Anonymous wrote:I am confused where this conversation is headed. The whole quota system at ANY level is stupid and discriminatory. The focus should be on how to bring everyone to the same level playing field, have a process that clearly recognizes the talent and not segregate people into different pools.
They've tried that for decades and it hasn't worked. Even assuming that it was possible, FCPS doesn't have anything approaching the budget that it would take to bring a kid with uneducated parents who don't care about education up to par with a kid whose parents hold graduate degrees and who expect their child to follow a similar path and know what boxes need to be checked along the way.
FCPS already does much more to elevate kids who are poor or are URMs than just about any other school district. Any FARMS or URM kid demonstrating any spark of anything will be placed in Young Scholars and receive enrichment therein. The URM and FARMS kids who impress anyone along the way will be placed in Level IV AAP and receive full-time AAP instruction through 8th grade. The equity report demonstrated that URM kids are being admitted into AAP with significantly lower test scores than white and Asian kids. This is fine, because it is helping give a leg up to the kids who generally are not privileged.
After 8 years of being supported and mentored through Young Scholars and another 6 years of full-time gifted instruction, if the kids have not managed to distinguish themselves in any way and have done nothing to suggest TJ worthiness, it's likely that they're just not very exceptional.
It will take time before these measures are fully realized, but you do have a point.
Let's not make the mistake, however, of presuming that most kids admitted under the previous process had managed to distinguish themselves in any way other than test scores that were buffered by prep that they received outside of the advanced school environment, however.
I would estimate that about half of the kids distinguished themselves at the very least as kids who need or would greatly benefit from TJ, and the other half are undistinguished prep kids. At least the prep kids have demonstrated that they're hard workers.
I'm surprised that the old system didn't filter out the prep kids. High SES Schoo + perfect grades + high test scores + participation in a lot of STEM activities but without notable achievements + tepid teacher recommendations should pretty clearly indicate an otherwise unimpressive prep kid.
I genuinely don't think that the teacher recommendations did a good job of allowing teachers to compare their students with one another. At a place like Carson or Longfellow, that would have made all the difference in the world.
The private schools do this and it helps greatly.
The problem is they aren't objective or a reliable metric.
Genuine question: why the obsession with objectivity? Selection processes are almost never objective in nature for any field.
Enough said...but why have an obsessions with objectivity when you can be subjectively racist. Indeed.
That's not an answer.
That is an answer. Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it easier to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Correction: Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it tougher to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Objectivity makes it easier to use your resources to game the system.
You can't really argue oppression when the class selected by the new admissions process was significantly less resourced than the classes before it.
It's not oppression to have an avenue to buy one's way into TJ removed.
Communist revolutions everywhere relied on expropriation of the rich people’s wealth and redistribution of the same to the less fortunate. There is a reason we oppose communism. Transfer of resources from the have to the have nots is good but it has to be done in a manner that is just and equitable - not by the power of the gun or the (temporary) power of the ballot.
That is why Nelson Mandela is great. He had every reason to kick the whites to the curb. He did not. He brought the community together and still achieved his goal.
Nelson Mandela being invoked to keep black kids out of a school may be a first.
Which black kid is being kept out of school? Can’t help your hyperbole?
There have been fewer Black students in the entire 35-year history of TJ than there were Asian students in the Class of 2024.
The new admissions process resulted in an increase of 70% in Black applications and over a 500% increase in Black students.
But Neson Mandela would apparently be against it, so no more black kids at TJ
Your attempt at humor is lost on me.
Mandela had the power and could have brute forced his way. He did not. He made sure change happened in a manner that was fair to all.
You won’t get it. You see the world as black, white and Asian. I see the world as fair and unfair, process-driven and arbitrary. Different perspective.
I agree with this poster. 1 year of artificially elevated number of Black kids does nothing for the long-term goal of increasing achievement of underrepresented student population. It also divides communities and may have a very detrimental long term effect. This is not a smart way to change the way we admit students to TJ. The way it was done indicates a quick political point to be gained. Kids were never at the center of the decision making process, just read the TJ papers.
Oh please. Any change would cause great hue and outcry. Someone upthread (or maybe on a different thread) proposed phasing in changes in the admissions process over several years. So that children would have time to curate their resumes properly, apparently. That certainly doesn't put children "at the center of the decision making process".
all the communities should have been invited to comment. Instead, FCPS school board rushed the process and excluded parents completely. Arrogant, to say the least. Now they are dealing with the fall out. I used to work in university admissions and any kind of change in the process involved 2 years of advanced notice. This allowed for a smooth implementation. Stop being defensive and clean up your mess. Present a transparent and fair process and we might just get behind you. Get down from your pedestal. We are the constituents and our taxes pay for your salaries. Please try to remember that you are supposed to represent us, the parents.
Please stop acting as though the fall-out would have been any different had parents been granted to ability to comment on the new process more than they already were. They did more than enough commenting throughout the process on platforms outside of School Board meetings.
Regardless of their motives, they were going to have to come up with a new process to account for the fact that doing an exam during the worst of COVID would have been impossible. 2 years notice wasn't realistic and the entire purpose of making the change was to limit the amount of "resume-crafting" or "process gaming" that would be possible.
The C4TJ folks were going to scream bloody murder on this no matter what the end result was if it created a more representative TJ population. They might have a stronger leg to stand on legally because the School Board couldn't get out of its own way as far as messaging and discipline, but it's not as if their anger is some sort of righteous response that is generated by some level of disrespect. This is about the zero-sum game of spaces at TJ and the continued ability to hoard opportunities away from less fortunate students.
Listen to yourself. Constantly making it sound like everything hinges on TJ admissions and that all will be right in the world once more kids from certain middle schools and fewer from others go there. Nothing else matters besides your petty political victories and the vindication you’d get if only you were able to stick it to the Asian families like you’d planned.
Just shut the damn school down. It’s not like it’s going to escape you eventually that the bigger “inequity” is that TJHHST exists at all.
That's not how they sound at all. They seem to care about a fair process that gives all children an equal chance just not those with means to afford expensive prep classes.
Very true and it is kind of nuts that the group that has benefited the most from these programs and continues to do so is angry because they want an unfair advantage over others.
Gaslighting much?
Apparently ^^
I mean it's ridiculous at this point. Everyone's seen the emails proving the racist motives, yet Brabrand's agitators are still out here pretending they care about fairness. People have been on here explaining exactly why students who are elite in math should be important to TJ, yet these agitators still act like its nothing.
The sad part is that these “reformers” claim the moral high ground - somehow this is being done to help the under-privileged. It is just pork barrel politics.
These progressives are doing such disservice to the Democrats. They think it is a “small group” that is agitated and vocal on these pages. They don’t know how much they have alienated the Asian American community. But then they underestimated the impact of education issues at the gubernatorial election.
It may not be a small group that is agitated and vocal, but it is a small group that is in any way negatively impacted.
I am certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that many of the folks whom the Coalition has conscripted into their unholy alliance actually stand to benefit from the same policy that they’re erroneously calling “racist”.
The largest racial group to benefit from the experience factors was - guess who? - ASIANS.
In a nutshell, this group that makes up 15%-20% of the county went from getting 70% of all TJ seats to 62% and feel this is obvious discrimination?
If you up think the end justifies the means then you are better off in a dictatorship. Whether the outcome was good, better or pristine does not matter - what is being questioned is the racist process used to get that outcome. Welcome to the conversation
DP. The "TJ papers" are pretty ugly. But when the process and the end result of changing the admissions is looked at, the new admissions aren't discriminatory. There are parts I think should be modified, but as they are, they are facially neutral. So even if the school board and superintendent wanted to make a policy that was explicitly discriminatory, they didn't.
Have you read the concurrence and dissent from the Fourth Circuit?
I did. I am not a lawyer and I admit my reasoning is more sentiment than the appreciation of legal nuances. The following from Judge Rushing’s dissent resonated with me.
Based on the undisputed evidence before it, the district court found that the Board pursued the policy change "at least in part 'because of,' and not merely 'in spite of,' its adverse effects" upon Asian Americans.Pers. Adm'r of Mass. v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). Specifically, the court determined that the Board acted with an impermissible racial purpose when it sought to decrease enrollment of "overrepresented" Asian-American students at TJ to better "reflect the racial composition" of the surrounding area. As the court explained, Board member discussions were permeated with racial balancing, as were its stated aims and its use of racial data to model proposed outcomes.
The stay was a procedural matter and I actually support it - there was no reason to penalize the class of 2026 for the follies of FCPS. The court ruled 2-1 for the stay. When the substantive matter comes up in front of the bench (or the full court) there is good chance that the egregious correspondence between the board members and Braband cannot be overlooked as a pointer to their motivations.
But again, independent of the courts decision, this matter will impact Asian American voting preferences. It started with the last gubernatorial election and will continue. Either the Dems do a course correction that translates into policy changes and rein in their subversive faux equity warriors or pay for it at the polls.
It's a Democratic-controlled court. Almost no chance of the district court decision not getting reversed on the merits.
Nah. It's 7 dems and 7 repubs with 1 vacancy. Likely to be affirmed on the merits.
It's crazy that people really think this will get more than a three judge panel decision. Less than 1% of en banc requests are granted by the 4th circuit and there is nothing very special about this case.
The same three judges or different ones? If the court is 7 - 7, why the three judge panel must have 2 democrats and 1 republican?
It will be reviewed by the same three judges. Additionally, there is no official designation among the judges for "Democrat" and "Republican" or "liberal" and "conservative" - when people make those assertions, they're merely highlighting which president appointed those judges in most cases. One of the "Republican" judges on the 4th was actually nominated by Clinton before being confirmed by Bush 43.
There isn't really any reason to think that this group will come to a different conclusion than they did in reviewing the stay order, for better or worse. C4TJ will have to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, which is EXTREMELY unlikely to grant certiorari because this is not a case that would move the needle with respect to affirmative action.
It will definitely move the needle with respect to affirmative action in k-12 for public schools.
It's also a very messy case that comes down to the weight to place on deliberations occurring when a process is debated. The supreme court cherry picks cases that set up perfectly and this isn't one.
Anonymous wrote:I am confused where this conversation is headed. The whole quota system at ANY level is stupid and discriminatory. The focus should be on how to bring everyone to the same level playing field, have a process that clearly recognizes the talent and not segregate people into different pools.
They've tried that for decades and it hasn't worked. Even assuming that it was possible, FCPS doesn't have anything approaching the budget that it would take to bring a kid with uneducated parents who don't care about education up to par with a kid whose parents hold graduate degrees and who expect their child to follow a similar path and know what boxes need to be checked along the way.
FCPS already does much more to elevate kids who are poor or are URMs than just about any other school district. Any FARMS or URM kid demonstrating any spark of anything will be placed in Young Scholars and receive enrichment therein. The URM and FARMS kids who impress anyone along the way will be placed in Level IV AAP and receive full-time AAP instruction through 8th grade. The equity report demonstrated that URM kids are being admitted into AAP with significantly lower test scores than white and Asian kids. This is fine, because it is helping give a leg up to the kids who generally are not privileged.
After 8 years of being supported and mentored through Young Scholars and another 6 years of full-time gifted instruction, if the kids have not managed to distinguish themselves in any way and have done nothing to suggest TJ worthiness, it's likely that they're just not very exceptional.
It will take time before these measures are fully realized, but you do have a point.
Let's not make the mistake, however, of presuming that most kids admitted under the previous process had managed to distinguish themselves in any way other than test scores that were buffered by prep that they received outside of the advanced school environment, however.
I would estimate that about half of the kids distinguished themselves at the very least as kids who need or would greatly benefit from TJ, and the other half are undistinguished prep kids. At least the prep kids have demonstrated that they're hard workers.
I'm surprised that the old system didn't filter out the prep kids. High SES Schoo + perfect grades + high test scores + participation in a lot of STEM activities but without notable achievements + tepid teacher recommendations should pretty clearly indicate an otherwise unimpressive prep kid.
I genuinely don't think that the teacher recommendations did a good job of allowing teachers to compare their students with one another. At a place like Carson or Longfellow, that would have made all the difference in the world.
The private schools do this and it helps greatly.
The problem is they aren't objective or a reliable metric.
Genuine question: why the obsession with objectivity? Selection processes are almost never objective in nature for any field.
Enough said...but why have an obsessions with objectivity when you can be subjectively racist. Indeed.
That's not an answer.
That is an answer. Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it easier to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Correction: Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it tougher to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Objectivity makes it easier to use your resources to game the system.
You can't really argue oppression when the class selected by the new admissions process was significantly less resourced than the classes before it.
It's not oppression to have an avenue to buy one's way into TJ removed.
Communist revolutions everywhere relied on expropriation of the rich people’s wealth and redistribution of the same to the less fortunate. There is a reason we oppose communism. Transfer of resources from the have to the have nots is good but it has to be done in a manner that is just and equitable - not by the power of the gun or the (temporary) power of the ballot.
That is why Nelson Mandela is great. He had every reason to kick the whites to the curb. He did not. He brought the community together and still achieved his goal.
Nelson Mandela being invoked to keep black kids out of a school may be a first.
Which black kid is being kept out of school? Can’t help your hyperbole?
There have been fewer Black students in the entire 35-year history of TJ than there were Asian students in the Class of 2024.
The new admissions process resulted in an increase of 70% in Black applications and over a 500% increase in Black students.
But Neson Mandela would apparently be against it, so no more black kids at TJ
Your attempt at humor is lost on me.
Mandela had the power and could have brute forced his way. He did not. He made sure change happened in a manner that was fair to all.
You won’t get it. You see the world as black, white and Asian. I see the world as fair and unfair, process-driven and arbitrary. Different perspective.
I agree with this poster. 1 year of artificially elevated number of Black kids does nothing for the long-term goal of increasing achievement of underrepresented student population. It also divides communities and may have a very detrimental long term effect. This is not a smart way to change the way we admit students to TJ. The way it was done indicates a quick political point to be gained. Kids were never at the center of the decision making process, just read the TJ papers.
Oh please. Any change would cause great hue and outcry. Someone upthread (or maybe on a different thread) proposed phasing in changes in the admissions process over several years. So that children would have time to curate their resumes properly, apparently. That certainly doesn't put children "at the center of the decision making process".
all the communities should have been invited to comment. Instead, FCPS school board rushed the process and excluded parents completely. Arrogant, to say the least. Now they are dealing with the fall out. I used to work in university admissions and any kind of change in the process involved 2 years of advanced notice. This allowed for a smooth implementation. Stop being defensive and clean up your mess. Present a transparent and fair process and we might just get behind you. Get down from your pedestal. We are the constituents and our taxes pay for your salaries. Please try to remember that you are supposed to represent us, the parents.
