Fairfax County Parents Association blasts leaders: How dare you tell students that their hard work doesn t matter? | | fairfaxtimes.com
With four more school principals confessing they withheld National Merit awards from students, bringing the total to seven schools so far, the Fairfax County Parents Association sent the school district, state and local leaders a scathing letter, calling them out for saying that the awards don t matter.
You should hang your heads in shame, the parents group, a nonpartisan volunteer grassroots organization, wrote in a letter published late Saturday morning.
In recent days, Jennifer Adeli, the Dranesville District representative of the Fairfax-Falls Church Community Services Board, called the National Merit Commended Student award winners 4th place finishers. Children in the Dranesville District have been impacted by the withholding of the awards. (She later deleted the tweet.)
The Fairfax-Falls Church Community Services Board is the local agency that provides services for people in Fairfax County and the cities of Fairfax and Falls Church who have mental illness, substance use disorders, and/or intellectual or developmental disabilities. The administrative board of which Adeli is part of oversees the establishment and operation of these local services.
Also earlier this week, in a tweet, Virginia Sen. Scott Surovell (D-Mt. Vernon), an attorney and a longtime critic of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST), published a tweet, calling an investigation into the issue by Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares, fake. Virginia House Minority Leader Don Scott (D-Portsmouth) alleged Miyares had created a fake controversy that in no way impacts educational outcomes in schools.
I find it really shocking that these high schools would not even inform students about their National Merit awards. Unless things have greatly changed since the 1970s, these are among the very few, nationally recognized academic awards that all high schoolers can compete for. If you are a young person not from a distinguished family, without any great access to funds, and no spectacular athletic talent, the National Merit awards are one of the few ladders out into the great world. That world may not be all it’s cracked up to be, but for the ambitious but basically poor, bookish student, the National Merit awards, and a few other programs like them, are it. That the leaders of these high schools would deliberately keep their students down, and that’s what they’re doing, just to make things appear more equal — it’s a complete outrage, actually, far more serious than its coverage in the media suggests. Especially since the National Merit awards are exactly set up to be a level playing field that anyone can walk onto, whether you’re from Upper East Side of Manhattan or the wrong side of the tracks in Podunk, Arkansas. It’s the same test, graded the same way, wherever you are from. And the winners used to reflect the diversity geography of American strivers. There were some kids from Boston Latin and Brearley, but also kids from nowhere schools in flyover country. I hope Virginians treat this as the serious scandal it is.
I’ll always love Idaho, but in the 1970s it just wasn’t the place I wanted to go to college. The only thing that got me out was my ability to score well on standardized tests. They’re a bit like the US version of the great Chinese exams, although far less imposing. Now we’re undermining them, or throwing them out altogether. This will end up giving us a far *more* stratified, and privileged society. If test scores don’t make a difference, personal fortunes, connections, ethnic affinities and political posturing will take up the slack. And that’s exactly what we’re getting.