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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Since I don’t know Dr. Reid at present I have a much more favorable opinion about her than I do of the current School Board. What happened last night was an embarrassing spectacle, with most of the School Board members making it very clear that they care less about our kids’ education than making sure they constantly check off the boxes needed to keep them in good standing with the special interest groups, whether it’s the Fairfax NAACP, Pride Liberation, or the “equity”-obsessed types who dominate the FCDC and control the endorsements for School Board races.

I challenge anyone to watch Abrar Omeish’s rambling speech last night and not come away saying to themselves “WTF is this silly narcissist talking about and what does it have to do with FCPS?”  The only saving grace was Pekarsky muttering “oh boy” on a hot mic as Omeish launched into her lengthy spiel.

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Politics and spiels aside though, equity is one of the biggest problems any superintendent is going to have to face. FCPS is a big county with schools where wealth is concentrated and schools where it is not and that impacts a lot of the educational process.  The equity push actually came from George W. Bush in 2001 with No Child Left Behind where equity was the primary focus.  So an equity-focus isn't some new democratic school board thing--it's that there's been 2 decades of pressure to improve equity nationally starting with a Republican president who put it into strong policy.  And with 2 decades of trying, FCPS is better than many places--and Virginia has been in the top 5 states in terms of educational achievement for a long time with FCPS near the top in the state-- but it's still been a persistent problem nationally.[/quote]

Well, maybe, except what you're calling equity hasn't necessarily meant the same thing over that period.

NCLB's focus was to close achievement gaps, not to do away with the notion of achievement or merit.

But it ran into problems because gaps are hard to narrow, teachers felt like they were being punished for failures to solve problems not of their making, and parents in wealthier communities saw how some of their kids and schools received fewer resources as school districts began to spend much more per pupil on poorer schools.

Now, the equity advocates still want more money spent on schools in low-income communities, but they've figured out that one way to curry favor with the educational establishment is to assert that tests are discriminatory,  the idea of merit is racist, and that teachers should never be held accountable for "systemic" problems.  That's a lot more attractive than being constantly expected to close an achievement gap.

But at the same time, it breeds suspicion among those whose children were doing well in the public schools, especially those who don't otherwise have a lot of political power, because they no longer see an obvious path for their kids to advance or distinguish themselves.  The assumption is that the "equity" advocates want a short-cut to equal outcomes, which won't actually involve raising the academic performance of lower-achieving students, but instead simply reallocating wealth and opportunity through overtly political means (such as the recent admissions to the TJ admissions policies).

Reid appears to have been an adept practitioner of this new form of "equity" but she's going to find that FCPS is a much larger and more diverse community than her prior district, and that the degree of suspicion with respect to FCPS's leadership and School Board is currently at an all-time high.  [/quote]

I think the current equity push is the logical end point of focusing on the achievement gap. It's not politically palatable to admit that it will never be closed unless economic disparities cease to exist, but politicians need to find way to make it appear like the gap is closing. At some point they realized that you can close a gap by raising the low to meet the high, but you can also close it by pushing down the high to meet the low. It turns out the latter is easier than the former. [/quote]

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