Symone Walker can’t help wondering how her son’s academic experience might have been different had his dyslexia been caught sooner. As a 7-year-old in the Montessori program at Drew Model School (now Drew Elementary), his reading struggles were mistaken for ADHD.
“Arlington Public Schools [APS] offered reading recovery, which doesn’t help a dyslexic kid, and offered him special ed services that allowed him to get by,” says Walker, a lawyer and mom of two. But by middle school her son’s problems were snowballing. Unable to focus, he was getting called out by his teachers for being distracted in class.
A school recommendation to discontinue her son’s special education services is what finally prompted Walker to seek a private diagnosis before he started eighth grade. “His test results showed he was dealing with an orthographic deficiency, making it hard for him to draw conclusions from [word] patterns and make connections. It also impacted his ability to perform written expression and math solutions,” she says. “The tests revealed that he was three to five years—years!—behind grade level. Yet he was bringing home A’s and B’s and honor roll certificates. I thought, How is this happening?”
The answer, she believes, involved a combination of grade inflation and lowered expectations. “Because he was in special education, his teachers expected less from him. They just pushed him up and out. Had I not gotten so deeply involved and sent him for independent testing, I wouldn’t have known how far behind he was.”
Speaking candidly, Walker also wonders if implicit bias (unconscious attitudes, in this case on the part of teachers and administrators) was a factor—if certain assumptions about why her Black son was falling behind may have further derailed his progress.
“I think undiagnosed reading issues are frequently at the root of opportunity gap problems,” says Walker, who co-chairs the Arlington NAACP education committee and ran for the Arlington school board in 2020. “I think Black students are under-identified for learning disabilities.
“The schools are quick to identify behavioral issues,” she says, “but less perceptive when it comes to picking up [processing disorders like dyslexia]. They make assumptions. If you’re a Black kid who struggles to read, the first thing is to place blame on the parent—you don’t read to your kid at home; they watch too much TV. That if you’re Black, you’re automatically poor and you don’t care about education.”
Implicit bias can be difficult to prove on a case-by-case basis, but it’s hard to ignore the bigger picture. APS data show clear academic discrepancies between white students and Black and Latino students.
An analysis of Virginia Department of Education and APS dashboard data by the advocacy group Black Parents of Arlington (BPA) found Black APS students consistently lagging behind white students in Standards of Learning (SOL) pass rates over a period of three years, often by around 20 percentage points. For Arlington kids enrolled in advanced placement and international baccalaureate classes during the 2017-18 school year, the AP/IB pass rate among white students was 79%, compared with 31% for Black students.
Nearly a quarter of white APS elementary school students were identified as eligible for gifted instruction that school year, compared with only 12% of Black students.
But Black students, who represented only 11% of the APS high school population in 2017-18, accounted for 35% of out-of-school suspensions. Two years later, that trend remained. Black students made up 12% of Arlington high-schoolers during the 2019-20 academic year, but received 31% of suspensions.
“When Black children misbehave, they are singled out for much lesser transgressions and the reaction tends to be much more punitive,” BPA founding member Sherrice Kerns said in a 2020 interview with Arlington Magazine. “There’s a presumption of guilt and criminality of minorities, which undergirds our school system. There’s a fundamental presumption of innocence for white kids that isn’t afforded to Black and Latino children.”
Racial justice advocates once referred to discrepancies like this as evidence of an “achievement gap,” but the terminology has changed. “When we used the term ‘achievement gap,’ it put the onus and the burden on the kids, like it was the students’ fault they weren’t performing well,” explains Arron Gregory, who joined APS as chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer in January 2020. “The term ‘opportunity gap’ puts the onus back on the system, which operates under the shadow of systemic racism and leads to different opportunities for different student groups. Opportunity gaps are created by systems; they lead to academic gaps that predict outcomes by race, gender, disability, class, socioeconomics.”
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Opportunity gaps also tend to compound over time. BPA’s analysis revealed that fewer than half of Black APS students graduate with an advanced diploma, whereas more than four out of five white students do. It’s not because white kids are smarter or more driven, says Kerns, who co-chairs NAACP Arlington’s Education Committee with Walker. Sometimes a student’s decision about whether to pursue more rigorous courses stems from support and encouragement from teachers and school counselors. Or if the student has learning differences that are detected and addressed early.
“Implicit biases can prompt teachers and administrators to look for giftedness among children with specific behavior markers,” Kerns says. “For example, well-behaved students may tend to be selected for identification and related review, while children without that particular marker could be excluded from further consideration.”
Students who are recognized as gifted receive differentiated instruction after review of a portfolio demonstrating their potential for above-grade-level performance. (Walker’s daughter is one such student; she was identified for gifted services in both reading/language arts and math.) However, if a child is not identified, parents can request consideration and, if needed, pay for outside evaluations to bolster their case.
