Menu Close

Our Neglected Underfunded Schools

Come with me to the Imperial Capital, Sodom-On-The-Potomac, aka Washington D.C.

Even the average public school student knows that the District of Columbia is technically the capital of these United States, home to the White House and Capitol Hill, the Lincoln and Washington Memorials, lots of cool museums and a great zoo, all full of screaming diverse children who don’t appreciate what they are seeing because it isn’t part of their history.

What most people don’t really seem to understand is that while D.C. is the seat of power, there are only around 700,000 people who actually live in the district and depending on which zip code they live in it looks very different. Only around 1/3 of District-dwellers are White….

That percentage has been slowly climbing as the Federal leviathan grows via “gentrification”, a fancy word that means “White people moving back into a city, pricing out the blacks and turning a crappy neighborhood into a less shitty place to live”.

Most of the Court Mandarin-class that runs this country, not to be confused with the figureheads we are allowed to “vote” for, live in the outlying suburbs in places like Alexandria and Arlington in Virginia and Montgomery County in Maryland. These are the real power people, the figures behind the scenes that turn vague laws into Federal policies.

No one knows their names and no matter who “wins the election”, they mostly stay in power. They are “Permanent Washington”, the Swamp, the Deep State, whatever you want to call them.

I’ll tell this story again because it is instructive. In 2008 the bank branch I was managing closed, not because we were underperforming as quite the contrary we were killing it, but because the banking world took a kick to the nuts. We ended up having to move from Northern Michigan, something I swore we wouldn’t do, and I ended up as the manager at a different bank branch near Detroit. In the depth of the mortgage crisis with most of the country in really bad shape, houses being foreclosed, cars being repossessed, I went out to Northern Virginia. It was like being in a different world. Houses were selling at or above asking price, new cars were in every driveway, the job market was hopping, restaurants and stores were packed. The rest of the country was in a recession but in the D.C/Northern Virginia world it was all sunshine and puppy dogs.

Northern Virginia and the whole D.C. metroplex are living different worlds than the rest of us. This story caught my eye over the weekend….

Pricetag of “equity” in Fairfax County Schools: $6.4 million

The public school system in Fairfax, Virginia spends over $6 million on “equity” in the form of 52 employees who don’t teach or spend time in classrooms. This school system is the 9th largest in the U.S. with 199 individual schools and a $4 billion budget for FY 2026…

With the Trump administration axing “diversity, equity, and inclusion” jobs throughout the federal bureaucracy, Mark Spooner, a 79-year-old retired attorney in Fairfax County, unearthed startling documents through a public records request, detailing the price tag for salaries of 52 employees in the “Chief Equity Office” of Fairfax County Public Schools: $6.4 million, or enough to pay about 125 new teachers. 

According to documents, Nardos King, the “Chief Equity Officer” at FCPS, makes the highest salary in the department, earning $258,641 annually – more than the salary of U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, U.S. Senator Tim Kaine, U.S. Rep. Gerry Connolly, and other top lawmakers. King reports to FCPS Superintendent Michelle Reid, who just got a pay raise to $424,146, which is more than the salary of the president of the United States.

In order to achieve “equity”, which means equal outcomes for everyone regardless of ability, rather than equality, meaning equal opportunities for everyone, the Fairfax Schools devote a huge amount of money to non-teaching staff devoted to “equity”, rather than hiring more teachers. When you look at the staff with the top-10 highest salaries:

  1. Nardos King, Chief Equity Officer: $258,641
  2. Kathleen S. Watts, Executive Director, Equity and Student Relations: $191,634
  3. Lisa S. Forrest, Hearings Office: $189,569
  4. Tara P. Hewan, Director III, Equity: $181,288
  5. Linda A. Ferguson, Special Projects Administrator: $177,276
  6. Joseph Berret, Assistant Administrative Hearing Officer: $171,664
  7. Alisha K. Martinez, Administrator, Equity Programs: $169,127
  8. Gina S. Brooks, Assistant Administrative Hearing Officer: $164,165
  9. Mark T. Holbrook, Assistant Administrative Hearing Officer: $164,165
  10. Junena A. Thomas, Senior Manager II, Professional Learning and Cultural Responsiveness: $157,941

…none of them are teaching. Four work in “hearings” whatever that means, the others do vaguely defined project work like number 10, Junena A. Thomas, who is a “Senior Manager II, Professional Learning and Cultural Responsiveness” making over $150,000 per year. What does she do to help black and mestizo students become more prepared for college or the workforce? I will go on a limb and say “nothing”. It is a beautiful scam because you will never achieve “equity” so these people never have to worry about losing their jobs because no one knows what they are supposed to be doing in the first place.

