TJHSST Director of Admissions leaves FCPS after 25 years

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Smart move.
He’s clearly seen the writing on the wall and is going where his talents for sifting through applications and selecting the best and brightest strictly based on academic merit and demonstrated talent will be utilized again.

Equity admissions is “Equality of outcome” and by definition it will devalue TJ as a top school…..by design. May take a few years to see in reality, but that’s the entire purpose of equity re-engineering of that school.

OH I know! TJ is now selecting the top students instead of the rigged process where parents could buy their way in. It's time to find a new scam.

People pushing DEI like you are the direct reason for the blowback we are seeing today.
Trump won because of people like you pushing things too fckn far.

What's more correct is that we have a political environment right now where if you're not solidly in one of two camps:

1) All DEI all the time! or
2) All efforts to support marginalized populations are garbage!

... then you don't have a home. If you want to belong to ANYTHING, you have to pick one or the other. There's no room for a commonsense middle path anymore.

The real answer in this situation is that defining acceptance to TJ as an "outcome" is problematic. Framing it as a contest or a prize to be won rather than as an opportunity to be properly distributed for maximum effect is awful.

TJ's job is to serve the STEM community writ large, not to serve parents who are trying to maximize their child's life outcomes. So a proper admissions policy for such a school would necessarily balance the need to identify top talent with the need to include populations that are underrepresented in STEM fields so as to grow the base of talent for the future and to address the needs of communities that are being harmed by the profit motive.

The new admissions process took a step in a positive direction by including students from those undervalued communities, but did so partly at the expense of identifying top talent (this is at once both inarguable AND overblown - it's a problem but by no means a crisis).

The next step will be to figure out a way to more concretely identify a strong group of talent from all of those communities - which will probably require different methods and priorities of evaluation for each of those groups. But one thing that will not succeed at all is to evaluate all of them along the same metric out of a misplaced loyalty to "objectivity". That way lies madness and a return to the dark years of the mid-2010s where TJ produced high rankings (thanks to a retrograde system that relied on exam performance) - but very, very little else thanks to a staggering homogeneity of the student population.

Why is there a "need" to include underrepresented populations? Why can't we stop at identifying the top talent regardless of their skin color?

Academics undervalued communities that undervalue academics.

We should absolutely be identifying the top talent regardless of their skin color. But you can't possibly believe that we were doing that in the before times unless you think it was correct to admit a larger number of Asian students in the Class of 2024 than they'd admitted Black students in TJ's entire history in total to that point.

I am not here to argue that STEM talent is evenly distributed - it's not because the Asian immigrants who came to this area did so in order to leverage their STEM skills in America's second most significant tech market (after Silicon Valley). But the distribution is not so overwhelming as to produce that outcome, and to believe it is is to have a deeply disturbing view of Black people in this country.

Truth can sometimes be disturbing.

At the far right end tail of the curve, black students are rare.

https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-percentile-ranks-gender-race-ethnicity.pdf

9% of asians get a 1500+ on the sat
<1% of blacks get a score of 1500+ on the SAT

23% of asians get a 1400+ on the SAT
1% of blacks get a 1400+ on the SAT

40% of asians get a 1300+ on the SAT
3% of blacks get a 1300+ on the SAT

56% of asians get a 1200+ on the SAT
8% of blacks get a 1200+ on the SAT

This is not close.

Do you have the ability to make a coherent argument that doesn’t include exam scores?

I am responding to the accusation that my views about the lopsided nature of academic talent that exists in the asian community vs the black community is because I have deeply disturbing views.

I am providing some evidence to support my statement that the academic talent between these two groups is extremely lopsided.
The asian kids aren't born smarter, they become smarter.
Stop making excuses for black underachievement, you are not doing them any favors.

Unless you believe they are black children have already reached their potential and are simply incapable of doing as well as the children of mexican immigrants, why would you curse them with lower standards?

It's not about "lower" standards and it never has been. It's about recognizing that the lazy, outdated "standard" of exam performance favors families who want their kid to specialize earlier than is healthy.

And those families are free to continue to raise their kids however they want under a better selection method - they're just not being rewarded for obsessing over admissions processes while their kid is in elementary school.

When you are accustomed to privilege (in this case, admissions practices that favor your approach to child-rearing), equality (the removal of those practices) feels like oppression.

And the more you argue in favor of the legacy process, the more you shout your child's privilege (your parenting choices) from the rooftops.

DEI is not a policy; it's a mentality. Policies can be changed, but free handouts cannot be taken away, otherwise you're a bigot, racist, or process-rigging ahole.

+1000

Anyone who thinks that DEI is "free handouts" probably is a racist.

A reverse racist is racist.

Wanting to have some nominal amount of representation of kids from all corners of FCPS is not "racist".

TJ is a community resource and shouldn't be hoarded by a handful of affluent middle schools.

Precisely the reason for fair, open and merit-based competition.

Which is what we have today.

Not until DEI is removed from the equation

Allocating seats to each MS makes it a fair and open resource.

Removing those seats brings us back to opportunity hoarding by affluent MSs. Not open or fair.

Allocation contradicts competition in the literal sense of the word, much like government interference distorts free market competition.

Completely free markets aren’t “fair or open” to all.

There is a reason why governments step in - to prevent abuse.

I would agree 1000% that there has been too much abuse; high time for course correction.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Smart move.
He’s clearly seen the writing on the wall and is going where his talents for sifting through applications and selecting the best and brightest strictly based on academic merit and demonstrated talent will be utilized again.

Equity admissions is “Equality of outcome” and by definition it will devalue TJ as a top school…..by design. May take a few years to see in reality, but that’s the entire purpose of equity re-engineering of that school.

OH I know! TJ is now selecting the top students instead of the rigged process where parents could buy their way in. It's time to find a new scam.

People pushing DEI like you are the direct reason for the blowback we are seeing today.
Trump won because of people like you pushing things too fckn far.

What's more correct is that we have a political environment right now where if you're not solidly in one of two camps:

1) All DEI all the time! or
2) All efforts to support marginalized populations are garbage!

... then you don't have a home. If you want to belong to ANYTHING, you have to pick one or the other. There's no room for a commonsense middle path anymore.

The real answer in this situation is that defining acceptance to TJ as an "outcome" is problematic. Framing it as a contest or a prize to be won rather than as an opportunity to be properly distributed for maximum effect is awful.

TJ's job is to serve the STEM community writ large, not to serve parents who are trying to maximize their child's life outcomes. So a proper admissions policy for such a school would necessarily balance the need to identify top talent with the need to include populations that are underrepresented in STEM fields so as to grow the base of talent for the future and to address the needs of communities that are being harmed by the profit motive.