Gregory points out that implicit biases can also feed instances of grade inflation. “Bias can mean that we decrease the standards we have for some students because we think they’re not capable of the work,” he explains. “It can lead us to feel sorry for [them]. We don’t increase the rigor or hold them to higher expectations because we don’t want to give them more than what we think they can handle. We have to be careful not to shift our expectations too far down; we have to hold everyone to a high standard of academic rigor.”
In a county where the average median income for white households is more than double that of Black households ($134,723 versus $58,878, according to Census data), white parents are a force.
Perhaps without even realizing it, “nice white parents” (to quote the well-known podcast by New York Times reporter Chana Joffe-Walt) have cleaved an ever-widening opportunity gap for families that can’t afford outside tutors, don’t feel comfortable being the squeaky wheel, are less adept at navigating the system due to language barriers, or can’t meet with teachers during school hours because of work or transportation obstacles. These disadvantages often fall on families of color, and on schools with larger minority populations.
It’s an imbalance the new APS administration has been fighting to change. “We’re working to shed the reputation that APS is a ‘system of schools’ rather than a ‘school system,’ ” Superintendent Francisco Durán acknowledges. “We don’t have division-wide expectations or school resource divisions that address these issues system-wide. We need to have deeper discussions about…closing the opportunity gap, about what resources we’re putting in place across every school. No matter which school you go to, you should have the same experience, expectation and opportunity.”
Durán is especially intent on developing a consistent framework for foundational literacy—so that by fourth grade, when kids stop learning to read and start reading to learn, everyone is on a level playing field. “We know that our schools serve different populations that may come from different deficits in different areas of literacy,” he says. “So depending on which school you go to, you may have a different experience, and that in and of itself may create an opportunity gap.”
Brian Stockton, Durán’s chief of staff, has spent the past year listening to stories from a broad spectrum of APS families, including Walker’s. (Walker is now a member of the Superintendent’s Advisory Committee for Equity and Excellence.) “Dr. Durán’s mission is to know every child by need and by name. He has instilled this philosophy in all of us,” says Stockton, who was appointed to the role in June 2020.
The listening has provided helpful and sometimes significant insights. For example, when Walker and her NAACP colleagues introduced Stockton to Dyslexic Edge Academy, a program offering free dyslexia identification and intervention services to families that can’t afford expensive third-party clinical evaluations, Stockton advocated to bring it to Arlington schools. Developed in partnership with Virginia Tech’s Thinkabit Lab and based in Falls Church, the academy has joined APS in a two-year pilot program that (as of press time) was expected to start in August. “Our job is to listen to the community,” Stockton says, “and find more resources for what our families need.”
Or, in some cases, defend those needs.
Daryl Johnson, director of strategic outreach at APS, had to do just that in 2019 when a cost-cutting proposal threatened to eliminate equity and excellence coordinators from the APS budget. “These coordinators support our students of color—they talk to them about their postgraduation options, encourage them to apply to college,” Johnson says. “If you’re not a student or family of color, you don’t appreciate the work that they do or how important they are to the success of our students.”
Milenka Coronel, who graduated from Lake Braddock Secondary School in Fairfax in 2005, can attest to this. “Most [school] counselors don’t have the time to get to know you, and they end up making assumptions that because you’re Black or brown, you don’t have high aspirations,” she says.
“In my junior year, my college counselor took one look at me and said, ‘You’re going to NOVA,’ just like all the other students who looked like me,” says Coronel, who is Hispanic. “I had a good GPA and I was well-rounded. I’d wanted to go to a four-year college, but I didn’t even apply because of what my counselor said.”
Coronel started out at NOVA, then transferred to the University of Maryland, earning a degree in sociology with a focus on teen programming. She did it all in three years. Looking back at her high school experience, she says, “I wish I had believed in myself more.”
Today, as assistant director of resident services at AHC, a nonprofit provider of affordable housing based in Arlington, she works with many Black and Latino students from low-income families. She strives to instill in others the confidence she once lacked. “Someone is always going to discourage these kids, either directly or indirectly,” she says. “I tell them, ‘Don’t let anyone bring you down. Learn how to be proactive. Ask teachers for help. Seek out advanced classes.’ ”
Of the dozens of students she counsels every year, she says the ones who thrive are often those who connect with the equity and excellence coordinators in their high schools. “The assigned guidance counselors tend to have such a heavy caseload that they don’t really have time to get to know the students,” Coronel says. “The equity and excellence coordinators dig deeper, take the time to help them make the right decisions.”
