TJ Admissions Roundup

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:"McLaughlin, like other board members, still worries about Washington’s booming test-prep industry. Modeled on Korean “cram” schools, classes meet after school, on weekends, and throughout the summer. “They’ve become professionals at that process of getting into TJ,” says Josh Silverman, a private tutor in the area."

When this goes on for years, we call it studying not test prep. There isn't enough test prepping material to fill more than 20-30 hours of instruction with test prep. Everything beyond those 20-30 hours of "process of elimination" "when and how to guess" "thinking like the test maker" etc. is substantive learning. You are learning math, you are learning logic, you are learning how to actively read.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Once again, if you can just buy your way into TJ, why aren't there more white kids there?

Because they aren’t as driven by national rankings? Not as interested in STEM or a grind HS experience?

It was well known in my affluent area that you could greatly improve chances of admissions by paying $$$ for prep classes.

It’s a choice that affluent families had.

20 years ago, TJ was majority white. Did they suddenly develop a disdain STEM and competitive high schools over the last 4 years? Or did they get crowded out?

Not so suddenly, but yes, there has been less push for kids to attend ultra competitive environments. The number of white applicants has been declining over the years.

I was a STEM kid at a competitive HS who went on to a T10 program. I intentionally did not encourage my kids to go to TJ.

I haven't looked at all years, but during previous thread I looked at the numbers for class of 2015.
56% of all Asian 8th graders in FCPS were eligible to apply to TJ
99% of them did apply

45% of all white 8th graders in FCPS were eligible to apply to TJ
49% of them did apply


FWIW, 92% of eligible black 8th graders in FCPS that year applied.

Here are the numbers.

Only half of eligible white students applied (vs 99% of Asian students). They don’t want the competitive environment.

I was a STEM kid at a competitive HS who went on to a T10 program. I intentionally did not encourage my kids to go to TJ.

[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:On the other hand, there might be lots of less advantaged kids who are more likely to find solutions to future problems because they are better at original thinking because they haven’t had everything handed to them by parents who are financially well off and/or focused on education.

I was the kid who was a NMF from a less advantaged family, so I know that kids like that need more support from the schools than kids who get plenty of support at home. As a society, it would be too bad to lose out on all that those kids can do in the future.

I don't doubt that less advantaged kids can achieve a lot.
I was not wealthy growing up, if you want to argue about who grew up poorer, we can have that debate but I think I met the threshold for growing up poor.
My family was on government assistance from time to time.
I know what government cheese, government peanut butter and government canned meat taste like.
I can tell you the denomination of a food stamp by its color.
But I also think that poor kids can meet objective measures of academic merit as well as anyone else.

There are three selective high schools in NYC whose alumni have won a ton of math and science prizes including 15 nobel prizes, a handful of wolf, field, abel, prizes in math, and a bunch of others.
These schools range from 40% to 60% free/reduced lunch.
Admissions to these schools is based on a single test.
The SHSAT is more or less the same test that TJHSST used until recently.
In this day and age of test prep, the population at these schools are significantly poorer than TJ and even more asian.

We know how to give preferences for poverty while preserving merit but we didn't do that at TJ because that was not the purpose of the change.
The purpose of the change was to reduce the asian population and increase the population of kids of other skin colors.
If we tried to preserve preferences for poverty while preserving merit, we would have seen an even larger concentration of asians as poor asians take a disproportionate number of spots meant for poor kids.

Are you sure about that? I thought the change was to address the rampant test buying and allow those who can't afford that a level playing field.

That was never stated by any school board official that I’m aware of.

It was in the 4th circuit opinion to the c4tj lawsuit.

No it wasn’t.

I'm on your side but the appellate opinion states:
"Nevertheless, in the 2021
application cycle, Asian American students attending middle schools historically
underrepresented at TJ saw a sixfold increase in offers, and the number of low-income
Asian American admittees to TJ increased to 51 — from a mere one in 2020."

I think this is probably the result of the fact that if you have a quota for every school, a very large percentage of those from poor schools are going to be asian.

Honestly, I think a place like TJ should only care about academic ability and not about how hard it was for individual students to achieve that academic ability because being poor or or being hispanic isn't going to make the curriculum easier for you and unless they also change academic standards for you within TJ based on your income or skin color, the differences in academic ability are going to start to be apparent.