Please stop acting as though the fall-out would have been any different had parents been granted to ability to comment on the new process more than they already were. They did more than enough commenting throughout the process on platforms outside of School Board meetings.
Regardless of their motives, they were going to have to come up with a new process to account for the fact that doing an exam during the worst of COVID would have been impossible. 2 years notice wasn't realistic and the entire purpose of making the change was to limit the amount of "resume-crafting" or "process gaming" that would be possible.
The C4TJ folks were going to scream bloody murder on this no matter what the end result was if it created a more representative TJ population. They might have a stronger leg to stand on legally because the School Board couldn't get out of its own way as far as messaging and discipline, but it's not as if their anger is some sort of righteous response that is generated by some level of disrespect. This is about the zero-sum game of spaces at TJ and the continued ability to hoard opportunities away from less fortunate students.
Listen to yourself. Constantly making it sound like everything hinges on TJ admissions and that all will be right in the world once more kids from certain middle schools and fewer from others go there. Nothing else matters besides your petty political victories and the vindication you’d get if only you were able to stick it to the Asian families like you’d planned.
Just shut the damn school down. It’s not like it’s going to escape you eventually that the bigger “inequity” is that TJHHST exists at all.
That's not how they sound at all. They seem to care about a fair process that gives all children an equal chance just not those with means to afford expensive prep classes.
Very true and it is kind of nuts that the group that has benefited the most from these programs and continues to do so is angry because they want an unfair advantage over others.
Gaslighting much?
Apparently ^^
I mean it's ridiculous at this point. Everyone's seen the emails proving the racist motives, yet Brabrand's agitators are still out here pretending they care about fairness. People have been on here explaining exactly why students who are elite in math should be important to TJ, yet these agitators still act like its nothing.
The sad part is that these “reformers” claim the moral high ground - somehow this is being done to help the under-privileged. It is just pork barrel politics.
These progressives are doing such disservice to the Democrats. They think it is a “small group” that is agitated and vocal on these pages. They don’t know how much they have alienated the Asian American community. But then they underestimated the impact of education issues at the gubernatorial election.
It may not be a small group that is agitated and vocal, but it is a small group that is in any way negatively impacted.
I am certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that many of the folks whom the Coalition has conscripted into their unholy alliance actually stand to benefit from the same policy that they’re erroneously calling “racist”.
The largest racial group to benefit from the experience factors was - guess who? - ASIANS.
In a nutshell, this group that makes up 15%-20% of the county went from getting 70% of all TJ seats to 62% and feel this is obvious discrimination?
If you up think the end justifies the means then you are better off in a dictatorship. Whether the outcome was good, better or pristine does not matter - what is being questioned is the racist process used to get that outcome. Welcome to the conversation
DP. The "TJ papers" are pretty ugly. But when the process and the end result of changing the admissions is looked at, the new admissions aren't discriminatory. There are parts I think should be modified, but as they are, they are facially neutral. So even if the school board and superintendent wanted to make a policy that was explicitly discriminatory, they didn't.
Have you read the concurrence and dissent from the Fourth Circuit?
I did. I am not a lawyer and I admit my reasoning is more sentiment than the appreciation of legal nuances. The following from Judge Rushing’s dissent resonated with me.
Based on the undisputed evidence before it, the district court found that the Board pursued the policy change "at least in part 'because of,' and not merely 'in spite of,' its adverse effects" upon Asian Americans.Pers. Adm'r of Mass. v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). Specifically, the court determined that the Board acted with an impermissible racial purpose when it sought to decrease enrollment of "overrepresented" Asian-American students at TJ to better "reflect the racial composition" of the surrounding area. As the court explained, Board member discussions were permeated with racial balancing, as were its stated aims and its use of racial data to model proposed outcomes.
The stay was a procedural matter and I actually support it - there was no reason to penalize the class of 2026 for the follies of FCPS. The court ruled 2-1 for the stay. When the substantive matter comes up in front of the bench (or the full court) there is good chance that the egregious correspondence between the board members and Braband cannot be overlooked as a pointer to their motivations.
But again, independent of the courts decision, this matter will impact Asian American voting preferences. It started with the last gubernatorial election and will continue. Either the Dems do a course correction that translates into policy changes and rein in their subversive faux equity warriors or pay for it at the polls.
It's a Democratic-controlled court. Almost no chance of the district court decision not getting reversed on the merits.
Nah. It's 7 dems and 7 repubs with 1 vacancy. Likely to be affirmed on the merits.
It's crazy that people really think this will get more than a three judge panel decision. Less than 1% of en banc requests are granted by the 4th circuit and there is nothing very special about this case.
The same three judges or different ones? If the court is 7 - 7, why the three judge panel must have 2 democrats and 1 republican?
It will be reviewed by the same three judges. Additionally, there is no official designation among the judges for "Democrat" and "Republican" or "liberal" and "conservative" - when people make those assertions, they're merely highlighting which president appointed those judges in most cases. One of the "Republican" judges on the 4th was actually nominated by Clinton before being confirmed by Bush 43.
There isn't really any reason to think that this group will come to a different conclusion than they did in reviewing the stay order, for better or worse. C4TJ will have to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, which is EXTREMELY unlikely to grant certiorari because this is not a case that would move the needle with respect to affirmative action.
One can only hope the C4TJ has to foot the bill for wasting the courts time.
Anonymous wrote:I am confused where this conversation is headed. The whole quota system at ANY level is stupid and discriminatory. The focus should be on how to bring everyone to the same level playing field, have a process that clearly recognizes the talent and not segregate people into different pools.
They've tried that for decades and it hasn't worked. Even assuming that it was possible, FCPS doesn't have anything approaching the budget that it would take to bring a kid with uneducated parents who don't care about education up to par with a kid whose parents hold graduate degrees and who expect their child to follow a similar path and know what boxes need to be checked along the way.
FCPS already does much more to elevate kids who are poor or are URMs than just about any other school district. Any FARMS or URM kid demonstrating any spark of anything will be placed in Young Scholars and receive enrichment therein. The URM and FARMS kids who impress anyone along the way will be placed in Level IV AAP and receive full-time AAP instruction through 8th grade. The equity report demonstrated that URM kids are being admitted into AAP with significantly lower test scores than white and Asian kids. This is fine, because it is helping give a leg up to the kids who generally are not privileged.
After 8 years of being supported and mentored through Young Scholars and another 6 years of full-time gifted instruction, if the kids have not managed to distinguish themselves in any way and have done nothing to suggest TJ worthiness, it's likely that they're just not very exceptional.
It will take time before these measures are fully realized, but you do have a point.
Let's not make the mistake, however, of presuming that most kids admitted under the previous process had managed to distinguish themselves in any way other than test scores that were buffered by prep that they received outside of the advanced school environment, however.
I would estimate that about half of the kids distinguished themselves at the very least as kids who need or would greatly benefit from TJ, and the other half are undistinguished prep kids. At least the prep kids have demonstrated that they're hard workers.
I'm surprised that the old system didn't filter out the prep kids. High SES Schoo + perfect grades + high test scores + participation in a lot of STEM activities but without notable achievements + tepid teacher recommendations should pretty clearly indicate an otherwise unimpressive prep kid.
I genuinely don't think that the teacher recommendations did a good job of allowing teachers to compare their students with one another. At a place like Carson or Longfellow, that would have made all the difference in the world.
The private schools do this and it helps greatly.
The problem is they aren't objective or a reliable metric.
Genuine question: why the obsession with objectivity? Selection processes are almost never objective in nature for any field.
Enough said...but why have an obsessions with objectivity when you can be subjectively racist. Indeed.
That's not an answer.
That is an answer. Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it easier to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Correction: Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it tougher to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Objectivity makes it easier to use your resources to game the system.
You can't really argue oppression when the class selected by the new admissions process was significantly less resourced than the classes before it.
It's not oppression to have an avenue to buy one's way into TJ removed.
Communist revolutions everywhere relied on expropriation of the rich people’s wealth and redistribution of the same to the less fortunate. There is a reason we oppose communism. Transfer of resources from the have to the have nots is good but it has to be done in a manner that is just and equitable - not by the power of the gun or the (temporary) power of the ballot.
That is why Nelson Mandela is great. He had every reason to kick the whites to the curb. He did not. He brought the community together and still achieved his goal.
Nelson Mandela being invoked to keep black kids out of a school may be a first.
Which black kid is being kept out of school? Can’t help your hyperbole?
There have been fewer Black students in the entire 35-year history of TJ than there were Asian students in the Class of 2024.
The new admissions process resulted in an increase of 70% in Black applications and over a 500% increase in Black students.
But Neson Mandela would apparently be against it, so no more black kids at TJ
Your attempt at humor is lost on me.
Mandela had the power and could have brute forced his way. He did not. He made sure change happened in a manner that was fair to all.
You won’t get it. You see the world as black, white and Asian. I see the world as fair and unfair, process-driven and arbitrary. Different perspective.
I agree with this poster. 1 year of artificially elevated number of Black kids does nothing for the long-term goal of increasing achievement of underrepresented student population. It also divides communities and may have a very detrimental long term effect. This is not a smart way to change the way we admit students to TJ. The way it was done indicates a quick political point to be gained. Kids were never at the center of the decision making process, just read the TJ papers.
Oh please. Any change would cause great hue and outcry. Someone upthread (or maybe on a different thread) proposed phasing in changes in the admissions process over several years. So that children would have time to curate their resumes properly, apparently. That certainly doesn't put children "at the center of the decision making process".
all the communities should have been invited to comment. Instead, FCPS school board rushed the process and excluded parents completely. Arrogant, to say the least. Now they are dealing with the fall out. I used to work in university admissions and any kind of change in the process involved 2 years of advanced notice. This allowed for a smooth implementation. Stop being defensive and clean up your mess. Present a transparent and fair process and we might just get behind you. Get down from your pedestal. We are the constituents and our taxes pay for your salaries. Please try to remember that you are supposed to represent us, the parents.
Please stop acting as though the fall-out would have been any different had parents been granted to ability to comment on the new process more than they already were. They did more than enough commenting throughout the process on platforms outside of School Board meetings.
Regardless of their motives, they were going to have to come up with a new process to account for the fact that doing an exam during the worst of COVID would have been impossible. 2 years notice wasn't realistic and the entire purpose of making the change was to limit the amount of "resume-crafting" or "process gaming" that would be possible.
The C4TJ folks were going to scream bloody murder on this no matter what the end result was if it created a more representative TJ population. They might have a stronger leg to stand on legally because the School Board couldn't get out of its own way as far as messaging and discipline, but it's not as if their anger is some sort of righteous response that is generated by some level of disrespect. This is about the zero-sum game of spaces at TJ and the continued ability to hoard opportunities away from less fortunate students.
Listen to yourself. Constantly making it sound like everything hinges on TJ admissions and that all will be right in the world once more kids from certain middle schools and fewer from others go there. Nothing else matters besides your petty political victories and the vindication you’d get if only you were able to stick it to the Asian families like you’d planned.
Just shut the damn school down. It’s not like it’s going to escape you eventually that the bigger “inequity” is that TJHHST exists at all.
That's not how they sound at all. They seem to care about a fair process that gives all children an equal chance just not those with means to afford expensive prep classes.
Very true and it is kind of nuts that the group that has benefited the most from these programs and continues to do so is angry because they want an unfair advantage over others.
Gaslighting much?
Apparently ^^
I mean it's ridiculous at this point. Everyone's seen the emails proving the racist motives, yet Brabrand's agitators are still out here pretending they care about fairness. People have been on here explaining exactly why students who are elite in math should be important to TJ, yet these agitators still act like its nothing.
The sad part is that these “reformers” claim the moral high ground - somehow this is being done to help the under-privileged. It is just pork barrel politics.
These progressives are doing such disservice to the Democrats. They think it is a “small group” that is agitated and vocal on these pages. They don’t know how much they have alienated the Asian American community. But then they underestimated the impact of education issues at the gubernatorial election.
It may not be a small group that is agitated and vocal, but it is a small group that is in any way negatively impacted.
I am certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that many of the folks whom the Coalition has conscripted into their unholy alliance actually stand to benefit from the same policy that they’re erroneously calling “racist”.
The largest racial group to benefit from the experience factors was - guess who? - ASIANS.
In a nutshell, this group that makes up 15%-20% of the county went from getting 70% of all TJ seats to 62% and feel this is obvious discrimination?
If you up think the end justifies the means then you are better off in a dictatorship. Whether the outcome was good, better or pristine does not matter - what is being questioned is the racist process used to get that outcome. Welcome to the conversation
DP. The "TJ papers" are pretty ugly. But when the process and the end result of changing the admissions is looked at, the new admissions aren't discriminatory. There are parts I think should be modified, but as they are, they are facially neutral. So even if the school board and superintendent wanted to make a policy that was explicitly discriminatory, they didn't.
Have you read the concurrence and dissent from the Fourth Circuit?
I did. I am not a lawyer and I admit my reasoning is more sentiment than the appreciation of legal nuances. The following from Judge Rushing’s dissent resonated with me.
Based on the undisputed evidence before it, the district court found that the Board pursued the policy change "at least in part 'because of,' and not merely 'in spite of,' its adverse effects" upon Asian Americans.Pers. Adm'r of Mass. v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). Specifically, the court determined that the Board acted with an impermissible racial purpose when it sought to decrease enrollment of "overrepresented" Asian-American students at TJ to better "reflect the racial composition" of the surrounding area. As the court explained, Board member discussions were permeated with racial balancing, as were its stated aims and its use of racial data to model proposed outcomes.
The stay was a procedural matter and I actually support it - there was no reason to penalize the class of 2026 for the follies of FCPS. The court ruled 2-1 for the stay. When the substantive matter comes up in front of the bench (or the full court) there is good chance that the egregious correspondence between the board members and Braband cannot be overlooked as a pointer to their motivations.
But again, independent of the courts decision, this matter will impact Asian American voting preferences. It started with the last gubernatorial election and will continue. Either the Dems do a course correction that translates into policy changes and rein in their subversive faux equity warriors or pay for it at the polls.
It's a Democratic-controlled court. Almost no chance of the district court decision not getting reversed on the merits.
Nah. It's 7 dems and 7 repubs with 1 vacancy. Likely to be affirmed on the merits.
It's crazy that people really think this will get more than a three judge panel decision. Less than 1% of en banc requests are granted by the 4th circuit and there is nothing very special about this case.
The same three judges or different ones? If the court is 7 - 7, why the three judge panel must have 2 democrats and 1 republican?
