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TJ Falls to 14th in the Nation Per US News
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Anonymous
Anyone interested in the PSAT and SAT results for the county by school for 2023, 2022, etc… can go here: https://fcta.org/ They have college board score reports for FCPS a little bit down the page. |
Anonymous
A link? I’m not digging through the data for you. Make the claim, do the work. |
Anonymous
There are multiple posters. I simply asked for data to back up your extreme claim. Earlier a poster was claiming that TJ did worse than all other schools. Then the claim shifted to worse than average. You make the claim, you back it up. |
Anonymous
The link isn't there for you. The link is there for everyone else that is actually looking for information. I ask you for links to evidence that a bunch of indian kids bought the test because I know you don't have any and it becomes obvious to anyone that whatever merit there might be in the new system it does not include academic merit. |
Anonymous
If linking data from the state of virginia and the link from the college board by that previous poster are not enough for you then nothing ever will be. Hopefully, it will help others see the lengths to which racists like you are willing to go to defend indefensible positions. |
Anonymous
Your inability to follow an argument does not make your pettifoggery any better. |
Anonymous
They can't because it's more #C4TJ #fakenews.... |
Anonymous
What links? You haven't posted any links. Stop lying! |
Anonymous
Hoo boy - as usual, a lot to unpack here... 1) The phrase "ambush testing" is certainly loaded here, but I'll play your game: yes, there is inherent value in testing a student's ability to develop a solution to a problem of a type that they've never seen before. That is literally the entire purpose of STEM education. Otherwise, we're just pushing out students with the ability to solve the same types of problems that have been solved already. Which is great if you want to develop code monkeys and math teachers, but not great if you want to create innovators. And this is why when it first came out, I was a huge fan of the Quant-Q. 2) Citing college GPAs is a worthless enterprise. No one cares about a person's college GPA after they've been out of school for more than about three years. Even colleges don't care - they care about whether or not you will donate money to the school or inspire others to do the same. If you develop the cure for Alzheimer's, no one is going to mention your 3.2 GPA in undergrad. 3) It doesn't matter that "most countries use a single test" for admissions. People in those countries by and large want to go to American colleges and universities (and even move here to go to TJ!), not vice versa. 4) You're not doing yourself any favors when you equate "merit" with "Asian kids". Or, for that matter, "merit" with "exam scores". Merit is a thing that happens in context and there's no argument to the contrary. All else being equal, a student who gets an 89 on an exam coming from a disadvantaged economic background is of greater merit than a student who gets a 90 on an exam with absolutely no individual adversity to overcome. Even if you want to use the tired old sports analogy - when teams draft players, they don't draft the players with the most points per game or even the best stats overall - they actually look at the player across a ton of dimensions to determine who has the most potential. A team bidding for players in the IPL uses previous strike rate, batting average, economy, and wickets taken, sure, but they also prioritize looking for players who have a good chance to outperform their rate stats and pay attention to the context in which they accumulated those stats. 5) Literally no one cares about increasing the white population at TJ. This is a boogeyman that gets repeated constantly but has absolutely no basis in reality. The application numbers for white families increased a tiny bit right after the admissions changes but TJ is still not a priority for white families in the catchment area. Applications remain at about 30-40% of the levels where they were 20 years ago in spite of massive population increases in the area. And oh by the way - going to school with Black and Hispanic kids is really good for white and Asian kids, and vice versa. That's also not something that's up for debate among serious people, though you're welcome to out yourself as unserious if you like. 6) The three NYC schools you mentioned have majority FARMS applications. It's not of any value to assert that those schools have high FARMS populations. But it is worth noting that those schools don't appear to be any worse off for having a high FARMS population - so I appreciate you doing some of my work for me. 7) No one is throwing any kids in the deep end of the pool. The kids are going to TJ and they are taking the classes that they're supposed to take based on their level of advancement. And yes, a few more of them are taking the equivalent of Geometry in year one. And yes, a few of them are washing out of TJ during their first year - just as has always been the case for decades. None of that is news. But it's not like kids are being thrown to the slaughter in an environment that they can't handle. Kids at TJ have been struggling to adjust to the rigor of freshmen year for as long as TJ has existed. It's not easy. And some parents have had the ability to mask those struggles by affording expensive private tutoring and forcing their kids to stay up until all hours of the night. The narrative of "oh, these unfortunate poor Algebra kids going to TJ, how will they ever survive" is deeply paternalistic and problematic. They are doing just fine and they don't need your crocodile tears pretending you care about them. |
Anonymous