We have seen SOLs drop significantly.
We have seen PSATs drop by over 100 points.
We have seen grades drop precipitously with the math department sending out an email saying that this was the worst performance they have ever seen.
This year we will see SAT scores and then college admissions and it will become apparent that we have replaced a hierarchy of merit with a hierarchy of perceived oppression.

We are replacing the hierarchy of merit with the hierarchy of perceived oppression.
This is bad for society and civilization.

The claim was the admissions were changed because of test buying. That’s just not true. Not even a little bit was mentioned by the SB.

The problem was that people gamed admissions so that only students from the most affluent schools had a fair shot. There are some posters try to cover this inconvenient fact up.

Mostly because you're lying to cover up the fact that this change was driven by racism against asians.
Your comments about indians are pretty gross and racist.

Your claim doesn't add up when you consider the facts.

1) The largest demographic cohort at TJ is still Asian by a considerable margin.
2) The selection process is still race-blind, and it's a matter of law.
3) The data shows the most significant beneficiaries of the admission change was low-income Asian families.

Asian cohort went from 75% to roughly their share of the applicant pool (50% of the applicants were asian and 55% of the admitted students were asian)
The selection process is race blind but the process was changed from a merit based process to the current method in order to achieve racial balance.
There was a significant increase in poor asian kids. This was an inevitable result of selecting for poverty, culture makes an even greater difference at the low end of the ses scale. If they could have figured out a race neutral way to replace those 50 poor asian kids with 50 middle class black/hispanic kids, they would have.

If you average a few years before and a few years after it was more like 70% to 60%.


There are MORE Asian students at TJ since the admissions change than almost any other year in the school’s history.

Asian students still make up the majority of students. More than all other groups, combined.

Do you think merit is equally distributed by race?
There are cultural differences that generates more academic merit in some groups over others.
These cultural differences lead to the sort of distribution in SAT scores we see below.
https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-percentile-ranks-gender-race-ethnicity.pdf

In 2021 asian admissions dropped below 300 for the first time since 2011 when the asian population in the area was significantly lower.
I mean if you go back just a few more years to 2008, whites were the majority at TJ, so it seems silly to compare the effects of the new admissions standards with stats from decades ago. The last year before the new admissions process, 355 asians were admitted. In the most recent class it was 315. Asian admissions went down 40 despite an increase of 70 seats.

But the decrease in asian admissions is not the real problem. The real problem is that the population of qualified students went down by at least 50% and was replaced by seemingly random kids from the applicant pool.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I totally agree with that.
I thought I was responding to a claim that there was an increase in poor asian kids.

Yeah, noone honestly thinks that this change was because they thought that the tests were compromised.
That's just something racists say because they want to call asians cheaters.
It used to be the white supremacists saying this about jews.
Then it was salty racists saying this about east asians.
And now it's progressives saying this about indians.
It's all coming from the same ugly impulse in human nature.

They did think the tests were compromised. Tbh, you sound like you just came to Nova in the past year or two and are totally unaware of everything that happened before you came here. It's strange.

PP probably doesn't even live in VA. It's an election year.

I live in farifax and I will say that issues like this is what is turning Virginia into a swing state.
If there was any republican other than trump on the ballot, virginia would flip.

[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:On the other hand, there might be lots of less advantaged kids who are more likely to find solutions to future problems because they are better at original thinking because they haven’t had everything handed to them by parents who are financially well off and/or focused on education.

I was the kid who was a NMF from a less advantaged family, so I know that kids like that need more support from the schools than kids who get plenty of support at home. As a society, it would be too bad to lose out on all that those kids can do in the future.

I don't doubt that less advantaged kids can achieve a lot.
I was not wealthy growing up, if you want to argue about who grew up poorer, we can have that debate but I think I met the threshold for growing up poor.
My family was on government assistance from time to time.
I know what government cheese, government peanut butter and government canned meat taste like.
I can tell you the denomination of a food stamp by its color.
But I also think that poor kids can meet objective measures of academic merit as well as anyone else.

There are three selective high schools in NYC whose alumni have won a ton of math and science prizes including 15 nobel prizes, a handful of wolf, field, abel, prizes in math, and a bunch of others.
These schools range from 40% to 60% free/reduced lunch.
Admissions to these schools is based on a single test.
The SHSAT is more or less the same test that TJHSST used until recently.
In this day and age of test prep, the population at these schools are significantly poorer than TJ and even more asian.