It will be reviewed by the same three judges. Additionally, there is no official designation among the judges for "Democrat" and "Republican" or "liberal" and "conservative" - when people make those assertions, they're merely highlighting which president appointed those judges in most cases. One of the "Republican" judges on the 4th was actually nominated by Clinton before being confirmed by Bush 43.
There isn't really any reason to think that this group will come to a different conclusion than they did in reviewing the stay order, for better or worse. C4TJ will have to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, which is EXTREMELY unlikely to grant certiorari because this is not a case that would move the needle with respect to affirmative action.
One can only hope the C4TJ has to foot the bill for wasting the courts time.
Or maybe future school boards should do a better job.
Anonymous wrote:I am confused where this conversation is headed. The whole quota system at ANY level is stupid and discriminatory. The focus should be on how to bring everyone to the same level playing field, have a process that clearly recognizes the talent and not segregate people into different pools.
They've tried that for decades and it hasn't worked. Even assuming that it was possible, FCPS doesn't have anything approaching the budget that it would take to bring a kid with uneducated parents who don't care about education up to par with a kid whose parents hold graduate degrees and who expect their child to follow a similar path and know what boxes need to be checked along the way.
FCPS already does much more to elevate kids who are poor or are URMs than just about any other school district. Any FARMS or URM kid demonstrating any spark of anything will be placed in Young Scholars and receive enrichment therein. The URM and FARMS kids who impress anyone along the way will be placed in Level IV AAP and receive full-time AAP instruction through 8th grade. The equity report demonstrated that URM kids are being admitted into AAP with significantly lower test scores than white and Asian kids. This is fine, because it is helping give a leg up to the kids who generally are not privileged.
After 8 years of being supported and mentored through Young Scholars and another 6 years of full-time gifted instruction, if the kids have not managed to distinguish themselves in any way and have done nothing to suggest TJ worthiness, it's likely that they're just not very exceptional.
It will take time before these measures are fully realized, but you do have a point.
Let's not make the mistake, however, of presuming that most kids admitted under the previous process had managed to distinguish themselves in any way other than test scores that were buffered by prep that they received outside of the advanced school environment, however.
I would estimate that about half of the kids distinguished themselves at the very least as kids who need or would greatly benefit from TJ, and the other half are undistinguished prep kids. At least the prep kids have demonstrated that they're hard workers.
I'm surprised that the old system didn't filter out the prep kids. High SES Schoo + perfect grades + high test scores + participation in a lot of STEM activities but without notable achievements + tepid teacher recommendations should pretty clearly indicate an otherwise unimpressive prep kid.
I genuinely don't think that the teacher recommendations did a good job of allowing teachers to compare their students with one another. At a place like Carson or Longfellow, that would have made all the difference in the world.
The private schools do this and it helps greatly.
The problem is they aren't objective or a reliable metric.
Genuine question: why the obsession with objectivity? Selection processes are almost never objective in nature for any field.
Enough said...but why have an obsessions with objectivity when you can be subjectively racist. Indeed.
That's not an answer.
That is an answer. Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it easier to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Correction: Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it tougher to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Objectivity makes it easier to use your resources to game the system.
You can't really argue oppression when the class selected by the new admissions process was significantly less resourced than the classes before it.
It's not oppression to have an avenue to buy one's way into TJ removed.
Communist revolutions everywhere relied on expropriation of the rich people’s wealth and redistribution of the same to the less fortunate. There is a reason we oppose communism. Transfer of resources from the have to the have nots is good but it has to be done in a manner that is just and equitable - not by the power of the gun or the (temporary) power of the ballot.
That is why Nelson Mandela is great. He had every reason to kick the whites to the curb. He did not. He brought the community together and still achieved his goal.
Nelson Mandela being invoked to keep black kids out of a school may be a first.
Which black kid is being kept out of school? Can’t help your hyperbole?
There have been fewer Black students in the entire 35-year history of TJ than there were Asian students in the Class of 2024.
The new admissions process resulted in an increase of 70% in Black applications and over a 500% increase in Black students.
But Neson Mandela would apparently be against it, so no more black kids at TJ
Your attempt at humor is lost on me.
Mandela had the power and could have brute forced his way. He did not. He made sure change happened in a manner that was fair to all.
You won’t get it. You see the world as black, white and Asian. I see the world as fair and unfair, process-driven and arbitrary. Different perspective.
I agree with this poster. 1 year of artificially elevated number of Black kids does nothing for the long-term goal of increasing achievement of underrepresented student population. It also divides communities and may have a very detrimental long term effect. This is not a smart way to change the way we admit students to TJ. The way it was done indicates a quick political point to be gained. Kids were never at the center of the decision making process, just read the TJ papers.
Oh please. Any change would cause great hue and outcry. Someone upthread (or maybe on a different thread) proposed phasing in changes in the admissions process over several years. So that children would have time to curate their resumes properly, apparently. That certainly doesn't put children "at the center of the decision making process".
all the communities should have been invited to comment. Instead, FCPS school board rushed the process and excluded parents completely. Arrogant, to say the least. Now they are dealing with the fall out. I used to work in university admissions and any kind of change in the process involved 2 years of advanced notice. This allowed for a smooth implementation. Stop being defensive and clean up your mess. Present a transparent and fair process and we might just get behind you. Get down from your pedestal. We are the constituents and our taxes pay for your salaries. Please try to remember that you are supposed to represent us, the parents.
Please stop acting as though the fall-out would have been any different had parents been granted to ability to comment on the new process more than they already were. They did more than enough commenting throughout the process on platforms outside of School Board meetings.
Regardless of their motives, they were going to have to come up with a new process to account for the fact that doing an exam during the worst of COVID would have been impossible. 2 years notice wasn't realistic and the entire purpose of making the change was to limit the amount of "resume-crafting" or "process gaming" that would be possible.
The C4TJ folks were going to scream bloody murder on this no matter what the end result was if it created a more representative TJ population. They might have a stronger leg to stand on legally because the School Board couldn't get out of its own way as far as messaging and discipline, but it's not as if their anger is some sort of righteous response that is generated by some level of disrespect. This is about the zero-sum game of spaces at TJ and the continued ability to hoard opportunities away from less fortunate students.
Listen to yourself. Constantly making it sound like everything hinges on TJ admissions and that all will be right in the world once more kids from certain middle schools and fewer from others go there. Nothing else matters besides your petty political victories and the vindication you’d get if only you were able to stick it to the Asian families like you’d planned.
Just shut the damn school down. It’s not like it’s going to escape you eventually that the bigger “inequity” is that TJHHST exists at all.
That's not how they sound at all. They seem to care about a fair process that gives all children an equal chance just not those with means to afford expensive prep classes.
Very true and it is kind of nuts that the group that has benefited the most from these programs and continues to do so is angry because they want an unfair advantage over others.
Gaslighting much?
Apparently ^^
I mean it's ridiculous at this point. Everyone's seen the emails proving the racist motives, yet Brabrand's agitators are still out here pretending they care about fairness. People have been on here explaining exactly why students who are elite in math should be important to TJ, yet these agitators still act like its nothing.
The sad part is that these “reformers” claim the moral high ground - somehow this is being done to help the under-privileged. It is just pork barrel politics.
These progressives are doing such disservice to the Democrats. They think it is a “small group” that is agitated and vocal on these pages. They don’t know how much they have alienated the Asian American community. But then they underestimated the impact of education issues at the gubernatorial election.
It may not be a small group that is agitated and vocal, but it is a small group that is in any way negatively impacted.
I am certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that many of the folks whom the Coalition has conscripted into their unholy alliance actually stand to benefit from the same policy that they’re erroneously calling “racist”.
The largest racial group to benefit from the experience factors was - guess who? - ASIANS.
In a nutshell, this group that makes up 15%-20% of the county went from getting 70% of all TJ seats to 62% and feel this is obvious discrimination?
If you up think the end justifies the means then you are better off in a dictatorship. Whether the outcome was good, better or pristine does not matter - what is being questioned is the racist process used to get that outcome. Welcome to the conversation
DP. The "TJ papers" are pretty ugly. But when the process and the end result of changing the admissions is looked at, the new admissions aren't discriminatory. There are parts I think should be modified, but as they are, they are facially neutral. So even if the school board and superintendent wanted to make a policy that was explicitly discriminatory, they didn't.
Have you read the concurrence and dissent from the Fourth Circuit?
I did. I am not a lawyer and I admit my reasoning is more sentiment than the appreciation of legal nuances. The following from Judge Rushing’s dissent resonated with me.
Based on the undisputed evidence before it, the district court found that the Board pursued the policy change "at least in part 'because of,' and not merely 'in spite of,' its adverse effects" upon Asian Americans.Pers. Adm'r of Mass. v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). Specifically, the court determined that the Board acted with an impermissible racial purpose when it sought to decrease enrollment of "overrepresented" Asian-American students at TJ to better "reflect the racial composition" of the surrounding area. As the court explained, Board member discussions were permeated with racial balancing, as were its stated aims and its use of racial data to model proposed outcomes.
The stay was a procedural matter and I actually support it - there was no reason to penalize the class of 2026 for the follies of FCPS. The court ruled 2-1 for the stay. When the substantive matter comes up in front of the bench (or the full court) there is good chance that the egregious correspondence between the board members and Braband cannot be overlooked as a pointer to their motivations.
But again, independent of the courts decision, this matter will impact Asian American voting preferences. It started with the last gubernatorial election and will continue. Either the Dems do a course correction that translates into policy changes and rein in their subversive faux equity warriors or pay for it at the polls.
It's a Democratic-controlled court. Almost no chance of the district court decision not getting reversed on the merits.
Nah. It's 7 dems and 7 repubs with 1 vacancy. Likely to be affirmed on the merits.
It's crazy that people really think this will get more than a three judge panel decision. Less than 1% of en banc requests are granted by the 4th circuit and there is nothing very special about this case.
The same three judges or different ones? If the court is 7 - 7, why the three judge panel must have 2 democrats and 1 republican?
It will be reviewed by the same three judges. Additionally, there is no official designation among the judges for "Democrat" and "Republican" or "liberal" and "conservative" - when people make those assertions, they're merely highlighting which president appointed those judges in most cases. One of the "Republican" judges on the 4th was actually nominated by Clinton before being confirmed by Bush 43.
There isn't really any reason to think that this group will come to a different conclusion than they did in reviewing the stay order, for better or worse. C4TJ will have to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, which is EXTREMELY unlikely to grant certiorari because this is not a case that would move the needle with respect to affirmative action.
It will definitely move the needle with respect to affirmative action in k-12 for public schools.
It won't. Why would it?
Because it is obvious to all reasonable folks that the new process is racist and an absolute overreach of authority in the guise of equity. The perpetrators of this covert racism of course would like everyone to believe that they are saving the world.
The old process was even more racist
That may very well be the case. But the old process is not under legal scrutiny. The new process is. Defending the new process as less racist than the earlier one will not fly. The constitutional obligation of the School Board is to come up with a process that is not racist in the absolute. That is what they failed at.
You're wrong about this. The only way one can justify calling the new process - and the only way Hilton attempted to - is by comparing its results to the results of the old process.
The question of the School Board's malfeasance and intent is a separate issue, and one that deserves accountability. But when we're talking about what the eventual admissions process at TJ will look like, you have to evaluate this new process in a vacuum. And the case simply isn't strong enough here for the Supreme Court to take it up.
The Coalition's hope was to secure a favorable panel of judges in the Fourth Circuit, and that didn't happen. At this point, they'd be best served turning their attention to the 2023 School Board elections with an eye toward gaining traction for the Class of 2028.
Anonymous wrote:I am confused where this conversation is headed. The whole quota system at ANY level is stupid and discriminatory. The focus should be on how to bring everyone to the same level playing field, have a process that clearly recognizes the talent and not segregate people into different pools.
They've tried that for decades and it hasn't worked. Even assuming that it was possible, FCPS doesn't have anything approaching the budget that it would take to bring a kid with uneducated parents who don't care about education up to par with a kid whose parents hold graduate degrees and who expect their child to follow a similar path and know what boxes need to be checked along the way.
FCPS already does much more to elevate kids who are poor or are URMs than just about any other school district. Any FARMS or URM kid demonstrating any spark of anything will be placed in Young Scholars and receive enrichment therein. The URM and FARMS kids who impress anyone along the way will be placed in Level IV AAP and receive full-time AAP instruction through 8th grade. The equity report demonstrated that URM kids are being admitted into AAP with significantly lower test scores than white and Asian kids. This is fine, because it is helping give a leg up to the kids who generally are not privileged.
After 8 years of being supported and mentored through Young Scholars and another 6 years of full-time gifted instruction, if the kids have not managed to distinguish themselves in any way and have done nothing to suggest TJ worthiness, it's likely that they're just not very exceptional.
It will take time before these measures are fully realized, but you do have a point.
Let's not make the mistake, however, of presuming that most kids admitted under the previous process had managed to distinguish themselves in any way other than test scores that were buffered by prep that they received outside of the advanced school environment, however.
I would estimate that about half of the kids distinguished themselves at the very least as kids who need or would greatly benefit from TJ, and the other half are undistinguished prep kids. At least the prep kids have demonstrated that they're hard workers.
I'm surprised that the old system didn't filter out the prep kids. High SES Schoo + perfect grades + high test scores + participation in a lot of STEM activities but without notable achievements + tepid teacher recommendations should pretty clearly indicate an otherwise unimpressive prep kid.
I genuinely don't think that the teacher recommendations did a good job of allowing teachers to compare their students with one another. At a place like Carson or Longfellow, that would have made all the difference in the world.
The private schools do this and it helps greatly.
The problem is they aren't objective or a reliable metric.
Genuine question: why the obsession with objectivity? Selection processes are almost never objective in nature for any field.
Enough said...but why have an obsessions with objectivity when you can be subjectively racist. Indeed.
That's not an answer.
That is an answer. Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it easier to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Correction: Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it tougher to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Objectivity makes it easier to use your resources to game the system.
You can't really argue oppression when the class selected by the new admissions process was significantly less resourced than the classes before it.
It's not oppression to have an avenue to buy one's way into TJ removed.
Communist revolutions everywhere relied on expropriation of the rich people’s wealth and redistribution of the same to the less fortunate. There is a reason we oppose communism. Transfer of resources from the have to the have nots is good but it has to be done in a manner that is just and equitable - not by the power of the gun or the (temporary) power of the ballot.
That is why Nelson Mandela is great. He had every reason to kick the whites to the curb. He did not. He brought the community together and still achieved his goal.
Nelson Mandela being invoked to keep black kids out of a school may be a first.