Aaaaand here we go again. 1) Yes, Heytens' opinion matters more. And so does King's. Their votes became policy. Rushing's didn't and Alito's didn't. And the SFFA decision was not relevant in the TJ case because SFFA dealt with race as an explicit factor in admissions process - something that does not exist in the TJ case. You'll note that CJ Roberts, who wrote the "indirectly" poison pill in the SFFA opinion that everyone thought was going to weigh in on the TJ case, voted NOT to grant cert. These things matter, and pretending they don't makes you look ill-informed. 2) Yes, testing absolutely can be unjust if it is used as a gatekeeper in admissions processes. Because standardized testing - because of the existence and prevalence of the boutique test-prep industry - discriminates against students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and those students are disproportionately Black and Hispanic. Remember how much better low-income Asian students are doing now that the admissions process was updated? And no one said anything about white students. White students have largely been able to get in to TJ at the rate of their applications for as long as they've been applicants to TJ. But go on, misrepresent the argument in an attempt to make it seem like this is about white people. How very Harry Jackson of you. 3) I already dealt with your misleading claims about FARMS students in a previous posting. But, unlike the Coalition 4 TJ, I'm actually a big fan of low-income Asian students having access to TJ for the first time in its history. Are you? 4) That whole screed at the bottom of your post is word salad nonsense. Yes, Asians were treated horribly in the middle part of the last century in America. Honestly, most of those folks were of Japanese extraction, and their story is largely irrelevant to TJ because TJ has never had a Japanese population of significance. The explosion of the Asian population at TJ over the last two decades has consistent almost entirely of children of upper-middle class and wealthy families of South Asian descent - and these folks have no access point whatsoever to the claims of racism against Asian-Americans at basically any point in America's history. Indeed, they have crowded out Korean and Vietnamese middle- and lower-middle class families from the TJ population where there had previously been a much larger cohort. They are a highly successful and an extremely powerful minority in Northern Virginia. And their hard work is to be commended, especially among those who came to America with relatively little beyond an education from India's outstanding technical colleges. But what they want today is for their children to reap the rewards of their own hard work and success by maintaining an admissions process at TJ that pretty explicitly favored both their cultural approach to education and their well-earned resources and connections. It is the literal definition of resource- and opportunity-hoarding. Their children are already being rewarded with opportunities and resources beyond their wildest dreams when they were children themselves. And their response appears to be to insulate their children from having to go to school with what I'm sure some of them would call "untouchables". It's ugly and it's gross. |
Anonymous
What law school did you go to that taught you that a concurring opinion carried any more weight than a dissenting opinion? They are both minority viewpoints and in this case a minority of one. We know that anything that is in the Heyton opinion that was not in the King opinion was rejected by King otherwise it would be in the majority opinion. Does Thomas' concurring opinion in Dobbs or SFFA carry any more weight than Sotomayor's dissents? Don't most lawyers learn this in the first week of law school? The fact that you are reading this much into a failure to grant cert without reading anything into the dissent to denying cert makes me wonder how informed you are. A dissent to denial of cert is pretty rare. We usually see it in those cases where the dissenter thinks that their opinion (or something close to it) would have prevailed.
If test prep really was what kept out poor kids, you would have expected to see a surge in poor students in the first year quant q was implemented, before anyone knew what the test looked like. But we didn't see a surge in poor kids because test prep isn't what is keeping poor kids out. It is a combination of the accumulated human capital invested in these children and the gentrifying effects of holistic admissions. And even if all of that is wrong, how would a test combined with farm preference and 1.5% not be a better filter? Even if you think that going from 10 black kids a year to 19 black kids a year is worth this drop in academic standards, how would a test be unjust if you kept the 1.5% and the various preferences?
The last year of the old system 86 white studwents. The most recent year of the new system 140 white students. Black students went from 10 to 19, a larger increase percentage-wise but, C'mon! Even if we use that rolling average that someone else wanted to use, we still see larger absolute gains for whites than blacks.
I am not a fan of anyone getting in that doesn't deserve it. We should not be in the business of picking the winners and losers, that should be an objective merit based process. But I would shut up about the 1.5% and the preferences if we brought back the test so at least we would get the smartest kids from each of the school and the smartest kids that get a preference instead of a cross section of the applicant pool. The current state of affairs is pretty bleak and either you can't see it, refuse to see it or don't care.
The lynchings were of Chinese men in California, Oregon and Washington. The point is that this is just the liberal version of racist massive resistance compelled by white liberal guilt to take from one group they have wronged to give to another group they feel more guilty about having wronged. And it is not just coincidence that white kids benefit, this is what Derrick Bell called interest convergence.
I have already addressed how the quant q experiment undermines the claim about the insurmountable test prep advantage being the driving exclusionary force. I have also seen the point raised that if resources were really the driving force, then there would be more white kids at TJ. You seem to be saying that Indians have had as much success as you think they deserve and indians should stop trying to take the opportunities that you want to give to black people, not because they've earned it but because white people feel guilty about what white people did to black people. As for the untouchables comment, that is a pretty despicable comment. Which is it? Are Indians so racist that they don't want to see black kids at TJ or are we so greedy that we don't want to share opportunity with black kids at TJ. Meanwhile this change increase the population of white kids more than black kids. Only a mean and uneducated people would hold the attitudes you seem to impute on Indians. You must hold Indians in such contempt to say these sort of things when all they want is fairness and equality in the eyes of our government. |
Anonymous
Another great post. THANKS! This also needs to be pinned to this forum. 
