Another Daily Signal Burn Book from the Project 2025 Mean Girls
Propaganda Mean Girls of Project 2025
How many times has 4 Public Education corrected false narratives and cherry-picked data shared by the Heritage Foundation's Daily Signal? So. Many. Times. Yet, these propaganda "Mean Girls" keep on publishing disinformation right out of the Project 2025 playbook and pushing the "public schools are failing" mantra in their Daily Signal Burn Book.
Meanwhile Fairfax County Public School (FCPS) staff steadfastly continue to support and educate Fairfax County students by the hundreds of thousands, and top colleges actively recruit Fairfax County seniors because of the high quality of education. Fortunately, more and more Northern Virginia residents have caught on to the Daily Signal's lies, half-truths, and data fallacies.
Nevertheless, the Propaganda Mean Girls are at it again with a September 3, 2026 Daily Signal Opinion piece (see below) by Independent Women's Forum's (IWF) Stephanie Lundquist-Arora, which was amplified by the Fairfax GOP on September 9th (see below), repackaged by the Washington Times on September 16th, before a follow up interview--ominously entitled, VA Schools Failing--with Lundquist-Arora by Larry O'Connor on Salem Media on September 19, 2026.
The interview with O'Connor is enlightening (and entertaining) for anyone in the know for multiple reasons.
O'Connor says the quiet part out loud (0:30): "We use Fairfax County .... because it is so highly politicized because of its proximity to Washington DC .... What we see in Fairfax County is replicated across the country in a lower profile way, all across the county, because of activists who get on the school board." It has been clear to 4PE that Project 2025 and their affiliates targeted Fairfax County for precisely these reasons; however, this author is presuming that O'Connor may be confused about the definition of "activist" as elected officials are parents, concerned citizens, and neighbors who care about their community.
Lundquist-Arora is unable to answer some of her own basic questions: "So like [these jobs] what exactly do you do? The question can't be answered. It's unclear what they do." (6:50). She is quick to criticize different FCPS departments, but never bothers to find out what they do, including FCPS's Green Initiative, Engagement Officer, and Equity Officer. (Look! 4PE found the links quite easily!)
O'Connor highlights FCPS outside legal fees (7:30) and questions whether it is about the "transgender issue" (7:55), which hits too close to Lundquist-Arora's own multiple anti-trans lawsuits against FCPS, so Lundquist-Arora pivots to the fake Centreville "whistleblower" legal costs.
O'Connor, himself, gives away the Project 2025 Mean Girls goal (3:35) when he says:
All you have to do is reach out to Independent Women's Network wherever you are living in the country and say I want to have the tools and resources and training to go after my local school system.
Daily Signal Burn Book "Big Reveals"
On September 3, 2026 Lundquist-Arora suddenly discovered what everyone else already knew: there is a "performance gap" between students from economically-disadvantaged homes and overall student performance on standardized tests. Or, as the Brookings Institute reported in 2019: "income tracks with test performance."
Lundquist-Arora also erroneously referred to these outcomes as "failure rates" rather than "pass rates" wherein she reveals either a strong commitment to a negative narrative and/or a fundamental lack of pedagogical background, since there has been a shift since the 1990's from a "Deficit" model to a "Growth" model which has been the dominant best-practice framework since the 2010s.
A Deficit model focuses on what a student cannot do: it may perceive a student as broken and in the need of "fixing." In contrast, a Growth model focuses on what a student knows and builds upon that: students are seen as unique and capable, but may require some support (a.k.a., scaffolding) to achieve success.
In Fairfax County, the school system, educators, the Fairfax NAACP, and education advocacy organizations have known and been concerned about opportunity gaps for decades. In fact, FCPS and local advocacy groups have worked hard to narrow opportunity gaps for various groups, including economically-disadvantaged, students with disabilities, and English learners. Meanwhile propaganda Mean Girls merely take space in Project 2025-affilated publications like the Daily Signal and the Federalist to complain about those same students (see When Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric Seeps into Public School Discussions), but do not lift a finger, much less a dollar, to support students or encourage positive student-focused change.
