Fairfax County Public Schools is a strong education system. But where our practices have worked fine for the children of highly educated parents, we have not kept up with the changing demographics in our county. Today, we educate than 31,000 low income students and more than 22,000 who speak a language other than English at home.

Despite Fairfax County’s reputation for excellence, in the last five years our third grade reading scores have dropped us from 11^th out of 132 Virginia school divisions to 36^th place – below the top 25 percent.

For at-risk students, the scores are even worse: In tests we have given for 12 years, we find that, on average, one-third of at-risk students in third, fifth, or eighth grades are not reading at grade level. One-fourth are not doing math on grade level.

The disparity cannot be laid at the feet of socioeconomic circumstances: Richmond City’s Black, Hispanic and low-income students all outpace the same subgroups in Fairfax County in third, fifth and eighth grade – sometimes by double-digits. In fact, Richmond students (74% of them in poverty) have already tied Fairfax’s fifth grade students (20% in poverty) in reading. Norfolk City, with a 64% poverty rate, now exceeds Fairfax County's passing rate.

A key difference is that Richmond has embraced 50 years of research by the National Institute of Child Health and Development demonstrating that an effective reading program includes phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. The Washington Post reported that Fairfax officials decline the explicit use of phonics and have bluntly said that they don’t want to give up the “creativity” that often works well with higher-income children.

It isn’t an “either/or” proposition: Once a student understands phonics, they can move rapidly to the other components. But a student needs to learn the science of reading so they can appreciate the art of reading. And in opposing doing “what works” in the first place, the School Board ends up spending millions on remediation that could otherwise be used to enhance the education of all children.

Incumbent School Board members are touting the idea that the Minority Student Achievement Gap has declinedamong high school students. True enough. What is not mentioned is that it’s made easier by the departure of students who could not pass the test: In fact, last year’s senior class was 1,775 students smaller than it was when those same students were in ninth grade.

Could it be that they dropped out because they could not read well enough?

None of this is a sign of the imminent collapse of our education system.

But they are clear warning signs. And all of them have been reported on the state Board of Education website, on the front page of The Washington Post, and in reports to the School Board.

Their response has been to create an Academic Achievement Goal that reads: “Students will achieve their full academic potential in the core disciplines” – a goal that the School Board consultant who created it admitted was designed for “high-achieving students.”

And one FCPS leader claimed that one effort to “close the achievement gap” was to teach all elementary school children a foreign language.

Now … I’m all in favor of elementary school kids learning a foreign language.

But before we teach third graders how to speak French, shouldn’t we first make certain all children can read English?

During my previous eight years (1995-2003) on the Board, the school system and many Board members resisted the explicit and sequential use of the phonics component. Our battles were categorized as the “phonics wars.”

But that resistance – based not on science, but on ideology – is bearing bitter fruit now.

And it is hurting our system, and most especially hurting the students who are struggling to learn to read.

Our protocols used to require purchasing new textbooks every six years. Our reading textbooks are not only older than that but they are outdated and fail to use the most recent and proven methods for teaching reading.

We can go a long way towards helping kids learn to read by preparing to purchase new texts that use the proven methods – on paper and in the classroom – that have enabled so many poverty-stricken school systems to shoot ahead of wealthy Fairfax.

My goal is a simple one: I want simply to make certain that all children learn the science of reading so they can appreciate the art of reading – especially literature.