This is what happens all over the public school system in America. We are endlessly hectored about not spending enough money when in fact we spend far too much money on public schools and get worse results the more we spend. For example:

NY teachers unions pump school spending to highest in the nation at $36K per kid — yet they rank low in reading and math: report

$36 thousand per student so in a classroom with 20 students you have nearly three quarters of a million dollars represented, and yet the results are awful.

Among the findings in the report:

  • The state spends 91% above the national average on K-12 schools and even considerably higher than spendthrift neighbors and competitor states — including California, Massachusetts and New Jersey.
  • The average of $36,293 per-pupil spending includes federal, state and local aid — but the state’s portion rose by nearly 26% since 2020-21, or about 6% a year.
  • The increase in education funding has come despite a drop in student enrollment over the last decade — shrinking 7.7% from 2.66 million in 2013 to 2.45 million students this year.

All that spending has produced less than stellar and even dismal results.

New York’s fourth grade students ranked 32nd and 46th on reading and math NAEP exams taken in 2022, respectively, while eighth grade students rank 9th and 22nd, the report noted.

That is quite the return on investment. The issue in New York schools is the same as it is everywhere. If you spend all of your money on administrative staff who don’t teach, you are wasting money. The other half is that demographic changes in schools mean that no matter how much you spend, results will be poor. You could spend $100,000 per student in New York and not move the needle on performance because school spending can’t trump biological reality.

It’s a dead horse but I am going to keep beating it. We can’t spend ourselves out of ignorance when the academic ceiling for the majority of school children tops out at bus driver or turnpike toll collector.

The Great Replacement is showing up most prominently in our public schools. More on that in a moment but for now just know that far from needing to spend more on “public education”, America needs to spend a lot less.

14 Comments

  1. John Perry

    Quite a few years ago when my youngest was still school age, our biggest school district was spending enough per student to send my kid to state college.

  2. ghostsniper

    Public schools have nothing to do with education and are indoctrination centers where parents that don’t care about their kids store them so they are able to do other things.

  3. SirLawrence

    These DIE jobs are also the counterparty to the college scam.

    Government and education are already mostly makework for the dim and the dark, but there is a massive employment grift within the education (as well as the “refugee resettlement” and other social service functionaries) that operates as a crony-employment machine that powers the social-political and economic capital of these urban leftist hellscapes.

    It guarantees jobs for the dipshit kids of the leftist urban elites. Keeps all the nepotism and cronyism in positions that keep people employed and paid well. The retards with $150k in loans for a masters in international cultural communications are lined up to pull the cart for the death cult.

    Almost entirely women, diversities, and joos. Some soyjacks for giggles. This keeps the whole racket going. It’s the answer to the question of “what would someone do with a black/womens/african/cultural studies degree?”

    These are also the people doing the child grooming and ballot harvesting.

    As for your experience in NOVA post ’08, that’s the same feeling I have had for years. There are at least two very different economies going on. The difference is the leftist machine is a lot better at making sure their kinds get paid, employed, and positioned for influence.

    Meritocracy for thee.

    • Big Ruckus D

      ^^^ this nails it. It’s why I’ve said public schools need to be eliminated nationwide, not only to end the indoctrination of successive generations of the average (at best) but to end the outrageous spending (which of course has become the entire reason for the enterprise, as it employee scores of assholes at pay rates far above their actual capability to contribute anything to society) which will, in itself, bankrupt us all soon enough at the rate of growth in it’s cost. As to what to do with all the unemployed rectal cavities, I don’t have a good answer to that, at least not one fit to discuss publicly.

  4. Max Wiley

    The higher education system is where the Frankfurt School radicals embedded themselves when they moved here from Europe and it is (deliberately) the first institution they marched through.
    Due to their position teaching the next generation of teachers and journalists, we now have activists instead of professionals doing these jobs, in the vast majority of cases. Even in nominally red states, the education systems are huge money sinks that are a protected leftist power base while they primarily indoctrinate, not educate.
    Burn. It. The. Fuck. Down.
    First off do not send your children to public school or most colleges and especially not state colleges. Second, throw whatever political funding and activism you have resources for into anything that is a school choice system, and whatever it takes to end the taxpayer backed student loan scam. Starve the beast until it dies on the altar of choice in an open market or your grandchildren are still going to be fighting these same battles.

    • Big Ruckus D

      And this is precisely why I hold that collapse is really the only way out. None of these people will willingly cede their paychecks and power, now that they’ve established a system that keeps them fat and influential. It will collapse, too, because the exponential rate of growth in it’s cost to society, both in direct economic.cost, as well as the damage it does to the competence and capability of the population at large, is already untenable, and only getting worse with each passing year.