The new admissions process took a step in a positive direction by including students from those undervalued communities, but did so partly at the expense of identifying top talent (this is at once both inarguable AND overblown - it's a problem but by no means a crisis).

The next step will be to figure out a way to more concretely identify a strong group of talent from all of those communities - which will probably require different methods and priorities of evaluation for each of those groups. But one thing that will not succeed at all is to evaluate all of them along the same metric out of a misplaced loyalty to "objectivity". That way lies madness and a return to the dark years of the mid-2010s where TJ produced high rankings (thanks to a retrograde system that relied on exam performance) - but very, very little else thanks to a staggering homogeneity of the student population.

Why is there a "need" to include underrepresented populations? Why can't we stop at identifying the top talent regardless of their skin color?

Academics undervalued communities that undervalue academics.

We should absolutely be identifying the top talent regardless of their skin color. But you can't possibly believe that we were doing that in the before times unless you think it was correct to admit a larger number of Asian students in the Class of 2024 than they'd admitted Black students in TJ's entire history in total to that point.

I am not here to argue that STEM talent is evenly distributed - it's not because the Asian immigrants who came to this area did so in order to leverage their STEM skills in America's second most significant tech market (after Silicon Valley). But the distribution is not so overwhelming as to produce that outcome, and to believe it is is to have a deeply disturbing view of Black people in this country.

Truth can sometimes be disturbing.

At the far right end tail of the curve, black students are rare.

https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-percentile-ranks-gender-race-ethnicity.pdf

9% of asians get a 1500+ on the sat
<1% of blacks get a score of 1500+ on the SAT

23% of asians get a 1400+ on the SAT
1% of blacks get a 1400+ on the SAT

40% of asians get a 1300+ on the SAT
3% of blacks get a 1300+ on the SAT

56% of asians get a 1200+ on the SAT
8% of blacks get a 1200+ on the SAT

This is not close.

Do you have the ability to make a coherent argument that doesn’t include exam scores?

I am responding to the accusation that my views about the lopsided nature of academic talent that exists in the asian community vs the black community is because I have deeply disturbing views.

I am providing some evidence to support my statement that the academic talent between these two groups is extremely lopsided.
The asian kids aren't born smarter, they become smarter.
Stop making excuses for black underachievement, you are not doing them any favors.

Unless you believe they are black children have already reached their potential and are simply incapable of doing as well as the children of mexican immigrants, why would you curse them with lower standards?

It's not about "lower" standards and it never has been. It's about recognizing that the lazy, outdated "standard" of exam performance favors families who want their kid to specialize earlier than is healthy.

And those families are free to continue to raise their kids however they want under a better selection method - they're just not being rewarded for obsessing over admissions processes while their kid is in elementary school.

When you are accustomed to privilege (in this case, admissions practices that favor your approach to child-rearing), equality (the removal of those practices) feels like oppression.

And the more you argue in favor of the legacy process, the more you shout your child's privilege (your parenting choices) from the rooftops.

DEI is not a policy; it's a mentality. Policies can be changed, but free handouts cannot be taken away, otherwise you're a bigot, racist, or process-rigging ahole.

+1000

Anyone who thinks that DEI is "free handouts" probably is a racist.

A reverse racist is racist.

Wanting to have some nominal amount of representation of kids from all corners of FCPS is not "racist".

TJ is a community resource and shouldn't be hoarded by a handful of affluent middle schools.

Precisely the reason for fair, open and merit-based competition.

Which is what we have today.

Not until DEI is removed from the equation

Allocating seats to each MS makes it a fair and open resource.

Removing those seats brings us back to opportunity hoarding by affluent MSs. Not open or fair.

Allocation contradicts competition in the literal sense of the word, much like government interference distorts free market competition.

Completely free markets aren’t “fair or open” to all.

There is a reason why governments step in - to prevent abuse.

I would agree 1000% that there has been too much abuse; high time for course correction.

To admit students into the bottom of the class and make them accept poor grades as normal just to fill a diversity chart is unfair and unacceptable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You don’t think sound middle path at all, PP. you sound wholly in the camp of those who wanted to select certain people for TJ based on factors other than STEM interest and aptitude.

That is literally the definition of a middle path. It's balancing STEM interest and aptitude (which are critical!) and the essential need for STEM to be an aspirational field for students from all walks of life.

It is true that academic aptitude is not evenly balanced across demographics, but it is also true that no racial or socioeconomic demo has a monopoly on it. But when it comes to TJ admissions, there have been populations that had been almost entirely excluded prior to the updates to the process, and that needed to change.

I don't want to select people for TJ based on factors *other than* STEM interest and aptitude. I want to select them based on factors *in addition to* STEM interest and aptitude. And there's more work to be done to get there.

"Undervalued communities" is just a doushebag of bullsheet. Nobody can undervalue you except yourself. Don't blame others when you haven't worked hard enough.

Presuming that folks haven't worked hard enough just because they're poor, Black, or Hispanic isn't really a good look. It's also not a good look when the "work" they've had access to isn't narrowly tailored to success on a specific exam or in a specific admissions process.

You want to protect the advantages of groups that already have advantages. Just own up to that and be fine with it - it is a legitimate political position that I happen to disagree with.

When people start questioning DEI, you immediately think of Black and Hispanic. Do you see the problem with this kneejerk? You choose to stay in your pit and never get out. Or you see it as a privilege or entitlement that you don't want to lose.

Those are the communities that have been undervalued. Until that is no longer the case, it's good policy to create an atmosphere where everyone has a chance to compete and have input. Full stop.

They have the same opportunity to compete as anyone else. Full stop.

This is the poster who want everybody to believe that 1:1 tutor at $180 per hour rate in the comfort of fancy home, is the same with self study (while also babysitting 3 little sibling) from $20 prep books from amazon.

The idea was not to take a way the first, but, only hope to at least give a chance to the latter.

That’s a fair point, but the real solution is to provide early support rather than guaranteeing outcomes in high school, especially at a place like TJ. I’m even okay with tax-funded tutoring and mentoring at the elementary level, but forcing guaranteed outcomes through DEI at high schools or TJ is not the answer. And smearing hardworking middle-class parents for investing in their children's education is utter nonsense.

DP

1) That's a false choice for multiple reasons, first because no one is guaranteeing outcomes at all, and second because there's no reason for us to choose between providing additional support AND evaluating students' merit based on the context of their circumstances. We can and should be doing both.