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Anonymous
DP - In my experience at TJ, it’s both tbh. You would be shocked at how many Indian kids talk very openly about the naked racism that their parents spew against the Black kids at TJ on a daily basis. And more often than not the parents don’t even know that it’s racist. PP is pretty spot on in their assessment. |
Anonymous
I don't have a dog in the fight, but damn. I'd read something you wrote again. Your kids must write great essays and I assume in an elevator, your kids look at other people's shoes instead of their own. |
Anonymous
That is most definitely not the purpose, let alone the entire purpose of stem education. Every stem institution uses standardized tests. In fact they tend to use testy scores more than other majors. Do you think TJ has been producing code monkeys and math teachers up until quant q came along? If quant q was able to identify innovators, why hasn't there been a sea change in the science competitions? I mean the class of 2022 (the class that took the first quant q and couldn't prepare for it) did about as well as the classes before and after it.
So standardized tests scores don't measure anything worth measuring. GPA doesn't measure anything worth measuring. Only ambush testing does? Do you have any evidence for this theory of yours? Or is it just a wild ass guess that you cobbled together to make your world make sense?
You think people come here to study because we have the best selection criteria? People come here because we are the richest country in the world. No other country offers the opportunities we do. I think people come to TJ because they mistake cause and effect. They want their kids to go to HYPSM and they think a lot of TJ students go to good colleges because they went to TJ.
Exam scores most certainly is a type of merit. The type that is important in academics. Your way of defining merit is certainly one way of defining merit. Another way of defining merit is accomplishment and achievement. Doesn't the Olympics measure athletic merit? Do they in the process of determining that merit take into account how rich the athlete is? If you want innovation, you don't care if the innovator didn't have to overcome any individual adversity before he solved fusion energy. Scientific achievement and innovation isn't graded on a curve. Asians are not all excellent students and there are certainly excellent students of all races but the distribution is not consistent. *https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-percentile-ranks-gender-race-ethnicity.pdf 23% of asians score above a 1400. It's like 7% of whites and 1 or 2% of most other groups. This is largely due to a difference in culture. Asian cultures value education more than americans. You can see it almost everywhere. The popularity of students in high school here is frequently based on sports. In asia, the best students are frequently the most popular. The superstar teachers in asian countries are millionaires. The superstar teachers here are trying to figure out if their summer job as a lifeguard will be enough so they can buy school supplies for the coming year. Americans. Do. Not. Value. Education. And it's going to bite them in the ass unless immigrants save them.
You are advocating for eliminating those stats or measuring athletic ability by using drills the athletes have never seen before. You don't show up to an IPL tryout and have them test you on something you have never seen before because they want to see what your "native" athletic ability is. They have you bat, they have you deliver the ball, they don't make you do a somersault.
You really think white families don't care about achievement in STEM in todays world? TJ used to be almost entirely white, white families care, they stopped applying because (1) they don't want their kids to be disappointed when they don't get in. Asian parents are not as concerned about protecting their kids ego. I wish they would. (2) they know their kids are better off excelling at their base school than struggling to hang on to the bottom rung at TJ. Asian parents don't make this distinction. I wish they would. This recent change in the admissions process increase the white population significantly. Certainly by more then it increased the black population. And it served the additional function of reducing the competition so their kids would be less likely to struggle.
The three schools are not the only specialized schools. They are the three original science schools. And their combined population is majority FARM. Stuyvesant alone is only 40% FARM but the FARM students are 90% asian. EVERYONE at theses schools got in by getting a top score on a single test and nothing else. A lot of FARM students got in and they are indeed doing pretty well but that is only because they all got in on merit. The same folks that changed the admissions process at TJ tried to change the admissions process at these schools because of a low URM population.
It's not "few more" kids washing out. The washout rate has gone from 2 per year to 40+ per year. And I don't care if more kids are taking geometry freshman year. I care that the caliber of kids has dropped so low that the mathd epartment felt compelled to send an email to all their Math 4 students to express their disappointment in the lowest grades they have ever seen despite a lowering of standards and a curve.
I don't care what level of math they are taking. I care that they can handle the rigor and we are not selecting for kids that can do that. TJ has enough tutoring that the $300/month at curie isn't going to provide much more benefit. And why is staying up late studying a thing only rich kids can do? I am not engaging in crocodile tears, I am saying your pity is really not doing them much good. They are simply not prepared and you should get mad at FCPS about that. If we were really overlooking a bunch of poor innovators with the old preppable test, you would think that we would see a significantly higher FARM rate in the class of 2022 but we didn't. The class of 2022 was just a rich as every other class. Because we used holistic criteria in both years. |