      If I could wave a magic wand and make the entire scam disappear from the face of the planet (along with those who are it’s true beneficiaries) I’d do so in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, no such easy way out exists for addressing this problem; and it is a huge problem that almost defies comprehension. An uncontained crash and burn is the surest, quickest way out. And even that will have myriad brutal consequences, until the smoke clears.

  5. ozark homesteader

    The inverse relationship between money-spent and learning-per-student. It is widely accepted that government employees are typically abysmal stewards of the public’s money. Schools, school teachers and school administrators are by far the worst of the worst. Entitled, steeped in ideations of their martyrhood, smarter, more deserving, more righteous than all, school staffs seem to believe that their slovenly comportment, poor attitudes and shitty manners are somehow endearing simply because they are so much better than the rest of society. I once took a job for a short time doing janitorial/maintenance work in a small, rural, one-building school district and I was appalled by the cavalier waste and the virtual disdain they all seemed to hold for their customers-the parents of the students they claimed to have taught. I’ve never worked with such a bunch of rude, spoiled and generally unpleasant people in my whole life.

    • Mike_C

      “Entitled, steeped in ideations of their martyrhood, smarter, more deserving, more righteous than all […] poor attitudes and shitty manners [… yet somehow believe they are…] so much better than the rest of society.”

      Boy, that sounds awfully familiar. I had a long conversation the other day that started out pleasantly enough, but soon devolved into a morass of paranoia and ethnoreligious supremacist ideology. (When they accuse you of it, it’s almost certainly Projection.)

      At the time I was disappointed, because for some reason I expected better from this individual. (Based on nothing, admittedly. Idiot hope springs eternal, I guess.) But reflecting on it a few days later? It was good for me. Reminders are necessary.

  6. ozark homesteader

    Off topic, but what’s the story about the J6’er murdered in Indiana during a traffic stop? Who is the fedboi/hitter that took the J6’er out? I wonder how many more of these “hits” we will see, and I also wonder what happened to the victim while he was in the custody of BOP that made him a threat to the left’s power base. Y’all probably already heard about Daniel Ball, J6’er who was chained to his cell and beat so badly by guards that they are playing games with his release due to Trump’s pardon. Apparently he was beaten so badly that his teeth pushed through his face and has been threatened by the guards that they will be back to power-punch his back door with their filthy, BOP peckers (which clearly identifies the guards as either joos or blaques). The left/deep state is pushing hard for CWII. We’ll see how it plays out. X post summarizing Ball’s situation…https://x.com/JohnStrandUSA/status/1883775334446772274

  7. MN Steel

    Not to worry, there won’t be any money for schools in a couple months. The whole economy was teetering on the brink at the end of 2019 when the coof stalled that crash, and the here-and-now is a re-run (die-no-myte!) of the dot-com puke with the commie AI coming out hot and cheap.

    Arthur’s theory about The Fall Guy replacing The Big Guy looks like it’s playing out like the rest of the news, fast and hard. Much like the coof shutdowns and most people ignoring secondary and tertiary effects on the supply chain, the posts about factories shut down because all they employ are burrito-goblins are going to fuck everything up really fast.

    I’m an optimist, so I see earth-shaking events in economic and real-life events in 2 months at the outside. They usually pull infrastructure in the fall like September through November but this should be obvious in time to plant your salvation, if the seeds are available and there isn’t much diversity in your area.

    • Big Ruckus D

      That’s about my take on it, too. Spooking all the illegals into going off the radar (as appears to be happening now, at least anecdotally) will screw up supply chains in a hurry. And no matter how much fat Trump may cut – and I remain highly skeptical that this will be anything more than a token effort – we are bankrupt as a country.

      The new Chinese AI that appears to immediately negate so much of the hot money investment made in US centric so called AI tech is very likely a black swan of unfathomable proportions (and “AI” is mostly a financialization and collusive scam in the same vein as Internet 1.0 that crashed and burned in 2000-01) so it was primed to get BTFO at some point anyway. The clock is ticking, and I’m just hanging hack here anticipating the big show. It’s not likely I can position myself beyond the blast radius, in any case.

  8. Stealth Spaniel

    GSEHD alumna Dr. Nardos King (master’s, Special Education and Disability Studies); yes, Geo Washington University. My money is on the fact that she lives nowhere near Black People, shops at the whitest and most expensive stores in town, and never goes near anybody poor. Most of the ones that I have tracked are Blacker than midnight…. what a grift. Shut the whole damned public school scene down!!

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *