Waitlisted at TJ - now what?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are some good points being made on here.

I think we can all agree the sband Fairfax administration doesnt have the intellectual rigor to design the best policy

I would propose a citizen committee to do most of the heavy lifting instead with sb giving an up or down vote at the end

One policy point from me,. Aap continues to be the main pathway to tj. The identification process for aap needs to improve to actually identify gifted kids vs now where it's just smart kids in many cases skewed toward higher income and yes mainly asian and white. All sides agree on these points.

Am I the only person here who read the AAP equity report? They're NOT missing any URM gifted kids. In fact, the process is highly skewed toward admitting any URM who is a pretty good student and has test scores 115+. The URMs are getting in with much lower scores than white and Asian kids.

They certainly are over-identifying affluent/prepped white and Asian kids. They are not under-identifying URMs.

If you want to fix the AAP to TJ pipeline, the best way is to have the 2nd grade admissions only be for 2nd-6th grade, and then have another round of admissions in 6th for middle school AAP. This would let schools more easily add the late bloomers and boot out the kids who don't belong.

Pro-reform advocate and agree completely! I would also love to see AAP services available at each FCPS middle school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There are 12 or so middle schools that are not AAP Centers. If you assume 6 dedicated spots per school for TJ, then that's 72 spots allocated exclusively to kids not in AAP. FCPS only has slightly over 300 slots, so that's a huge portion of the FCPS spots to set aside in the hopes that some kid might be a late bloomer.

If FCPS used zoned school rather than attending school, they'd still have the same geographic diversity without making it significantly harder to get accepted to TJ from AAP than it is from gen ed.

It's less than a quarter of the spots. Hardly a huge portion. Put differently, it's a smaller number than the group that used to get in solely from Carson every year under the old process.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There are 12 or so middle schools that are not AAP Centers. If you assume 6 dedicated spots per school for TJ, then that's 72 spots allocated exclusively to kids not in AAP. FCPS only has slightly over 300 slots, so that's a huge portion of the FCPS spots to set aside in the hopes that some kid might be a late bloomer.

If FCPS used zoned school rather than attending school, they'd still have the same geographic diversity without making it significantly harder to get accepted to TJ from AAP than it is from gen ed.

It's less than a quarter of the spots. Hardly a huge portion. Put differently, it's a smaller number than the group that used to get in solely from Carson every year under the old process.

Pro-reform advocate here. I could very easily get behind an adjustment to 1% allocated seats rather than 1.5%. You'd probably add some 50-75 additional unallocated opportunities in the pool. To be frank, the biggest problem with the new system in my mind is you have a few too many kids from Prince William who have a lot of trouble making the commute and also participating in all of the many opportunities that TJ has to offer that go beyond the classroom.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Here's the link to the FCAG report I just mentioned:
https://www.fcag.org/documents/TJ_Class_of_2025_analysis.pdf

Yes, we know the students that were admitted weren't as well prepped as in years past but were selected because they were naturally more gifted than the less successful preppers.

Diversity is great and diversity in any cohort enriches the cohort - schools or workplace.

But to claim that by increasing diversity we have somehow admitted more “naturally gifted” students is the kind of asinine wokeness that is leading the progressives to ruin.

You wanted a more diverse class through this reform - understood. But to claim all this BS around natural giftedness, et al demonstrates an absolute absence of logic or a cult-like following of woke ideology.

+1. We can't win if our position is that doing away with a test and giving extra points for "experience factors" such as poverty and ESL is the trick to getting the best and brightest. We are so much better off sticking to the fact that all of Fairfax pays taxes that support TJ so all middle schools in Fairfax should have the opportunity to send the top 1.5% of their middle school student body to TJ. Why is that so hard to stand behind?

Disagree, admitting the top performers from all schools will result in a stronger cohort than admitting the 3rd tier preppers from the most affluent school. This is just common sense, but some parents dislike this since it makes it harder to game admissions.

Bull. It is not common sense. It's your load of crap opinion. Don't try to assume away the issue by labelling your unsupported and unsubstantiated opinions as common sense. #wokie

It's a well known fact that admitting the top performers from all schools results in a stronger cohort than admitting the 3rd tier preppers from the most affluent school. This is just common sense, but some affluent parents dislike this since it makes it harder to game admissions with their $$$.

You nailed it!

