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.

Allocating is a quota a geographic quota that is a proxy for a racial quota.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

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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.

When one group does better because they work harder, that is not abuse, that is the very definition of merit.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

It’s not. What’s surprising is that they are predominantly Asian. Even while NYC has plenty of other poor groups, and while this free prep course is presumably open to all. Yet Asians, again, come out on top. Explain without using silly words like privilege.

DP

They can use whatever silly words they want.

Work ethic privilege.
Cultural privilege.
Good parent privilege.

It doesn't matter what silly words they use, the meaning is the same.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:

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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.

And at the expense of hardworking and qualified students. That is abuse and needs to be eliminated.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

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.

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.

This is false

[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.

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?

Nope - the largest beneficiary was poor Asian students and by some distance. 1 in 2024 to 51 in 2025.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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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.

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.

And then they come to America to go to school.

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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.

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.

This is false

+1

Wealth played a bigger factor to get into the pool, not out of it.

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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.

When one group does better because they work harder, that is not abuse, that is the very definition of merit.

When one group does better because they can afford to game the system, that is not merit.