Letter to FCPS about TJ Admissions By TJHSST Students

[Anonymous]

From Sami:
Lottery is wrong because

1. It will destroy TJ's standard and ranking. The goal / definite outcome is downgrade of TJ to a normal good high school. If you look at the presentation (page 25) FCPS
superintendent made to the board, he listed some schools which are good and use lottery as intake method. If you look at the rank of those schools, some are in 100, 600. If TJ
starts lottery TJ will be one of those. Some sample schools he listed are
- Raisbeck Aviation High School, WA with niche.com rank 272, US news rank 108;
- International community school, Washington; niche.com rank 157, US news did not rank the school.


2. Lowering of quality will be extended to future. Student body that will enter through lottery will do worse than usual noting the fact that even students who go through admission
test struggle at TJ. Then teachers will be asked to dumb down the test so the advocates of lottery look better. AP courses all have structured test which will manifest the
degradation in quality. Unless colleges change their admission criteria TJ students will not go to top colleges in usual proportion.

3. About 5% of TJ students finally selected had "Algebra 1" in 8th std. Rest are higher (Geometry 1, Trig etc.). For FCPS that means they took algebra in grade 7 which in turn means
they were top percentile in Iowa Test. Now, Algebra 1 students will be more. Lowering standard again.

4. "Merit" is a falsely used word here. Life only measures , rewards "preparedness for a role". Standardized test is very good (not perfect) at measuring it. Most other methods
cannot cite success over long time. Lottery does not even care for it. If someone disagrees we can measure. Take 90% of students through admission test and take 10%
through lottery. Track their grades for 4 years and the colleges they go to. If the results converge then make lottery the process of admission.

5. If you look at the presentation FCPS superintendent made he mentioned what has been tried to admit more "economically disadvantaged" student (page 6). He acted as if he tried everything he possible could but still did not get the result. If you notice carefully FCPS did nothing to "improve the quality" of "economically disadvantaged". Only action
(outreach) that could have benefited them was curtailed. He kept on changing the structure of the test and of course did not get result. In case you have any doubt about the
information here is what he presented. Unless someone is absolutely dumb he would not expect these changes to help "economically disadvantaged"

2011 (Class of 2016) –Outreach Specialist Position Created
2013 (Class of 2018) –Holistic Review , Student Information Sheet proctored
2014 (Class of 2019) –Sliding Scale Adjusted, Minimum semifinalist requirements lowered
2015 (Class of 2020) –Problem Solving Essay Added
2016 (Class of 2021) –Outreach Specialist Reduced to 0.5 Position
2017 (Class of 2022) –New Tests Introduced, Quant-Q and ACT Aspire Reading & Science
These changes have not made a significant impact on the application pool or admitted student demographics

This reminds me of going to Iraq war . Saddam was a bad person and removing him was a good goal. But Iraq war was the wrong choice. But this is what jingoism, zealots do. They focus on 1 topic and completely ignore everything else. Fortunately, people will not die if this passes. However, lot of hard work backed dreams will die. More importantly, an institution that took long time to build will die.

[Anonymous]

Good. It has become toxic.