It's not hard to see that some pyramids have far more higher-achieving kids than others. You can ignore these differences, which are apparent in both middle schools and high schools other than TJ, but pretending that there isn't a far deeper bench in some pyramids than others is willful blindness. It's obvious that you try to mask it by suggesting that disparities that are the result of differences in resources, intelligence, and parental commitment to their children's education is all somehow due to test prepping.

You aren't fooling anyone.

There certainly is a far deeper bench at Carson than there is at, say, Whitman. That’s why Carson STILL gets in 50-60 kids compared to 5-6 at Whitman.

This is a better situation than 80-90 kids from Carson and 0 kids from Whitman, and if you can’t understand that on its face you don’t understand the classroom environment. And that’s fine - but don’t pretend that you do.

In other words, the case for TJ now isn’t to take the strongest kids in the region and cultivate their talents, but to rescue some above-average kids from the Mount Vernon pyramid, as they’d otherwise be stuck at an under-performing IB school that FCPS is too lazy to do anything about.

1) It's a false choice - TJ can do both because you're talking about a class of 550 kids. TJ doesn't need the 80th best kid from Carson - that kid doesn't provide any additional value to the environment.

2) The kids coming from that pyramid are significantly better than "above average".

What a ridiculous response. If the 80th best kid from Carson is a stronger applicant than the 2nd best applicant from Whitman, the Carson kid should get the nod, unless you’re simply committed to arbitrary, residential tokenism.

And if there were a large cohort of well above-average kids from Whitman, they wouldn’t have needed Brabrand and the School Board coming to their rescue to re-engineer the entire process.

Please educate yourself before spewing your personal opinions on educational policy driven by your self-serving desires. Are you going to argue against real academic researchers from Johns Hopkins and Duke? What makes you so qualified to tell FCPS what's best for the kids?
Effect of Local Norms on Racial and Ethnic Representation in Gifted Education
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332858419848446

Agree, but it's also just common sense that policies that favor the naturally gifted over the least successful prepper from a rich school will result in a stronger, more diverse cohort.

hey are leaving out many Asian naturally gifted students in favor of above average students who can check boxes.

No, I don't think they mentioned race, but I can see their point. Of course, the #1 kid from a less wealthy school would be a better fit than the 80th kid from some wealthy school even though they had less prep.

Not when the #1 kid from the less wealthy school would be #101 at their own school if FCPS hadn't already siphoned off kids #1-100 and sent them to the neighboring AAP center. Kids #1-10 from Sandburg would be able to contribute more to TJ than kid #80 from Carson. Kid #1 from Whitman is really kid #50 zoned to Whitman and is not remotely up to TJ standards.

AGAIN - and it's annoying to have to keep making this point - you're presuming that the growth and development curves of these students are stagnant with respect to one another as they progress from the time that they are identified for AAP to the time they are evaluated for TJ.

The best analogy here is the literal growth of kids in height. Some kids top out at their full adult height in 6th grade. Others have growth spurts and surpass their peers later on in their development. It is myopic to believe that the #1-80 kid from whatever AAP school in 6th grade are necessarily going to be better fits for TJ than the #1-10 kids from some non-AAP school when they're evaluated in 8th grade.

And AGAIN - it doesn't serve elite educational communities to have a whole mess of kids within their walls come from the same few schools. Even if the 80th best kid from Carson scores somewhat higher on a few objective metrics than the top kid from Whitman, the only way you can genuinely believe that the kid from Carson will contribute more to the community is to have zero experience in elite academic environments.

AGAIN - and it's annoying for me to have to keep making this point - No one is saying that the 80th best kid from Carson should be included. I'm just saying that the Sandburg AAP kids zoned to Whitman should count against Whitman's 1.5% allocation and not Sandburg's. If your entire argument is that some kids are later bloomers, then you're saying that it's appropriate and fair for a gen ed kid from Sandburg to effectively have no chance of getting picked for AAP, since they have to compete against their own zoned AAP kids as well as the Whitman zoned AAP kids, while the Whitman gen ed kid doesn't have to compete against any of those and will be able to get picked for TJ with relatively unimpressive stats. The most equitable solution would be to have the Whitman gen ed kids + Whitman zoned Sandburg AAP kids in the Whitman 1.5% pot and then Sandburg gen ed kids + Sandburg zoned AAP kids in the Sandburg 1.5% plot. There are zero bonuses in the application process for AAP, so there's no reason that a late blooming all Honors gen ed kid wouldn't have a reasonable shot of being picked.

