It’s easy to justify ever-increasing school budgets when enrollment is also rising rapidly, but Fairfax County Public Schools officials must be more creative now that that’s no longer the case. As inflation-adjusted FCPS budgets rose nine times faster than enrollment over the last 30 years, taxpayers were told this was the price of a “world-class” education. Then administrators used special ed and non-English-speaking students to justify more spending. The latest way to keep the party going? Blame the federal No Child Left Behind Act for more than half of next year’s proposed $184.2 million budget increase.
Superintendent Jack Daleclaims FCPS spent $122 million this year to comply with the 2001 federal law. But as the County Board considers a record $2.1 billion transfer to the schools tonight, supervisors and taxpayers should be asking: On what? NCLB requires annual testing to measure proficiency in reading and math, but Virginia submits results from its Standards of Learning — the state-mandated assessments that predate NCLB by six years. And Virginia kids don’t even take SOLs every year.
According to Dale’s own budget figures, state and federal aid will increase $23 million next year, almost exactly what a new summer school remediation program will cost. FCPS doesn’t need a 10 percent raise to hire more teachers. Staff has increased four times the rate of enrollment since 1975 — and only 17 more students are expected next year anyway.
Fairfax School Board Chairman Ilryong Moon shocked supervisors earlier this month when he told them that 122 out of 199 Fairfax public schools (61 percent) are in danger of not meeting this year’s NCLB benchmarks — even though FCPS has spent half a billion dollars since 2002 trying. “If money could fix public schools,” Arthur Purves, president of the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance, told county supervisors at a public hearing, “they would have been fixed by now.”
Contrary to popular belief, the federal benchmarks are modest: Less than three-fourths of students tested have to pass the same math and reading tests Virginia education officials have already determined are accurate measures of basic competency at each grade level. Proficiency levels are set in Richmond, not Washington. However, the feds do require evidence that those who don’t hit the mark are making “adequate yearly progress.”
They’re not. As the Washington Post reported, FCPS’ black students — who make up 11 percent of one of the nation’s wealthiest suburban school districts — test lower than their counterparts in urban areas of Richmond and Norfolk withdouble the poverty rate. And these are just the students who actually take the tests; thousands of special ed students simply don’t count.
The head of the nation’s 12th-largest school system seemed surprised. “We had a perception that our performance is higher than the data would indicate, in part because of the accolades our schools get,” Dale said. But you don’t need a Ph.D. in education to figure out that the chronically low black admissions at FCPS’ flagship Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is a symptom of a basic problem at the elementary level that won’t be fixed by more spending at the top.
