Dishonesty, malice and plain idiocy masquerading as care and compassion is an unlovely feature of contemporary progressivism, inflicting injustice and pain on people in the name of “antiracism, “equity” or some other slogan. Take, for instance, the decision of administrators at Virginia’s elite Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHS) to withhold or delay notifications of prestigious National Merit awards, preventing students from citing them in their college admissions. For five years, the school’s principal, Ann Bonitatibus, and its director of student services, Brandon Kosatka, colluded to rob students and their families, many of them Asian, of the competitive edge they’d worked so hard to earn. Some 1,200 students are believed to have been affected.
How can such a thing be justified? Very easily, it turns out, if one accepts the precepts of progressive pedagogy. As the New York Post detailed in this article, the Fairfax [Virginia] Public Schools District, which includes TJHS, recently adopted a policy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exceptions,” effectively abandoning the concepts of merit and achievement. This Orwellian proposal touched off a backlash from parents, culminating in the exposure of the TJHS administration’s scandalous behavior.
No doubt you can guess why they did it. Once outed, the director of student services claimed that his and the principal’s hearts were pure. “We want to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,” he said, adding that they didn’t want to hurt the feelings of students who didn’t get the award. The feelings of the affected students and families were not, it seems, taken into consideration. Nor was it explained why recognizing students for “who they are as individuals” precludes taking note of their achievements—unless, that is, the progressive definition of individuality is restricted to surface signifiers such as race, ethnicity, “gender identity,” etc.
Now of course, “equal outcomes for every student” is a practical impossibility, no matter how heavily Woke administrators and teachers thumb one side of the scale. In the long run and on the whole, high achievers will meet with more success in life than those whose lack of achievement is explained away by antiracist blather. Rebranding virtues like studiousness and hard work as racist traits—“acting white”—while praising vices such as laziness and contempt for learning as “other ways of knowing” amounts to the construction of an intellectual and spiritual ghetto. You cannot expect a high school graduate who is functionally illiterate and innumerate to succeed in life, no matter how many progressive educators insist otherwise, no matter how hard they try to prevent the student’s feelings from being hurt.
Fairfax County’s equal-outcomes policy has been branded as racist by people who charge that Asian students are disproportionately harmed by it. But really it’s doubly racist. Lowering standards across the board all but guarantees that students who need the most attention, many of them black, don’t receive it. The lesson they imbibe is that education isn’t for them. If it were, the administrators and teachers who run their schools would be striving to raise them up instead of casting others down.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed that the majority of school administrators and teachers in both public and private education are not intellectuals but ideologues. For all their paeans to “the Science” & etc., these people have rejected the idea that there’s any such thing as objective reality. The expression “my truth” sums up their worldview. In effect, this grants individual delusions equal status with the reality they contradict. If, for example, a biological male convinces himself that he’s really a woman, then he is a woman, despite all evidence to the contrary. Or we’re told that all cultures are of equal value, a claim contradicted by the evidence of one’s eyes. For all the whining of fourth-wave feminists, where would they rather live—America or Iran?
The Fairfax Public Schools District’s equal outcomes policy is just such a delusion. In reality, the infinite variety of human nature precludes equal outcomes. Some students are smarter than others, some have a better home environment than others, some do better at English than at math, etc. Educators can do nothing to change this reality. What they can do—what they are doing in Fairfax County and elsewhere—is abolish the concept of merit and actively discriminate against high-achieving students. Fairfax County has adopted a policy of “equitable grading” that does just that, rewarding low achievement and nonparticipation while slighting high achievement. No student can receive a grade lower than 50%, even if he has done no work at all. But meritorious achievement is not to be recognized, much less celebrated: National Merit awards are withheld from the students who earned them, so as to spare the feelings of those who did not.
At the request of Governor Glenn Youngkin, Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares has launched pair of investigations into the goings-on at TJHS: one to determine if the decision to withhold National Merit awards was racially motivated, and one to determine if the school’s recently revised admissions standards are racially discriminatory. The admissions policy was revised on grounds of “diversity”; that is, the school district was worried that too many students of Asian ethnicity were getting in. Lowering standards to make more students eligible for admission made it easier to keep Asians out.
Before the pandemic gave parents and the public a look behind the curtain, TJHS and the Fairfax County School District would probably have gotten away with this racist policy. But the trust once placed in school boards, school administrators and teachers is gone now—evaporated like dew on the grass in summer. The education establishment finds itself fighting in the last ditch, and one way or another it’s going to lose the battle.