2) No one is smearing hard-working middle class parents for investing in their children's education. What we're smearing about you is your insistence that admissions processes should be tailored to incentivize an imbalanced childhood. By all means, raise your kid however you want to and streamline their educational process to be STEM-focused for their own sake - just stop expecting that elite schools are going to reward you for doing so. And by the way, they shouldn't punish you for it either - and they're not.

DP

Life does not grade on a curve.

What you consider an imbalanced childhood is the typical childhood of 90% of the rest of the world outside of the USA.

No elite school is punishing any individual asian kid for studying too hard but they are punishing asian kids in general for being a member of a race that is disproportionately hardworking and academically successful. We live in a world where our country really can't afford to elevate mediocrity in an effort to equalize outcomes based or race. We have to become more merit based. There's a place for everyone but those places should not be allocated based on race in an effort to equalize racial outcomes.

There’s no sense in which Asian kids are being “punished”. They’re just not being rewarded to the same extent for their parents’ emphasis on testing.

It’s easy to confuse removal of an advantage with introduction of discrimination, but that doesn’t make you right.

Of course asian kids are being punished. They are being punished with discrimination for being too successful.

Almost everybody understands this now. Only the true believers deny that asians are discriminated against in this way

If you are one of the people that think asians are not being discriminated against then nothing will change your mind, so I will not try.

If there were discrimination, you would expect Asians to get in at:

1) A significantly lower rate per applicant than other cohorts;

2) A significantly lower percentage than their total applicants.

Neither is true - in fact the reverse is true.

What has instead happened is that a piece of the application that gave a statistically significant advantage to Asian students - that being a requirement that applicants reach certain percentile thresholds (not absolute scores) on a battery of standardized exams to even be considered at the semifinal level - was removed. You're calling that discrimination because you think that the advantage that the exam gave to the Asian students was correct and appropriate, and there is an argument for that.

But you have no evidence that the current process in a vacuum actively discriminates against Asian students. It just doesn't discriminate in favor of them anymore.

You can be discriminated against and still end up being over-represented. This is especially true when the discrimination is an effort to reduce the over-representation.

The current process was designed to remove merit because merit based processes discriminate in favor of asians

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Smart move.
He’s clearly seen the writing on the wall and is going where his talents for sifting through applications and selecting the best and brightest strictly based on academic merit and demonstrated talent will be utilized again.

Equity admissions is “Equality of outcome” and by definition it will devalue TJ as a top school…..by design. May take a few years to see in reality, but that’s the entire purpose of equity re-engineering of that school.

OH I know! TJ is now selecting the top students instead of the rigged process where parents could buy their way in. It's time to find a new scam.

People pushing DEI like you are the direct reason for the blowback we are seeing today.
Trump won because of people like you pushing things too fckn far.

What's more correct is that we have a political environment right now where if you're not solidly in one of two camps:

1) All DEI all the time! or
2) All efforts to support marginalized populations are garbage!

... then you don't have a home. If you want to belong to ANYTHING, you have to pick one or the other. There's no room for a commonsense middle path anymore.

The real answer in this situation is that defining acceptance to TJ as an "outcome" is problematic. Framing it as a contest or a prize to be won rather than as an opportunity to be properly distributed for maximum effect is awful.

TJ's job is to serve the STEM community writ large, not to serve parents who are trying to maximize their child's life outcomes. So a proper admissions policy for such a school would necessarily balance the need to identify top talent with the need to include populations that are underrepresented in STEM fields so as to grow the base of talent for the future and to address the needs of communities that are being harmed by the profit motive.

The new admissions process took a step in a positive direction by including students from those undervalued communities, but did so partly at the expense of identifying top talent (this is at once both inarguable AND overblown - it's a problem but by no means a crisis).

The next step will be to figure out a way to more concretely identify a strong group of talent from all of those communities - which will probably require different methods and priorities of evaluation for each of those groups. But one thing that will not succeed at all is to evaluate all of them along the same metric out of a misplaced loyalty to "objectivity". That way lies madness and a return to the dark years of the mid-2010s where TJ produced high rankings (thanks to a retrograde system that relied on exam performance) - but very, very little else thanks to a staggering homogeneity of the student population.

Why is there a "need" to include underrepresented populations? Why can't we stop at identifying the top talent regardless of their skin color?

Academics undervalued communities that undervalue academics.

We should absolutely be identifying the top talent regardless of their skin color. But you can't possibly believe that we were doing that in the before times unless you think it was correct to admit a larger number of Asian students in the Class of 2024 than they'd admitted Black students in TJ's entire history in total to that point.

I am not here to argue that STEM talent is evenly distributed - it's not because the Asian immigrants who came to this area did so in order to leverage their STEM skills in America's second most significant tech market (after Silicon Valley). But the distribution is not so overwhelming as to produce that outcome, and to believe it is is to have a deeply disturbing view of Black people in this country.

Truth can sometimes be disturbing.

At the far right end tail of the curve, black students are rare.

https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-percentile-ranks-gender-race-ethnicity.pdf

9% of asians get a 1500+ on the sat
<1% of blacks get a score of 1500+ on the SAT

23% of asians get a 1400+ on the SAT
1% of blacks get a 1400+ on the SAT

40% of asians get a 1300+ on the SAT
3% of blacks get a 1300+ on the SAT

56% of asians get a 1200+ on the SAT
8% of blacks get a 1200+ on the SAT

This is not close.

Do you have the ability to make a coherent argument that doesn’t include exam scores?

I am responding to the accusation that my views about the lopsided nature of academic talent that exists in the asian community vs the black community is because I have deeply disturbing views.

I am providing some evidence to support my statement that the academic talent between these two groups is extremely lopsided.
The asian kids aren't born smarter, they become smarter.
Stop making excuses for black underachievement, you are not doing them any favors.

Unless you believe they are black children have already reached their potential and are simply incapable of doing as well as the children of mexican immigrants, why would you curse them with lower standards?

It's not about "lower" standards and it never has been. It's about recognizing that the lazy, outdated "standard" of exam performance favors families who want their kid to specialize earlier than is healthy.

And those families are free to continue to raise their kids however they want under a better selection method - they're just not being rewarded for obsessing over admissions processes while their kid is in elementary school.

When you are accustomed to privilege (in this case, admissions practices that favor your approach to child-rearing), equality (the removal of those practices) feels like oppression.

And the more you argue in favor of the legacy process, the more you shout your child's privilege (your parenting choices) from the rooftops.

You are conflating privilege with effort.

The new process unambiguously lowers standards.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You are missing a key piece of the mindset of this immigrant community.

A friend family had their child in all the prep classes since early elementary school. They even took the TJ exam prep classes.

They had no intention of attending TJ as they went back to India.