Point-by-point:

1) PLENTY of people are saying that the 80th best kid from Carson should be included. The fact that you're apparently not doesn't eliminate all of those other voices.

2) Your solution - to place the Whitman-zoned kids who are at Sandburg in the Whitman pool - essentially eliminates the possibility that any kids who actually attend Whitman would have a realistic shot to be selected. It would also greatly increase the number of students - probably in your mind, by design - from the large feeder schools like Carson and Longfellow, because they'd end up taking a ton of the slots that would otherwise be offered to kids from Herndon, Franklin, etc. This idea is just another way of trying to create more spaces from Carson at TJ, when the entire point of this exercise is to STOP having an overwhelming percentage of the students who attend TJ coming from such a limited group of schools. It doesn't solve any of TJ's problems with experiential or socioeconomic diversity to simply create a new way to ensure that the vast majority of students come from the AAP program.

3) The historical structural advantages that AAP students enjoy in the TJ admissions process don't have anything to do with the admissions policy. There has NEVER been a point-value bonus in the admissions process for attending an AAP center or for taking a particularly advanced math class. Those advantages come from existing amongst a group of students and parents who have cobbled together years and years of institutional knowledge about the process. They come from being a part of communities where parents have been attending TJ Open Houses since they were pregnant for the first time. They come from belonging to PTSAs where parents share resources for how to best attack the process. And the rewards (not de jure, but de facto) of existing in those spaces needs to be eliminated, or at least mitigated to the extent possible.

Then it all comes down to whether you think TJ should have a decent number of non-AAP kids or whether they should be rare. To me, having over 1/3* of the FCPS spots filled by kids who weren't in the top 20% of FCPS students is ludicrous. IME, there might be like 5-10 TJ worthy non-AAP kids across all of FCPS, but then surely they would have a reasonable chance to get in through the general application. Clearly, you disagree and think that non-AAP highly gifted late bloomers are abundant in FCPS. The numbers put out by FCAG suggest that 92 slots out of the 300 are reserved solely for gen ed kids zoned to non centers (because who cares about gen ed kids zoned to centers?), and that in actuality, 117 gen ed kids got in vs. 189 AAP kids.

The best solution, though, would be to have AAP at every middle school and have a separate application in 6th grade for middle school AAP. The first point would make the whole attending vs. zoned MS issue disappear. The second would capture more of the late bloomers.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Here's the link to the FCAG report I just mentioned:
https://www.fcag.org/documents/TJ_Class_of_2025_analysis.pdf

Yes, we know the students that were admitted weren't as well prepped as in years past but were selected because they were naturally more gifted than the less successful preppers.

Diversity is great and diversity in any cohort enriches the cohort - schools or workplace.

But to claim that by increasing diversity we have somehow admitted more “naturally gifted” students is the kind of asinine wokeness that is leading the progressives to ruin.

You wanted a more diverse class through this reform - understood. But to claim all this BS around natural giftedness, et al demonstrates an absolute absence of logic or a cult-like following of woke ideology.

+1. We can't win if our position is that doing away with a test and giving extra points for "experience factors" such as poverty and ESL is the trick to getting the best and brightest. We are so much better off sticking to the fact that all of Fairfax pays taxes that support TJ so all middle schools in Fairfax should have the opportunity to send the top 1.5% of their middle school student body to TJ. Why is that so hard to stand behind?

Disagree, admitting the top performers from all schools will result in a stronger cohort than admitting the 3rd tier preppers from the most affluent school. This is just common sense, but some parents dislike this since it makes it harder to game admissions.

Bull. It is not common sense. It's your load of crap opinion. Don't try to assume away the issue by labelling your unsupported and unsubstantiated opinions as common sense. #wokie

It's a well known fact that admitting the top performers from all schools results in a stronger cohort than admitting the 3rd tier preppers from the most affluent school. This is just common sense, but some affluent parents dislike this since it makes it harder to game admissions with their $$$.

You nailed it!

It's not hard to see that some pyramids have far more higher-achieving kids than others. You can ignore these differences, which are apparent in both middle schools and high schools other than TJ, but pretending that there isn't a far deeper bench in some pyramids than others is willful blindness. It's obvious that you try to mask it by suggesting that disparities that are the result of differences in resources, intelligence, and parental commitment to their children's education is all somehow due to test prepping.

You aren't fooling anyone.

