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Anonymous wrote:Uh, no, there are more commended students at TJ than semifinalists. He wanted to protect the feelings of the 20% or so of TJ students who were neither semifinalists nor commended.
THIS. And it states so in the emails
Ultimately, he did distribute them so his opinion about the "feelings" is moot.
It's not moot. He used it as a cover-up for why he didn't distribute them when the reality is he just forgot to do it. That's lying to a parent and it's not okay.
He used it as a reason for why they didn’t deliver the letters
with much fanfare. Subtle but extremely important distinction there.
"Mr. Kosatka, you told me that you held these letters, in part, because you were concerned about handing them out around students who didn't receive the award."
This. Was. A. Lie.
And it was a lie to cover the fact that he forgot to do it.
We don't know what he actually said or what he meant by it.
Look, I think that the Coalition for TJ is the single worst thing to happen to the school in its existence. It's literally ripping the school apart at the seams, making it more difficult for the school to educate its students and maintain its position. I generally side with the school on most things. And I acknowledge that Yashar, like all of the major players on Asra's side in this, are Republican operatives who are hell bent on destroying public education.
But in reading this e-mail chain and digging into the facts surrounding the situation, there's only one conclusion you can come to, and that's that the DSS either lied to cover his ass or made a decision that was his and his alone to withhold these letters for whatever reason. Either of these are fireable offenses, neither of them should implicate the principal in any way because she CLEARLY wasn't on board with them, and neither of them should be inviting a damn state-level investigation.
+100. The fight between the Coalition and… the school? TJAAG? (Are there even people in TJAAG? I feel like I hear about them very little compared to the Coalition.) is going scorched-earth and everyone will be worse off for it. And if you think it isn’t disruptive, then you’ve never been in class with TJ students fighting Coalition members on Facebook, or run a TJ club with the fear that some nut job parent will get you in trouble because you didn’t pick their kid for a competitive team and that’s apparently racist. Just because it’s not obvious from the outside doesn’t mean this isn’t hurting the school.
-2022 TJ grad who has worried about all the above in the past
The TJAAG is a real group with real people.
https://www.tjaag.org/
They are just as active as the Coalition, if not more so; the difference is that they can rely on publications like the Washington Post and bodies like the FCPS School Board to parrot their viewpoints, whereas the Coalition has to make more noise to get people to pay attention.
Fundamentally, the TJAAG tries to thread a needle, in that it's trying to preserve an elitist institution that serves only 3-4% of FCPS high school students and yet suggest that it's deeply committed to principles of equity. They've tied themselves up into some rhetorical knots recently, such as when a number of them have suggested that receiving a letter of commendation is a "consolation prize" and a "4th-rate award," which comes across as awfully elitist when 97% of high school students are neither semifinalists nor commended students.
Overall, many of them (you?) come across as less interested in equity, or for that matter anything having to do with schools other than TJ, so much as just making sure that TJ is sufficiently diverse, with fewer Asian kids, so that all the alumni will still feel comfortable name-dropping that they went to TJ in random conversations with acquaintances.
DP. It's unclear where the rhetorical knots are that you're mentioning. In the context of TJ, the Commended Student recognition is absolutely a consolation prize and the students view it as such. TJ students (for better or for worse) measure themselves against one another, not against the rest of America.
Folks on the right are obsessed with the anti-Asian narrative, but it falls apart in the face of this reality: if TJ's incoming classes were 70% Asian, 10% White, 10% Black, and 10% Hispanic, the pro-diversity crowd would be thrilled. They'd be shouting from the rooftops.
It's never been about fewer Asians, and it's always been about stronger representation amongst historically excluded populations, which means low income students, Black students, and Hispanic students. But folks on the right, because of their resources, connections, and media savvy, have successfully been able to frame the conversation about "anti-Asianness" when it's anything but.
There was a fairly coordinated on the part of the left to portray the environment at TJ as "toxic" and to imply that most Asian students at TJ were only admitted because their allegedly wealthy parents shelled out tens of thousands of dollars for test prep materials.
Statistically, one can see that the increases in Black and Hispanic enrollment have come largely at the expense of Asian enrollment, as the White enrollment has remained relatively steady.
And, to this day, the TJAAG folks and their allies continue to assert that Asian students are "over-represented" at TJ, as if Asian applicants should be looked at, in the first instance, not as individuals but instead primarily as members of a group.
So, good luck with your efforts to suggest conservatives have some unique "media savvy," but the most recent controversies over TJ stem from
the left having made a calculated political decision that changing the admissions process to promote the admission of more Black and Hispanic kids would provide more electoral benefits than antagonizing the Asian community (or at least certain segments of the Asian community). The verdict is still out on whether those efforts were politically astute or, for that matter, even legal.
The funny thing about conservatives is that they can't imagine a universe where a political actor would do a thing for a reason other than political or personal benefit. Perhaps, I don't know,
diversity in the classroom is an educational benefit that has been corroborated by hundreds of peer-reviewed studies. But then, research and reality tend to skew left compared to today's America...
The fact that Asian students are overrepresented at TJ isn't an assertion - it's an obvious mathematical fact. Now, I'm a firm believer that Asians are absolutely NOT a monolith, and the fact that they are for reporting purposes is highly problematic. The catchment area of TJ is approximately 20% Asian, give or take a few percentage points, but about 3/4 of those are captured by East, Southeast, or Middle Eastern descent. These groups are
slightly overrepresented at TJ, but not to an extent that would raise any issues. They're also significantly less well-off and have a much, much higher percentage of FARMS students than their South Asian counterparts.
The group that is
wildly overrepresented at TJ are South Asians, who comprise about 5% of the catchment area but approximately 45% of TJ students prior to the admissions improvements. Again, this part of the conversation is not a value judgment - it's a simple math problem. This group is comprised to a much larger level of recent immigrants who are relatively VERY well-off compared to every other demographic in Northern Virginia.
Here's the value judgment part: TJ is toxic and has been for many years not because of its ethnic composition but because of the lack of diversity of interests, approaches to education, and intended college destinations and fields of study of its student body. For too many years under the old process, too large a group of TJ students wanted to accomplish the same things and get to the same goals along the same path - which creates a hyper-competitive and yes, "toxic" atmosphere.
There are those who believe that the substantial increase in the Asian - and especially first-gen South Asian - population is responsible for the streamlining of student goals and ambitions (the "everyone wants to be a doctor, lawyer, entrepreneur, or full-stack web developer" problem). Most of the people who believe that are indeed South Asian, but do not understand the relationship between the narrowing of academic focus and the toxicity that it necessarily creates within the environment at TJ (and to a lesser extent, at schools like Rachel Carson and Rocky Run). I would prefer not to believe that, but at every turn I hear people say "well of COURSE I want my child to be a doctor" as though there's nothing wrong with that sentiment when the child is, say, 8 years old.
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