Why spend thousands of dollars and years of effort on something that they have no plan of attending?

The thinking is that if the kids spend time learning all the material, it would be good for them, it would help them in academics, it would prepare them well for college, keeps the kids away from distractions (phones, drugs, etc.) and so on.

This attitude is quite common in the community. I strongly disagree with this approach and think this is harmful in other more subtle ways.

Some of the other "distractions" that they "keep the kids away from" are actually quite healthy. Sports, collective participation in the arts, random unstructured play with friends, and the like. In this mindset, anything a child does that can't go on their TJ or college app is a "waste of time". We'll let you do music, but only if it's an instrument for which you can receive status or an award.

And by the way, this isn't okay when families do it with respect to sports either. Parents who yoke their kids into year-round travel sports at the age of 10, 11, or 12 aren't doing their kids any favors either. It's the exact same damn thing but both groups tend to think of themselves as superior to the other.

That is your perception. In our middle school, the same kids who took the TJ test are the kids who are first violins and cellos in the school orchestra, AND the are the same kids fronting Science Olympiad and CTA meets, AND they have As in all classes, not just math. It's an approach that demands excellence and tells parents it's OK to insist on excellence because the kids are capable of it. If you think this approach confers an unfair privilege...well okay.

There is this desire/need among some folks to believe that kids that are smart are lacking in other areas of their life.

They are not athletic or not creative or their intellect has narrow applications to one subject or another.

This is contrary to research data showing that higher IQ correlates to better coordination and health.
Higher IQ correlates to creativity.
Higher IQ generally applies to all academic areas.

Some cultures think that the trajectory of your IQ is set at birth and is immutable while other cultures believe that there is an environmental component to IQ.
Asians and other "striver" cultures believe the latter.
We know our kid is not likely to be a straight A student and go to harvard or anything like that but if we help our our C- student become a B+ student, their life will be significantly better than if we just let them get that C- on autopilot.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You don’t think sound middle path at all, PP. you sound wholly in the camp of those who wanted to select certain people for TJ based on factors other than STEM interest and aptitude.

That is literally the definition of a middle path. It's balancing STEM interest and aptitude (which are critical!) and the essential need for STEM to be an aspirational field for students from all walks of life.

It is true that academic aptitude is not evenly balanced across demographics, but it is also true that no racial or socioeconomic demo has a monopoly on it. But when it comes to TJ admissions, there have been populations that had been almost entirely excluded prior to the updates to the process, and that needed to change.

I don't want to select people for TJ based on factors *other than* STEM interest and aptitude. I want to select them based on factors *in addition to* STEM interest and aptitude. And there's more work to be done to get there.

"Undervalued communities" is just a doushebag of bullsheet. Nobody can undervalue you except yourself. Don't blame others when you haven't worked hard enough.

Presuming that folks haven't worked hard enough just because they're poor, Black, or Hispanic isn't really a good look. It's also not a good look when the "work" they've had access to isn't narrowly tailored to success on a specific exam or in a specific admissions process.

You want to protect the advantages of groups that already have advantages. Just own up to that and be fine with it - it is a legitimate political position that I happen to disagree with.

When people start questioning DEI, you immediately think of Black and Hispanic. Do you see the problem with this kneejerk? You choose to stay in your pit and never get out. Or you see it as a privilege or entitlement that you don't want to lose.

Those are the communities that have been undervalued. Until that is no longer the case, it's good policy to create an atmosphere where everyone has a chance to compete and have input. Full stop.

They have the same opportunity to compete as anyone else. Full stop.

First of all, no, they really don't have the same opportunity to compete as anyone else. When the most successful prep company releases their list of admits three years in a row and literally every single name of the nearly 300 on those lists is of South Asian descent, you don't have equality of opportunity. When access to bespoke prep courses that are narrowly tailored to the TJ admissions process costs $5,000 and requires hundreds of hours of additional time, you don't have equality of opportunity. And when communities of parents build their child's entire elementary and middle school career on optimizing their applications, using tips and tricks cobbled together from their WhatsApp chats and Facebook groups, you don't have equality of opportunity.

People like you get strangely quiet when confronted with the record of Stuyvesant High - very selective, very Asian and very poor.

FCPS isn't NYC.

Expensive prep programs give kids a leg up on admissions. Period.

The % FRE at TJ before the change was ridiculous. Less than 1% of the class of 2024. There is no defending that.

Maybe make admissions based solely on a single test and you would get more economically representative admissions.

It was the holistic stuff keeping poor kids from the pool out of TJ.

Schools like Twain had plenty of kids that did really well on the test and get into the pool but they don't make it out of pool because they don't do so well on the holistic part because those impressive holistic factors can cost a lot of money. A lot more money than a $300 prep course.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You don’t think sound middle path at all, PP. you sound wholly in the camp of those who wanted to select certain people for TJ based on factors other than STEM interest and aptitude.

That is literally the definition of a middle path. It's balancing STEM interest and aptitude (which are critical!) and the essential need for STEM to be an aspirational field for students from all walks of life.

It is true that academic aptitude is not evenly balanced across demographics, but it is also true that no racial or socioeconomic demo has a monopoly on it. But when it comes to TJ admissions, there have been populations that had been almost entirely excluded prior to the updates to the process, and that needed to change.

I don't want to select people for TJ based on factors *other than* STEM interest and aptitude. I want to select them based on factors *in addition to* STEM interest and aptitude. And there's more work to be done to get there.

"Undervalued communities" is just a doushebag of bullsheet. Nobody can undervalue you except yourself. Don't blame others when you haven't worked hard enough.

Presuming that folks haven't worked hard enough just because they're poor, Black, or Hispanic isn't really a good look. It's also not a good look when the "work" they've had access to isn't narrowly tailored to success on a specific exam or in a specific admissions process.

You want to protect the advantages of groups that already have advantages. Just own up to that and be fine with it - it is a legitimate political position that I happen to disagree with.

When people start questioning DEI, you immediately think of Black and Hispanic. Do you see the problem with this kneejerk? You choose to stay in your pit and never get out. Or you see it as a privilege or entitlement that you don't want to lose.

Those are the communities that have been undervalued. Until that is no longer the case, it's good policy to create an atmosphere where everyone has a chance to compete and have input. Full stop.

They have the same opportunity to compete as anyone else. Full stop.

This is the poster who want everybody to believe that 1:1 tutor at $180 per hour rate in the comfort of fancy home, is the same with self study (while also babysitting 3 little sibling) from $20 prep books from amazon.

The idea was not to take a way the first, but, only hope to at least give a chance to the latter.