We know how to give preferences for poverty while preserving merit but we didn't do that at TJ because that was not the purpose of the change.
The purpose of the change was to reduce the asian population and increase the population of kids of other skin colors.
If we tried to preserve preferences for poverty while preserving merit, we would have seen an even larger concentration of asians as poor asians take a disproportionate number of spots meant for poor kids.

Are you sure about that? I thought the change was to address the rampant test buying and allow those who can't afford that a level playing field.

That was never stated by any school board official that I’m aware of.

It was in the 4th circuit opinion to the c4tj lawsuit.

No it wasn’t.

I'm on your side but the appellate opinion states:
"Nevertheless, in the 2021
application cycle, Asian American students attending middle schools historically
underrepresented at TJ saw a sixfold increase in offers, and the number of low-income
Asian American admittees to TJ increased to 51 — from a mere one in 2020."

I think this is probably the result of the fact that if you have a quota for every school, a very large percentage of those from poor schools are going to be asian.

Honestly, I think a place like TJ should only care about academic ability and not about how hard it was for individual students to achieve that academic ability because being poor or or being hispanic isn't going to make the curriculum easier for you and unless they also change academic standards for you within TJ based on your income or skin color, the differences in academic ability are going to start to be apparent.

We have seen SOLs drop significantly.
We have seen PSATs drop by over 100 points.
We have seen grades drop precipitously with the math department sending out an email saying that this was the worst performance they have ever seen.
This year we will see SAT scores and then college admissions and it will become apparent that we have replaced a hierarchy of merit with a hierarchy of perceived oppression.

We are replacing the hierarchy of merit with the hierarchy of perceived oppression.
This is bad for society and civilization.

The claim was the admissions were changed because of test buying. That’s just not true. Not even a little bit was mentioned by the SB.

The problem was that people gamed admissions so that only students from the most affluent schools had a fair shot. There are some posters try to cover this inconvenient fact up.

Mostly because you're lying to cover up the fact that this change was driven by racism against asians.
Your comments about indians are pretty gross and racist.

Your claim doesn't add up when you consider the facts.

1) The largest demographic cohort at TJ is still Asian by a considerable margin.
2) The selection process is still race-blind, and it's a matter of law.
3) The data shows the most significant beneficiaries of the admission change was low-income Asian families.

Asian cohort went from 75% to roughly their share of the applicant pool (50% of the applicants were asian and 55% of the admitted students were asian)
The selection process is race blind but the process was changed from a merit based process to the current method in order to achieve racial balance.
There was a significant increase in poor asian kids. This was an inevitable result of selecting for poverty, culture makes an even greater difference at the low end of the ses scale. If they could have figured out a race neutral way to replace those 50 poor asian kids with 50 middle class black/hispanic kids, they would have.

Asian kids continue to have a higher acceptance rate than other groups.

The data also shows that Asian students were accepted at a higher rate than almost all other groups, aside from Hispanic students.

Asian 19%
Black 14%
Hispanic 21%
White 17%
Multiracial/Other* 13%
ALL 18%

But DISCRIMINATION!!! The changes to admission got students from schools other than the wealthy feeders apply because they'd now have a shot.

It's not the identity of the students that should matter.
It's the ability, the merit that should matter.
Poor kids are not incapable of outperforming wealthier kids.
Stuyvesant high school in NYC is 40% free/reduced lunch

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I totally agree with that.
I thought I was responding to a claim that there was an increase in poor asian kids.

Yeah, noone honestly thinks that this change was because they thought that the tests were compromised.
That's just something racists say because they want to call asians cheaters.
It used to be the white supremacists saying this about jews.
Then it was salty racists saying this about east asians.
And now it's progressives saying this about indians.
It's all coming from the same ugly impulse in human nature.

They did think the tests were compromised. Tbh, you sound like you just came to Nova in the past year or two and are totally unaware of everything that happened before you came here. It's strange.

PP probably doesn't even live in VA. It's an election year.

I live in farifax and I will say that issues like this is what is turning Virginia into a swing state.
If there was any republican other than trump on the ballot, virginia would flip.

I am moderate to left leaning all my life. Now I am going to vote for Trump. Fed up with woke nonsense.

[Anonymous]

Do you think merit is equally distributed by race?
There are cultural differences that generates more academic merit in some groups over others.

Once again, babies do not choose the parents they are born to. A child does not have more “merit” because of the “cultural differences” of the family they just happen to be born into.