Ignoring the fact that this opportunity gap among students of differing income levels is universal and caused by unequal distribution of resources, funding, and life experiences, Lundquist-Arora insisted that Fairfax and Loudoun counties are uniquely failing economically-disadvantaged students and these recent SOL results require "serious examination of whether Fairfax and Loudoun are getting sufficient academic returns on their substantial education spending." Oh my. She must really care....
But, does she care about economically-disadvantaged students when she has advocated against equity measures intended to support disadvantaged students and has repeatedly railed against rights of disadvantaged and marginalized groups? Does she care if she has never really looked at the data before to discover this income opportunity gap associated with standardized testing?
Well, Lundquist-Arora also failed to share that the scores for economically-disadvantaged students have improved in the last two years anywhere from four to seven points in Fairfax County, which is an improvement of anywhere from 7 to 14% (see graph below). FCPS has been using targeted academic interventions, expanded math/literacy access, and strategic budgeting to successfully address opportunity gaps. Why ignore that kind of impressive change, unless it interfered with a Mean Girl Burn Book narrative? This author finds that "particularly disconcerting."
What is worse, is that Lundquist-Arora's recent FCPS hit-pieces are using long-standing data on economically disadvantaged students to promote the firing of hundreds of hardworking FCPS instructional specialists, who Lundquist-Arora (and/or her Mean Girl partners) chose to name and shame by posting their salaries, positions, and names. Although this information is public information, many might consider this to be doxing, particularly when these employees are our neighbors, friends, and family members. (Note: 4PE has chosen not to link to the 26 pages of names collected and published by Lundquist-Arora.)
Speaking of salaries, as a fellow "mom with a spreadsheet," this author would love to find out Lundquist-Aurora's compensation packages from her various Project 2025 gigs, since she manages to repeatedly complain about how much everyone else is making.
Burn Books versus Real Reform
The Mean Girl coalition of Project 2025, Fairfax GOP, and Salem Media collaborators have been running the same schtick for far too long, and we have all caught on to it. They claim to care about accountability and transparency but are they accountable to anyone else but those who sign their paychecks? Speaking of which, how much are those paychecks, and who is giving their marching orders?
While they write Burn Books full of disinformation about FCPS accomplishments, they are standing in the way of progress and actual reform which can help solve opportunity gaps between average SOL scores and those of economically disadvantaged students. How can our schools solve these critical issues when Lundquist-Arora, her boss, and their friends are suing FCPS right and left?
Real reform that creates long-lasting impactful change and improves the quality of K-12 public schools involves policies that focus directly on classroom support, evidence-based teaching practices, and student needs, rather than top-down political mandates or directives from Project 2025 Mean Girls.
Real reform would involve community stakeholders, educators, and families working together with legislators to provide equitable pupil funding, fair compensation, and other resources to ensure that every child has access to high-quality education regardless of zip code, disability, or any other immutable characteristic.
Daily Signal: Stop Trying to Make "Fetch" Happen
This regular amplification of Daily Signal's opinion pieces feels very much like the scene from Mean Girls where Gretchen tries to create a new slang term, but fails miserably. Except in this case, Project 2025 is pretending that a paid author is "just a mom" or an "accidental activist" when she has been actively working with Project 2025 partners and/or the Trump Administration for at least four years.
Honestly, that is even more cringe than "fetch."
IWF, Heritage Foundation, Salem Media, and the Fairfax GOP are collectively trying to make Lundquist-Aurora's "fetch" happen, but their efforts are flopping. Despite their millions of dark money, political intentions, and anti-public school intentions, Northern Virginia knows that Daily Signal is just a Project 2025 propaganda tool and that cherry-picked data provided without context or links is as reliable as a Mean Girl burn book.
It is getting to the point that their attacks on FCPS have the depth and consistency of plastic being led by a queen bee whose only hive seems to be a bunch of paid anti-public school collaborators. It's so fetch.
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