The Fairfax County School Board hired itself a new superintendent last week, but only after three of the 12 School Board members voted against the selection.

Had Fairfax an actual functional two-party political system – or perhaps a School Board that truly was above politics – this split might not be particularly surprising. But the fact is, all 12 current School Board members sit encased in, to various degrees, the progressive bubble. The fact that three of them said whoa, this matter needs to be vetted a bit more is, well, interesting if nothing else.

Best of luck to the incoming superintendent, although it seems the selection criteria weren’t exactly focused on picking someone who knew how to increase academic performance, which one used to presume was the raison d’etre for the existence of a school system. No longer, perhaps.

We’ve been watching the Fairfax school system since the era of Robert “Bud” Spillane as superintendent decades ago. Ol’ Bud didn’t take [guff] from anybody – but most especially not from School Board members. His relationship with them seemed to be (paraphrasing here) “you can always fire me, but unless and until you do, sit down, pipe down and let me run things.”

Good times. But it’s unlikely we will see them again. Nobody who sincerely wants to run a school system would actually want to come to Fairfax these days, and nobody with such a streak of independence ever would be selected in the first place, we’d wager.

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