That’s a fair point, but the real solution is to provide early support rather than guaranteeing outcomes in high school, especially at a place like TJ. I’m even okay with tax-funded tutoring and mentoring at the elementary level, but forcing guaranteed outcomes through DEI at high schools or TJ is not the answer. And smearing hardworking middle-class parents for investing in their children's education is utter nonsense.

DP

1) That's a false choice for multiple reasons, first because no one is guaranteeing outcomes at all, and second because there's no reason for us to choose between providing additional support AND evaluating students' merit based on the context of their circumstances. We can and should be doing both.

2) No one is smearing hard-working middle class parents for investing in their children's education. What we're smearing about you is your insistence that admissions processes should be tailored to incentivize an imbalanced childhood. By all means, raise your kid however you want to and streamline their educational process to be STEM-focused for their own sake - just stop expecting that elite schools are going to reward you for doing so. And by the way, they shouldn't punish you for it either - and they're not.

DP

Life does not grade on a curve.

What you consider an imbalanced childhood is the typical childhood of 90% of the rest of the world outside of the USA.

No elite school is punishing any individual asian kid for studying too hard but they are punishing asian kids in general for being a member of a race that is disproportionately hardworking and academically successful. We live in a world where our country really can't afford to elevate mediocrity in an effort to equalize outcomes based or race. We have to become more merit based. There's a place for everyone but those places should not be allocated based on race in an effort to equalize racial outcomes.

There’s no sense in which Asian kids are being “punished”. They’re just not being rewarded to the same extent for their parents’ emphasis on testing.

It’s easy to confuse removal of an advantage with introduction of discrimination, but that doesn’t make you right.

Of course asian kids are being punished. They are being punished with discrimination for being too successful.

Almost everybody understands this now. Only the true believers deny that asians are discriminated against in this way

If you are one of the people that think asians are not being discriminated against then nothing will change your mind, so I will not try.

If there were discrimination, you would expect Asians to get in at:

1) A significantly lower rate per applicant than other cohorts;

2) A significantly lower percentage than their total applicants.

Neither is true - in fact the reverse is true.

What has instead happened is that a piece of the application that gave a statistically significant advantage to Asian students - that being a requirement that applicants reach certain percentile thresholds (not absolute scores) on a battery of standardized exams to even be considered at the semifinal level - was removed. You're calling that discrimination because you think that the advantage that the exam gave to the Asian students was correct and appropriate, and there is an argument for that.

But you have no evidence that the current process in a vacuum actively discriminates against Asian students. It just doesn't discriminate in favor of them anymore.

Exactly.

There is no discrimination against Asian students. There is less discrimination against black/Hispanic students now, but not entirely eliminated.

And less discrimination against whites too? The largest beneficiary of the new process are white kids. Largely because fairfax is mostly white, but still, you are saying the old system discriminated against white kids?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
It's not about "lower" standards and it never has been. It's about recognizing that the lazy, outdated "standard" of exam performance favors families who want their kid to specialize earlier than is healthy.

And those families are free to continue to raise their kids however they want under a better selection method - they're just not being rewarded for obsessing over admissions processes while their kid is in elementary school.

When you are accustomed to privilege (in this case, admissions practices that favor your approach to child-rearing), equality (the removal of those practices) feels like oppression.

And the more you argue in favor of the legacy process, the more you shout your child's privilege (your parenting choices) from the rooftops.

What? Admissions practices that reward studying are unfair?

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:You don’t think sound middle path at all, PP. you sound wholly in the camp of those who wanted to select certain people for TJ based on factors other than STEM interest and aptitude.

That is literally the definition of a middle path. It's balancing STEM interest and aptitude (which are critical!) and the essential need for STEM to be an aspirational field for students from all walks of life.

It is true that academic aptitude is not evenly balanced across demographics, but it is also true that no racial or socioeconomic demo has a monopoly on it. But when it comes to TJ admissions, there have been populations that had been almost entirely excluded prior to the updates to the process, and that needed to change.

I don't want to select people for TJ based on factors *other than* STEM interest and aptitude. I want to select them based on factors *in addition to* STEM interest and aptitude. And there's more work to be done to get there.

"Undervalued communities" is just a doushebag of bullsheet. Nobody can undervalue you except yourself. Don't blame others when you haven't worked hard enough.

Presuming that folks haven't worked hard enough just because they're poor, Black, or Hispanic isn't really a good look. It's also not a good look when the "work" they've had access to isn't narrowly tailored to success on a specific exam or in a specific admissions process.

You want to protect the advantages of groups that already have advantages. Just own up to that and be fine with it - it is a legitimate political position that I happen to disagree with.

When people start questioning DEI, you immediately think of Black and Hispanic. Do you see the problem with this kneejerk? You choose to stay in your pit and never get out. Or you see it as a privilege or entitlement that you don't want to lose.

Those are the communities that have been undervalued. Until that is no longer the case, it's good policy to create an atmosphere where everyone has a chance to compete and have input. Full stop.

They have the same opportunity to compete as anyone else. Full stop.

First of all, no, they really don't have the same opportunity to compete as anyone else. When the most successful prep company releases their list of admits three years in a row and literally every single name of the nearly 300 on those lists is of South Asian descent, you don't have equality of opportunity. When access to bespoke prep courses that are narrowly tailored to the TJ admissions process costs $5,000 and requires hundreds of hours of additional time, you don't have equality of opportunity. And when communities of parents build their child's entire elementary and middle school career on optimizing their applications, using tips and tricks cobbled together from their WhatsApp chats and Facebook groups, you don't have equality of opportunity.

People like you get strangely quiet when confronted with the record of Stuyvesant High - very selective, very Asian and very poor.

No, I don’t. The applicant pool at Stuyvesant is exceedingly poor, especially when compared to the applicant pool for TJ. The kids who get into Stuy wouldn’t have a prayer of getting in to TJ - they’ve been shut out of TJ for generations in favor of the Asians that have money.

Until now. In a backwards way, you managed to make my point for me.

DP.

The kids at stuyvesant clearly test as well as the TJ kids as demonstrated by the fact that their average SAT scores are always within 10 or 20 points of each other. If Tj admissions were test only, it is likely that most stuyvesant students would be competitive for admission to TJ. What might keep them out is the holistic part of the application where having wealthy parents that pay for expensive extracurriculars like summer camps and robotics teams or have access to opportunities to engage in tech activities. This is why poor asians lose out to rich asians. It's not the test, it's the rest of the the application process.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:You don’t think sound middle path at all, PP. you sound wholly in the camp of those who wanted to select certain people for TJ based on factors other than STEM interest and aptitude.

