Virginia Districts Plan the Summit While Students Are Stuck at Base Camp

Last month, public school leaders from Fairfax County, Prince William County, and Richmond traveled to Aspen, Colorado. As members of the Aspen Institute and College Board’s Social Mobility Leadership Network, their districts are participating in a three-year program on expanding low-income students’ access to advanced coursework.

As I previously wrote in the Daily Signal, membership requires each district to sign a data-sharing agreement with the Aspen Institute and the College Board. The agreement covers advanced coursework participation data “disaggregated by race, ethnicity, income status, and other locally relevant student groups.”

Aspen is beautiful, and helping more students succeed in advanced coursework is a worthy goal. But these districts face a more basic problem: Many of their students are not performing at grade level.

Richmond Public Schools is a case in point. According to the Virginia Department of Education, nearly half of its students failed their Standards of Learning (SOL) tests in reading, math, and science in 2025-26.

Richmond Public Schools: SOL Failure Rates, 2025-26

Source: Virginia Department of Education

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According to Richmond Public Schools’ website, Superintendent Jason Kamras “views public education as a means of promoting equity and justice for all children in the United States.”

By one measure, that mission is succeeding, but only in a perverse sense. Economically disadvantaged students, who make up 36.3% of Richmond’s student body, are failing at nearly the same rates as their peers. It is strange, then, that Kamras’ district would join an Aspen program to explore expanding advanced coursework when nearly half of the district’s students are not performing at grade level. Richmond is planning the summit while nearly half the district’s students are still stuck at base camp.

Fairfax County and Prince William County, the state’s two largest districts, have lower failure rates but significant problems of their own. According to the Virginia Department of Education, 20% to 29% of their students failed standardized tests in reading, math, and science. Among economically disadvantaged students, the failure rates are much higher, from 34% to 42%.

Fairfax and Prince William: SOL Failure Rates, 2025-26

Source: Virginia Department of Education. Economically disadvantaged students make up 30.1% of enrollment in Fairfax County and 32.3% in Prince William County.

Roughly two in five economically disadvantaged students in Fairfax and Prince William are failing to perform at grade level. That is a far more immediate problem than whether these students take advanced courses at the same rate as their peers. Yet no Aspen-style program, free trip included, is devoted to it.

Expanding access to advanced coursework is a worthy goal, but it comes after a more basic one: making sure students can read, write, and do math at grade level. Before district leaders fly to Aspen and agree to share data broken down by race, parents should ask whether their schools are getting the basics right. Until those numbers improve, trips like this one are a distraction from the work students need.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.