As a community, we need a school like to TJ to bring in the kids who truly need the education provided there. We particularly need to find the kids who have not been born to families that “generate more academic merit.” Children born to families that encourage academics will do fine, no matter what their level of intelligence is. The bright children born to families that do not have the bandwidth to encourage academics are the kids who truly need a school like TJ.

Kids whose parents encourage academics already won the lottery. It’s the smart kids who didn’t win the lottery who truly need the education available at TJ.

[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:On the other hand, there might be lots of less advantaged kids who are more likely to find solutions to future problems because they are better at original thinking because they haven’t had everything handed to them by parents who are financially well off and/or focused on education.

I was the kid who was a NMF from a less advantaged family, so I know that kids like that need more support from the schools than kids who get plenty of support at home. As a society, it would be too bad to lose out on all that those kids can do in the future.

I don't doubt that less advantaged kids can achieve a lot.
I was not wealthy growing up, if you want to argue about who grew up poorer, we can have that debate but I think I met the threshold for growing up poor.
My family was on government assistance from time to time.
I know what government cheese, government peanut butter and government canned meat taste like.
I can tell you the denomination of a food stamp by its color.
But I also think that poor kids can meet objective measures of academic merit as well as anyone else.

There are three selective high schools in NYC whose alumni have won a ton of math and science prizes including 15 nobel prizes, a handful of wolf, field, abel, prizes in math, and a bunch of others.
These schools range from 40% to 60% free/reduced lunch.
Admissions to these schools is based on a single test.
The SHSAT is more or less the same test that TJHSST used until recently.
In this day and age of test prep, the population at these schools are significantly poorer than TJ and even more asian.

We know how to give preferences for poverty while preserving merit but we didn't do that at TJ because that was not the purpose of the change.
The purpose of the change was to reduce the asian population and increase the population of kids of other skin colors.
If we tried to preserve preferences for poverty while preserving merit, we would have seen an even larger concentration of asians as poor asians take a disproportionate number of spots meant for poor kids.

Are you sure about that? I thought the change was to address the rampant test buying and allow those who can't afford that a level playing field.

That was never stated by any school board official that I’m aware of.

It was in the 4th circuit opinion to the c4tj lawsuit.

No it wasn’t.

I'm on your side but the appellate opinion states:
"Nevertheless, in the 2021
application cycle, Asian American students attending middle schools historically
underrepresented at TJ saw a sixfold increase in offers, and the number of low-income
Asian American admittees to TJ increased to 51 — from a mere one in 2020."

I think this is probably the result of the fact that if you have a quota for every school, a very large percentage of those from poor schools are going to be asian.

Honestly, I think a place like TJ should only care about academic ability and not about how hard it was for individual students to achieve that academic ability because being poor or or being hispanic isn't going to make the curriculum easier for you and unless they also change academic standards for you within TJ based on your income or skin color, the differences in academic ability are going to start to be apparent.

We have seen SOLs drop significantly.
We have seen PSATs drop by over 100 points.
We have seen grades drop precipitously with the math department sending out an email saying that this was the worst performance they have ever seen.
This year we will see SAT scores and then college admissions and it will become apparent that we have replaced a hierarchy of merit with a hierarchy of perceived oppression.

We are replacing the hierarchy of merit with the hierarchy of perceived oppression.
This is bad for society and civilization.

The claim was the admissions were changed because of test buying. That’s just not true. Not even a little bit was mentioned by the SB.

The problem was that people gamed admissions so that only students from the most affluent schools had a fair shot. There are some posters try to cover this inconvenient fact up.

Mostly because you're lying to cover up the fact that this change was driven by racism against asians.
Your comments about indians are pretty gross and racist.

Your claim doesn't add up when you consider the facts.

1) The largest demographic cohort at TJ is still Asian by a considerable margin.
2) The selection process is still race-blind, and it's a matter of law.
3) The data shows the most significant beneficiaries of the admission change was low-income Asian families.

Asian cohort went from 75% to roughly their share of the applicant pool (50% of the applicants were asian and 55% of the admitted students were asian)
The selection process is race blind but the process was changed from a merit based process to the current method in order to achieve racial balance.
There was a significant increase in poor asian kids. This was an inevitable result of selecting for poverty, culture makes an even greater difference at the low end of the ses scale. If they could have figured out a race neutral way to replace those 50 poor asian kids with 50 middle class black/hispanic kids, they would have.

