Column: In some Virginia schools, 'equity' seems to mean hiding achievement

When her parents gave her an appealing adjective for a first name, they could not have imagined that their daughter, who 58 years later is Virginia’s lieutenant governor, would have a combative streak. It probably served Winsome Earle-Sears well in the Marine Corps, and now has a new focus.

A synonym for “winsome” is “cheerful,” but she is in medium dudgeon about the latest strangeness from the public schools of Fairfax County, an affluent Washington suburb. As was once said of the Balkans, these schools have been producing more history than can be consumed locally. Begin with Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, established as a highly selective magnet school in 1985.

TJHS has long had a national reputation for excellence. Recently, however, it has earned an alarming reputation for extremism in pursuit of “equity,” understood as equality of outcomes among racial or ethnic groups. Fairfax’s progressive presumption is that disparities are the results of “systemic” or other unfairness.

TJHS and other Fairfax secondary schools recently chose not to disclose to students and their parents the fact that the students — at TJHS, 230 of them, mostly Asian Americans — had won National Merit Commendation awards. The National Merit Scholarship Corp.’s letter to TJHS said: “Please present the letters of commendation as soon as possible since it is the students’ only notification.” One parent says a TJHS administrator told her that announcing the commendations would hurt the feelings of students not commended. Many commendations were eventually announced too late to mention in college applications.

Earle-Sears, who is Black and whose father immigrated from Jamaica with $1.75 in his pocket, says “education lifted my family out of poverty.” She does not want the Fairfax school system’s response to the non-notification episode to be “nothing to see here.” The day she said this in a telephone interview, The Washington Post published two “nothing to see here” letters defending TJHS.

One dismissed the non-notification as “a minor slipup by administrators,” minor because its consequences were not “catastrophic.” The other said being a commended student is “trivial” regarding college admissions because “tens of thousands” receive this designation annually. More than 3.5 million do not. And the “minor slipup” seems to have been a policy, repeated in various Fairfax secondary schools. It seems suspiciously congruent with the school system’s political ideology.

It has one: The Fairfax school district paid $455,000 to a California consulting firm that says its aim is “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” Tonight’s homework assignment, dear reader, is to write an essay explaining what that can possibly mean in practice, and to consider how Fairfax schools might apply it to, say, school track meets.

Virginia’s attorney general, Jason Miyares, has announced a civil rights investigation to determine whether there is “unlawful discrimination.” Norma Margulies, an immigrant from Peru and an incensed unnotified Fairfax parent, said the school system “seems to value obfuscation and deception.” A spokesperson for Fairfax County Public Schools denied a “deliberate intent” to withhold the Merit Commendation information. She said this would be “contrary to” the school’s values. But would it be, now that “equity” is the sovereign value?

The coming investigation should show who is being truthful.

It is undeniable — Fairfax officials having said as much — that TJHS reconfigured its admissions policies to address the “problem” of too many successful Asian American admittees: 73% of the student body in 2021. The antonym of “equity,” in progressives’ definition of this as a standard of justice, is “merit”: The opposite of an equitable society is a meritocracy. So, TJHS is an engine of injustice. Fairfax has attempted to design a more progressive racial composition for TJHS in an effort to, in the words of TJHS’ principal, “close the equity gap.” The percentage of Asian American students plunged by nearly one-third.

Republican Earle-Sears, a former vice president of Virginia’s Board of Education, referring to the 2021 election that put her, Republican Miyares, and Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin in office, says: “We were elected to put a stop to the nonsense.” And: “It’s time to grow up.” And: “Heads should roll.”

The reasons for shrinking enrollments in traditional public schools include declining birthrates, increased competition from public charter schools and private schools, and more home schooling. But surely another reason is dissatisfaction with public schools that are embroiled in controversies about their “equity” agendas. Which means: There are declining numbers of truly traditional public schools.