Another school superintendent is headed for the exit, and another is declaring victory over test scores he credits to dismantling "exclusionary practices" — and in both cases, parents remain spectators in their own children's education.
The Winston-Salem Journal reports that Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools' superintendent will retire October 1. The announcement itself is routine — another bureaucrat collecting a pension after presiding over a district where, as is standard across American public education, student outcomes have stagnated or declined for years. The Journal offered no details on the terms of the departure or the pension, and the district offered no explanation for the timing beyond the usual gratitude for service.
Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Bridgewater-Raritan Superintendent Robert Beers used a July 21 Board of Education meeting to celebrate four years of AP gains — and to frame those gains as proof that old standards were the problem. According to Patch, Beers said the district's AP passing rate rose from 86.7 percent in 2022 to 95 percent in 2026, the number of exams taken jumped 49.6 percent, and the mean score reached 4.10.
Beers called it "an excellent result" and "tremendous." But the telling line came when he explained the cause: "The problem is that we had exclusionary practices that prevented students from accessing this higher-level coursework. And by expanding offerings and access to AP courses, students demonstrated the aptitude and work ethic necessary for success in a college-level class."
"Exclusionary practices" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It is the language of the education bureaucracy — implying that standards, prerequisites, or any gatekeeping mechanism is inherently unjust. Beers did not specify what those practices were, who imposed them, or whether any rigor was sacrificed in the push to expand enrollment. The Patch report did not ask.
The numbers themselves may be genuinely impressive. More students taking harder courses and scoring well is a good thing. But the framing matters. When a superintendent declares that his own district's prior practices were "exclusionary," he is not just reporting results — he is rewriting history to justify a philosophy: that any barrier to entry is illegitimate. That is an ideological claim, not an empirical one, and it deserves scrutiny the local press did not provide.
In Winston-Salem, the outgoing superintendent leaves behind the same structural problem every district faces: an unaccountable bureaucracy that answers to boards, not parents. In Bridgewater-Raritan, the sitting superintendent gets to declare victory on his own terms, with no follow-up on what was lost when the old "exclusionary practices" were scrapped.
The question in both districts is the same: when do parents get a vote on who runs their schools and how?
