Esther Cooper founded the Arlington NAACP branch in 1940 primarily to address educational inequities. Ms. Cooper moved from Ohio to Arlington to work for the Federal Forest Service. She became an advocate for education equality after deeming that Arlington’s Black schools were unfit for her own children. Under her leadership, the Arlington NAACP sued the school board challenging the inequalities in the county’s Black high schools, in Carter v. School Board of Arlington Co. (1950). The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, ruling that Arlington’s separate high schools constituted unlawful discrimination.
Today, 70 years after the Carter decision, and 66 years after Brown v. Board of Education, we still don’t have education parity or fully integrated schools in APS. The school board and county have taken affirmative steps to re-segregate schools either by busing or boundaries. In fact, our north Arlington schools are more segregated today than they were 50 years ago.
Not surprisingly, the academic gap has not closed in decades. Black children hover around 20 points below their White counterparts and are performing below the state average which is already quite low. In addition, we are facing a literary crisis in APS wherein reading scores for all students have been on a steady decline. However, Black students are disproportionately impacted, and some are graduating from high school semi-literate. How is that 20K per pupil being spent?
We see the equivalence of education redlining in APS wherein the high school with the highest minority population, Wakefield, is not utilizing a science-based, structured literacy approach for struggling readers, i.e., Orton Gillingham, as recommended by the International Dyslexia Association, the VDOE, and APS. And this problem is not limited to our high schools. We have students who are entering 9th grade reading on a 3rd-grade level. A student may get access to a science-based reading curriculum or effective reading diagnostic assessments, or they may not, depending on where they attend school. The inability to read and comprehend impacts a student’s ability to access other content areas and the gaps will widen instead of closing. Literacy is a civil right and neglecting to adequately address gaps and deficiencies in literacy is a violation of civil rights.
Black students with disabilities in APS face a more daunting academic outcome as many are over-identified as emotionally disturbed, when in fact, their behavior is the manifestation of undiagnosed learning disabilities. Many of our Black students are unidentified for learning disabilities. When gone unidentified and untreated, the difficulty reading and learning then presents as emotional or psychological behavioral problems due to frustration, anger, anxiety, and low self-esteem.
The civil rights data on APS makes clear that Black students and especially those with disabilities are disciplined, suspended, and referred to law enforcement, and forced into the juvenile justice system at rates disproportionate to their white counterparts. Arlington County Police Department’s data shows a disproportionate number of arrests and detention of Black children in Arlington. How Black students and students with disabilities experience School Resource Officers (SROs) is markedly different and generally less positive than how white, neurotypical students experience SROs.
Black students experience racism and bias and are subject to implicit bias, low expectations, and tracking at every juncture of their academic journey. It is no coincidence that national statistics reveal that 62% of juveniles in the juvenile justice system qualify for special education, and 50% of federal inmates are dyslexic. Everything that I have described thus far, is the school-to-prison pipeline. And APS is very much a party to it, whether wittingly or unwittingly.
Intersection with Criminal Justice Reform
Since we have established that these education failures are a direct route along the school-to-prison pipeline, we cannot have a meaningful conversation about criminal justice reform without addressing education reform. The two are inextricably linked. We have to stop the stove-pipe of Black, Latino, and students with disabilities into the criminal justice system. We advance criminal justice reform by identifying learning disabilities early and effectively remediating it. We advance criminal justice reform by prioritizing literacy and producing stellar graduates who are college-ready or career-ready when they leave APS. We advance criminal justice reform by rooting out racism and implicit bias in our schools (to the extent we can) through training and frequent refreshers. We advance criminal justice reform by having a robust equity framework and assigning an equity lead at all schools. We advance criminal justice reform by taking a trauma-informed approach to teaching and expanding upon the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional (CASEL) learning. We advance criminal justice reform by fully implementing robust restorative practices in our schools, such as the PEER program (Promoting Empathy through Equitable Resolution). We advance criminal justice reform by effectively addressing bullying behaviors from a safety and wholistic approach. Finally, we advance criminal justice reform by replacing SROs with the recommended ratios of mental health professionals in our schools.