My house belongs to the 38th District of Virginia. A Democratic candidate, Kaye Kory, for the State Delegate of the 38th District recently described the neighborhood with these words: "
Little River Turnpike is a highly developed drag where it’s common to see Hispanic immigrants waiting for work outside the Home Depot." In the description, Kory also mentions the premier high school in the United States, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, where only 2% of low-income children are enrolled.
Thomas Jefferson High School Student Demographics
The above lies in stark contrast with other high schools in the neighborhood, Annandale, Justice and Falls Church:
Annandale High School Student Demographics
Justice High School Student Demographics
Falls Church High School Student Demographics
Kaye Kory labels herself with "progressive leadership for a progressive district". This is not progressive leadership for a progressive district. Danieli Evans Peterman, a PhD candidate at Yale Law School, outlines a better legislative agenda to address discrimination. In
Socioeconomic Status Discrimination,
104 Virginia Law Review 1283 (2018), she writes:
First and most straightforward, the values animating discrimination law apply to poverty: Existing discrimination laws protect traits that are subject to pervasive and illegitimate social bias. They cover both immutable and mutable traits. The logic animating these laws applies to poverty, regardless of whether a person was born poor or falls into poverty later in life.
Peterman also notes that schools that serve low-income children often have the "worse physical resources, including inadequate climate control systems, fewer books, fewer computers, crumbling infrastructure, and outdated technology. They also tend to have less-qualified and less-experienced teachers and less-advanced curriculum".
This is discrimination, and we cannot really hide it even under the guise of progressiveness.
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