There certainly is a far deeper bench at Carson than there is at, say, Whitman. That’s why Carson STILL gets in 50-60 kids compared to 5-6 at Whitman.

This is a better situation than 80-90 kids from Carson and 0 kids from Whitman, and if you can’t understand that on its face you don’t understand the classroom environment. And that’s fine - but don’t pretend that you do.

In other words, the case for TJ now isn’t to take the strongest kids in the region and cultivate their talents, but to rescue some above-average kids from the Mount Vernon pyramid, as they’d otherwise be stuck at an under-performing IB school that FCPS is too lazy to do anything about.

1) It's a false choice - TJ can do both because you're talking about a class of 550 kids. TJ doesn't need the 80th best kid from Carson - that kid doesn't provide any additional value to the environment.

2) The kids coming from that pyramid are significantly better than "above average".

What a ridiculous response. If the 80th best kid from Carson is a stronger applicant than the 2nd best applicant from Whitman, the Carson kid should get the nod, unless you’re simply committed to arbitrary, residential tokenism.

And if there were a large cohort of well above-average kids from Whitman, they wouldn’t have needed Brabrand and the School Board coming to their rescue to re-engineer the entire process.

Please educate yourself before spewing your personal opinions on educational policy driven by your self-serving desires. Are you going to argue against real academic researchers from Johns Hopkins and Duke? What makes you so qualified to tell FCPS what's best for the kids?
Effect of Local Norms on Racial and Ethnic Representation in Gifted Education
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332858419848446

Agree, but it's also just common sense that policies that favor the naturally gifted over the least successful prepper from a rich school will result in a stronger, more diverse cohort.

hey are leaving out many Asian naturally gifted students in favor of above average students who can check boxes.

No, I don't think they mentioned race, but I can see their point. Of course, the #1 kid from a less wealthy school would be a better fit than the 80th kid from some wealthy school even though they had less prep.

Not when the #1 kid from the less wealthy school would be #101 at their own school if FCPS hadn't already siphoned off kids #1-100 and sent them to the neighboring AAP center. Kids #1-10 from Sandburg would be able to contribute more to TJ than kid #80 from Carson. Kid #1 from Whitman is really kid #50 zoned to Whitman and is not remotely up to TJ standards.

AGAIN - and it's annoying to have to keep making this point - you're presuming that the growth and development curves of these students are stagnant with respect to one another as they progress from the time that they are identified for AAP to the time they are evaluated for TJ.

The best analogy here is the literal growth of kids in height. Some kids top out at their full adult height in 6th grade. Others have growth spurts and surpass their peers later on in their development. It is myopic to believe that the #1-80 kid from whatever AAP school in 6th grade are necessarily going to be better fits for TJ than the #1-10 kids from some non-AAP school when they're evaluated in 8th grade.

And AGAIN - it doesn't serve elite educational communities to have a whole mess of kids within their walls come from the same few schools. Even if the 80th best kid from Carson scores somewhat higher on a few objective metrics than the top kid from Whitman, the only way you can genuinely believe that the kid from Carson will contribute more to the community is to have zero experience in elite academic environments.

AGAIN - and it's annoying for me to have to keep making this point - No one is saying that the 80th best kid from Carson should be included. I'm just saying that the Sandburg AAP kids zoned to Whitman should count against Whitman's 1.5% allocation and not Sandburg's. If your entire argument is that some kids are later bloomers, then you're saying that it's appropriate and fair for a gen ed kid from Sandburg to effectively have no chance of getting picked for AAP, since they have to compete against their own zoned AAP kids as well as the Whitman zoned AAP kids, while the Whitman gen ed kid doesn't have to compete against any of those and will be able to get picked for TJ with relatively unimpressive stats. The most equitable solution would be to have the Whitman gen ed kids + Whitman zoned Sandburg AAP kids in the Whitman 1.5% pot and then Sandburg gen ed kids + Sandburg zoned AAP kids in the Sandburg 1.5% plot. There are zero bonuses in the application process for AAP, so there's no reason that a late blooming all Honors gen ed kid wouldn't have a reasonable shot of being picked.

Point-by-point:

1) PLENTY of people are saying that the 80th best kid from Carson should be included. The fact that you're apparently not doesn't eliminate all of those other voices.

