Washington Post Article On Freshmen Admitted Under New Admissions Process

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:25% low income? Oof, this is going to shift the schools budget from academics to social and welfare needs, you want to avoid schools with farms in the double digits.

Wow. Didn’t even hesitate to say that out loud.

You should stay away from TJ. And any other FCPS school.

No good fcps school has farms of 25% or higher

BS. Stop sh1tting on schools with 10%+ FRL.

TJ is supposed to be exclusive and not for these poors!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why do you all care about this so much?

People care about tax spending. Rapes in schools, failure rates of minorities in virtual learning, inhibiting advanced math, and those get ignored but TJ gets changed without a 2-year notice???!!! The NAACP sued the school. We care because Braband doesn't make us feel like we have a say in the expenditure we are forced to pay. A better expenditure would be a second STEM magnet near Rachel-Carson.

I'm sure right-wing extremists felt that way but most of us like an approach that levels the playing field for regular tax payers.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:25% low income? Oof, this is going to shift the schools budget from academics to social and welfare needs, you want to avoid schools with farms in the double digits.

Wow. Didn’t even hesitate to say that out loud.

You should stay away from TJ. And any other FCPS school.

No good fcps school has farms of 25% or higher

BS. Stop sh1tting on schools with 10%+ FRL.

Then name one good high school in FCPS with a farms rate above 25%

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:While all 4 of the kids profiled are racial minorities, all of them seem to be middle class and not at or below the poverty line. Discussion of whether FARMS kids can succeed isn't relevant for this thread.

Oh no your assumptions are incorrect they were all low-income kids. Please stop making these false assumptions to spin your false narrative.

No, they are definitely not all low income. There are many wealthy URMs at TJ.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I loved this article

To the parents who are frustrated at the number of mods who could handle TJ work but were turned away, wouldn’t it make more sense to lobby for creating another high school that has this level of challenge so all the capable kids can get the best possible public school education rather than figuring out who to deny this to? I’d love to see more schools raise their expectations so kids can get as far as they can go.

Yeah sure but we can’t even get a renovation for Mclean HS. A new HS will do nothing to help the very capable students who were rejected this year.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why do you all care about this so much?

People care about tax spending. Rapes in schools, failure rates of minorities in virtual learning, inhibiting advanced math, and those get ignored but TJ gets changed without a 2-year notice???!!! The NAACP sued the school. We care because Braband doesn't make us feel like we have a say in the expenditure we are forced to pay. A better expenditure would be a second STEM magnet near Rachel-Carson.

Braband isn’t there anymore and has now been replaced by someone more open about supporting white supremacy. You will never get a STEM magnate near Carson. Maybe in Fairfax, McLean, or Vienna possibly, but not Carson.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I loved this article

To the parents who are frustrated at the number of mods who could handle TJ work but were turned away, wouldn’t it make more sense to lobby for creating another high school that has this level of challenge so all the capable kids can get the best possible public school education rather than figuring out who to deny this to? I’d love to see more schools raise their expectations so kids can get as far as they can go.

Yeah sure but we can’t even get a renovation for Mclean HS. A new HS will do nothing to help the very capable students who were rejected this year.

If they are capable of being successful at TJ, they will be successful wherever they go.

[Anonymous]

There will not be another STEM magnate until there is no over crowding at regular HS and until there is an Arts Magnate.

STEM is excellent and important but it is not the end all and be all. I wish they would look at the under enrolled schools and use those spaces for a specialized Arts program and STEM program. The schools have the room, why not use that space to meet the needs of kids with specialized interests. It might help with over crowding at some schools. But I suspect that many folks would be unhappy with that because they don't want to send their kid to Justice or Mount Vernon or the other under enrolled schools regardless of programs.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:While all 4 of the kids profiled are racial minorities, all of them seem to be middle class and not at or below the poverty line. Discussion of whether FARMS kids can succeed isn't relevant for this thread.

Oh no your assumptions are incorrect they were all low-income kids. Please stop making these false assumptions to spin your false narrative.

No way. Second kid has a basement computer lab at home. Third kid attended a mostly white school in Arlington, so one of the wealthier N Arlington schools. Fourth kid takes private music lessons and also lives in a mostly white neighborhood, generally meaning not low income. Nowhere in the article was income level even addressed. For this type of article, if any of the kids were FARMS, the article would have made a big deal about it. It instead focused on race.

It is interesting that the changes mostly affect FCPS kids, yet at least two of the four profiled kids aren't in FCPS. One is Arlington, and one is Prince William Co.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I loved this article

To the parents who are frustrated at the number of mods who could handle TJ work but were turned away, wouldn’t it make more sense to lobby for creating another high school that has this level of challenge so all the capable kids can get the best possible public school education rather than figuring out who to deny this to? I’d love to see more schools raise their expectations so kids can get as far as they can go.

