Fairfax Democrats are stealthily trying to torpedo the naming of Fairfax parent, STEM professional, and education activist Suparna Dutta to the Virginia Board of Education. The General Assembly must confirm her nomination, and the education activist Left is doing all it can to scuttle Dutta’s nomination.
Dutta, of course, is a villain for Fairfax County’s education activist Left. As a co-founder of the Coalition for TJ, she helped bring suit against Fairfax County Public Schools for their changes to the admissions policies at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology that over the course of a single year cut Asian student admissions by 19 percent.
Michael Ginsberg | Fairfax County Times
Fairfax Democrats are stealthily trying to torpedo the naming of Fairfax parent, STEM professional, and education activist Suparna Dutta to the Virginia Board of Education. The General Assembly must confirm her nomination, and the education activist Left is doing all it can to scuttle Dutta’s nomination.
Dutta, of course, is a villain for Fairfax County’s education activist Left. As a co-founder of the Coalition for TJ, she helped bring suit against Fairfax County Public Schools for their changes to the admissions policies at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology that over the course of a single year cut Asian student admissions by 19 percent.
That activist Fairfax Democrats have no substantive objection to Dutta is made plain by their lead argument that Dutta, a female Indian immigrant who came to the United States to study engineering, is associated with “white supremacist” groups and is “disruptive” and “divisive”.
Imagine being so incapable of making a substantive argument that you are forced to smear a woman of color, a South Asian immigrant, as a white supremacist.
What a disgrace.
Forgive this voter for thinking that public policy discussions with education activist Democrats are nothing more than a game of Mad Libs, where words like “racism!” and “misogyny!” and “patriarchy!” fill the blank spaces in Democrat arguments.
Oh, but she’s not an “educator”, they say. She isn’t qualified to help make education policy.
Excuse me? If you, dear reader, check Article VIII, Section 4 of the Virginia Constitution, which establishes the state Board of Education, you will find no “must be an educator to serve” clause.
America, as liberal activists are so fond of reminding us when it is politically convenient for them, is a democracy. That means that here, the people rule. And “the people” very much includes a female Indian immigrant, parent, and successful STEM professional who cares deeply about the education of her children and her neighbors’ children and serves as the education platform director of the American Hindu Coalition.
No matter. Democrats’ religious devotion to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) stops where differing opinions begin.
Here’s a thought experiment: imagine if a Fairfax Republican claimed a woman of color nominated by a Democrat was unqualified to serve on the Virginia Board of Education without producing a shred of evidence. Imagine that they claimed this nominee was “disruptive” and “divisive”. How many nanoseconds would it take for Fairfax Democrats to scream “racism and misogyny!”?
Jennifer Granholm, attorney at law, is Secretary of Energy. Pete Buttigieg, whose only previous public office was mayor of a city of 100,000 people, is Secretary of Transportation for the entire nation. No complaints from Democrats about experience there.
But when a female South Asian immigrant with advanced STEM education is nominated for Virginia’s board of education by a Republican, well, suddenly the activist Democrat education establishment is flyspecking every jot and tittle of the nominee’s experience.
The people with the experience that would meet the discerning, refined standards of the education activist Left are the same folks that brought you two years of school closures, unremedied pandemic learning loss, and falling standardized test scores. No thanks.
But the Fairfax education activist Left isn’t done. Their bill of particulars against Dutta also claims, without evidence, that she once said that Fairfax school board members were “standing on the necks of Asians”.
Wherever would Dutta have gotten that idea? Maybe from the 19 percent decline in Asian students being admitted to TJHSST the year after the board changed TJ’s admissions criteria? Maybe Dutta doesn’t want Fairfax County schools fifty years from now to have to apologize to Asian students the way Stanford apologized to Jews last October for the admissions quotas it infamously imposed on Jewish applicants in the 1950s?
Governor Glenn Youngkin was elected to put parents in charge of their children’s education and to return their voices to the governance of the schools their children attend and for which their taxes pay. By naming Suparna Dutta to the Virginia Board of Education, he nominated someone eminently qualified to bring a parent’s perspective to our public schools’ curriculum and operations.
Come to think of it, you know who is unqualified to serve on the Virginia Board of Education? Anyone whose first thought, when confronted with a nominee who is a female South Asian immigrant and successful STEM professional, is “white supremacy!”
Michael Ginsberg is Virginia’s 11th Congressional District GOP chairman. This column was first published in the Fairfax County Times.