If you average a few years before and a few years after it was more like 70% to 60%.


There are MORE Asian students at TJ since the admissions change than almost any other year in the school’s history.

Asian students still make up the majority of students. More than all other groups, combined.

Do you think merit is equally distributed by race?
There are cultural differences that generates more academic merit in some groups over others.
These cultural differences lead to the sort of distribution in SAT scores we see below.
https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-percentile-ranks-gender-race-ethnicity.pdf

In 2021 asian admissions dropped below 300 for the first time since 2011 when the asian population in the area was significantly lower.
I mean if you go back just a few more years to 2008, whites were the majority at TJ, so it seems silly to compare the effects of the new admissions standards with stats from decades ago. The last year before the new admissions process, 355 asians were admitted. In the most recent class it was 315. Asian admissions went down 40 despite an increase of 70 seats.

But the decrease in asian admissions is not the real problem. The real problem is that the population of qualified students went down by at least 50% and was replaced by seemingly random kids from the applicant pool.

"Merit" is certainly not evenly distributed across HHI. When a huge portion of the admitted class comes from an expensive test prep company then you know something is wrong.

I was comparing stats from the 4 years prior to the chance and the 4 years after, not decades ago. There are, on average, 29 fewer Asian students (8% reduction) per admitted class after the change than before the admissions change (+/- 4 yrs).
asian -29 (-8%)
white +27 (+28%)
hispanic +30 (+207%)
black + 22 (+226%)
other +8 (+37%)




The averages are for the most recent four years - it was more like 70% to 60%.


There are MORE Asian students at TJ since the admissions change than almost any other year in the school’s history. Asian students still make up the majority of students. More than all other groups, combined.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
I totally agree with that.
I thought I was responding to a claim that there was an increase in poor asian kids.

Yeah, noone honestly thinks that this change was because they thought that the tests were compromised.
That's just something racists say because they want to call asians cheaters.
It used to be the white supremacists saying this about jews.
Then it was salty racists saying this about east asians.
And now it's progressives saying this about indians.
It's all coming from the same ugly impulse in human nature.

They did think the tests were compromised. Tbh, you sound like you just came to Nova in the past year or two and are totally unaware of everything that happened before you came here. It's strange.

PP probably doesn't even live in VA. It's an election year.

I live in farifax and I will say that issues like this is what is turning Virginia into a swing state.
If there was any republican other than trump on the ballot, virginia would flip.

I am moderate to left leaning all my life. Now I am going to vote for Trump. Fed up with woke nonsense.

The problem with trump is that he is every bit as racist as woke crowd.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Once again, if you can just buy your way into TJ, why aren't there more white kids there?

Because they aren’t as driven by national rankings? Not as interested in STEM or a grind HS experience?

It was well known in my affluent area that you could greatly improve chances of admissions by paying $$$ for prep classes.

It’s a choice that affluent families had.

20 years ago, TJ was majority white. Did they suddenly develop a disdain STEM and competitive high schools over the last 4 years? Or did they get crowded out?

Not so suddenly, but yes, there has been less push for kids to attend ultra competitive environments. The number of white applicants has been declining over the years.

I was a STEM kid at a competitive HS who went on to a T10 program. I intentionally did not encourage my kids to go to TJ.

I haven't looked at all years, but during previous thread I looked at the numbers for class of 2015.
56% of all Asian 8th graders in FCPS were eligible to apply to TJ
99% of them did apply

45% of all white 8th graders in FCPS were eligible to apply to TJ
49% of them did apply


FWIW, 92% of eligible black 8th graders in FCPS that year applied.

Here are the numbers.

Only half of eligible white students applied (vs 99% of Asian students). They don’t want the competitive environment.

I was a STEM kid at a competitive HS who went on to a T10 program. I intentionally did not encourage my kids to go to TJ.

The eligibility criteria were laughably low. I think the GPA requirement was like a 3.0.

There was a time when TJ was majority white, the white kids didn't leave, they got pushed out.
See this chart by the college board showing that 22% of asian kids geta 750 or higher on the math section of the SAT. That number if 4% for whites.
23% of asians get a 1400 SAT score or higher, that number if 7% for whites kids
9% of asians get a 1500 SAT score or higher, than number is 2% for white kids
White kids are clearly trying to get good SAT scores but they cannot seem to do so at the same rate as asians.