Yeah sure but we can’t even get a renovation for Mclean HS. A new HS will do nothing to help the very capable students who were rejected this year.

If they are capable of being successful at TJ, they will be successful wherever they go.

This.

There have always been capable student not accepted to TJ. Every year there are more applications then spots. And every year the kids who are not accepted attend their base schools or move to a private school. You are all acting like this is a new thing, it's not. You just don't like not getting a spot because a smart kid from a high FARMs school was accepted and your kid was not. And now you are bemoaning that there FARMs kids at TJ and how they won't be able to keep up because they don't have the money for tutoring.

[Anonymous]

Congrats to these kids. There are always good kids who don't make it. Question was never about minorities in the school. It was about purging one minority for the other to assuage guilt for the majority while also helping the majority. There were better ways of doing it without cruelly targeting just one group, with intent. which is why the court said the new process was not legal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I loved this article

To the parents who are frustrated at the number of mods who could handle TJ work but were turned away, wouldn’t it make more sense to lobby for creating another high school that has this level of challenge so all the capable kids can get the best possible public school education rather than figuring out who to deny this to? I’d love to see more schools raise their expectations so kids can get as far as they can go.

Yeah sure but we can’t even get a renovation for Mclean HS. A new HS will do nothing to help the very capable students who were rejected this year.

If they are capable of being successful at TJ, they will be successful wherever they go.

This.

There have always been capable student not accepted to TJ. Every year there are more applications then spots. And every year the kids who are not accepted attend their base schools or move to a private school. You are all acting like this is a new thing, it's not. You just don't like not getting a spot because a smart kid from a high FARMs school was accepted and your kid was not. And now you are bemoaning that there FARMs kids at TJ and how they won't be able to keep up because they don't have the money for tutoring.

They will keep up fine. Not the point at all though.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I loved this article

To the parents who are frustrated at the number of mods who could handle TJ work but were turned away, wouldn’t it make more sense to lobby for creating another high school that has this level of challenge so all the capable kids can get the best possible public school education rather than figuring out who to deny this to? I’d love to see more schools raise their expectations so kids can get as far as they can go.

Yeah sure but we can’t even get a renovation for Mclean HS. A new HS will do nothing to help the very capable students who were rejected this year.

If they are capable of being successful at TJ, they will be successful wherever they go.

This.

There have always been capable student not accepted to TJ. Every year there are more applications then spots. And every year the kids who are not accepted attend their base schools or move to a private school. You are all acting like this is a new thing, it's not. You just don't like not getting a spot because a smart kid from a high FARMs school was accepted and your kid was not. And now you are bemoaning that there FARMs kids at TJ and how they won't be able to keep up because they don't have the money for tutoring.

Tutoring comment is from troll who wants to muddy the waters. No one has time to do tutoring in the middle of all the TJ work.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:We appreciate that your thread is about nothing so much as rubbing it in the face of kids who likely would have been admitted to TJ in the past that they've been turned away.

At the end of the day, the Post is a bastion of elitism. It's owned by a Princeton graduate, and the article was written by a Harvard graduate. They want to make sure that elite institutions continue to remain the focus of everyone's attention by admitting more URMs, so they retain their cachet.

It would be interesting if the Post did a follow-up story interviewing four kids who had exceptional credentials, but were denied admission to TJ and ended up at their base schools. Were they depressed and disappointed freshmen year? Or did they end up having a great freshmen year and feeling like it all worked out for the best? We'll never know because their stories won't be told by the Post. Hannah Natanson already knew she'd write this story from the moment the School Board started discussing changes to the TJ admissions process in 2020. If and when these four kids graduate from TJ in 2025, there will also be a sequel, but the experiences of the 96% of FCPS students who attend other high schools will continue to be ignored.

What? Qualified kids with exceptional credentials were turned away before the process change. This isn’t new.

+1

Only the kids who felt ENTITLED to a TJ education (because that’s what their parents tell them) would be “depressed and disappointed”.

Cheating was rampant under the old admission system and cheating was a religion at TJ. Hopefully those days are over. The change is positive.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:25% low income? Oof, this is going to shift the schools budget from academics to social and welfare needs, you want to avoid schools with farms in the double digits.

There is definitely truth to this. It's unavoidable. They have to provide all those supports at school. That takes time and money.

Yep. And TJ, like most successful high schools both public and private, has long benefitted from very involved parent volunteers. Low income families are less likely to be able to provide that. Though I wonder if this number is artificially influenced by the fact that during covid ALL kids were eligible for FARMS, so some applicants may have checked that box following the letter but not spirit of the question...

No, they were not. Free lunches were provided to all, but "eligible for FARMS" is a specific term. By implying that these kids were cheating the system, you are implicitly saying that you do not believe a FARMS-eligible child could be admitted. That's actually pretty problematic.