Virginia Reimagines Public Education

For John, BLUF:  Yes, the disadvantaged need a leg up, but should it be at the expense of other, hard working, students?  How do we have equity across the range of students?  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Woke War on America's No. 1 High School:  Push to 'Segregate by Race and Income'

Here is the sub-headline:

Secretive Virginia Governor's 'Task Force' Threatens Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology

From the blog Asra Investigates, by Asra Q. Nomani, 11 August 2020.

Here is the lede plus one:

Last month, Suparna Dutta spent countless hours researching how her son could safely return to school this fall as a rising sophomore at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a sprawling campus of classrooms, laboratories and open spaces with names like “Gandhi Commons” and “Einstein Commons,” outside the nation's capital here off Braddock Road.  Little did she know that a secretive “task force” assembled by orders of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam was quietly meeting to discuss legislating radical changes to the school that would threaten the very future of the school.

Unbeknownst to Dutta — and me, also a TJ mother — Virginia Secretary of Education Atif Qarni, a former teacher, met remotely on Friday, July 24, with a carefully curated list of Democratic lawmakers, state education officials and others in a “Diversity/Equity/Inclusion Group” to make recommendations to the Virginia State Legislature on how to increase the number of Black, Hispanic and low-income students at the state’s 19 Governor’s Schools, specialized public school programs with admissions requirements.  The group met again on Friday, July 31, and last week on Friday, August 7, and is expected to issue its recommendations in the coming days.

Here is how the longish, fact filled post, ends:

For Dutta, the TJ mother, it had been an arduous journey to TJ.  In 1947, her father had crossed the border from Bangladesh to West Bengal in India, fleeing war with just the clothes on his back, then walking miles from his family’s new home in a village to the closest school, enlisting in his teens in the Indian Air Force.  In the summer of 1992, Dutta, then 22, arrived in the U.S. for graduate studies with a supply of rice, lentils and red kidney beans and $250 to her name.

“It’s demoralizing,” Dutta said, “that all the values of hard work and merit that I believed defined America are being turned upside down. It’s depressing.”

Undeterred, Dutta works tirelessly now with other TJ parents — courageous pioneers who fled communism, oppression, poverty and other injustices — to stand up for the values of hard work and merit that brought them to the United States in the first place.

I judge that Governor Newsom has misidentied the problem and is now instituting changes that won't fix the prblem, and may, in fact, make it worse, as did welfare reform in the mid-1960s.

One final though.  Is it time for Virginia to Change its name, as acknowledemen of its racist pass?

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff