is what’s good for students.” What a marvelous summary of the dictatorial impulses of her professional masters!
A Parents’ Revolution
Luckily for American society, more parents are rejecting the tyranny of Michelle Reid and her cronies. Public support for school choice initiatives (including the vouchers so reviled by Cowen) remains very high across party lines. In particular, parents have embraced homeschooling options in recent years; the percentage of homeschooled students has nearly doubled since 2019.
Even progressives have climbed on the homeschooling bandwagon. Fueled by legacy media-endorsed lies about the elimination of DEI programs and “book bans,” a greater number of left-leaning parents (especially in black communities) are homeschooling their children, taking full advantage of the groundwork done by more conservative parents over the last few decades. Those conservative parents should not expect a thank-you note for their heroic efforts, but this trend shows that the educational revolution truly benefits everyone.
As American children enter another school year, parents must keep vigilant regarding their kids’ welfare in the classroom. For too long, educrats have paid themselves more and more out of taxpayer coffers while providing less and less in the way of effective education for the young minds in their charge.
President Trump’s effort to turn off the spigot of federal funds by shutting down the Department of Education is an excellent move, but real change can only happen at the local level when parents and community members tell petty tyrants like “Queen Reid” that enough is enough. School choice is the guillotine that will finally end the educrats’ regime, no matter how many palace guards they hire to defend them.
Robert Busek is a Catholic homeschooling father of six who has taught history and Western Civilization in both traditional and online classrooms for over twenty years. His essays have also been published in The American Conservative and The American Spectator. The views he expresses here are his own.
