The current state of Fairfax County is evident in the county’s Economic Mobility Pilot program, which is giving $750 of guaranteed income per month ($9,000 over 12 months) to 180 families for 15 months. The rules are complicated. The evaluation plan, if there is one, is not available. Most important, the pilot is an implicit admission that what should be the county’s economic mobility program – Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) – is a $3.7 billion failure.
The children who do well in FCPS are those whose families can teach them the basics overlooked in the classroom. However, nearly half of FCPS’s enrollment is now low-income and/or non-English speakers and/or special education. Achievement among these groups is generally low. Teaching methods (phonics-based reading, arithmetic drill) that had successfully educated America for a century were abandoned by “progressive education” spawned by John Dewey at the Columbia University Teachers College in the 1920s. Failure to master the basics ruins economic mobility.
The consequences of school failure cascade. Socially promoted students are at higher risk for poverty and crime. To prevent disproportionate incarceration of these youth, the commonwealth’s attorney has gone soft on crime, leading to unprecedented resignations of police. Residents oppose increased housing densities because they equate affordable housing with crime.
It doesn’t help that FCPS prepares students to be global citizens, not American citizens. The Founding Fathers, who replaced a monarch with an elected president, who sounded the death-knell for slavery by declaring all men created equal, and who introduced the world to the radical concepts of freedom of speech and religion, are put under the historical microscope while socialism is not. What the Founding Fathers created still attracts millions of all races and creeds from around the world.
National trends affect the county. The climate alarmists’ war on fossil fuels causes us crippling inflation. The Virginia Clean Economy Act shuts down affordable, reliable natural-gas power plants by 2050. Yet the alarmists, while having plenty of evidence of increased carbon dioxide and warming, have no evidence of increased natural disasters. For example:
• The 42-page United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2023 “Summary for Policymakers” devotes only two pages to the impact of climate change and makes many alarmist assertions, but buries the supporting data.
• NASA’s climate-change page asserts accelerating sea-level rise and increasing frequency of extreme events, but when you click on the footnotes for sources, you are asked to log in with a smartcard!
• The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has a “Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters” page. However, NOAA admitted to Substack author Dr. Roger Pielke that it had to “improve the documentation and transparency of the data set.” The NOAA data had not had an external peer review since 2015.
Also, the federal government’s high-carbohydrate nutrition guidelines have caused in the county – and nation – an epidemic of diabetes and other chronic diseases, including mental illness. Harvard-trained psychiatrists Dr. Chris Palmer and Dr. Georgia Ede each have published books about low-carb diets’ reversing mental illness much more effectively than drugs. In last year’s budget guidance, Fairfax County supervisors stated, “We are facing an unprecedented mental-health crisis among children and adolescents.”
The fixes are simple. Competition, not money, would fix public schools. For starters, end state control of public schools and let local school boards compete against each other. Stop the war on fossil fuels to reverse inflation. Have health departments campaign against highly processed foods.
Schools that teach ALL students, affordable prices and restored health would make Fairfax County the economic-mobility model for America in 2050. Let’s begin now!