That is literally the definition of a middle path. It's balancing STEM interest and aptitude (which are critical!) and the essential need for STEM to be an aspirational field for students from all walks of life.

It is true that academic aptitude is not evenly balanced across demographics, but it is also true that no racial or socioeconomic demo has a monopoly on it. But when it comes to TJ admissions, there have been populations that had been almost entirely excluded prior to the updates to the process, and that needed to change.

I don't want to select people for TJ based on factors *other than* STEM interest and aptitude. I want to select them based on factors *in addition to* STEM interest and aptitude. And there's more work to be done to get there.

"Undervalued communities" is just a doushebag of bullsheet. Nobody can undervalue you except yourself. Don't blame others when you haven't worked hard enough.

Presuming that folks haven't worked hard enough just because they're poor, Black, or Hispanic isn't really a good look. It's also not a good look when the "work" they've had access to isn't narrowly tailored to success on a specific exam or in a specific admissions process.

You want to protect the advantages of groups that already have advantages. Just own up to that and be fine with it - it is a legitimate political position that I happen to disagree with.

When people start questioning DEI, you immediately think of Black and Hispanic. Do you see the problem with this kneejerk? You choose to stay in your pit and never get out. Or you see it as a privilege or entitlement that you don't want to lose.

Those are the communities that have been undervalued. Until that is no longer the case, it's good policy to create an atmosphere where everyone has a chance to compete and have input. Full stop.

They have the same opportunity to compete as anyone else. Full stop.

This is the poster who want everybody to believe that 1:1 tutor at $180 per hour rate in the comfort of fancy home, is the same with self study (while also babysitting 3 little sibling) from $20 prep books from amazon.

The idea was not to take a way the first, but, only hope to at least give a chance to the latter.

That’s a fair point, but the real solution is to provide early support rather than guaranteeing outcomes in high school, especially at a place like TJ. I’m even okay with tax-funded tutoring and mentoring at the elementary level, but forcing guaranteed outcomes through DEI at high schools or TJ is not the answer. And smearing hardworking middle-class parents for investing in their children's education is utter nonsense.

DP

1) That's a false choice for multiple reasons, first because no one is guaranteeing outcomes at all, and second because there's no reason for us to choose between providing additional support AND evaluating students' merit based on the context of their circumstances. We can and should be doing both.

2) No one is smearing hard-working middle class parents for investing in their children's education. What we're smearing about you is your insistence that admissions processes should be tailored to incentivize an imbalanced childhood. By all means, raise your kid however you want to and streamline their educational process to be STEM-focused for their own sake - just stop expecting that elite schools are going to reward you for doing so. And by the way, they shouldn't punish you for it either - and they're not.

DP

Life does not grade on a curve.

What you consider an imbalanced childhood is the typical childhood of 90% of the rest of the world outside of the USA.

No elite school is punishing any individual asian kid for studying too hard but they are punishing asian kids in general for being a member of a race that is disproportionately hardworking and academically successful. We live in a world where our country really can't afford to elevate mediocrity in an effort to equalize outcomes based or race. We have to become more merit based. There's a place for everyone but those places should not be allocated based on race in an effort to equalize racial outcomes.

There’s no sense in which Asian kids are being “punished”. They’re just not being rewarded to the same extent for their parents’ emphasis on testing.

It’s easy to confuse removal of an advantage with introduction of discrimination, but that doesn’t make you right.

Of course asian kids are being punished. They are being punished with discrimination for being too successful.

Almost everybody understands this now. Only the true believers deny that asians are discriminated against in this way

If you are one of the people that think asians are not being discriminated against then nothing will change your mind, so I will not try.

If there were discrimination, you would expect Asians to get in at:

1) A significantly lower rate per applicant than other cohorts;

2) A significantly lower percentage than their total applicants.

Neither is true - in fact the reverse is true.

What has instead happened is that a piece of the application that gave a statistically significant advantage to Asian students - that being a requirement that applicants reach certain percentile thresholds (not absolute scores) on a battery of standardized exams to even be considered at the semifinal level - was removed. You're calling that discrimination because you think that the advantage that the exam gave to the Asian students was correct and appropriate, and there is an argument for that.

But you have no evidence that the current process in a vacuum actively discriminates against Asian students. It just doesn't discriminate in favor of them anymore.

Wait, you think the ability to do well on standardized tests is unique to Asians?

Hmmm.

It demonstrably is. But the problem is that the ability to do well on standardized exams has no relevance to anything except admissions to schools. There is no other situation in life where it has any value whatsoever.

It has predictive value.

It tells you who is most likely to be able to take advantage of academic opportunity.
It tells you who is likely to be more intelligent
It tells you who is likely to be more creative
It tells you who is likely to make more contributions to scientific research

There is a reason we use standardized tests to select students pretty much everywhere else in the world.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:You don’t think sound middle path at all, PP. you sound wholly in the camp of those who wanted to select certain people for TJ based on factors other than STEM interest and aptitude.

That is literally the definition of a middle path. It's balancing STEM interest and aptitude (which are critical!) and the essential need for STEM to be an aspirational field for students from all walks of life.

It is true that academic aptitude is not evenly balanced across demographics, but it is also true that no racial or socioeconomic demo has a monopoly on it. But when it comes to TJ admissions, there have been populations that had been almost entirely excluded prior to the updates to the process, and that needed to change.

I don't want to select people for TJ based on factors *other than* STEM interest and aptitude. I want to select them based on factors *in addition to* STEM interest and aptitude. And there's more work to be done to get there.

"Undervalued communities" is just a doushebag of bullsheet. Nobody can undervalue you except yourself. Don't blame others when you haven't worked hard enough.

Presuming that folks haven't worked hard enough just because they're poor, Black, or Hispanic isn't really a good look. It's also not a good look when the "work" they've had access to isn't narrowly tailored to success on a specific exam or in a specific admissions process.

You want to protect the advantages of groups that already have advantages. Just own up to that and be fine with it - it is a legitimate political position that I happen to disagree with.

When people start questioning DEI, you immediately think of Black and Hispanic. Do you see the problem with this kneejerk? You choose to stay in your pit and never get out. Or you see it as a privilege or entitlement that you don't want to lose.

Those are the communities that have been undervalued. Until that is no longer the case, it's good policy to create an atmosphere where everyone has a chance to compete and have input. Full stop.

They have the same opportunity to compete as anyone else. Full stop.

This is the poster who want everybody to believe that 1:1 tutor at $180 per hour rate in the comfort of fancy home, is the same with self study (while also babysitting 3 little sibling) from $20 prep books from amazon.