Which black kid is being kept out of school? Can’t help your hyperbole?
There have been fewer Black students in the entire 35-year history of TJ than there were Asian students in the Class of 2024.
The new admissions process resulted in an increase of 70% in Black applications and over a 500% increase in Black students.
But Neson Mandela would apparently be against it, so no more black kids at TJ
Your attempt at humor is lost on me.
Mandela had the power and could have brute forced his way. He did not. He made sure change happened in a manner that was fair to all.
You won’t get it. You see the world as black, white and Asian. I see the world as fair and unfair, process-driven and arbitrary. Different perspective.
I agree with this poster. 1 year of artificially elevated number of Black kids does nothing for the long-term goal of increasing achievement of underrepresented student population. It also divides communities and may have a very detrimental long term effect. This is not a smart way to change the way we admit students to TJ. The way it was done indicates a quick political point to be gained. Kids were never at the center of the decision making process, just read the TJ papers.
Oh please. Any change would cause great hue and outcry. Someone upthread (or maybe on a different thread) proposed phasing in changes in the admissions process over several years. So that children would have time to curate their resumes properly, apparently. That certainly doesn't put children "at the center of the decision making process".
all the communities should have been invited to comment. Instead, FCPS school board rushed the process and excluded parents completely. Arrogant, to say the least. Now they are dealing with the fall out. I used to work in university admissions and any kind of change in the process involved 2 years of advanced notice. This allowed for a smooth implementation. Stop being defensive and clean up your mess. Present a transparent and fair process and we might just get behind you. Get down from your pedestal. We are the constituents and our taxes pay for your salaries. Please try to remember that you are supposed to represent us, the parents.
Please stop acting as though the fall-out would have been any different had parents been granted to ability to comment on the new process more than they already were. They did more than enough commenting throughout the process on platforms outside of School Board meetings.
Regardless of their motives, they were going to have to come up with a new process to account for the fact that doing an exam during the worst of COVID would have been impossible. 2 years notice wasn't realistic and the entire purpose of making the change was to limit the amount of "resume-crafting" or "process gaming" that would be possible.
The C4TJ folks were going to scream bloody murder on this no matter what the end result was if it created a more representative TJ population. They might have a stronger leg to stand on legally because the School Board couldn't get out of its own way as far as messaging and discipline, but it's not as if their anger is some sort of righteous response that is generated by some level of disrespect. This is about the zero-sum game of spaces at TJ and the continued ability to hoard opportunities away from less fortunate students.
Listen to yourself. Constantly making it sound like everything hinges on TJ admissions and that all will be right in the world once more kids from certain middle schools and fewer from others go there. Nothing else matters besides your petty political victories and the vindication you’d get if only you were able to stick it to the Asian families like you’d planned.
Just shut the damn school down. It’s not like it’s going to escape you eventually that the bigger “inequity” is that TJHHST exists at all.
That's not how they sound at all. They seem to care about a fair process that gives all children an equal chance just not those with means to afford expensive prep classes.
Very true and it is kind of nuts that the group that has benefited the most from these programs and continues to do so is angry because they want an unfair advantage over others.
Gaslighting much?
Apparently ^^
I mean it's ridiculous at this point. Everyone's seen the emails proving the racist motives, yet Brabrand's agitators are still out here pretending they care about fairness. People have been on here explaining exactly why students who are elite in math should be important to TJ, yet these agitators still act like its nothing.
The sad part is that these “reformers” claim the moral high ground - somehow this is being done to help the under-privileged. It is just pork barrel politics.
These progressives are doing such disservice to the Democrats. They think it is a “small group” that is agitated and vocal on these pages. They don’t know how much they have alienated the Asian American community. But then they underestimated the impact of education issues at the gubernatorial election.
It may not be a small group that is agitated and vocal, but it is a small group that is in any way negatively impacted.
I am certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that many of the folks whom the Coalition has conscripted into their unholy alliance actually stand to benefit from the same policy that they’re erroneously calling “racist”.
The largest racial group to benefit from the experience factors was - guess who? - ASIANS.
In a nutshell, this group that makes up 15%-20% of the county went from getting 70% of all TJ seats to 62% and feel this is obvious discrimination?
If you up think the end justifies the means then you are better off in a dictatorship. Whether the outcome was good, better or pristine does not matter - what is being questioned is the racist process used to get that outcome. Welcome to the conversation
DP. The "TJ papers" are pretty ugly. But when the process and the end result of changing the admissions is looked at, the new admissions aren't discriminatory. There are parts I think should be modified, but as they are, they are facially neutral. So even if the school board and superintendent wanted to make a policy that was explicitly discriminatory, they didn't.
Have you read the concurrence and dissent from the Fourth Circuit?
I did. I am not a lawyer and I admit my reasoning is more sentiment than the appreciation of legal nuances. The following from Judge Rushing’s dissent resonated with me.
Based on the undisputed evidence before it, the district court found that the Board pursued the policy change "at least in part 'because of,' and not merely 'in spite of,' its adverse effects" upon Asian Americans.Pers. Adm'r of Mass. v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). Specifically, the court determined that the Board acted with an impermissible racial purpose when it sought to decrease enrollment of "overrepresented" Asian-American students at TJ to better "reflect the racial composition" of the surrounding area. As the court explained, Board member discussions were permeated with racial balancing, as were its stated aims and its use of racial data to model proposed outcomes.
The stay was a procedural matter and I actually support it - there was no reason to penalize the class of 2026 for the follies of FCPS. The court ruled 2-1 for the stay. When the substantive matter comes up in front of the bench (or the full court) there is good chance that the egregious correspondence between the board members and Braband cannot be overlooked as a pointer to their motivations.
But again, independent of the courts decision, this matter will impact Asian American voting preferences. It started with the last gubernatorial election and will continue. Either the Dems do a course correction that translates into policy changes and rein in their subversive faux equity warriors or pay for it at the polls.
It's a Democratic-controlled court. Almost no chance of the district court decision not getting reversed on the merits.
Nah. It's 7 dems and 7 repubs with 1 vacancy. Likely to be affirmed on the merits.
It's crazy that people really think this will get more than a three judge panel decision. Less than 1% of en banc requests are granted by the 4th circuit and there is nothing very special about this case.
The same three judges or different ones? If the court is 7 - 7, why the three judge panel must have 2 democrats and 1 republican?
It will be reviewed by the same three judges. Additionally, there is no official designation among the judges for "Democrat" and "Republican" or "liberal" and "conservative" - when people make those assertions, they're merely highlighting which president appointed those judges in most cases. One of the "Republican" judges on the 4th was actually nominated by Clinton before being confirmed by Bush 43.
There isn't really any reason to think that this group will come to a different conclusion than they did in reviewing the stay order, for better or worse. C4TJ will have to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, which is EXTREMELY unlikely to grant certiorari because this is not a case that would move the needle with respect to affirmative action.
It will definitely move the needle with respect to affirmative action in k-12 for public schools.
It won't. Why would it?
Because it is obvious to all reasonable folks that the new process is racist and an absolute overreach of authority in the guise of equity. The perpetrators of this covert racism of course would like everyone to believe that they are saving the world.
The old process was even more racist
That may very well be the case. But the old process is not under legal scrutiny. The new process is. Defending the new process as less racist than the earlier one will not fly. The constitutional obligation of the School Board is to come up with a process that is not racist in the absolute. That is what they failed at.
You're wrong about this. The only way one can justify calling the new process - and the only way Hilton attempted to - is by comparing its results to the results of the old process.
The question of the School Board's malfeasance and intent is a separate issue, and one that deserves accountability. But when we're talking about what the eventual admissions process at TJ will look like, you have to evaluate this new process in a vacuum. And the case simply isn't strong enough here for the Supreme Court to take it up.
The Coalition's hope was to secure a favorable panel of judges in the Fourth Circuit, and that didn't happen. At this point, they'd be best served turning their attention to the 2023 School Board elections with an eye toward gaining traction for the Class of 2028.
Anonymous wrote:I am confused where this conversation is headed. The whole quota system at ANY level is stupid and discriminatory. The focus should be on how to bring everyone to the same level playing field, have a process that clearly recognizes the talent and not segregate people into different pools.
They've tried that for decades and it hasn't worked. Even assuming that it was possible, FCPS doesn't have anything approaching the budget that it would take to bring a kid with uneducated parents who don't care about education up to par with a kid whose parents hold graduate degrees and who expect their child to follow a similar path and know what boxes need to be checked along the way.
FCPS already does much more to elevate kids who are poor or are URMs than just about any other school district. Any FARMS or URM kid demonstrating any spark of anything will be placed in Young Scholars and receive enrichment therein. The URM and FARMS kids who impress anyone along the way will be placed in Level IV AAP and receive full-time AAP instruction through 8th grade. The equity report demonstrated that URM kids are being admitted into AAP with significantly lower test scores than white and Asian kids. This is fine, because it is helping give a leg up to the kids who generally are not privileged.
After 8 years of being supported and mentored through Young Scholars and another 6 years of full-time gifted instruction, if the kids have not managed to distinguish themselves in any way and have done nothing to suggest TJ worthiness, it's likely that they're just not very exceptional.
It will take time before these measures are fully realized, but you do have a point.
Let's not make the mistake, however, of presuming that most kids admitted under the previous process had managed to distinguish themselves in any way other than test scores that were buffered by prep that they received outside of the advanced school environment, however.
I would estimate that about half of the kids distinguished themselves at the very least as kids who need or would greatly benefit from TJ, and the other half are undistinguished prep kids. At least the prep kids have demonstrated that they're hard workers.
I'm surprised that the old system didn't filter out the prep kids. High SES Schoo + perfect grades + high test scores + participation in a lot of STEM activities but without notable achievements + tepid teacher recommendations should pretty clearly indicate an otherwise unimpressive prep kid.
I genuinely don't think that the teacher recommendations did a good job of allowing teachers to compare their students with one another. At a place like Carson or Longfellow, that would have made all the difference in the world.
The private schools do this and it helps greatly.
The problem is they aren't objective or a reliable metric.
Genuine question: why the obsession with objectivity? Selection processes are almost never objective in nature for any field.
Enough said...but why have an obsessions with objectivity when you can be subjectively racist. Indeed.
That's not an answer.
That is an answer. Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it easier to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Correction: Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it tougher to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Objectivity makes it easier to use your resources to game the system.
You can't really argue oppression when the class selected by the new admissions process was significantly less resourced than the classes before it.
It's not oppression to have an avenue to buy one's way into TJ removed.
Communist revolutions everywhere relied on expropriation of the rich people’s wealth and redistribution of the same to the less fortunate. There is a reason we oppose communism. Transfer of resources from the have to the have nots is good but it has to be done in a manner that is just and equitable - not by the power of the gun or the (temporary) power of the ballot.
That is why Nelson Mandela is great. He had every reason to kick the whites to the curb. He did not. He brought the community together and still achieved his goal.
Nelson Mandela being invoked to keep black kids out of a school may be a first.
Which black kid is being kept out of school? Can’t help your hyperbole?
There have been fewer Black students in the entire 35-year history of TJ than there were Asian students in the Class of 2024.
The new admissions process resulted in an increase of 70% in Black applications and over a 500% increase in Black students.
But Neson Mandela would apparently be against it, so no more black kids at TJ
Your attempt at humor is lost on me.
Mandela had the power and could have brute forced his way. He did not. He made sure change happened in a manner that was fair to all.
You won’t get it. You see the world as black, white and Asian. I see the world as fair and unfair, process-driven and arbitrary. Different perspective.
I agree with this poster. 1 year of artificially elevated number of Black kids does nothing for the long-term goal of increasing achievement of underrepresented student population. It also divides communities and may have a very detrimental long term effect. This is not a smart way to change the way we admit students to TJ. The way it was done indicates a quick political point to be gained. Kids were never at the center of the decision making process, just read the TJ papers.
Oh please. Any change would cause great hue and outcry. Someone upthread (or maybe on a different thread) proposed phasing in changes in the admissions process over several years. So that children would have time to curate their resumes properly, apparently. That certainly doesn't put children "at the center of the decision making process".
all the communities should have been invited to comment. Instead, FCPS school board rushed the process and excluded parents completely. Arrogant, to say the least. Now they are dealing with the fall out. I used to work in university admissions and any kind of change in the process involved 2 years of advanced notice. This allowed for a smooth implementation. Stop being defensive and clean up your mess. Present a transparent and fair process and we might just get behind you. Get down from your pedestal. We are the constituents and our taxes pay for your salaries. Please try to remember that you are supposed to represent us, the parents.
Please stop acting as though the fall-out would have been any different had parents been granted to ability to comment on the new process more than they already were. They did more than enough commenting throughout the process on platforms outside of School Board meetings.
Regardless of their motives, they were going to have to come up with a new process to account for the fact that doing an exam during the worst of COVID would have been impossible. 2 years notice wasn't realistic and the entire purpose of making the change was to limit the amount of "resume-crafting" or "process gaming" that would be possible.
The C4TJ folks were going to scream bloody murder on this no matter what the end result was if it created a more representative TJ population. They might have a stronger leg to stand on legally because the School Board couldn't get out of its own way as far as messaging and discipline, but it's not as if their anger is some sort of righteous response that is generated by some level of disrespect. This is about the zero-sum game of spaces at TJ and the continued ability to hoard opportunities away from less fortunate students.
Listen to yourself. Constantly making it sound like everything hinges on TJ admissions and that all will be right in the world once more kids from certain middle schools and fewer from others go there. Nothing else matters besides your petty political victories and the vindication you’d get if only you were able to stick it to the Asian families like you’d planned.
Just shut the damn school down. It’s not like it’s going to escape you eventually that the bigger “inequity” is that TJHHST exists at all.
That's not how they sound at all. They seem to care about a fair process that gives all children an equal chance just not those with means to afford expensive prep classes.
Very true and it is kind of nuts that the group that has benefited the most from these programs and continues to do so is angry because they want an unfair advantage over others.
Gaslighting much?
Apparently ^^
I mean it's ridiculous at this point. Everyone's seen the emails proving the racist motives, yet Brabrand's agitators are still out here pretending they care about fairness. People have been on here explaining exactly why students who are elite in math should be important to TJ, yet these agitators still act like its nothing.
The sad part is that these “reformers” claim the moral high ground - somehow this is being done to help the under-privileged. It is just pork barrel politics.
These progressives are doing such disservice to the Democrats. They think it is a “small group” that is agitated and vocal on these pages. They don’t know how much they have alienated the Asian American community. But then they underestimated the impact of education issues at the gubernatorial election.