The white kids weren't foregoing tjhsst because they didn't want to deal with the competitive environment. They couldn't get in and they knew it so they didn't try.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Once again, if you can just buy your way into TJ, why aren't there more white kids there?

Because they aren’t as driven by national rankings? Not as interested in STEM or a grind HS experience?

It was well known in my affluent area that you could greatly improve chances of admissions by paying $$$ for prep classes.

It’s a choice that affluent families had.

20 years ago, TJ was majority white. Did they suddenly develop a disdain STEM and competitive high schools over the last 4 years? Or did they get crowded out?

Not so suddenly, but yes, there has been less push for kids to attend ultra competitive environments. The number of white applicants has been declining over the years.

I was a STEM kid at a competitive HS who went on to a T10 program. I intentionally did not encourage my kids to go to TJ.

I haven't looked at all years, but during previous thread I looked at the numbers for class of 2015.
56% of all Asian 8th graders in FCPS were eligible to apply to TJ
99% of them did apply

45% of all white 8th graders in FCPS were eligible to apply to TJ
49% of them did apply


FWIW, 92% of eligible black 8th graders in FCPS that year applied.

Here are the numbers.

Only half of eligible white students applied (vs 99% of Asian students). They don’t want the competitive environment.

I was a STEM kid at a competitive HS who went on to a T10 program. I intentionally did not encourage my kids to go to TJ.

The eligibility criteria were laughably low. I think the GPA requirement was like a 3.0.

There was a time when TJ was majority white, the white kids didn't leave, they got pushed out.
See this chart by the college board showing that 22% of asian kids geta 750 or higher on the math section of the SAT. That number if 4% for whites.
23% of asians get a 1400 SAT score or higher, that number if 7% for whites kids
9% of asians get a 1500 SAT score or higher, than number is 2% for white kids
White kids are clearly trying to get good SAT scores but they cannot seem to do so at the same rate as asians.

The white kids weren't foregoing tjhsst because they didn't want to deal with the competitive environment. They couldn't get in and they knew it so they didn't try.

The problem with your numbers is that SAT scores are highly affected by prep for the SAT. The SAT score is only one aspect that colleges consider during the application process and the fact that it is highly preppable is a fact that they keep in mind when looking at the applicant’s total package.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Do you think merit is equally distributed by race?
There are cultural differences that generates more academic merit in some groups over others.

Once again, babies do not choose the parents they are born to. A child does not have more “merit” because of the “cultural differences” of the family they just happen to be born into.

As a community, we need a school like to TJ to bring in the kids who truly need the education provided there. We particularly need to find the kids who have not been born to families that “generate more academic merit.” Children born to families that encourage academics will do fine, no matter what their level of intelligence is. The bright children born to families that do not have the bandwidth to encourage academics are the kids who truly need a school like TJ.

Kids whose parents encourage academics already won the lottery. It’s the smart kids who didn’t win the lottery who truly need the education available at TJ.

You are not replacing the worst rich students with the best poor students.
You are replacing 50-80% of the students selected for merit with a random cross section of the applicant pool.

Poor kids are not incapable of doing well on standardized tests.
Stuyvesant high school in NYC is 40% free reduced lunch.
If you want more poor kids, make the admissions more test based, not less test based.

You have a gross misconeption of what TJ is.
It is special ed for kids that are already accelerated, it's not a vehicle for becoming accelerated.
If the kid isn't accelerated by 8th grade, TJ isn't going to be much use to them, they will drown.

We know how to select for gifted poor kids, these changes were not designed to do that. These changes were designed to select a cross section of the applicant pool.

[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:On the other hand, there might be lots of less advantaged kids who are more likely to find solutions to future problems because they are better at original thinking because they haven’t had everything handed to them by parents who are financially well off and/or focused on education.

I was the kid who was a NMF from a less advantaged family, so I know that kids like that need more support from the schools than kids who get plenty of support at home. As a society, it would be too bad to lose out on all that those kids can do in the future.

I don't doubt that less advantaged kids can achieve a lot.
I was not wealthy growing up, if you want to argue about who grew up poorer, we can have that debate but I think I met the threshold for growing up poor.
My family was on government assistance from time to time.
I know what government cheese, government peanut butter and government canned meat taste like.
I can tell you the denomination of a food stamp by its color.
But I also think that poor kids can meet objective measures of academic merit as well as anyone else.