The idea was not to take a way the first, but, only hope to at least give a chance to the latter.

That’s a fair point, but the real solution is to provide early support rather than guaranteeing outcomes in high school, especially at a place like TJ. I’m even okay with tax-funded tutoring and mentoring at the elementary level, but forcing guaranteed outcomes through DEI at high schools or TJ is not the answer. And smearing hardworking middle-class parents for investing in their children's education is utter nonsense.

DP

1) That's a false choice for multiple reasons, first because no one is guaranteeing outcomes at all, and second because there's no reason for us to choose between providing additional support AND evaluating students' merit based on the context of their circumstances. We can and should be doing both.

2) No one is smearing hard-working middle class parents for investing in their children's education. What we're smearing about you is your insistence that admissions processes should be tailored to incentivize an imbalanced childhood. By all means, raise your kid however you want to and streamline their educational process to be STEM-focused for their own sake - just stop expecting that elite schools are going to reward you for doing so. And by the way, they shouldn't punish you for it either - and they're not.

DP

Life does not grade on a curve.

What you consider an imbalanced childhood is the typical childhood of 90% of the rest of the world outside of the USA.

No elite school is punishing any individual asian kid for studying too hard but they are punishing asian kids in general for being a member of a race that is disproportionately hardworking and academically successful. We live in a world where our country really can't afford to elevate mediocrity in an effort to equalize outcomes based or race. We have to become more merit based. There's a place for everyone but those places should not be allocated based on race in an effort to equalize racial outcomes.

There’s no sense in which Asian kids are being “punished”. They’re just not being rewarded to the same extent for their parents’ emphasis on testing.

It’s easy to confuse removal of an advantage with introduction of discrimination, but that doesn’t make you right.

Of course asian kids are being punished. They are being punished with discrimination for being too successful.

Almost everybody understands this now. Only the true believers deny that asians are discriminated against in this way

If you are one of the people that think asians are not being discriminated against then nothing will change your mind, so I will not try.

If there were discrimination, you would expect Asians to get in at:

1) A significantly lower rate per applicant than other cohorts;

2) A significantly lower percentage than their total applicants.

Neither is true - in fact the reverse is true.

What has instead happened is that a piece of the application that gave a statistically significant advantage to Asian students - that being a requirement that applicants reach certain percentile thresholds (not absolute scores) on a battery of standardized exams to even be considered at the semifinal level - was removed. You're calling that discrimination because you think that the advantage that the exam gave to the Asian students was correct and appropriate, and there is an argument for that.

But you have no evidence that the current process in a vacuum actively discriminates against Asian students. It just doesn't discriminate in favor of them anymore.

Exactly.

There is no discrimination against Asian students. There is less discrimination against black/Hispanic students now, but not entirely eliminated.

If one group has much a much higher percentage of 8th graders in Geometry or higher, much higher SOL scores, and much better achievements, but is still being admitted at a similar rate to everyone else, then there absolutely is discrimination.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:You are missing a key piece of the mindset of this immigrant community.

A friend family had their child in all the prep classes since early elementary school. They even took the TJ exam prep classes.

They had no intention of attending TJ as they went back to India.

Why spend thousands of dollars and years of effort on something that they have no plan of attending?

The thinking is that if the kids spend time learning all the material, it would be good for them, it would help them in academics, it would prepare them well for college, keeps the kids away from distractions (phones, drugs, etc.) and so on.

This attitude is quite common in the community. I strongly disagree with this approach and think this is harmful in other more subtle ways.

Some of the other "distractions" that they "keep the kids away from" are actually quite healthy. Sports, collective participation in the arts, random unstructured play with friends, and the like. In this mindset, anything a child does that can't go on their TJ or college app is a "waste of time". We'll let you do music, but only if it's an instrument for which you can receive status or an award.

And by the way, this isn't okay when families do it with respect to sports either. Parents who yoke their kids into year-round travel sports at the age of 10, 11, or 12 aren't doing their kids any favors either. It's the exact same damn thing but both groups tend to think of themselves as superior to the other.

That is your perception. In our middle school, the same kids who took the TJ test are the kids who are first violins and cellos in the school orchestra, AND the are the same kids fronting Science Olympiad and CTA meets, AND they have As in all classes, not just math. It's an approach that demands excellence and tells parents it's OK to insist on excellence because the kids are capable of it. If you think this approach confers an unfair privilege...well okay.

All of the things you described are status items. You are selecting things like the violin and cello for your child because all they have to do is rely on themselves and practice by themselves and follow the stick and they will get rewarded by being “first chair”.

They’ll get solid first jobs out of college, and they will be passed up for elite opportunities and promotions in favor of kids who grew up learning to work with other people.

Certainly, a lot of high achieving students can only achieve all that by avoiding group activities. You can't serve two masters and if you are focused on robotics competitions, you are going to miss a lot of team practices. But you can be competitive at robotics and play tennis or run cross country.

I agree that you learn things by being on a team that you don't learn by being in a more individual sport. But there are things you learn in an individual sport that you do not get with team sports.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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Anonymous wrote:You don’t think sound middle path at all, PP. you sound wholly in the camp of those who wanted to select certain people for TJ based on factors other than STEM interest and aptitude.

That is literally the definition of a middle path. It's balancing STEM interest and aptitude (which are critical!) and the essential need for STEM to be an aspirational field for students from all walks of life.

It is true that academic aptitude is not evenly balanced across demographics, but it is also true that no racial or socioeconomic demo has a monopoly on it. But when it comes to TJ admissions, there have been populations that had been almost entirely excluded prior to the updates to the process, and that needed to change.

I don't want to select people for TJ based on factors *other than* STEM interest and aptitude. I want to select them based on factors *in addition to* STEM interest and aptitude. And there's more work to be done to get there.

"Undervalued communities" is just a doushebag of bullsheet. Nobody can undervalue you except yourself. Don't blame others when you haven't worked hard enough.

Presuming that folks haven't worked hard enough just because they're poor, Black, or Hispanic isn't really a good look. It's also not a good look when the "work" they've had access to isn't narrowly tailored to success on a specific exam or in a specific admissions process.

You want to protect the advantages of groups that already have advantages. Just own up to that and be fine with it - it is a legitimate political position that I happen to disagree with.

When people start questioning DEI, you immediately think of Black and Hispanic. Do you see the problem with this kneejerk? You choose to stay in your pit and never get out. Or you see it as a privilege or entitlement that you don't want to lose.

Those are the communities that have been undervalued. Until that is no longer the case, it's good policy to create an atmosphere where everyone has a chance to compete and have input. Full stop.