It may not be a small group that is agitated and vocal, but it is a small group that is in any way negatively impacted.
I am certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that many of the folks whom the Coalition has conscripted into their unholy alliance actually stand to benefit from the same policy that they’re erroneously calling “racist”.
The largest racial group to benefit from the experience factors was - guess who? - ASIANS.
In a nutshell, this group that makes up 15%-20% of the county went from getting 70% of all TJ seats to 62% and feel this is obvious discrimination?
If you up think the end justifies the means then you are better off in a dictatorship. Whether the outcome was good, better or pristine does not matter - what is being questioned is the racist process used to get that outcome. Welcome to the conversation
DP. The "TJ papers" are pretty ugly. But when the process and the end result of changing the admissions is looked at, the new admissions aren't discriminatory. There are parts I think should be modified, but as they are, they are facially neutral. So even if the school board and superintendent wanted to make a policy that was explicitly discriminatory, they didn't.
Have you read the concurrence and dissent from the Fourth Circuit?
I did. I am not a lawyer and I admit my reasoning is more sentiment than the appreciation of legal nuances. The following from Judge Rushing’s dissent resonated with me.
Based on the undisputed evidence before it, the district court found that the Board pursued the policy change "at least in part 'because of,' and not merely 'in spite of,' its adverse effects" upon Asian Americans.Pers. Adm'r of Mass. v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). Specifically, the court determined that the Board acted with an impermissible racial purpose when it sought to decrease enrollment of "overrepresented" Asian-American students at TJ to better "reflect the racial composition" of the surrounding area. As the court explained, Board member discussions were permeated with racial balancing, as were its stated aims and its use of racial data to model proposed outcomes.
The stay was a procedural matter and I actually support it - there was no reason to penalize the class of 2026 for the follies of FCPS. The court ruled 2-1 for the stay. When the substantive matter comes up in front of the bench (or the full court) there is good chance that the egregious correspondence between the board members and Braband cannot be overlooked as a pointer to their motivations.
But again, independent of the courts decision, this matter will impact Asian American voting preferences. It started with the last gubernatorial election and will continue. Either the Dems do a course correction that translates into policy changes and rein in their subversive faux equity warriors or pay for it at the polls.
It's a Democratic-controlled court. Almost no chance of the district court decision not getting reversed on the merits.
Nah. It's 7 dems and 7 repubs with 1 vacancy. Likely to be affirmed on the merits.
It's crazy that people really think this will get more than a three judge panel decision. Less than 1% of en banc requests are granted by the 4th circuit and there is nothing very special about this case.
The same three judges or different ones? If the court is 7 - 7, why the three judge panel must have 2 democrats and 1 republican?
It will be reviewed by the same three judges. Additionally, there is no official designation among the judges for "Democrat" and "Republican" or "liberal" and "conservative" - when people make those assertions, they're merely highlighting which president appointed those judges in most cases. One of the "Republican" judges on the 4th was actually nominated by Clinton before being confirmed by Bush 43.
There isn't really any reason to think that this group will come to a different conclusion than they did in reviewing the stay order, for better or worse. C4TJ will have to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, which is EXTREMELY unlikely to grant certiorari because this is not a case that would move the needle with respect to affirmative action.
It will definitely move the needle with respect to affirmative action in k-12 for public schools.
It won't. Why would it?
Because it is obvious to all reasonable folks that the new process is racist and an absolute overreach of authority in the guise of equity. The perpetrators of this covert racism of course would like everyone to believe that they are saving the world.
The old process was even more racist
That may very well be the case. But the old process is not under legal scrutiny. The new process is. Defending the new process as less racist than the earlier one will not fly. The constitutional obligation of the School Board is to come up with a process that is not racist in the absolute. That is what they failed at.
You're wrong about this. The only way one can justify calling the new process - and the only way Hilton attempted to - is by comparing its results to the results of the old process.
The question of the School Board's malfeasance and intent is a separate issue, and one that deserves accountability. But when we're talking about what the eventual admissions process at TJ will look like, you have to evaluate this new process in a vacuum. And the case simply isn't strong enough here for the Supreme Court to take it up.
The Coalition's hope was to secure a favorable panel of judges in the Fourth Circuit, and that didn't happen. At this point, they'd be best served turning their attention to the 2023 School Board elections with an eye toward gaining traction for the Class of 2028.
Asians vs FCPS. Right now the Asians are up.
Not when it comes to TJ, they aren't. Once this new class is admitted and seated, half the school will have been admitted under the new process.
20% of the FCPS teachers must be Asian to properly reflect the student population. 20% of the County employees must be Asians to reflect the demographics of the County.
20% of the County contracts and grants must go to Asians and Asian groups. It is not equitable that virtually 0% goes to Asians and Asian groups.
Anonymous wrote:20% of the FCPS teachers must be Asian to properly reflect the student population. 20% of the County employees must be Asians to reflect the demographics of the County.
20% of the County contracts and grants must go to Asians and Asian groups. It is not equitable that virtually 0% goes to Asians and Asian groups.
And then only 20% of the student population at TJ should be Asian.
Anonymous wrote:I am confused where this conversation is headed. The whole quota system at ANY level is stupid and discriminatory. The focus should be on how to bring everyone to the same level playing field, have a process that clearly recognizes the talent and not segregate people into different pools.
They've tried that for decades and it hasn't worked. Even assuming that it was possible, FCPS doesn't have anything approaching the budget that it would take to bring a kid with uneducated parents who don't care about education up to par with a kid whose parents hold graduate degrees and who expect their child to follow a similar path and know what boxes need to be checked along the way.
FCPS already does much more to elevate kids who are poor or are URMs than just about any other school district. Any FARMS or URM kid demonstrating any spark of anything will be placed in Young Scholars and receive enrichment therein. The URM and FARMS kids who impress anyone along the way will be placed in Level IV AAP and receive full-time AAP instruction through 8th grade. The equity report demonstrated that URM kids are being admitted into AAP with significantly lower test scores than white and Asian kids. This is fine, because it is helping give a leg up to the kids who generally are not privileged.
After 8 years of being supported and mentored through Young Scholars and another 6 years of full-time gifted instruction, if the kids have not managed to distinguish themselves in any way and have done nothing to suggest TJ worthiness, it's likely that they're just not very exceptional.
It will take time before these measures are fully realized, but you do have a point.
Let's not make the mistake, however, of presuming that most kids admitted under the previous process had managed to distinguish themselves in any way other than test scores that were buffered by prep that they received outside of the advanced school environment, however.
I would estimate that about half of the kids distinguished themselves at the very least as kids who need or would greatly benefit from TJ, and the other half are undistinguished prep kids. At least the prep kids have demonstrated that they're hard workers.
I'm surprised that the old system didn't filter out the prep kids. High SES Schoo + perfect grades + high test scores + participation in a lot of STEM activities but without notable achievements + tepid teacher recommendations should pretty clearly indicate an otherwise unimpressive prep kid.
I genuinely don't think that the teacher recommendations did a good job of allowing teachers to compare their students with one another. At a place like Carson or Longfellow, that would have made all the difference in the world.
The private schools do this and it helps greatly.
The problem is they aren't objective or a reliable metric.
Genuine question: why the obsession with objectivity? Selection processes are almost never objective in nature for any field.
Enough said...but why have an obsessions with objectivity when you can be subjectively racist. Indeed.
That's not an answer.
That is an answer. Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it easier to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Correction: Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it tougher to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Objectivity makes it easier to use your resources to game the system.
You can't really argue oppression when the class selected by the new admissions process was significantly less resourced than the classes before it.
It's not oppression to have an avenue to buy one's way into TJ removed.
Communist revolutions everywhere relied on expropriation of the rich people’s wealth and redistribution of the same to the less fortunate. There is a reason we oppose communism. Transfer of resources from the have to the have nots is good but it has to be done in a manner that is just and equitable - not by the power of the gun or the (temporary) power of the ballot.
That is why Nelson Mandela is great. He had every reason to kick the whites to the curb. He did not. He brought the community together and still achieved his goal.
Nelson Mandela being invoked to keep black kids out of a school may be a first.
Which black kid is being kept out of school? Can’t help your hyperbole?
There have been fewer Black students in the entire 35-year history of TJ than there were Asian students in the Class of 2024.
The new admissions process resulted in an increase of 70% in Black applications and over a 500% increase in Black students.
But Neson Mandela would apparently be against it, so no more black kids at TJ
Your attempt at humor is lost on me.
Mandela had the power and could have brute forced his way. He did not. He made sure change happened in a manner that was fair to all.
You won’t get it. You see the world as black, white and Asian. I see the world as fair and unfair, process-driven and arbitrary. Different perspective.
I agree with this poster. 1 year of artificially elevated number of Black kids does nothing for the long-term goal of increasing achievement of underrepresented student population. It also divides communities and may have a very detrimental long term effect. This is not a smart way to change the way we admit students to TJ. The way it was done indicates a quick political point to be gained. Kids were never at the center of the decision making process, just read the TJ papers.
Oh please. Any change would cause great hue and outcry. Someone upthread (or maybe on a different thread) proposed phasing in changes in the admissions process over several years. So that children would have time to curate their resumes properly, apparently. That certainly doesn't put children "at the center of the decision making process".
all the communities should have been invited to comment. Instead, FCPS school board rushed the process and excluded parents completely. Arrogant, to say the least. Now they are dealing with the fall out. I used to work in university admissions and any kind of change in the process involved 2 years of advanced notice. This allowed for a smooth implementation. Stop being defensive and clean up your mess. Present a transparent and fair process and we might just get behind you. Get down from your pedestal. We are the constituents and our taxes pay for your salaries. Please try to remember that you are supposed to represent us, the parents.
Please stop acting as though the fall-out would have been any different had parents been granted to ability to comment on the new process more than they already were. They did more than enough commenting throughout the process on platforms outside of School Board meetings.
Regardless of their motives, they were going to have to come up with a new process to account for the fact that doing an exam during the worst of COVID would have been impossible. 2 years notice wasn't realistic and the entire purpose of making the change was to limit the amount of "resume-crafting" or "process gaming" that would be possible.
The C4TJ folks were going to scream bloody murder on this no matter what the end result was if it created a more representative TJ population. They might have a stronger leg to stand on legally because the School Board couldn't get out of its own way as far as messaging and discipline, but it's not as if their anger is some sort of righteous response that is generated by some level of disrespect. This is about the zero-sum game of spaces at TJ and the continued ability to hoard opportunities away from less fortunate students.
Listen to yourself. Constantly making it sound like everything hinges on TJ admissions and that all will be right in the world once more kids from certain middle schools and fewer from others go there. Nothing else matters besides your petty political victories and the vindication you’d get if only you were able to stick it to the Asian families like you’d planned.
Just shut the damn school down. It’s not like it’s going to escape you eventually that the bigger “inequity” is that TJHHST exists at all.
That's not how they sound at all. They seem to care about a fair process that gives all children an equal chance just not those with means to afford expensive prep classes.
Very true and it is kind of nuts that the group that has benefited the most from these programs and continues to do so is angry because they want an unfair advantage over others.
Gaslighting much?
Apparently ^^
I mean it's ridiculous at this point. Everyone's seen the emails proving the racist motives, yet Brabrand's agitators are still out here pretending they care about fairness. People have been on here explaining exactly why students who are elite in math should be important to TJ, yet these agitators still act like its nothing.
The sad part is that these “reformers” claim the moral high ground - somehow this is being done to help the under-privileged. It is just pork barrel politics.
These progressives are doing such disservice to the Democrats. They think it is a “small group” that is agitated and vocal on these pages. They don’t know how much they have alienated the Asian American community. But then they underestimated the impact of education issues at the gubernatorial election.
It may not be a small group that is agitated and vocal, but it is a small group that is in any way negatively impacted.
I am certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that many of the folks whom the Coalition has conscripted into their unholy alliance actually stand to benefit from the same policy that they’re erroneously calling “racist”.
The largest racial group to benefit from the experience factors was - guess who? - ASIANS.
In a nutshell, this group that makes up 15%-20% of the county went from getting 70% of all TJ seats to 62% and feel this is obvious discrimination?
If you up think the end justifies the means then you are better off in a dictatorship. Whether the outcome was good, better or pristine does not matter - what is being questioned is the racist process used to get that outcome. Welcome to the conversation
DP. The "TJ papers" are pretty ugly. But when the process and the end result of changing the admissions is looked at, the new admissions aren't discriminatory. There are parts I think should be modified, but as they are, they are facially neutral. So even if the school board and superintendent wanted to make a policy that was explicitly discriminatory, they didn't.
Have you read the concurrence and dissent from the Fourth Circuit?
I did. I am not a lawyer and I admit my reasoning is more sentiment than the appreciation of legal nuances. The following from Judge Rushing’s dissent resonated with me.
Based on the undisputed evidence before it, the district court found that the Board pursued the policy change "at least in part 'because of,' and not merely 'in spite of,' its adverse effects" upon Asian Americans.Pers. Adm'r of Mass. v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). Specifically, the court determined that the Board acted with an impermissible racial purpose when it sought to decrease enrollment of "overrepresented" Asian-American students at TJ to better "reflect the racial composition" of the surrounding area. As the court explained, Board member discussions were permeated with racial balancing, as were its stated aims and its use of racial data to model proposed outcomes.
The stay was a procedural matter and I actually support it - there was no reason to penalize the class of 2026 for the follies of FCPS. The court ruled 2-1 for the stay. When the substantive matter comes up in front of the bench (or the full court) there is good chance that the egregious correspondence between the board members and Braband cannot be overlooked as a pointer to their motivations.
But again, independent of the courts decision, this matter will impact Asian American voting preferences. It started with the last gubernatorial election and will continue. Either the Dems do a course correction that translates into policy changes and rein in their subversive faux equity warriors or pay for it at the polls.
It's a Democratic-controlled court. Almost no chance of the district court decision not getting reversed on the merits.
Nah. It's 7 dems and 7 repubs with 1 vacancy. Likely to be affirmed on the merits.
It's crazy that people really think this will get more than a three judge panel decision. Less than 1% of en banc requests are granted by the 4th circuit and there is nothing very special about this case.
The same three judges or different ones? If the court is 7 - 7, why the three judge panel must have 2 democrats and 1 republican?
It will be reviewed by the same three judges. Additionally, there is no official designation among the judges for "Democrat" and "Republican" or "liberal" and "conservative" - when people make those assertions, they're merely highlighting which president appointed those judges in most cases. One of the "Republican" judges on the 4th was actually nominated by Clinton before being confirmed by Bush 43.