2) Your solution - to place the Whitman-zoned kids who are at Sandburg in the Whitman pool - essentially eliminates the possibility that any kids who actually attend Whitman would have a realistic shot to be selected. It would also greatly increase the number of students - probably in your mind, by design - from the large feeder schools like Carson and Longfellow, because they'd end up taking a ton of the slots that would otherwise be offered to kids from Herndon, Franklin, etc. This idea is just another way of trying to create more spaces from Carson at TJ, when the entire point of this exercise is to STOP having an overwhelming percentage of the students who attend TJ coming from such a limited group of schools. It doesn't solve any of TJ's problems with experiential or socioeconomic diversity to simply create a new way to ensure that the vast majority of students come from the AAP program.

3) The historical structural advantages that AAP students enjoy in the TJ admissions process don't have anything to do with the admissions policy. There has NEVER been a point-value bonus in the admissions process for attending an AAP center or for taking a particularly advanced math class. Those advantages come from existing amongst a group of students and parents who have cobbled together years and years of institutional knowledge about the process. They come from being a part of communities where parents have been attending TJ Open Houses since they were pregnant for the first time. They come from belonging to PTSAs where parents share resources for how to best attack the process. And the rewards (not de jure, but de facto) of existing in those spaces needs to be eliminated, or at least mitigated to the extent possible.

Then it all comes down to whether you think TJ should have a decent number of non-AAP kids or whether they should be rare. To me, having over 1/3* of the FCPS spots filled by kids who weren't in the top 20% of FCPS students is ludicrous. IME, there might be like 5-10 TJ worthy non-AAP kids across all of FCPS, but then surely they would have a reasonable chance to get in through the general application. Clearly, you disagree and think that non-AAP highly gifted late bloomers are abundant in FCPS. The numbers put out by FCAG suggest that 92 slots out of the 300 are reserved solely for gen ed kids zoned to non centers (because who cares about gen ed kids zoned to centers?), and that in actuality, 117 gen ed kids got in vs. 189 AAP kids.

The best solution, though, would be to have AAP at every middle school and have a separate application in 6th grade for middle school AAP. The first point would make the whole attending vs. zoned MS issue disappear. The second would capture more of the late bloomers.

We agree on both points of your "best solution". Where we disagree is probably the idea that the AAP screening process does a great job of capturing all of the students that it should, or that all of the students in AAP necessarily represent the "top" 20% of the group.

Nevertheless, this has been a fruitful conversation and I appreciate it. What's important for me is that students who are attending every single school in FCPS feel they have a realistic shot to get into the school and are eventually represented within the incoming class. I'd be more than happy for that to happen through the existence of AAP services at every school.

[Anonymous]

The reformed TJ admission is just a plan to ensure that all schools are left behind in terms of facilities, courses available etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The reformed TJ admission is just a plan to ensure that all schools are left behind in terms of facilities, courses available etc.

How so? If that's the plan, it will fail miserably.

One suspects the geniuses in FCPS thought the new process would somehow incentivize people to move their kids to "under-represented" middle schools and, therefore, start to level the playing field.

Instead, it will reduce the appeal of TJ and enhance the appeal of the pyramids that had been sending the most kids to TJ previously, especially Langley, McLean, Chantilly, and Oakton.

And then the parents at those schools will demand more STEM courses for their kids, and if FCPS doesn't oblige the School Board members who are already on very shaky ground in their districts will get kicked out of office.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The reformed TJ admission is just a plan to ensure that all schools are left behind in terms of facilities, courses available etc.

How so? If that's the plan, it will fail miserably.

One suspects the geniuses in FCPS thought the new process would somehow incentivize people to move their kids to "under-represented" middle schools and, therefore, start to level the playing field.

Instead, it will reduce the appeal of TJ and enhance the appeal of the pyramids that had been sending the most kids to TJ previously, especially Langley, McLean, Chantilly, and Oakton.

And then the parents at those schools will demand more STEM courses for their kids, and if FCPS doesn't oblige the School Board members who are already on very shaky ground in their districts will get kicked out of office.

This is happening at McLean big time. They are adding two more post-AP CS classes. These classes are essentially the same classes taught at TJ.

Its a total waste of money! I don’t know why they don’t just let the kids drive/bus over to TJ during the “free block” and take the class. Or teach it online. Hiring a teacher for two classes doesn’t make sense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The reformed TJ admission is just a plan to ensure that all schools are left behind in terms of facilities, courses available etc.

How so? If that's the plan, it will fail miserably.