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Wakefield High School’s Tim Cotman is one of those equity coordinators. He still remembers the African American literature class he took in college and the Black professor who taught it.
“All of a sudden, I could see myself in the curriculum and picture my family having those conversations,” Cotman says. “It gave me confidence and a sense of belonging. My role as equity and excellence coordinator is to help students feel the same way.”
He does this, in part, through Cohort, a Wakefield program for male students of color that has a sister program, United Minority Girls, or UMG. “In Cohort, boys meet weekly for lunch and talk about classes and summer opportunities,” Cotman says. “They do overnight college tours in the fall and spring, and graduate with an advanced diploma. It feels like a brotherhood—upperclassmen share advice with younger students and alumni come back and speak to current students.”
Ideally, he says, programs like this would be available to kids in all schools and at all academic levels. “The successes of Cohort and UMG are great, but what else can we do so we don’t need mitigative work? What are all the things we need to think about to engage with all stakeholders?”
Cotman also co-chairs Wakefield’s Equity Team, part of a systemwide initiative APS launched in the fall of 2020 that brings students, staff and families together at each school to talk about the impact of race on their lives, both in and outside of school.
“Looking at disparities by race, if we say that parents of color don’t care about education as much as white parents, we create a story that makes the data make sense—instead of understanding what’s happening in the system that’s creating the data,” he says. “APS has a good reputation, so when something goes wrong with students we tend to think it’s the families, not the system.”
The reality, Cotman says, is more complex. “The individuals within the system are the system. It’s not separate from us. Our level of awareness, our skills, our biases tie into the system. It’s important to reflect on our biases and experiences, on all the things that impact the decisions we make and actions we take. If you’re absorbing messages from society that tell you that men of color are dangerous or unruly, then you may not even be aware of how it impacts the way you respond to boys of color acting a certain way.”
Racial justice was top of mind for Gabby Allen when APS formalized its Equity Teams network last fall. “The events of summer 2020 left me feeling helpless and overwhelmed,” says the special education teacher at Campbell Elementary, referencing the nationwide protests that erupted after George Floyd’s murder. “So I got a group of teachers together to talk about current events and be a support system for each other.”
When the 2020-21 school year began, Allen’s informal group became Campbell’s Equity Team. They invited kids, parents and teachers from each grade level to join. Not only does the group now offer a safe space for conversations about race, but also Allen says it’s helped further the school’s expeditionary learning goals. The Equity Team has helped Campbell classroom teachers create age-appropriate lesson plans that prompt kids of all races and ethnicities to explore their identities, and even analyze data through an equity lens.
“It’s been great to see kids engaging in conversations about identity and diversity, discussing what to say when someone doesn’t agree with you, talking about the difference between fact and opinion,” says Allen, who is Black. “At a time when I felt very out of control, it helped me feel like I had a purpose.”
Veteran teacher Deitra Pulliam and math interventionist Katherine Garcia-Larner had a similar groundwork in place when they established the Equity Team at Hoffman-Boston Elementary. As a precursor, the duo organized a workshop for the entire school community, from students and families to custodians and administrators.
“We asked people, What is a stereotype, and where do they come from? We worked to build trust in our community and underscored the importance of staying open-minded,” says Garcia-Larner, who is Latina. “Then we started asking ourselves questions like, Who is benefiting from this lesson? Who is being marginalized? We looked at our school’s data to help us identify what we need, but also to be accountable to ourselves. There’s no finger-pointing or blame—only moving forward to support our students and families.”
Now they’re on a mission to amplify every voice. “Hoffman-Boston is a school of great diversity, but we also want to become a school where people can have conversations about what makes us unique, different, special,” says Pulliam, who is Black. “We had to learn how to listen to our students, to let them tell their stories. We haven’t always had that in our county. We need to look within our own communities and our own buildings. We are starting to unpack the conversations and questions that the families in our communities are having.”
Schools can’t close the opportunity gap on their own. They need buy-in from families, including the white parents who exert considerable influence on school policy and spending priorities.
“The American Dream is the myth we all internalize,” says Emily Vincent, founder of the discussion group Facing Race in Arlington, which has more than 700 Facebook followers.
“The belief that everyone starts from the same place and has the same chance to succeed—it’s just not true,” says Vincent, a mom of three whose children attended Randolph Elementary before their family’s move to Colorado this summer. “There are disparities in how easy it is for different groups of people to attain what they set out to attain. That’s the opportunity gap. Those disparities are caused by things that are out of people’s control—it has nothing to do with how hard they work or their characteristics. It has to do with the structures they work within and the people who perpetuate the norm.”