There isn't really any reason to think that this group will come to a different conclusion than they did in reviewing the stay order, for better or worse. C4TJ will have to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, which is EXTREMELY unlikely to grant certiorari because this is not a case that would move the needle with respect to affirmative action.
It will definitely move the needle with respect to affirmative action in k-12 for public schools.
It won't. Why would it?
Because it is obvious to all reasonable folks that the new process is racist and an absolute overreach of authority in the guise of equity. The perpetrators of this covert racism of course would like everyone to believe that they are saving the world.
The old process was even more racist
That may very well be the case. But the old process is not under legal scrutiny. The new process is. Defending the new process as less racist than the earlier one will not fly. The constitutional obligation of the School Board is to come up with a process that is not racist in the absolute. That is what they failed at.
Anonymous wrote:I am confused where this conversation is headed. The whole quota system at ANY level is stupid and discriminatory. The focus should be on how to bring everyone to the same level playing field, have a process that clearly recognizes the talent and not segregate people into different pools.
They've tried that for decades and it hasn't worked. Even assuming that it was possible, FCPS doesn't have anything approaching the budget that it would take to bring a kid with uneducated parents who don't care about education up to par with a kid whose parents hold graduate degrees and who expect their child to follow a similar path and know what boxes need to be checked along the way.
FCPS already does much more to elevate kids who are poor or are URMs than just about any other school district. Any FARMS or URM kid demonstrating any spark of anything will be placed in Young Scholars and receive enrichment therein. The URM and FARMS kids who impress anyone along the way will be placed in Level IV AAP and receive full-time AAP instruction through 8th grade. The equity report demonstrated that URM kids are being admitted into AAP with significantly lower test scores than white and Asian kids. This is fine, because it is helping give a leg up to the kids who generally are not privileged.
After 8 years of being supported and mentored through Young Scholars and another 6 years of full-time gifted instruction, if the kids have not managed to distinguish themselves in any way and have done nothing to suggest TJ worthiness, it's likely that they're just not very exceptional.
It will take time before these measures are fully realized, but you do have a point.
Let's not make the mistake, however, of presuming that most kids admitted under the previous process had managed to distinguish themselves in any way other than test scores that were buffered by prep that they received outside of the advanced school environment, however.
I would estimate that about half of the kids distinguished themselves at the very least as kids who need or would greatly benefit from TJ, and the other half are undistinguished prep kids. At least the prep kids have demonstrated that they're hard workers.
I'm surprised that the old system didn't filter out the prep kids. High SES Schoo + perfect grades + high test scores + participation in a lot of STEM activities but without notable achievements + tepid teacher recommendations should pretty clearly indicate an otherwise unimpressive prep kid.
I genuinely don't think that the teacher recommendations did a good job of allowing teachers to compare their students with one another. At a place like Carson or Longfellow, that would have made all the difference in the world.
The private schools do this and it helps greatly.
The problem is they aren't objective or a reliable metric.
Genuine question: why the obsession with objectivity? Selection processes are almost never objective in nature for any field.
Enough said...but why have an obsessions with objectivity when you can be subjectively racist. Indeed.
That's not an answer.
That is an answer. Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it easier to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Correction: Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it tougher to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Objectivity makes it easier to use your resources to game the system.
You can't really argue oppression when the class selected by the new admissions process was significantly less resourced than the classes before it.
It's not oppression to have an avenue to buy one's way into TJ removed.
Communist revolutions everywhere relied on expropriation of the rich people’s wealth and redistribution of the same to the less fortunate. There is a reason we oppose communism. Transfer of resources from the have to the have nots is good but it has to be done in a manner that is just and equitable - not by the power of the gun or the (temporary) power of the ballot.
That is why Nelson Mandela is great. He had every reason to kick the whites to the curb. He did not. He brought the community together and still achieved his goal.
Nelson Mandela being invoked to keep black kids out of a school may be a first.
Which black kid is being kept out of school? Can’t help your hyperbole?
There have been fewer Black students in the entire 35-year history of TJ than there were Asian students in the Class of 2024.
The new admissions process resulted in an increase of 70% in Black applications and over a 500% increase in Black students.
But Neson Mandela would apparently be against it, so no more black kids at TJ
Your attempt at humor is lost on me.
Mandela had the power and could have brute forced his way. He did not. He made sure change happened in a manner that was fair to all.
You won’t get it. You see the world as black, white and Asian. I see the world as fair and unfair, process-driven and arbitrary. Different perspective.
I agree with this poster. 1 year of artificially elevated number of Black kids does nothing for the long-term goal of increasing achievement of underrepresented student population. It also divides communities and may have a very detrimental long term effect. This is not a smart way to change the way we admit students to TJ. The way it was done indicates a quick political point to be gained. Kids were never at the center of the decision making process, just read the TJ papers.
Oh please. Any change would cause great hue and outcry. Someone upthread (or maybe on a different thread) proposed phasing in changes in the admissions process over several years. So that children would have time to curate their resumes properly, apparently. That certainly doesn't put children "at the center of the decision making process".
all the communities should have been invited to comment. Instead, FCPS school board rushed the process and excluded parents completely. Arrogant, to say the least. Now they are dealing with the fall out. I used to work in university admissions and any kind of change in the process involved 2 years of advanced notice. This allowed for a smooth implementation. Stop being defensive and clean up your mess. Present a transparent and fair process and we might just get behind you. Get down from your pedestal. We are the constituents and our taxes pay for your salaries. Please try to remember that you are supposed to represent us, the parents.
Please stop acting as though the fall-out would have been any different had parents been granted to ability to comment on the new process more than they already were. They did more than enough commenting throughout the process on platforms outside of School Board meetings.
Regardless of their motives, they were going to have to come up with a new process to account for the fact that doing an exam during the worst of COVID would have been impossible. 2 years notice wasn't realistic and the entire purpose of making the change was to limit the amount of "resume-crafting" or "process gaming" that would be possible.
The C4TJ folks were going to scream bloody murder on this no matter what the end result was if it created a more representative TJ population. They might have a stronger leg to stand on legally because the School Board couldn't get out of its own way as far as messaging and discipline, but it's not as if their anger is some sort of righteous response that is generated by some level of disrespect. This is about the zero-sum game of spaces at TJ and the continued ability to hoard opportunities away from less fortunate students.
Listen to yourself. Constantly making it sound like everything hinges on TJ admissions and that all will be right in the world once more kids from certain middle schools and fewer from others go there. Nothing else matters besides your petty political victories and the vindication you’d get if only you were able to stick it to the Asian families like you’d planned.
Just shut the damn school down. It’s not like it’s going to escape you eventually that the bigger “inequity” is that TJHHST exists at all.
That's not how they sound at all. They seem to care about a fair process that gives all children an equal chance just not those with means to afford expensive prep classes.
Very true and it is kind of nuts that the group that has benefited the most from these programs and continues to do so is angry because they want an unfair advantage over others.
Gaslighting much?
Apparently ^^
I mean it's ridiculous at this point. Everyone's seen the emails proving the racist motives, yet Brabrand's agitators are still out here pretending they care about fairness. People have been on here explaining exactly why students who are elite in math should be important to TJ, yet these agitators still act like its nothing.
The sad part is that these “reformers” claim the moral high ground - somehow this is being done to help the under-privileged. It is just pork barrel politics.
These progressives are doing such disservice to the Democrats. They think it is a “small group” that is agitated and vocal on these pages. They don’t know how much they have alienated the Asian American community. But then they underestimated the impact of education issues at the gubernatorial election.
It may not be a small group that is agitated and vocal, but it is a small group that is in any way negatively impacted.
I am certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that many of the folks whom the Coalition has conscripted into their unholy alliance actually stand to benefit from the same policy that they’re erroneously calling “racist”.
The largest racial group to benefit from the experience factors was - guess who? - ASIANS.
In a nutshell, this group that makes up 15%-20% of the county went from getting 70% of all TJ seats to 62% and feel this is obvious discrimination?
If you up think the end justifies the means then you are better off in a dictatorship. Whether the outcome was good, better or pristine does not matter - what is being questioned is the racist process used to get that outcome. Welcome to the conversation
DP. The "TJ papers" are pretty ugly. But when the process and the end result of changing the admissions is looked at, the new admissions aren't discriminatory. There are parts I think should be modified, but as they are, they are facially neutral. So even if the school board and superintendent wanted to make a policy that was explicitly discriminatory, they didn't.
Have you read the concurrence and dissent from the Fourth Circuit?
I did. I am not a lawyer and I admit my reasoning is more sentiment than the appreciation of legal nuances. The following from Judge Rushing’s dissent resonated with me.
Based on the undisputed evidence before it, the district court found that the Board pursued the policy change "at least in part 'because of,' and not merely 'in spite of,' its adverse effects" upon Asian Americans.Pers. Adm'r of Mass. v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). Specifically, the court determined that the Board acted with an impermissible racial purpose when it sought to decrease enrollment of "overrepresented" Asian-American students at TJ to better "reflect the racial composition" of the surrounding area. As the court explained, Board member discussions were permeated with racial balancing, as were its stated aims and its use of racial data to model proposed outcomes.
The stay was a procedural matter and I actually support it - there was no reason to penalize the class of 2026 for the follies of FCPS. The court ruled 2-1 for the stay. When the substantive matter comes up in front of the bench (or the full court) there is good chance that the egregious correspondence between the board members and Braband cannot be overlooked as a pointer to their motivations.
But again, independent of the courts decision, this matter will impact Asian American voting preferences. It started with the last gubernatorial election and will continue. Either the Dems do a course correction that translates into policy changes and rein in their subversive faux equity warriors or pay for it at the polls.
It's a Democratic-controlled court. Almost no chance of the district court decision not getting reversed on the merits.
Nah. It's 7 dems and 7 repubs with 1 vacancy. Likely to be affirmed on the merits.
It's crazy that people really think this will get more than a three judge panel decision. Less than 1% of en banc requests are granted by the 4th circuit and there is nothing very special about this case.
The same three judges or different ones? If the court is 7 - 7, why the three judge panel must have 2 democrats and 1 republican?
It will be reviewed by the same three judges. Additionally, there is no official designation among the judges for "Democrat" and "Republican" or "liberal" and "conservative" - when people make those assertions, they're merely highlighting which president appointed those judges in most cases. One of the "Republican" judges on the 4th was actually nominated by Clinton before being confirmed by Bush 43.
There isn't really any reason to think that this group will come to a different conclusion than they did in reviewing the stay order, for better or worse. C4TJ will have to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, which is EXTREMELY unlikely to grant certiorari because this is not a case that would move the needle with respect to affirmative action.
It will definitely move the needle with respect to affirmative action in k-12 for public schools.
It won't. Why would it?
Because it is obvious to all reasonable folks that the new process is racist and an absolute overreach of authority in the guise of equity. The perpetrators of this covert racism of course would like everyone to believe that they are saving the world.
The old process was even more racist
That may very well be the case. But the old process is not under legal scrutiny. The new process is. Defending the new process as less racist than the earlier one will not fly. The constitutional obligation of the School Board is to come up with a process that is not racist in the absolute. That is what they failed at.
+1000
The appeals court made that analysis. And they concluded the opposite.
Anonymous wrote:I am confused where this conversation is headed. The whole quota system at ANY level is stupid and discriminatory. The focus should be on how to bring everyone to the same level playing field, have a process that clearly recognizes the talent and not segregate people into different pools.
They've tried that for decades and it hasn't worked. Even assuming that it was possible, FCPS doesn't have anything approaching the budget that it would take to bring a kid with uneducated parents who don't care about education up to par with a kid whose parents hold graduate degrees and who expect their child to follow a similar path and know what boxes need to be checked along the way.
FCPS already does much more to elevate kids who are poor or are URMs than just about any other school district. Any FARMS or URM kid demonstrating any spark of anything will be placed in Young Scholars and receive enrichment therein. The URM and FARMS kids who impress anyone along the way will be placed in Level IV AAP and receive full-time AAP instruction through 8th grade. The equity report demonstrated that URM kids are being admitted into AAP with significantly lower test scores than white and Asian kids. This is fine, because it is helping give a leg up to the kids who generally are not privileged.
After 8 years of being supported and mentored through Young Scholars and another 6 years of full-time gifted instruction, if the kids have not managed to distinguish themselves in any way and have done nothing to suggest TJ worthiness, it's likely that they're just not very exceptional.
It will take time before these measures are fully realized, but you do have a point.
Let's not make the mistake, however, of presuming that most kids admitted under the previous process had managed to distinguish themselves in any way other than test scores that were buffered by prep that they received outside of the advanced school environment, however.
I would estimate that about half of the kids distinguished themselves at the very least as kids who need or would greatly benefit from TJ, and the other half are undistinguished prep kids. At least the prep kids have demonstrated that they're hard workers.
I'm surprised that the old system didn't filter out the prep kids. High SES Schoo + perfect grades + high test scores + participation in a lot of STEM activities but without notable achievements + tepid teacher recommendations should pretty clearly indicate an otherwise unimpressive prep kid.
I genuinely don't think that the teacher recommendations did a good job of allowing teachers to compare their students with one another. At a place like Carson or Longfellow, that would have made all the difference in the world.
The private schools do this and it helps greatly.
The problem is they aren't objective or a reliable metric.
Genuine question: why the obsession with objectivity? Selection processes are almost never objective in nature for any field.
Enough said...but why have an obsessions with objectivity when you can be subjectively racist. Indeed.
That's not an answer.
That is an answer. Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it easier to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Correction: Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it tougher to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Objectivity makes it easier to use your resources to game the system.
You can't really argue oppression when the class selected by the new admissions process was significantly less resourced than the classes before it.
It's not oppression to have an avenue to buy one's way into TJ removed.
Communist revolutions everywhere relied on expropriation of the rich people’s wealth and redistribution of the same to the less fortunate. There is a reason we oppose communism. Transfer of resources from the have to the have nots is good but it has to be done in a manner that is just and equitable - not by the power of the gun or the (temporary) power of the ballot.
That is why Nelson Mandela is great. He had every reason to kick the whites to the curb. He did not. He brought the community together and still achieved his goal.
Nelson Mandela being invoked to keep black kids out of a school may be a first.
Which black kid is being kept out of school? Can’t help your hyperbole?
There have been fewer Black students in the entire 35-year history of TJ than there were Asian students in the Class of 2024.
The new admissions process resulted in an increase of 70% in Black applications and over a 500% increase in Black students.
But Neson Mandela would apparently be against it, so no more black kids at TJ
Your attempt at humor is lost on me.
Mandela had the power and could have brute forced his way. He did not. He made sure change happened in a manner that was fair to all.