There are three selective high schools in NYC whose alumni have won a ton of math and science prizes including 15 nobel prizes, a handful of wolf, field, abel, prizes in math, and a bunch of others.
These schools range from 40% to 60% free/reduced lunch.
Admissions to these schools is based on a single test.
The SHSAT is more or less the same test that TJHSST used until recently.
In this day and age of test prep, the population at these schools are significantly poorer than TJ and even more asian.

We know how to give preferences for poverty while preserving merit but we didn't do that at TJ because that was not the purpose of the change.
The purpose of the change was to reduce the asian population and increase the population of kids of other skin colors.
If we tried to preserve preferences for poverty while preserving merit, we would have seen an even larger concentration of asians as poor asians take a disproportionate number of spots meant for poor kids.

Are you sure about that? I thought the change was to address the rampant test buying and allow those who can't afford that a level playing field.

That was never stated by any school board official that I’m aware of.

It was in the 4th circuit opinion to the c4tj lawsuit.

No it wasn’t.

I'm on your side but the appellate opinion states:
"Nevertheless, in the 2021
application cycle, Asian American students attending middle schools historically
underrepresented at TJ saw a sixfold increase in offers, and the number of low-income
Asian American admittees to TJ increased to 51 — from a mere one in 2020."

I think this is probably the result of the fact that if you have a quota for every school, a very large percentage of those from poor schools are going to be asian.

Honestly, I think a place like TJ should only care about academic ability and not about how hard it was for individual students to achieve that academic ability because being poor or or being hispanic isn't going to make the curriculum easier for you and unless they also change academic standards for you within TJ based on your income or skin color, the differences in academic ability are going to start to be apparent.

We have seen SOLs drop significantly.
We have seen PSATs drop by over 100 points.
We have seen grades drop precipitously with the math department sending out an email saying that this was the worst performance they have ever seen.
This year we will see SAT scores and then college admissions and it will become apparent that we have replaced a hierarchy of merit with a hierarchy of perceived oppression.

We are replacing the hierarchy of merit with the hierarchy of perceived oppression.
This is bad for society and civilization.

The claim was the admissions were changed because of test buying. That’s just not true. Not even a little bit was mentioned by the SB.

The problem was that people gamed admissions so that only students from the most affluent schools had a fair shot. There are some posters try to cover this inconvenient fact up.

Mostly because you're lying to cover up the fact that this change was driven by racism against asians.
Your comments about indians are pretty gross and racist.

Your claim doesn't add up when you consider the facts.

1) The largest demographic cohort at TJ is still Asian by a considerable margin.
2) The selection process is still race-blind, and it's a matter of law.
3) The data shows the most significant beneficiaries of the admission change was low-income Asian families.

Asian cohort went from 75% to roughly their share of the applicant pool (50% of the applicants were asian and 55% of the admitted students were asian)
The selection process is race blind but the process was changed from a merit based process to the current method in order to achieve racial balance.
There was a significant increase in poor asian kids. This was an inevitable result of selecting for poverty, culture makes an even greater difference at the low end of the ses scale. If they could have figured out a race neutral way to replace those 50 poor asian kids with 50 middle class black/hispanic kids, they would have.

If you average a few years before and a few years after it was more like 70% to 60%.


There are MORE Asian students at TJ since the admissions change than almost any other year in the school’s history.

Asian students still make up the majority of students. More than all other groups, combined.

Do you think merit is equally distributed by race?
There are cultural differences that generates more academic merit in some groups over others.
These cultural differences lead to the sort of distribution in SAT scores we see below.
https://satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/sat-percentile-ranks-gender-race-ethnicity.pdf

In 2021 asian admissions dropped below 300 for the first time since 2011 when the asian population in the area was significantly lower.
I mean if you go back just a few more years to 2008, whites were the majority at TJ, so it seems silly to compare the effects of the new admissions standards with stats from decades ago. The last year before the new admissions process, 355 asians were admitted. In the most recent class it was 315. Asian admissions went down 40 despite an increase of 70 seats.

But the decrease in asian admissions is not the real problem. The real problem is that the population of qualified students went down by at least 50% and was replaced by seemingly random kids from the applicant pool.

"Merit" is certainly not evenly distributed across HHI. When a huge portion of the admitted class comes from an expensive test prep company then you know something is wrong.