One suspects the geniuses in FCPS thought the new process would somehow incentivize people to move their kids to "under-represented" middle schools and, therefore, start to level the playing field.

Instead, it will reduce the appeal of TJ and enhance the appeal of the pyramids that had been sending the most kids to TJ previously, especially Langley, McLean, Chantilly, and Oakton.

And then the parents at those schools will demand more STEM courses for their kids, and if FCPS doesn't oblige the School Board members who are already on very shaky ground in their districts will get kicked out of office.

On the contrary, I know my kid is so excited to start TJ this fall. They would never have bothered to even apply in years past because the old system was so rigged in favor of the rich MS's. Overall I think this will be one of the strongest classes in recent memory because the new process favors on innate talent and ability over prep.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Please educate yourself before spewing your personal opinions on educational policy driven by your self-serving desires. Are you going to argue against real academic researchers from Johns Hopkins and Duke? What makes you so qualified to tell FCPS what's best for the kids?
Effect of Local Norms on Racial and Ethnic Representation in Gifted Education
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2332858419848446

They are talking about using the top % at each building, since the gifted programs tend to be run at the building level. The alternative they are considering is where eligibility is based on a national percentile.

I don't think this can be read as an endorsement of the new TJ admissions policy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
And AGAIN - it doesn't serve elite educational communities to have a whole mess of kids within their walls come from the same few schools. Even if the 80th best kid from Carson scores somewhat higher on a few objective metrics than the top kid from Whitman, the only way you can genuinely believe that the kid from Carson will contribute more to the community is to have zero experience in elite academic environments.

Why should acceptance be based on contributions to the community?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The reformed TJ admission is just a plan to ensure that all schools are left behind in terms of facilities, courses available etc.

How so? If that's the plan, it will fail miserably.

One suspects the geniuses in FCPS thought the new process would somehow incentivize people to move their kids to "under-represented" middle schools and, therefore, start to level the playing field.

Instead, it will reduce the appeal of TJ and enhance the appeal of the pyramids that had been sending the most kids to TJ previously, especially Langley, McLean, Chantilly, and Oakton.

And then the parents at those schools will demand more STEM courses for their kids, and if FCPS doesn't oblige the School Board members who are already on very shaky ground in their districts will get kicked out of office.

This is happening at McLean big time. They are adding two more post-AP CS classes. These classes are essentially the same classes taught at TJ.

Its a total waste of money! I don’t know why they don’t just let the kids drive/bus over to TJ during the “free block” and take the class. Or teach it online. Hiring a teacher for two classes doesn’t make sense.

Those classes will be filled with all, wait for it, Asians!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
Agree many enjoyed the ease with which they could get their children into these programs simply by spending a few grand on prep classes, but now it's harder because they have to compete against all schools, not just the affluent ones.

No, the objection is they are competing with just the affluent ones while the other schools are given automatic spots for lower scoring students.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Agree many enjoyed the ease with which they could get their children into these programs simply by spending a few grand on prep classes, but now it's harder because they have to compete against all schools, not just the affluent ones.

No, the objection is they are competing with just the affluent ones while the other schools are given automatic spots for lower scoring students.

That's odd when I saw the data, the lion's share of spots are still going to the wealthiest schools.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:The reformed TJ admission is just a plan to ensure that all schools are left behind in terms of facilities, courses available etc.

How so? If that's the plan, it will fail miserably.

One suspects the geniuses in FCPS thought the new process would somehow incentivize people to move their kids to "under-represented" middle schools and, therefore, start to level the playing field.

Instead, it will reduce the appeal of TJ and enhance the appeal of the pyramids that had been sending the most kids to TJ previously, especially Langley, McLean, Chantilly, and Oakton.

And then the parents at those schools will demand more STEM courses for their kids, and if FCPS doesn't oblige the School Board members who are already on very shaky ground in their districts will get kicked out of office.

This is happening at McLean big time. They are adding two more post-AP CS classes. These classes are essentially the same classes taught at TJ.

Its a total waste of money! I don’t know why they don’t just let the kids drive/bus over to TJ during the “free block” and take the class. Or teach it online. Hiring a teacher for two classes doesn’t make sense.

That is a big waste of money. Dual enrollment exists for a reason. McLean students, or any student, who finds themselves seeking such courses should look into Northern Virginia Community College or GMU dual enrollment to take those those classes. There's no reason for FCPS to cater to such small groups of students scattered across the county for post-K12 material.