As with everything in life, leadership is critical. Our kids, but also our teachers, need great leaders who can lead with love. Leading with love is having high expectations for kids. Leading with love means you care about the whole child. Leading with love means it’s about social justice and changing lives for kids. … We just want to make sure that every Richmond public school has a leader who leads with love.

The Virginia Department of Education is increasingly dominated by proponents of the social justice approach to education, and the City of Richmond, under prodding from the U.S. Justice Department, was one of the earlier districts in Virginia to adopt a disciplinary policy that relies less upon punishments such as suspensions and more upon therapeutic intervention. Now Richmond is using explicitly social-justice criteria for hiring and firing its school principals.

Liz Doerr, who sits on the Richmond school board, put it this way: “We know teacher retention is a problem for RPS. We need to make sure we have leaders who hold the bar high but do it with love and inspiration.”

However, in their zeal to pursue social-justice remedies, which are predicated on the assumption that the educational system is structurally racist, Richmond educators may be overlooking acute problems such as a dysfunctional organizational culture.

“I am still trying to navigate through a broken school system with a lack of written systems and structure,” said Rose Ferguson, who, in her second year as principal of George Mason Elementary School, is on the way out. “Mason had layers of concerns before I arrived, and I was hired to help improve those concerns. … It is unfortunate that the new administration has not provided clear guidance and support to assist me with the numerous issues.”

Bacon’s bottom line: Richmond will become a pure, unadulterated test case for social justice-inspired education. No half measures here. Richmond is going full social justice warrior. The results should be instructive to all Virginians, particularly as the VDOE continues to push its social justice agenda in other school districts.

Unfortunately, VDOE is changing the rules for Standards of Learning tests this year, allowing students who have who have already earned a verified credit in the subject area to skip the end-of-year standardized tests. The change will render inoperative any comparisons between past year’s SOL pass rates and this year’s. Virginians will have to wait until next year to make valid comparisons, and even then, we are likely to hear that one can’t reach conclusive judgments on a single year’s results.

We’ll see about that. In the meantime, a note to self: Make a point of comparing SOL test scores for next year and this year at the following schools mentioned in the RTD article:

George Mason Elementary
Overby-Sheppard Elementary
Fairfield Court Elementary
Henderson Middle
George Wythe High School
John Marshall High School
Thomas Jefferson High School