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Court: TJ's New Admission Policy Does Not Discriminate
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Anonymous
Exactly. Double standard liberal extremist. |
Anonymous
Any proof on buying? Stop lying. |
Anonymous
| Any opinions on suing FCPS fails to achieve equality and inclusion for Asian American students in sports teams? |
Anonymous
I'll concede that low income Asian Americans and low income people of all colors have benefited from the process. That's a good thing, but I highly doubt they were the driving factors behind the changes. You make it sound like the school board only cared about the socioeconomic disparity and that race happened to be a side concern. I think it's the opposite, and the idea that Brabrand was some kind of lone wolf is pretty laughable. TJ has been trying to fight the racial demographics for decades and the discussions have always been about race. Do you think the school board would have done anything if TJ was 30% black, 30% Latino but 1% FARMs? I highly, highly doubt it. Instead, I think TJ would make national news for getting URMs to overachieve. People would not be agonizing over how the wealthy black and Latinos were stealing spots over the poor FARM kids. Just look at what happened to Nassau County. Newspapers everywhere were touting how Nassau County got detracking to work. Nobody seemed to care or notice that the median income in Nassau county was $146,000. I have some sympathy for the idea that URMs have been shut out of magnet schools, and if TJ was an isolated case I would be less bothered by it. But it appears every time Asians gain a majority in something it triggers an existential crises in people and makes them reexamine things. That's also a form of racism. Your arguments lose a lot of weight in Boston and NYC, two cities with a substantial number of poor Asian Americans. Stuyvesant is regularly over 40% FARMs. But that doesn't stop people from crying foul and demanding changes with vitriol. Clearly, it's about race. |
0_CURRENT_SCHOOL_ID,P0_EDSL:300,0 That's where you can find the demographic of the school as of the end of last school year, which would include two classes admitted by the new process. Feel free to dig around the data. The relevant number is that as of the end of last school year, a little over 10% of TJ was FARMS eligible, as opposed to 2.27%, the number you cited, before the changes took effect.
Anonymous
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It’s obvious what they are doing. They are engineering admissions criteria for a desired demographic outcome. More URM. And that’s OK, if that is their opinion on what “best” constitutes. But don’t gaslight people about prep services. They are just following college playbooks and the response to AA being taken off the table.
The following changes are ways that colleges are looking to achieve desired diversity and TJ is doing the same: -geographic targeting (1.5 percent). They know some schools are more URM populated than others. Guarantees of admissions to those schools increases the likelihood of URM admissions. -test blind (removing Quant). Standardized testing has always been a hot button topic around demographic results in elite academic admissions -No more teacher recommendations. These allow bias. The only bias allowed now is that of the admissions personnel. This removes any bias conflict that could cause issues with desired results. -low income hooks. Low-income high-performing stats is considered a hook in most undergraduate admissions. They codified this in TJ admissions with the FARMs experience factor bump. Then there are the more overt changes that don’t even need to be broken down. -one less honors class required for Young Scholars. Young Scholars is defined as being for URMs including explicit black and brown student identification. -English language learner experience factor. While this isn’t racially explicit, the numbers of white ESL children is next to nothing. Asians could benefit from this, however. Everyone knows what’s going on. Doesn’t mean you can prove intent. I do enjoy the “tEsT buYinG” poster though. As if all these changes were done to fix the testing. Haha. |
Anonymous
Also, makes average students more appealing academically by eliminating class ranking and inflating GPAs. |
Anonymous
That’s not an argument of any kind. |
Anonymous
Whoever it is that keeps yelling about "test buying" - you're not helping. That's not what happened. What happened - confirmed by TJ students who had attended Curie Learning Centers - is that students who took the secured Quant-Q exam for entry into the Class of 2022 reported those questions back to their teachers at Curie, in violation of their signed agreement not to do so. The teachers at Curie then used those questions to build a bank of similar questions, thus giving the students whose families could afford the boutique $5K TJ prep class as well as the hundreds of hours to attend it an enormous advantage on an exam whose entire purpose is to evaluate students' ability to solve problems of types that they've never seen before. Curie students applying for the Classes of 2023 and 2024 were thus shocked to sit for their Quant-Q and find several lengthy word problems that they'd already seen before - verbatim - in their prep classes. Not the entire test, but several individual questions. And wouldn't you know it.... Curie went from 50 students in 2022, to 96 in 2023, to 133 in 2024. Asian population went from 74.9%, its highest ever, in 2021, to 65.2% in 2022, and then magically back up to 72.3% in 2023, and 73.2% in 2024. But those families did not buy the test. What they bought was access to people who had seen a test that was supposed to be secured. There is a key difference. The folks who did wrong were the 8th grade students who went back to Curie and gave them the questions, and we'll never know who those kids were. All Curie did was take advantage of the situation to make millions, in a way that many others would have also done. And they acted legally (if deeply unethically) in doing so. |
