Testimony to the Fairfax County School Board FY2022 Final Budget Hearing - 05/11/2021
-- by Arthur G. Purves, President of the President, Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance
Public Schools: Learning or Critical Race Theory?
Dr. Brabrand and Members of the Board:
Thank you for the opportunity to testify. I am Arthur Purves and address you as president of the FairfaxCounty Taxpayers Alliance.
The Taxpayers Alliance is concerned not just with how much you spend, but how you spend it. For example, we wanted to know the contents of Dr. Ibram Kendi's $20,000 1-hour online presentation toschool staff about Critical Race Theory (CRT). The schools' Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) office told us that there is a video, but that it is confidential and cannot be released to the public.
We then made a FOIA request to see all CRT materials taught in Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS). The FOIA office replied that our request was too vague. We then asked if FCPS taught CRT. We have not yet received an answer. We then asked if FCPS bought any of Dr. Kendi's books and received a request for an extension. [We did get an answer 4 PM today, which we saw after the hearing. About 3,200 books were purchased at a cost of $41,000.] I asked my school board representative if she felt that staff training should be transparent to taxpayers; I have not yet received an answer.
We did get slides to a Social Emotional Health lesson taught at Thomas Jefferson High School on March 19, 2021. The lesson centered on the movie, "13th", about the disproportionate incarceration of Blacks, and that incarceration is a modern form of slavery.
Who is responsible for the incarceration of Blacks? It's the school-to-prison pipeline, which begins in 3rd grade when Black and Hispanic students should have mastered reading and math facts but haven't. Being unable to read in the information age does indeed make one a slave to the government.
Why haven't they learned reading and math? Because government schools use "whole word" for reading instead of phonics and because schools reject arithmetic drill. Presenting children with a big picture and a few sentences and expecting them to guess at the meaning of words doesn't work.
The children who do learn reading and math are the affluent, predominately white and Asian, who get supplementary help at home or at private after-school programs. Sending low-income children to successful schools won't help, because the successful children didn't learn at school; they learned at home.
What government schools have done is persuade the low-income children that they can't learn reading and math and persuade the community that it's the fault of the children that they didn’t learn. In truth, they didn't learn because they weren’t taught.
Because of their flawed curriculum, government schools are the leading cause of poverty and racial inequality. Schools have devastated the lives of millions of children.
The good news is that this can be fixed. First, put all the curriculum specialists back in the classroom so they have to teach what they preach. Second, replace curriculum specialists with summer working groups of front-line teachers. Next replace "whole word" with phonics and reintroduce math drill.
Now is not the time for recriminations. The school board has the power to "bind up the nation's wounds" and restore hope for millions. The Taxpayers Alliance believes all students of all races can master reading and math. For the $3 billion we spend each yearon Fairfax County Public Schools, we expect no less.