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School board enlists caution
Members of the Fairfax County School Board were unanimous in their decision to postpone a vote on a staff report that shows racial and ethnic disparities between students in the areas of moral character and judgment. The vote was postponed to the June 19 school board meeting.The "Essential Life Skills" report concludes that black, Hispanic and special education students are more likely to receive poorer marks in character education than their white and Asian American classmates.
"When I saw [in the report] that African American or Latino kids had lower moral standards than their white or Asian counterparts, it troubled me," said At-large member Martina Hone, who proposed postponing the vote.
Many board members supported the delay to seek more time to evaluate the findings of the study.
"When I first got a report of the data I was perplexed," said At-large member Ilryong Moon, adding that he did not expect to see such disparities.
School board Chairman Dan Stork (Mount Vernon) said the issue should have been discussed more in a work session before it came up for a vote.
Deputy Division Superintendent Richard Moniuszko said the intent of the "measurements and the indicators ... is to give us information that's going to help us improve our students' skills ... and from a staff's perspective, there are some unintended consequences of how we presented the data" to the board at the March 27 board meeting.
Moniuszko said there may be potential "bias in some ratings [that] needs to be evaluated."
"Looking at any kind of data, for children who are 7, 8 and 9 years old, you have to be very careful what you are looking at. These are very young children," said Jane Strauss (Dranesville).
At-large school board member James Raney said that of all the student achievement resources the county employs, "essential life skills is more difficult to measure than others."
On measuring sound moral character and ethical judgment, school board vice chairman Kathy Smith (Sully) asked the board, "How do we do this? ... Is there a better way to say where we want to go?"
Hone, who is African American, said race is still a "painful" issue to discuss in America, and "we have to be sure that, whatever decisions we come to, that the value of the outcome of looking at information by race is worth the difficulties and the challenges and the risk of misperception that could come from looking at data by race."
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