You won’t get it. You see the world as black, white and Asian. I see the world as fair and unfair, process-driven and arbitrary. Different perspective.
I agree with this poster. 1 year of artificially elevated number of Black kids does nothing for the long-term goal of increasing achievement of underrepresented student population. It also divides communities and may have a very detrimental long term effect. This is not a smart way to change the way we admit students to TJ. The way it was done indicates a quick political point to be gained. Kids were never at the center of the decision making process, just read the TJ papers.
Oh please. Any change would cause great hue and outcry. Someone upthread (or maybe on a different thread) proposed phasing in changes in the admissions process over several years. So that children would have time to curate their resumes properly, apparently. That certainly doesn't put children "at the center of the decision making process".
all the communities should have been invited to comment. Instead, FCPS school board rushed the process and excluded parents completely. Arrogant, to say the least. Now they are dealing with the fall out. I used to work in university admissions and any kind of change in the process involved 2 years of advanced notice. This allowed for a smooth implementation. Stop being defensive and clean up your mess. Present a transparent and fair process and we might just get behind you. Get down from your pedestal. We are the constituents and our taxes pay for your salaries. Please try to remember that you are supposed to represent us, the parents.
Please stop acting as though the fall-out would have been any different had parents been granted to ability to comment on the new process more than they already were. They did more than enough commenting throughout the process on platforms outside of School Board meetings.
Regardless of their motives, they were going to have to come up with a new process to account for the fact that doing an exam during the worst of COVID would have been impossible. 2 years notice wasn't realistic and the entire purpose of making the change was to limit the amount of "resume-crafting" or "process gaming" that would be possible.
The C4TJ folks were going to scream bloody murder on this no matter what the end result was if it created a more representative TJ population. They might have a stronger leg to stand on legally because the School Board couldn't get out of its own way as far as messaging and discipline, but it's not as if their anger is some sort of righteous response that is generated by some level of disrespect. This is about the zero-sum game of spaces at TJ and the continued ability to hoard opportunities away from less fortunate students.
Listen to yourself. Constantly making it sound like everything hinges on TJ admissions and that all will be right in the world once more kids from certain middle schools and fewer from others go there. Nothing else matters besides your petty political victories and the vindication you’d get if only you were able to stick it to the Asian families like you’d planned.
Just shut the damn school down. It’s not like it’s going to escape you eventually that the bigger “inequity” is that TJHHST exists at all.
That's not how they sound at all. They seem to care about a fair process that gives all children an equal chance just not those with means to afford expensive prep classes.
Very true and it is kind of nuts that the group that has benefited the most from these programs and continues to do so is angry because they want an unfair advantage over others.
Gaslighting much?
Apparently ^^
I mean it's ridiculous at this point. Everyone's seen the emails proving the racist motives, yet Brabrand's agitators are still out here pretending they care about fairness. People have been on here explaining exactly why students who are elite in math should be important to TJ, yet these agitators still act like its nothing.
The sad part is that these “reformers” claim the moral high ground - somehow this is being done to help the under-privileged. It is just pork barrel politics.
These progressives are doing such disservice to the Democrats. They think it is a “small group” that is agitated and vocal on these pages. They don’t know how much they have alienated the Asian American community. But then they underestimated the impact of education issues at the gubernatorial election.
It may not be a small group that is agitated and vocal, but it is a small group that is in any way negatively impacted.
I am certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that many of the folks whom the Coalition has conscripted into their unholy alliance actually stand to benefit from the same policy that they’re erroneously calling “racist”.
The largest racial group to benefit from the experience factors was - guess who? - ASIANS.
In a nutshell, this group that makes up 15%-20% of the county went from getting 70% of all TJ seats to 62% and feel this is obvious discrimination?
If you up think the end justifies the means then you are better off in a dictatorship. Whether the outcome was good, better or pristine does not matter - what is being questioned is the racist process used to get that outcome. Welcome to the conversation
DP. The "TJ papers" are pretty ugly. But when the process and the end result of changing the admissions is looked at, the new admissions aren't discriminatory. There are parts I think should be modified, but as they are, they are facially neutral. So even if the school board and superintendent wanted to make a policy that was explicitly discriminatory, they didn't.
Have you read the concurrence and dissent from the Fourth Circuit?
I did. I am not a lawyer and I admit my reasoning is more sentiment than the appreciation of legal nuances. The following from Judge Rushing’s dissent resonated with me.
Based on the undisputed evidence before it, the district court found that the Board pursued the policy change "at least in part 'because of,' and not merely 'in spite of,' its adverse effects" upon Asian Americans.Pers. Adm'r of Mass. v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). Specifically, the court determined that the Board acted with an impermissible racial purpose when it sought to decrease enrollment of "overrepresented" Asian-American students at TJ to better "reflect the racial composition" of the surrounding area. As the court explained, Board member discussions were permeated with racial balancing, as were its stated aims and its use of racial data to model proposed outcomes.
The stay was a procedural matter and I actually support it - there was no reason to penalize the class of 2026 for the follies of FCPS. The court ruled 2-1 for the stay. When the substantive matter comes up in front of the bench (or the full court) there is good chance that the egregious correspondence between the board members and Braband cannot be overlooked as a pointer to their motivations.
But again, independent of the courts decision, this matter will impact Asian American voting preferences. It started with the last gubernatorial election and will continue. Either the Dems do a course correction that translates into policy changes and rein in their subversive faux equity warriors or pay for it at the polls.
It's a Democratic-controlled court. Almost no chance of the district court decision not getting reversed on the merits.
Nah. It's 7 dems and 7 repubs with 1 vacancy. Likely to be affirmed on the merits.
It's crazy that people really think this will get more than a three judge panel decision. Less than 1% of en banc requests are granted by the 4th circuit and there is nothing very special about this case.
The same three judges or different ones? If the court is 7 - 7, why the three judge panel must have 2 democrats and 1 republican?
It will be reviewed by the same three judges. Additionally, there is no official designation among the judges for "Democrat" and "Republican" or "liberal" and "conservative" - when people make those assertions, they're merely highlighting which president appointed those judges in most cases. One of the "Republican" judges on the 4th was actually nominated by Clinton before being confirmed by Bush 43.
There isn't really any reason to think that this group will come to a different conclusion than they did in reviewing the stay order, for better or worse. C4TJ will have to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, which is EXTREMELY unlikely to grant certiorari because this is not a case that would move the needle with respect to affirmative action.
It will definitely move the needle with respect to affirmative action in k-12 for public schools.
It won't. Why would it?
Because it is obvious to all reasonable folks that the new process is racist and an absolute overreach of authority in the guise of equity. The perpetrators of this covert racism of course would like everyone to believe that they are saving the world.
The old process was even more racist
That may very well be the case. But the old process is not under legal scrutiny. The new process is. Defending the new process as less racist than the earlier one will not fly. The constitutional obligation of the School Board is to come up with a process that is not racist in the absolute. That is what they failed at.
+1000
The appeals court made that analysis. And they concluded the opposite.
Not sure what race has to do with any of this. It's illegal to consider that in this country.
Anonymous wrote:I am confused where this conversation is headed. The whole quota system at ANY level is stupid and discriminatory. The focus should be on how to bring everyone to the same level playing field, have a process that clearly recognizes the talent and not segregate people into different pools.
They've tried that for decades and it hasn't worked. Even assuming that it was possible, FCPS doesn't have anything approaching the budget that it would take to bring a kid with uneducated parents who don't care about education up to par with a kid whose parents hold graduate degrees and who expect their child to follow a similar path and know what boxes need to be checked along the way.
FCPS already does much more to elevate kids who are poor or are URMs than just about any other school district. Any FARMS or URM kid demonstrating any spark of anything will be placed in Young Scholars and receive enrichment therein. The URM and FARMS kids who impress anyone along the way will be placed in Level IV AAP and receive full-time AAP instruction through 8th grade. The equity report demonstrated that URM kids are being admitted into AAP with significantly lower test scores than white and Asian kids. This is fine, because it is helping give a leg up to the kids who generally are not privileged.
After 8 years of being supported and mentored through Young Scholars and another 6 years of full-time gifted instruction, if the kids have not managed to distinguish themselves in any way and have done nothing to suggest TJ worthiness, it's likely that they're just not very exceptional.
It will take time before these measures are fully realized, but you do have a point.
Let's not make the mistake, however, of presuming that most kids admitted under the previous process had managed to distinguish themselves in any way other than test scores that were buffered by prep that they received outside of the advanced school environment, however.
I would estimate that about half of the kids distinguished themselves at the very least as kids who need or would greatly benefit from TJ, and the other half are undistinguished prep kids. At least the prep kids have demonstrated that they're hard workers.
I'm surprised that the old system didn't filter out the prep kids. High SES Schoo + perfect grades + high test scores + participation in a lot of STEM activities but without notable achievements + tepid teacher recommendations should pretty clearly indicate an otherwise unimpressive prep kid.
I genuinely don't think that the teacher recommendations did a good job of allowing teachers to compare their students with one another. At a place like Carson or Longfellow, that would have made all the difference in the world.
The private schools do this and it helps greatly.
The problem is they aren't objective or a reliable metric.
Genuine question: why the obsession with objectivity? Selection processes are almost never objective in nature for any field.
Enough said...but why have an obsessions with objectivity when you can be subjectively racist. Indeed.
That's not an answer.
That is an answer. Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it easier to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Correction: Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it tougher to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Objectivity makes it easier to use your resources to game the system.
You can't really argue oppression when the class selected by the new admissions process was significantly less resourced than the classes before it.
It's not oppression to have an avenue to buy one's way into TJ removed.
Communist revolutions everywhere relied on expropriation of the rich people’s wealth and redistribution of the same to the less fortunate. There is a reason we oppose communism. Transfer of resources from the have to the have nots is good but it has to be done in a manner that is just and equitable - not by the power of the gun or the (temporary) power of the ballot.
That is why Nelson Mandela is great. He had every reason to kick the whites to the curb. He did not. He brought the community together and still achieved his goal.
Nelson Mandela being invoked to keep black kids out of a school may be a first.
Which black kid is being kept out of school? Can’t help your hyperbole?
There have been fewer Black students in the entire 35-year history of TJ than there were Asian students in the Class of 2024.
The new admissions process resulted in an increase of 70% in Black applications and over a 500% increase in Black students.
But Neson Mandela would apparently be against it, so no more black kids at TJ
Your attempt at humor is lost on me.
Mandela had the power and could have brute forced his way. He did not. He made sure change happened in a manner that was fair to all.
You won’t get it. You see the world as black, white and Asian. I see the world as fair and unfair, process-driven and arbitrary. Different perspective.
I agree with this poster. 1 year of artificially elevated number of Black kids does nothing for the long-term goal of increasing achievement of underrepresented student population. It also divides communities and may have a very detrimental long term effect. This is not a smart way to change the way we admit students to TJ. The way it was done indicates a quick political point to be gained. Kids were never at the center of the decision making process, just read the TJ papers.
Oh please. Any change would cause great hue and outcry. Someone upthread (or maybe on a different thread) proposed phasing in changes in the admissions process over several years. So that children would have time to curate their resumes properly, apparently. That certainly doesn't put children "at the center of the decision making process".
all the communities should have been invited to comment. Instead, FCPS school board rushed the process and excluded parents completely. Arrogant, to say the least. Now they are dealing with the fall out. I used to work in university admissions and any kind of change in the process involved 2 years of advanced notice. This allowed for a smooth implementation. Stop being defensive and clean up your mess. Present a transparent and fair process and we might just get behind you. Get down from your pedestal. We are the constituents and our taxes pay for your salaries. Please try to remember that you are supposed to represent us, the parents.
Please stop acting as though the fall-out would have been any different had parents been granted to ability to comment on the new process more than they already were. They did more than enough commenting throughout the process on platforms outside of School Board meetings.
Regardless of their motives, they were going to have to come up with a new process to account for the fact that doing an exam during the worst of COVID would have been impossible. 2 years notice wasn't realistic and the entire purpose of making the change was to limit the amount of "resume-crafting" or "process gaming" that would be possible.
The C4TJ folks were going to scream bloody murder on this no matter what the end result was if it created a more representative TJ population. They might have a stronger leg to stand on legally because the School Board couldn't get out of its own way as far as messaging and discipline, but it's not as if their anger is some sort of righteous response that is generated by some level of disrespect. This is about the zero-sum game of spaces at TJ and the continued ability to hoard opportunities away from less fortunate students.
Listen to yourself. Constantly making it sound like everything hinges on TJ admissions and that all will be right in the world once more kids from certain middle schools and fewer from others go there. Nothing else matters besides your petty political victories and the vindication you’d get if only you were able to stick it to the Asian families like you’d planned.
Just shut the damn school down. It’s not like it’s going to escape you eventually that the bigger “inequity” is that TJHHST exists at all.
That's not how they sound at all. They seem to care about a fair process that gives all children an equal chance just not those with means to afford expensive prep classes.
Very true and it is kind of nuts that the group that has benefited the most from these programs and continues to do so is angry because they want an unfair advantage over others.
Gaslighting much?
Apparently ^^
I mean it's ridiculous at this point. Everyone's seen the emails proving the racist motives, yet Brabrand's agitators are still out here pretending they care about fairness. People have been on here explaining exactly why students who are elite in math should be important to TJ, yet these agitators still act like its nothing.
The sad part is that these “reformers” claim the moral high ground - somehow this is being done to help the under-privileged. It is just pork barrel politics.
These progressives are doing such disservice to the Democrats. They think it is a “small group” that is agitated and vocal on these pages. They don’t know how much they have alienated the Asian American community. But then they underestimated the impact of education issues at the gubernatorial election.
It may not be a small group that is agitated and vocal, but it is a small group that is in any way negatively impacted.
I am certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that many of the folks whom the Coalition has conscripted into their unholy alliance actually stand to benefit from the same policy that they’re erroneously calling “racist”.
The largest racial group to benefit from the experience factors was - guess who? - ASIANS.
In a nutshell, this group that makes up 15%-20% of the county went from getting 70% of all TJ seats to 62% and feel this is obvious discrimination?
If you up think the end justifies the means then you are better off in a dictatorship. Whether the outcome was good, better or pristine does not matter - what is being questioned is the racist process used to get that outcome. Welcome to the conversation
DP. The "TJ papers" are pretty ugly. But when the process and the end result of changing the admissions is looked at, the new admissions aren't discriminatory. There are parts I think should be modified, but as they are, they are facially neutral. So even if the school board and superintendent wanted to make a policy that was explicitly discriminatory, they didn't.
Have you read the concurrence and dissent from the Fourth Circuit?
