At Fairfax County’s school board meeting last week, Leslie Houston, the Fairfax Education Association president, was clear that teachers unions want parents out of the picture. During her testimony, she advised the district’s school board to “champion public education … Disregard your skeptics … Continue leveraging our expertise.”
“Expertise” is an interesting word for Houston to have used. Her union supported prolonged school closures and pushed for the forced masking of students and, ironically, the denial of medical freedom via vaccine mandates for all Fairfax County Public Schools employees. Houston and other teachers union activists are “experts” at advocating for their own power at the expense of America’s children, but not much else.
Indeed, local teachers union leaders such as Houston have been acting as foot soldiers in the destruction and politicization of quality education. Public education has been on a downhill trajectory for a long time, but teachers unions policies sent it into the trenches during and after the pandemic. Fairfax County, in particular, is an affluent district (with a $145,165 median household income in 2022) that used to be touted for its good public schools. Last year, though, following more than a year and a half of school closures, students fared quite poorly on their standards of learning assessments, or SOLs — 25% of the district’s students failed math, 43% failed writing, 22% failed reading, and 38% failed history.
Teachers unions leaders such as Houston would like to abdicate themselves of any blame for the learning loss. Rather, they are self-proclaimed “experts” on public education.
At the end of her testimony to school board members, Houston suggested that the school board should also seek advice from another local teachers union, the Fairfax County Federation of Teachers.
Sitting in the audience at the meeting was Emily VanDerhoff, Fairfax County Federation of Teachers’ executive board member and first-grade teacher. While conservative parents and residents spoke, VanDerhoff ignored their testimonies and instead made a public showing of reading the book It Feels Good to Be Yourself. This gender identity book, marketed to children ages 4 and up, explains, “Some people are boys. Some people are girls. Some people are both, neither, or somewhere in between.” This book, which is in Fairfax County’s public schools’ libraries, likely is also in VanDerhoff’s first-grade classroom library.
VanDerhoff and her teachers union colleagues have a history of ignoring parents. At a school board meeting on May 25, 2023, they stood in the audience with their backs to speakers who emphasized quality fundamental education over politics in classrooms to demonstrate their unwillingness to listen to our ideas.
And their belligerence dates even farther back. Despite parents’ desperate calls for children to return to in-person learning in September 2020, VanDerhoff, who doesn’t have any children of her own, joined others in drafting a letter advocating prolonged school closures. They wrote, “We hope to work with the FCPS Leadership Team and School Board on a plan that truly puts student and staff safety first by starting the year 100% virtually.”
Hindsight is 20/20, but many of us recognized the damage that activists such as VanDerhoff caused our children when she signed that letter. As teachers unions prioritized their own selfish desires, I joined many families in pulling my children from the public school system and opted instead to homeschool them for the 2020-2021 academic year. There was a mass exodus due to ignorant leadership. The district’s public school student population decreased from about 189,000 to 180,000. In the elementary school in which VanDerhoff is employed, about 1 in 10 students was pulled for the 2020-2021 academic year. Our public schools were failing us, and we knew it.
Public schools are continuing to fail us. Learning loss appears to be nearly insurmountable, particularly among students from low-income families. Chronic absenteeism is another consequence of teachers unions’ push for prolonged school closures. In Fairfax County, prior to the pandemic, chronically absent students, or those missing 10% or more of school, were fewer than 10%. In the 2022-2023 academic year, 17% of Fairfax County’s public school students were chronically absent.
Without a doubt, chronic absenteeism is a pandemic policy hangover. Students have internalized Houston’s, VanDerhoff’s, and the school board members’ message that school attendance is not important.
But all hope is not lost, even in the face of chronic absenteeism and declining standards in public education. In 2023, 20 states expanded K-12 educational choice options for America’s children and families. If public funds followed children instead of failing institutions during the pandemic, families with fewer resources also could have homeschooled or taken their children to one of the many private schools that didn’t shut their doors on the orders of teachers unions.
Just as they are across much of the nation, here in Fairfax County, teachers unions are a substantial obstacle to quality public education — and school choice is the solution.
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Stephanie Lundquist-Arora is a mother in Fairfax County, Virginia, an author, a member of the Coalition for TJ, and the Fairfax chapter leader of the Independent Women’s Network.