Anonymous
Sports teams exist to compete and win games. In the absence of that competitive element, they would be intramurals, which anyone can join if they want to. No one is suing for more Black kids to get to join the math team either. That would be a decent analogy. TJ does not exist to top any rankings or win any competitions. Why is that so challenging for you to understand? Is your mind so simplistic that you expect all selective processes to operate the exact same way regardless of the end goal of the entity? |
Anonymous
Do they? Have you read VHSL's mission and vision statements? I see a lot about participation and nothing about winning. FCPS's activities and athletics page promises participation at all levels and doesn't mention anything about winning. Do you have any source that high school athletics in Fairfax County exist to win games? |
Anonymous
PP. I appreciate the measured tone of this response and I'll engage with it as follows. Item 6) in my post, I thought, made it clear that race being a consideration shouldn't be nearly the bugaboo that people want to discuss it as. And the reason for that is that the experience of people of different races in America remains fundamentally different, offering value to those different perspectives in elite academic environments. You offered an interesting thought experiment regarding the 30% Black and 30% Latino but 1% FARMS example... I would actually be interested to see what the result of that would be in this School Board, but it's more or less irrelevant because race and socioeconomic status track together so neatly in Northern Virginia, especially along geographic lines. But let's talk about another hypothetical possibility that will help to make my point... Suppose we had the new admissions process come in, and the breakdown was 70% Asian, 10% white, 10% Black, and 10% Latino. This School Board would have been absolutely THRILLED, I guarantee you. Especially if it were buffered by, say 18-22% FARMS. And I think every reasonable observer to this process acknowledges that. Because while some part of this probably was about race (and rightfully so), it was never about harming Asian students. It was about opening access to students from underrepresented groups. One of the interesting things about the surge in the Black population at TJ is that now, for the first time in the school's history, you have significant representation of Black students whose parents were born in America. Even with the remarkably low numbers of Black students in previous classes, the overwhelming majority of those students had parents who were born and raised in Africa and who came to the United States alongside many of TJ's other immigrant families - this was the case in my TJ class as well. These are two very distinct groups with very distinct experiences. You're not wrong about Stuyvesant and the other NYC schools. I'll admit that I don't know much about them because my focus has been on TJ, but what I do take issue with is the overemphasis on exam performance as a gatekeeper for admission to these places. I am of the belief that standardized exams can be of some value and I actually really liked the Quant-Q (yes, I have seen it) but the reality is that there are some absolutely brilliant kids out there who just don't test well. And the trouble with using standardized exams is that if that's your only hard objective measure, people are going to cry foul when you see kids with lesser scores getting admitted over kids with higher scores even if it's right that they should do so. And the bottom line is, what was happening at TJ because of the way that the process was constructed was that if you didn't score well enough on the battery relative to the entire group, you were eliminated from the process no matter what. A student could be in the 100th percentile on the Quant and the ACT Aspire Science, but if they were in the 74th percentile in the Aspire Reading they were s*** out of luck. And that was wrong. I was lucky enough to get into TJ in large part because I was an excellent test taker and because my parents gave me all the resources that I needed to be one. Last thing I'll say is - Brabrand wasn't a lone wolf in trying to get better representation at TJ. What he was a lone wolf in was believing that a Merit Lottery was the way to get it done. It would have been disastrous, and every educated observer knew it. |
Anonymous
Interscholastic high school athletics do. The evidence of it is in the existence of district, region, and state championships. Eliminate those and you might have a point. |
Anonymous
This is actually a really good point. I hadn’t thought about that before. |
Anonymous
That's fake news. There are no limits. It's a race-blind process. |
Anonymous
Funny that FCPS and VHSL don't actually say that. I guess they don't really know what their own mission is |