I was comparing stats from the 4 years prior to the chance and the 4 years after, not decades ago. There are, on average, 29 fewer Asian students (8% reduction) per admitted class after the change than before the admissions change (+/- 4 yrs).
asian -29 (-8%)
white +27 (+28%)
hispanic +30 (+207%)
black + 22 (+226%)
other +8 (+37%)




The averages are for the most recent four years - it was more like 70% to 60%.


There are MORE Asian students at TJ since the admissions change than almost any other year in the school’s history. Asian students still make up the majority of students. More than all other groups, combined.

There are more asians in fairfax than any other year in fairfax history.

What is important isn't the race of the student, it is the academic ability of the student and it's not as important that we lost 10% asians, what's important is that we have lost 80% of the best students and replaced them with a random cross section of the applicant pool. So again we see racism leads to inefficiency.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Once again, if you can just buy your way into TJ, why aren't there more white kids there?

Because they aren’t as driven by national rankings? Not as interested in STEM or a grind HS experience?

It was well known in my affluent area that you could greatly improve chances of admissions by paying $$$ for prep classes.

It’s a choice that affluent families had.

20 years ago, TJ was majority white. Did they suddenly develop a disdain STEM and competitive high schools over the last 4 years? Or did they get crowded out?

Not so suddenly, but yes, there has been less push for kids to attend ultra competitive environments. The number of white applicants has been declining over the years.

I was a STEM kid at a competitive HS who went on to a T10 program. I intentionally did not encourage my kids to go to TJ.

I haven't looked at all years, but during previous thread I looked at the numbers for class of 2015.
56% of all Asian 8th graders in FCPS were eligible to apply to TJ
99% of them did apply

45% of all white 8th graders in FCPS were eligible to apply to TJ
49% of them did apply


FWIW, 92% of eligible black 8th graders in FCPS that year applied.

Here are the numbers.

Only half of eligible white students applied (vs 99% of Asian students). They don’t want the competitive environment.

I was a STEM kid at a competitive HS who went on to a T10 program. I intentionally did not encourage my kids to go to TJ.

The eligibility criteria were laughably low. I think the GPA requirement was like a 3.0.

There was a time when TJ was majority white, the white kids didn't leave, they got pushed out.
See this chart by the college board showing that 22% of asian kids geta 750 or higher on the math section of the SAT. That number if 4% for whites.
23% of asians get a 1400 SAT score or higher, that number if 7% for whites kids
9% of asians get a 1500 SAT score or higher, than number is 2% for white kids
White kids are clearly trying to get good SAT scores but they cannot seem to do so at the same rate as asians.

The white kids weren't foregoing tjhsst because they didn't want to deal with the competitive environment. They couldn't get in and they knew it so they didn't try.

The problem with your numbers is that SAT scores are highly affected by prep for the SAT. The SAT score is only one aspect that colleges consider during the application process and the fact that it is highly preppable is a fact that they keep in mind when looking at the applicant’s total package.

The thing is there is peer reviewed research out of harvard saying that test scores do not hide some sort of income advantage.
They predict future academic performance equally regardless of family income.
A 1500 poor kid does not outperform a 1500 rich kid.
This is why all those selective schools are requiring test scores again.
Similarly a 1500 white kid does not outperform a 1500 asian kid.
https://opportunityinsights.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/SAT_ACT_on_Grades.pdf

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Do you think merit is equally distributed by race?
There are cultural differences that generates more academic merit in some groups over others.

Once again, babies do not choose the parents they are born to. A child does not have more “merit” because of the “cultural differences” of the family they just happen to be born into.

As a community, we need a school like to TJ to bring in the kids who truly need the education provided there. We particularly need to find the kids who have not been born to families that “generate more academic merit.” Children born to families that encourage academics will do fine, no matter what their level of intelligence is. The bright children born to families that do not have the bandwidth to encourage academics are the kids who truly need a school like TJ.

Kids whose parents encourage academics already won the lottery. It’s the smart kids who didn’t win the lottery who truly need the education available at TJ.

This is the hard work of equity. Some kids will be fine because their parents, but these other kids won’t because of their parents? They seem to fine enough to have a 3.9 in FCPS MS though but not fine enough so give them extra points and opportunities over these other kids.

Ultimately this is a prevailing thought process with regards to public school resources. It’s a charity. Ignore kids with good parents and cater to kids with bad parents. We see this in classrooms across the county, not just TJ admissions. This is equity at work.

That’s why many people want AAP and send their kids to centers even if they aren’t truly gifted. Otherwise they are ignored… because they’ll be fine.