Why do Fairfax Democrats keep fighting for racism in schools?

Then, on Wednesday, the office of Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares reported that he had informed FCPS that it is in violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for its discrimination against Asian-Americans at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. On the same day, the US Department of Justice initiated a probe into the matter.

Then, on Thursday, the US Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights launched its own Title VI investigation.

The local source of the controversy is the county’s One Fairfax policy, an illogical fusion of the healthy American principle of equal opportunity,  cultural Marxism, good intentions to help the weak, and policies proven to harm them, all blended together in a sauce of feel-good buzzwords and vague platitudes with no clear metrics, deliverables, or restrictions. The policy has spread its tendrils throughout the county, from FCPS’s sprawling Office of Equity that has no defined deliverables, to the parks that racially discriminate in their hiring practices, to the office of Commonwealth’s Attorney Steve Descano, whose release of violent criminals and refusal to prosecute a child sex felon both stem from One Fairfax. 

Besides the fact that the policy jeopardizes $168M in federal funding and costs undisclosed sums in fighting lawsuits, it has several fatal defects.

First, it’s self-contradictory. The policy defines “race” (a category with no biological validity) as “a socially constructed category” and prohibits “all forms of discrimination under Federal and State law.” It then goes blithely on, however, to treat this artificial construct as if it were real, by dividing students into racial categories—implicitly here, but explicitly in the FCPS documents that taxonomize children into racial and ethnic tribes like animals at a zoo—and then treats the segregated groups differently. It advocates fairness but then turns Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream of a color-blind society on its head by judging on the basis of skin color.

Second, in pursuing its noble goal of equal opportunity, it pretends that systemic barriers to such opportunity exist even when they don’t. The alleged purpose of its discrimination is to remove “racial and social inequities” by removing “institutional and structural barriers” to opportunity — those “systemic barriers that are blocking some of our students from thriving.”

What barriers and which students? Slavery and segregation for African Americans? Laws prohibiting Hispanics from studying STEM? A school policy that no Asian student may appear in a Shakespeare play? None of these things exist. So what can they be talking about?

“Systemic” here, like “institutional” and “structural” is intentionally obfuscatory in order to expand particular problems into sweeping generalizations. As with all part-to-whole logical fallacies, this one reduces individuals to mere expressions of a group whose members share a particular characteristic. It is reductive and dehumanizing, and leads to exactly the kind of racial profiling that the proponents of this nonsense claim they oppose.

This is not to deny that individual students often do need extra help for any number of reasons, or that a necessary part of being a good teacher is discerning and addressing just those needs. What this policy does, however, is invite schools to prejudge the needs and abilities of certain students based on whether or not they belong to an “underserved community”—code in most cases for “not Caucasian or Asian” — and then treating members of those groups differently.

Third, its goal of equal outcomes, which Superintendent Michelle Reid says she has made her life’s work to “ensure” for “each and every student,” would destroy all excellence, which FCPS claims to be one of its goals, along with equity and opportunity. How can Reid assure “equal outcomes” for “each and every student” unless she actively restrains some students—including the very “underserved” students whom FCPS claims to want to help—from becoming the best they can be? “To excel” means “to be superior to.” Reid wants the impossible world where outcomes are equal and yet everyone is also superior to everyone else. This makes no sense. How can educators who don’t think and speak logically teach students to do so?

VIRGINIA ATTORNEY GENERAL FINDS FAIRFAX SCHOOL DISCRIMINATED AGAINST ASIAN STUDENTS

Better advice comes from Margarat Thatcher: “Let our children grow tall and some taller than others if they have the ability in them to do so . . . because we must build a society in which each citizen can develop his full potential.” Excellence grows in the garden of liberty; it dies in the garden of “equal outcomes.” 

One Fairfax, like the road to hell, may be paved with good intentions, but as a parent pointed out over two years ago, “I’ve noticed in my kids that since the county has pivoted toward this equity that they have lost sight of their core mission, which is to educate these kids.” Wise leaders would have learned by now that results in education do far more to help at-risk students than all the empty, harmful rhetoric of One Fairfax and its ilk.

Jeffrey A. Leach has worked in business and law for over 30 years. A member of the bars of VA and DC, he is a principal of Nomos Legal Consulting, PLLC, and may be reached at [email protected].