Vincent founded Facing Race in Arlington in 2017 after noticing that her Black friends’ experiences with the school system were often different from her own white family’s experiences. “It’s so much harder for people with privilege to see and understand the barriers that people without privilege face. The system is created in such a way that it’s easy not to see privilege or realize how unfair it is.”
She cites white parents’ “scarcity mentality” as an example. “If you think of [resources] as being finite, then your tendency is to grab as much as you can for yourself or your children,” Vincent says. “When we have such a narrow definition of success—like there are only 10 seats at [a competitive university] and our kid has to get one—it’s sometimes painful for us to let go of that idea, because it feels like a sacrifice.”
Alternately referred to as “resource hoarding,” this phenomenon is evident in actions large and small, sociologists John B. Diamond (University of Wisconsin) and Amanda E. Lewis (University of Illinois at Chicago) surmised in a recent academic paper on the subject—from parents lobbying to get their children into gifted programs to fighting school boundary changes that would send their kids to schools they consider inferior. The private “learning pods” that many families formed during the pandemic, paying tutors to keep their kids on track with distance learning, are another example. All are scenarios in which white parents who simply “want the best for their kids” come into play.
Shifting that mindset to one that is more intentional and inclusive, Vincent says, is one way to help level the playing field: “Parents know when something is wrong, but they may not know how to fix it. Advocating for more than just your own child—for the benefit of every child—is a step toward closing the opportunity gap.”
Take, for example, the matter of PTA funding, which schools rely on to bankroll needs both in and out of the classroom. According to the Arlington County Council of PTAs (CCPTA), parent-teacher associations countywide spend about $2 million annually, but more than 75% of that spending is concentrated in schools north of Route 50, in Arlington’s whiter and more affluent neighborhoods.
To share the wealth (literally), the CCPTA has established a communal grant fund where PTAs can pool a portion of their money. Arlington schools with fewer resources can then apply for grants to fund programs they might not be able to cover on their own, like grade-wide field trips. The fund is slowly gaining traction, although it has yet to enjoy the same level of support as individual school PTAs.
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When Merrit Gillard moved with her family from Washington, D.C., to Arlington in 2018, she and her husband did what so many parents do. Researching the county’s bountiful public school options, they liked the idea of a Spanish-language immersion experience and entered their rising kindergartner in the lottery for Claremont Immersion, one of Arlington’s designated “choice” schools. To their delight, their daughter got in.
Then the pandemic hit in the middle of first grade and schools switched to distance learning. The realization that they weren’t going to be able to support Spanish-language instruction in their monolingual home prompted some broader soul-searching. “I thought to myself, Why are we making the choice to send her to this immersion school outside of our neighborhood?” Gillard says. “Are we doing this because it’s the best place for our child, or because we feel like jockeying to get your kid into the right school is what a ‘good parent’ does?”
They decided to opt out of Claremont and send their daughter to her neighborhood school, Drew Elementary, instead.
Claremont isn’t among Arlington’s top-ranked elementary schools, and neither is Drew (Niche.com ranks Claremont 16th and Drew 18th out of 24 schools), but Gillard says her family has learned not to put too much stock in third-party rankings that hinge on metrics like standardized test scores. A few years ago, they entered the D.C. preschool lottery in hopes of enrolling their older daughter in one of the city’s more prestigious preschools, only to have her end up at a school that was not highly regarded—at least not on paper.
“The test scores were very low, and at the time it was 75% Black students and 15% white students,” says Gillard, whose daughter was part of that 15% minority. “She ended up having a fantastic experience. She made great friends, had great teachers and found a very supportive community. That experience really shifted my thinking about what makes for a good school.”
Despite that positive experience in D.C., Gillard admits to succumbing to the scarcity mentality upon arrival in Arlington. “I still felt like I needed to enter this lottery—like I needed to secure every opportunity for my daughter,” she says. “Everyone wants the best for their child—to be safe, happy and successful. To learn and thrive.
“But as a parent, part of my job is also to look critically at my relationship to schools and ask what I really want for my kids,” she says. “Do I want them to be in this white, affluent bubble? Do I want to commodify diversity—to send them to a school that has just enough of the different [racial and ethnic] groups to be acceptable? Or do I want to step back from the assumptions white parents make when judging what’s a good school or a bad school?
“The truth is that I want to live in a multiracial society,” she says. “I don’t think that’s possible without raising my kids in multiracial schools and in a community where everyone is given equal value.”
Adrienne Wichard-Edds is a white mom of two white boys who have attended four different public schools in Arlington. She is co-founder of The Essay Coaches (theessaycoaches.com), which she and her business partner, Ami Foster, established to offer college guidance and essay coaching to as many high school students as possible, regardless of income level. She is also a volunteer mentor in AHC’s College and Career Readiness program.