A data-backed approach to understand the TJ Admissions Process

[Anonymous]

It is a high school for science and technology. If we're going to have it, expecting students to have a passion for those topics doesn't seem unreasonable.

Instead, what we have is a group of people who want to turn TJ into a public school equivalent of an Ivy, just so they can say that admissions are holistic and that URMs - regardless of whether they really want to pursue STEM courses - are well represented there. That type of school is cooler to them that some icky STEM school full of Asians. If TJ were to remain the latter, they wouldn't be quite so sure to mention to everyone they meet well into their 40s that they attended TJ.

The strategy works fairly well, because the School Board is full of white women who are happy to throw Asians under the bus and the URMs who complained about the environment at TJ have an additional leg up in their own college admissions (i.e., the 2021 graduate who received the most attention is heading to Harvard in the fall).

Who?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

It is a high school for science and technology. If we're going to have it, expecting students to have a passion for those topics doesn't seem unreasonable.

Instead, what we have is a group of people who want to turn TJ into a public school equivalent of an Ivy, just so they can say that admissions are holistic and that URMs - regardless of whether they really want to pursue STEM courses - are well represented there. That type of school is cooler to them that some icky STEM school full of Asians. If TJ were to remain the latter, they wouldn't be quite so sure to mention to everyone they meet well into their 40s that they attended TJ.

The strategy works fairly well, because the School Board is full of white women who are happy to throw Asians under the bus and the URMs who complained about the environment at TJ have an additional leg up in their own college admissions (i.e., the 2021 graduate who received the most attention is heading to Harvard in the fall).

Who?

Not going to name names here because they are not a public figure, but the brave and exceptional student who was the most vocal about not only supporting the improvements to the admissions process, but also highlighting the need for internal reforms within the building so that students who are there are supported appropriately and given tools to work with students from backgrounds different from their own.

There are a lot of people on this board who are jealous of that student because that student got something that they want.