Fairfax County Public Schools tells its government teachers that the United States Constitution is “a study in power and privilege.”
That is not a critic’s summary. Those are the words FCPS put in writing, in the guide it hands teachers for the U.S. Government class your senior takes.
You would have no way of knowing that document existed, because the school system never sent it home to parents. A retired attorney in West Springfield named Mark Spooner tracked it down, read the whole thing, and published what is in it.
The unit on the Constitution runs two weeks. The guide lists three goals for it. Teach the system of government “with an emphasis on the concepts of power, position, bias, and agency.” Teach students to “analyze the harmful impact of bias and injustice on the world.” Teach them to “stand up to exclusion, prejudice and injustice.”
Then it says what students should walk away with. They should be able to “analyze the harmful consequences of bias and prejudice in the founding of America’s government structure.”
Two weeks on the Constitution, and the point is what is wrong with it.
Spooner is not a candidate or a paid consultant. He is a retired attorney who runs a small site called Fairfax Schools Monitor, and for years he has done the tedious work almost nobody volunteers for. He reads what the school system actually writes down.
A while back the School Board moved to put six-figure personal staff jobs on its own payroll. Spooner emailed the members and nobody answered, so he filed a public records request. The school system’s own attorney told him the documents did not exist. He took them to Circuit Court anyway.
The records he pulled loose told a very different story than the one FCPS had given the public. He paid for that fight himself. No title, no staff, no budget, against a school system with lawyers on retainer.
Fairfax is better off for it. A school system that answers to nobody drifts, and the only real check on one that controls its own records is a neighbor stubborn enough to ask twice.
Spooner’s point in this week’s piece is that the classroom comes first and the politics come after.
Look at what young voters are being sold right now. Abolish the Senate. Abolish the Electoral College. Put the courts and the presidency under the House of Representatives. Those proposals poll best among the young and the college-educated. Teach a kid for two weeks that the founding document is mostly a record of bias, and nobody should be surprised when he grows up believing it is fine to tear the whole thing up.
Spooner gives the other side its due. The Framers were all men, the 1787 text did not let women vote, and it did not end slavery. Every bit of that is true.
But the same document held the tool that fixed those things. We amended it. Women got the vote. Slavery ended. FCPS teaches the flaws and skips the repair, so a Fairfax graduate leaves knowing the Constitution failed people and never learns it is the thing that made it right.
Twelve elected members of the Fairfax County School Board own this curriculum. Superintendent Michelle Reid is hired, not elected. She carries out what they tell her to.
Do what Spooner did. Read what the school system writes down, because it is not going to mail it to you. Then remember who approved it. All twelve of those seats are on the ballot in November 2027.