They have the same opportunity to compete as anyone else. Full stop.

First of all, no, they really don't have the same opportunity to compete as anyone else. When the most successful prep company releases their list of admits three years in a row and literally every single name of the nearly 300 on those lists is of South Asian descent, you don't have equality of opportunity. When access to bespoke prep courses that are narrowly tailored to the TJ admissions process costs $5,000 and requires hundreds of hours of additional time, you don't have equality of opportunity. And when communities of parents build their child's entire elementary and middle school career on optimizing their applications, using tips and tricks cobbled together from their WhatsApp chats and Facebook groups, you don't have equality of opportunity.

People like you get strangely quiet when confronted with the record of Stuyvesant High - very selective, very Asian and very poor.

No, I don’t. The applicant pool at Stuyvesant is exceedingly poor, especially when compared to the applicant pool for TJ. The kids who get into Stuy wouldn’t have a prayer of getting in to TJ - they’ve been shut out of TJ for generations in favor of the Asians that have money.

Until now. In a backwards way, you managed to make my point for me.

No, not really - because Stuy is regularly under fire for admitting too many Asians. It magically stop mattering that they're poor.

The same thing drives the aversion to testing at stuy and tj. Not enough blacks, too many asians.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Smart move.
He’s clearly seen the writing on the wall and is going where his talents for sifting through applications and selecting the best and brightest strictly based on academic merit and demonstrated talent will be utilized again.

Equity admissions is “Equality of outcome” and by definition it will devalue TJ as a top school…..by design. May take a few years to see in reality, but that’s the entire purpose of equity re-engineering of that school.

OH I know! TJ is now selecting the top students instead of the rigged process where parents could buy their way in. It's time to find a new scam.

People pushing DEI like you are the direct reason for the blowback we are seeing today.
Trump won because of people like you pushing things too fckn far.

What's more correct is that we have a political environment right now where if you're not solidly in one of two camps:

1) All DEI all the time! or
2) All efforts to support marginalized populations are garbage!

... then you don't have a home. If you want to belong to ANYTHING, you have to pick one or the other. There's no room for a commonsense middle path anymore.

The real answer in this situation is that defining acceptance to TJ as an "outcome" is problematic. Framing it as a contest or a prize to be won rather than as an opportunity to be properly distributed for maximum effect is awful.

TJ's job is to serve the STEM community writ large, not to serve parents who are trying to maximize their child's life outcomes. So a proper admissions policy for such a school would necessarily balance the need to identify top talent with the need to include populations that are underrepresented in STEM fields so as to grow the base of talent for the future and to address the needs of communities that are being harmed by the profit motive.

The new admissions process took a step in a positive direction by including students from those undervalued communities, but did so partly at the expense of identifying top talent (this is at once both inarguable AND overblown - it's a problem but by no means a crisis).

The next step will be to figure out a way to more concretely identify a strong group of talent from all of those communities - which will probably require different methods and priorities of evaluation for each of those groups. But one thing that will not succeed at all is to evaluate all of them along the same metric out of a misplaced loyalty to "objectivity". That way lies madness and a return to the dark years of the mid-2010s where TJ produced high rankings (thanks to a retrograde system that relied on exam performance) - but very, very little else thanks to a staggering homogeneity of the student population.

Why is there a "need" to include underrepresented populations? Why can't we stop at identifying the top talent regardless of their skin color?

Academics undervalued communities that undervalue academics.

We should absolutely be identifying the top talent regardless of their skin color. But you can't possibly believe that we were doing that in the before times unless you think it was correct to admit a larger number of Asian students in the Class of 2024 than they'd admitted Black students in TJ's entire history in total to that point.

I am not here to argue that STEM talent is evenly distributed - it's not because the Asian immigrants who came to this area did so in order to leverage their STEM skills in America's second most significant tech market (after Silicon Valley). But the distribution is not so overwhelming as to produce that outcome, and to believe it is is to have a deeply disturbing view of Black people in this country.

Truth can sometimes be disturbing.

At the far right end tail of the curve, black students are rare.

https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-percentile-ranks-gender-race-ethnicity.pdf

9% of asians get a 1500+ on the sat
<1% of blacks get a score of 1500+ on the SAT

23% of asians get a 1400+ on the SAT
1% of blacks get a 1400+ on the SAT

40% of asians get a 1300+ on the SAT
3% of blacks get a 1300+ on the SAT

56% of asians get a 1200+ on the SAT
8% of blacks get a 1200+ on the SAT

This is not close.

Do you have the ability to make a coherent argument that doesn’t include exam scores?

I am responding to the accusation that my views about the lopsided nature of academic talent that exists in the asian community vs the black community is because I have deeply disturbing views.

I am providing some evidence to support my statement that the academic talent between these two groups is extremely lopsided.
The asian kids aren't born smarter, they become smarter.
Stop making excuses for black underachievement, you are not doing them any favors.

Unless you believe they are black children have already reached their potential and are simply incapable of doing as well as the children of mexican immigrants, why would you curse them with lower standards?

It's not about "lower" standards and it never has been. It's about recognizing that the lazy, outdated "standard" of exam performance favors families who want their kid to specialize earlier than is healthy.

And those families are free to continue to raise their kids however they want under a better selection method - they're just not being rewarded for obsessing over admissions processes while their kid is in elementary school.

When you are accustomed to privilege (in this case, admissions practices that favor your approach to child-rearing), equality (the removal of those practices) feels like oppression.

And the more you argue in favor of the legacy process, the more you shout your child's privilege (your parenting choices) from the rooftops.

DEI is not a policy; it's a mentality. Policies can be changed, but free handouts cannot be taken away, otherwise you're a bigot, racist, or process-rigging ahole.

+1000

Anyone who thinks that DEI is "free handouts" probably is a racist.

DEI seeks equality of outcome regardless of effort or ability.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Stuyvesant admissions isn't really comparable. It's a totally different beast.

Different population. The vast majority of students in NYC public schools come from low-income families - almost 75%. It's a much larger school system (10x) so they have a much larger talent pool from the start.

And NYC offers a free, extensive (150+ hours) SHSAT prep program for kids from low-income families that runs over several months. In addition to many other free/low-cost programs available.

So it's not surprising that there is a relatively large % of kids from low-income families.

Are you talking about stuyprep? I do not know of a larger comprehensive free SHSAT test prep in NYC.

It's not offered by NYC, it's offered by the stuyvesant alumni association.
It's 75 hours of prep.
It's not open to all poor kids on an equal basis, there is a preference for black and hispanic kids.
The biggest year they ever had was 165 students in 2019 of which 1 got into stuyvesant.