I did. I am not a lawyer and I admit my reasoning is more sentiment than the appreciation of legal nuances. The following from Judge Rushing’s dissent resonated with me.
Based on the undisputed evidence before it, the district court found that the Board pursued the policy change "at least in part 'because of,' and not merely 'in spite of,' its adverse effects" upon Asian Americans.Pers. Adm'r of Mass. v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). Specifically, the court determined that the Board acted with an impermissible racial purpose when it sought to decrease enrollment of "overrepresented" Asian-American students at TJ to better "reflect the racial composition" of the surrounding area. As the court explained, Board member discussions were permeated with racial balancing, as were its stated aims and its use of racial data to model proposed outcomes.
The stay was a procedural matter and I actually support it - there was no reason to penalize the class of 2026 for the follies of FCPS. The court ruled 2-1 for the stay. When the substantive matter comes up in front of the bench (or the full court) there is good chance that the egregious correspondence between the board members and Braband cannot be overlooked as a pointer to their motivations.
But again, independent of the courts decision, this matter will impact Asian American voting preferences. It started with the last gubernatorial election and will continue. Either the Dems do a course correction that translates into policy changes and rein in their subversive faux equity warriors or pay for it at the polls.
It's a Democratic-controlled court. Almost no chance of the district court decision not getting reversed on the merits.
Nah. It's 7 dems and 7 repubs with 1 vacancy. Likely to be affirmed on the merits.
It's crazy that people really think this will get more than a three judge panel decision. Less than 1% of en banc requests are granted by the 4th circuit and there is nothing very special about this case.
The same three judges or different ones? If the court is 7 - 7, why the three judge panel must have 2 democrats and 1 republican?
It will be reviewed by the same three judges. Additionally, there is no official designation among the judges for "Democrat" and "Republican" or "liberal" and "conservative" - when people make those assertions, they're merely highlighting which president appointed those judges in most cases. One of the "Republican" judges on the 4th was actually nominated by Clinton before being confirmed by Bush 43.
There isn't really any reason to think that this group will come to a different conclusion than they did in reviewing the stay order, for better or worse. C4TJ will have to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, which is EXTREMELY unlikely to grant certiorari because this is not a case that would move the needle with respect to affirmative action.
It will definitely move the needle with respect to affirmative action in k-12 for public schools.
It won't. Why would it?
Because it is obvious to all reasonable folks that the new process is racist and an absolute overreach of authority in the guise of equity. The perpetrators of this covert racism of course would like everyone to believe that they are saving the world.
The old process was even more racist
That may very well be the case. But the old process is not under legal scrutiny. The new process is. Defending the new process as less racist than the earlier one will not fly. The constitutional obligation of the School Board is to come up with a process that is not racist in the absolute. That is what they failed at.
You're wrong about this. The only way one can justify calling the new process - and the only way Hilton attempted to - is by comparing its results to the results of the old process.
The question of the School Board's malfeasance and intent is a separate issue, and one that deserves accountability. But when we're talking about what the eventual admissions process at TJ will look like, you have to evaluate this new process in a vacuum. And the case simply isn't strong enough here for the Supreme Court to take it up.
The Coalition's hope was to secure a favorable panel of judges in the Fourth Circuit, and that didn't happen. At this point, they'd be best served turning their attention to the 2023 School Board elections with an eye toward gaining traction for the Class of 2028.
There seems to be a direct correlation between how smug and self-assured the anti-Asian, pro-reform, TJAAG crowd is and how often they turn out to be incorrect with their predictions.
Anonymous wrote:I am confused where this conversation is headed. The whole quota system at ANY level is stupid and discriminatory. The focus should be on how to bring everyone to the same level playing field, have a process that clearly recognizes the talent and not segregate people into different pools.
They've tried that for decades and it hasn't worked. Even assuming that it was possible, FCPS doesn't have anything approaching the budget that it would take to bring a kid with uneducated parents who don't care about education up to par with a kid whose parents hold graduate degrees and who expect their child to follow a similar path and know what boxes need to be checked along the way.
FCPS already does much more to elevate kids who are poor or are URMs than just about any other school district. Any FARMS or URM kid demonstrating any spark of anything will be placed in Young Scholars and receive enrichment therein. The URM and FARMS kids who impress anyone along the way will be placed in Level IV AAP and receive full-time AAP instruction through 8th grade. The equity report demonstrated that URM kids are being admitted into AAP with significantly lower test scores than white and Asian kids. This is fine, because it is helping give a leg up to the kids who generally are not privileged.
After 8 years of being supported and mentored through Young Scholars and another 6 years of full-time gifted instruction, if the kids have not managed to distinguish themselves in any way and have done nothing to suggest TJ worthiness, it's likely that they're just not very exceptional.
It will take time before these measures are fully realized, but you do have a point.
Let's not make the mistake, however, of presuming that most kids admitted under the previous process had managed to distinguish themselves in any way other than test scores that were buffered by prep that they received outside of the advanced school environment, however.
I would estimate that about half of the kids distinguished themselves at the very least as kids who need or would greatly benefit from TJ, and the other half are undistinguished prep kids. At least the prep kids have demonstrated that they're hard workers.
I'm surprised that the old system didn't filter out the prep kids. High SES Schoo + perfect grades + high test scores + participation in a lot of STEM activities but without notable achievements + tepid teacher recommendations should pretty clearly indicate an otherwise unimpressive prep kid.
I genuinely don't think that the teacher recommendations did a good job of allowing teachers to compare their students with one another. At a place like Carson or Longfellow, that would have made all the difference in the world.
The private schools do this and it helps greatly.
The problem is they aren't objective or a reliable metric.
Genuine question: why the obsession with objectivity? Selection processes are almost never objective in nature for any field.
Enough said...but why have an obsessions with objectivity when you can be subjectively racist. Indeed.
That's not an answer.
That is an answer. Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it easier to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Correction: Subjectivity is a power play. Objectivity makes it tougher to oppress. Hence the obsession.
Objectivity makes it easier to use your resources to game the system.
You can't really argue oppression when the class selected by the new admissions process was significantly less resourced than the classes before it.
It's not oppression to have an avenue to buy one's way into TJ removed.
Communist revolutions everywhere relied on expropriation of the rich people’s wealth and redistribution of the same to the less fortunate. There is a reason we oppose communism. Transfer of resources from the have to the have nots is good but it has to be done in a manner that is just and equitable - not by the power of the gun or the (temporary) power of the ballot.
That is why Nelson Mandela is great. He had every reason to kick the whites to the curb. He did not. He brought the community together and still achieved his goal.
Nelson Mandela being invoked to keep black kids out of a school may be a first.
Which black kid is being kept out of school? Can’t help your hyperbole?
There have been fewer Black students in the entire 35-year history of TJ than there were Asian students in the Class of 2024.
The new admissions process resulted in an increase of 70% in Black applications and over a 500% increase in Black students.
But Neson Mandela would apparently be against it, so no more black kids at TJ
Your attempt at humor is lost on me.
Mandela had the power and could have brute forced his way. He did not. He made sure change happened in a manner that was fair to all.
You won’t get it. You see the world as black, white and Asian. I see the world as fair and unfair, process-driven and arbitrary. Different perspective.
I agree with this poster. 1 year of artificially elevated number of Black kids does nothing for the long-term goal of increasing achievement of underrepresented student population. It also divides communities and may have a very detrimental long term effect. This is not a smart way to change the way we admit students to TJ. The way it was done indicates a quick political point to be gained. Kids were never at the center of the decision making process, just read the TJ papers.
Oh please. Any change would cause great hue and outcry. Someone upthread (or maybe on a different thread) proposed phasing in changes in the admissions process over several years. So that children would have time to curate their resumes properly, apparently. That certainly doesn't put children "at the center of the decision making process".
all the communities should have been invited to comment. Instead, FCPS school board rushed the process and excluded parents completely. Arrogant, to say the least. Now they are dealing with the fall out. I used to work in university admissions and any kind of change in the process involved 2 years of advanced notice. This allowed for a smooth implementation. Stop being defensive and clean up your mess. Present a transparent and fair process and we might just get behind you. Get down from your pedestal. We are the constituents and our taxes pay for your salaries. Please try to remember that you are supposed to represent us, the parents.
Please stop acting as though the fall-out would have been any different had parents been granted to ability to comment on the new process more than they already were. They did more than enough commenting throughout the process on platforms outside of School Board meetings.
Regardless of their motives, they were going to have to come up with a new process to account for the fact that doing an exam during the worst of COVID would have been impossible. 2 years notice wasn't realistic and the entire purpose of making the change was to limit the amount of "resume-crafting" or "process gaming" that would be possible.
The C4TJ folks were going to scream bloody murder on this no matter what the end result was if it created a more representative TJ population. They might have a stronger leg to stand on legally because the School Board couldn't get out of its own way as far as messaging and discipline, but it's not as if their anger is some sort of righteous response that is generated by some level of disrespect. This is about the zero-sum game of spaces at TJ and the continued ability to hoard opportunities away from less fortunate students.
Listen to yourself. Constantly making it sound like everything hinges on TJ admissions and that all will be right in the world once more kids from certain middle schools and fewer from others go there. Nothing else matters besides your petty political victories and the vindication you’d get if only you were able to stick it to the Asian families like you’d planned.
Just shut the damn school down. It’s not like it’s going to escape you eventually that the bigger “inequity” is that TJHHST exists at all.
That's not how they sound at all. They seem to care about a fair process that gives all children an equal chance just not those with means to afford expensive prep classes.
Very true and it is kind of nuts that the group that has benefited the most from these programs and continues to do so is angry because they want an unfair advantage over others.
Gaslighting much?
Apparently ^^
I mean it's ridiculous at this point. Everyone's seen the emails proving the racist motives, yet Brabrand's agitators are still out here pretending they care about fairness. People have been on here explaining exactly why students who are elite in math should be important to TJ, yet these agitators still act like its nothing.
The sad part is that these “reformers” claim the moral high ground - somehow this is being done to help the under-privileged. It is just pork barrel politics.
These progressives are doing such disservice to the Democrats. They think it is a “small group” that is agitated and vocal on these pages. They don’t know how much they have alienated the Asian American community. But then they underestimated the impact of education issues at the gubernatorial election.
It may not be a small group that is agitated and vocal, but it is a small group that is in any way negatively impacted.
I am certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that many of the folks whom the Coalition has conscripted into their unholy alliance actually stand to benefit from the same policy that they’re erroneously calling “racist”.
The largest racial group to benefit from the experience factors was - guess who? - ASIANS.
In a nutshell, this group that makes up 15%-20% of the county went from getting 70% of all TJ seats to 62% and feel this is obvious discrimination?
If you up think the end justifies the means then you are better off in a dictatorship. Whether the outcome was good, better or pristine does not matter - what is being questioned is the racist process used to get that outcome. Welcome to the conversation
DP. The "TJ papers" are pretty ugly. But when the process and the end result of changing the admissions is looked at, the new admissions aren't discriminatory. There are parts I think should be modified, but as they are, they are facially neutral. So even if the school board and superintendent wanted to make a policy that was explicitly discriminatory, they didn't.
Have you read the concurrence and dissent from the Fourth Circuit?
I did. I am not a lawyer and I admit my reasoning is more sentiment than the appreciation of legal nuances. The following from Judge Rushing’s dissent resonated with me.
Based on the undisputed evidence before it, the district court found that the Board pursued the policy change "at least in part 'because of,' and not merely 'in spite of,' its adverse effects" upon Asian Americans.Pers. Adm'r of Mass. v. Feeney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). Specifically, the court determined that the Board acted with an impermissible racial purpose when it sought to decrease enrollment of "overrepresented" Asian-American students at TJ to better "reflect the racial composition" of the surrounding area. As the court explained, Board member discussions were permeated with racial balancing, as were its stated aims and its use of racial data to model proposed outcomes.
The stay was a procedural matter and I actually support it - there was no reason to penalize the class of 2026 for the follies of FCPS. The court ruled 2-1 for the stay. When the substantive matter comes up in front of the bench (or the full court) there is good chance that the egregious correspondence between the board members and Braband cannot be overlooked as a pointer to their motivations.
But again, independent of the courts decision, this matter will impact Asian American voting preferences. It started with the last gubernatorial election and will continue. Either the Dems do a course correction that translates into policy changes and rein in their subversive faux equity warriors or pay for it at the polls.
It's a Democratic-controlled court. Almost no chance of the district court decision not getting reversed on the merits.
Nah. It's 7 dems and 7 repubs with 1 vacancy. Likely to be affirmed on the merits.
It's crazy that people really think this will get more than a three judge panel decision. Less than 1% of en banc requests are granted by the 4th circuit and there is nothing very special about this case.
The same three judges or different ones? If the court is 7 - 7, why the three judge panel must have 2 democrats and 1 republican?
It will be reviewed by the same three judges. Additionally, there is no official designation among the judges for "Democrat" and "Republican" or "liberal" and "conservative" - when people make those assertions, they're merely highlighting which president appointed those judges in most cases. One of the "Republican" judges on the 4th was actually nominated by Clinton before being confirmed by Bush 43.
There isn't really any reason to think that this group will come to a different conclusion than they did in reviewing the stay order, for better or worse. C4TJ will have to appeal the case to the Supreme Court, which is EXTREMELY unlikely to grant certiorari because this is not a case that would move the needle with respect to affirmative action.
It will definitely move the needle with respect to affirmative action in k-12 for public schools.
It won't. Why would it?
Because it is obvious to all reasonable folks that the new process is racist and an absolute overreach of authority in the guise of equity. The perpetrators of this covert racism of course would like everyone to believe that they are saving the world.
The old process was even more racist
That may very well be the case. But the old process is not under legal scrutiny. The new process is. Defending the new process as less racist than the earlier one will not fly. The constitutional obligation of the School Board is to come up with a process that is not racist in the absolute. That is what they failed at.
You're wrong about this. The only way one can justify calling the new process - and the only way Hilton attempted to - is by comparing its results to the results of the old process.
The question of the School Board's malfeasance and intent is a separate issue, and one that deserves accountability. But when we're talking about what the eventual admissions process at TJ will look like, you have to evaluate this new process in a vacuum. And the case simply isn't strong enough here for the Supreme Court to take it up.
The Coalition's hope was to secure a favorable panel of judges in the Fourth Circuit, and that didn't happen. At this point, they'd be best served turning their attention to the 2023 School Board elections with an eye toward gaining traction for the Class of 2028.
No, that is not how this works. Intent is always looked at in strict scrutiny cases where individual constitutional rights are violated through administrative action.
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