A Republican bill targeting diversity efforts at Virginia’s governor’s schools would ban them from using race and other factors in admissions. But school leaders say students aren’t selected based on race, and the leader of Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School in Richmond says the bill is written in a way that doesn’t address its admissions process.
House Bill 127, introduced by Del. Glenn Davis, R-Virginia Beach, would prevent governor’s schools from collecting data on race, sex, nationality or ethnicity during an application process unless required by federal law. It also would prevent schools from participating in what Davis calls “proxy discrimination” — including using geographic or socioeconomic factors or limiting the number of students from any single school.
Some critics say that’s aimed directly at new admissions rules at Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology in Northern Virginia. Davis said those allegations are false.
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“There are communities that have historically not had the same resources as others when it came to educational opportunity,” Davis said in an interview. “By adjusting admissions standards significantly by allowing race to be used significantly as [an admission standard], it just covers up the inequities that exist at the middle school level.”
Davis is chair of the House of Delegates Education Committee. While the House is controlled by Republicans, the bill is likely to face a tougher path in the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Last year, Thomas Jefferson, colloquially known as TJ, admitted one of the most racially diverse classes it ever has after significant admissions changes. The school says it still did not consider race.
Instead, it removed its controversial admissions test and ensured that every feeder middle school in the localities it feeds was represented. The process also considers such factors as whether a student qualifies for free or reduced lunch and whether English is their first language. Those factors are what Davis describes as “proxy discrimination.”
Maggie Walker in Richmond may not be impacted by the bill as written because the bill spells out who is barred: governor’s schools or any “governing board member, director, administrator, or employee.”
Walker is regionally governed, and the board and its employees don’t select students. Students are selected by the 14 school districts that feed into it. TJ is singularly governed by the Fairfax County School Board.
Some of the localities that feed into Maggie Walker have explored or implemented changes that Davis describes as “proxy discrimination.”
Richmond Public Schools Superintendent Jason Kamras, whose school district has been seeking greater diversity in its open enrollment and governor’s schools admissions process, was the only superintendent in the area to publicly oppose the bill.
“I strongly oppose this bill, as it’s a thinly veiled effort to prevent Governor’s Schools from becoming more diverse,” Kamras said in a statement. “We should be breaking down barriers to educational opportunity in Virginia, not building them.”
And in 2020, Chesterfield County changed its admissions process to allow for more school-based admission — that was a driving factor behind the most diverse class in five years at the governor’s school, with nearly half of the Black students selected in the school’s freshman class having come from Chesterfield. Before the change, more years than not in the past two decades, Chesterfield had sent zero Black students to the school.
After reviewing the language to the bill, Bob Lowerre, the director of Maggie Walker, said he doesn’t see how the bill could affect the daily operations of the school since it already doesn’t seek demographic data during the admissions process.
“As the selection process for students is done by our partner districts and nobody employed by the MLWGS school board is involved in that process besides administering the assessments, the language of the bill does not appear to affect us,” Lowerre said in a statement. “We have never asked questions about race, sex, or gender on our applications nor would we do so in the future. To be honest, it doesn’t appear that the bill would affect the selection process of our students or how we actually operate our school.”
Richmond and Henrico County seek race during the admissions process, but parents can decline to answer — it also does not factor into whether a student is selected to attend the school.
Makya Little, a graduate of TJ who is part of the TJ Action Alumni Network, said the collection of demographics data is key to sound decisions on admissions policy.
“As TJ graduates, you know, we’re fortunate enough to receive a world-class education and so we understand the importance of data-driven decisions and science in public policy,” she said in an interview. “So how do we know that the system is working or improving without the data to evaluate it? And demographic data such as race isn’t currently a factor in the admissions at schools like TJ, so we feel like that argument is a straw man.”
The governor’s schools have struggled with diversity for decades. A six-month investigation by the Richmond Times-Dispatch into Maggie Walker found that white students had been selected to attend the school at a rate four times higher than Black students.
Carrie Kahwajy, a governor’s school alumna and member of the Maggie Walker Anti-Racist Alumni Group, says data is key to making sound decisions on diversity. She also worries about the part of the bill that encourages governor’s schools to use “traditional” methods of admissions, like testing. TJ removed their admissions test completely, and Maggie Walker removed the achievement portion of their admissions test after its planning committee found it had “no value.”
“My concerns in general are that politicians ... made promises to their voters that they would make some changes, and so some politicians are stretching themselves thin to find ways to execute those promises,” Kahwajy said in an interview. “I think his intention was to ensure that white children were allowed greater access to these regional schools than other children in the community.”
Davis says diversity shouldn’t be made by changing admissions efforts, but instead by fixing pipeline issues at the middle schools by providing more resources to underserved schools.
Last year, he voted against a bill that would have directed the Virginia Department of Education to address pipeline issues at the schools, but he says he voted against it for other reasons. That bill was later killed in the Senate Education and Health Committee, with a discussion centered around TJ.