Anonymous wrote:I can't believe that some people don't have the imagination to see why the TJ proposal might, just maybe, have legitimate problems with it. Off the top of my head:
- If a student is good enough that they'd get in comfortably on merit, but might be disqualified by lottery, that's unfair to that student. Furthermore, an exceptionally intelligent rising high schooler is smart enough to realize what's happening, and could easily find themselves disillusioned and unmotivated when they see that their efforts aren't correlating with their outcomes. There's no reason to expect a family with a potential to find themselves in those circumstances to willingly consent to the terms of the proposal.
Qualified, 'meritorious' students don't get in now, under the current process. There are only 400-500 acceptance slots depending on the year. I would think it's actually far less disillusioning to be on the losing end of a lottery than to watch peers advance based on their parents' investments.
- Gifted students are honest-to-goodness minorities with special needs, and the school board's apparent effort to discredit the fact (not to mention some posters' callous "TJ's no big deal, they'll be fine anywhere" attitude) by putting it up against other minorities borders on offensive.
By the principle of special needs accommodations, though, TJ is not and legally CANNOT be the only way by which true special needs are addressed. The Fairfax County Association for the Gifted actually proposed a dual-enrollment solution with GMU to address this. Also, historically, TJ has not been a welcoming or accommodating place for "twice exceptional" students, which is something of which parents and students should be aware.
- It's not at all clear that the proposal will have any effect in regards to its stated goal, to promote URM diversity. It's not even clear that the school board has a functional understanding of the issues inhibiting this goal. At GMU, the largest influx of quality black engineering students came right after GMU's historic Final Four run, suggesting what we all should realize - that there's a cultural component to people's involvement. It should be possible to nurture a culture friendly to URMs without penalizing cultures which already associate success with STEM, and it doesn't look like the current proposal is necessarily going to be successful on either count.
You're right! There are no guarantees this new approach will move the needle or improve anything. But you know what definitely won't? Maintaining the status quo.
- There's nothing controversial about suggesting that one should be skeptical of the good intentions behind any politically-motivated agenda, regardless of party. If someone is worried that the proposal's goal is to train an acceptance of nerd-targetted coercion and abuse, sugared with the promise of diversity, they'd have every right to be worried until we see a good reason to believe otherwise. This isn't a situation where innocent-until-proven-guilty applies.
I have no idea what this means. I honestly think the SB is being quite tactful in not implicating specific prep academies in their explanation for why change is needed. The TJ climate is toxic by so many standards - teacher satisfaction/workload, student mental health, demographic representation or lack thereof. I believe the parents who are "worried" (and posting constantly on DCUM and elsewhere, jeez) are those who felt their child[ren] is OWED admission to TJ based on their investment of time and resources, and that should NEVER be an acceptable stance for a magnet program.
- Continuing along the political theme, a highly sought-after capability these days is for awful, incompetent leaders who can't win an argument on merit, to instead get their way by claiming that clueless people aren't being represented well enough in merit-based groups. It would be naive to think that the opportunist wouldn't purposefully confuse URMs with clueless people, nor that this applies only to Trump.
I have no idea what you mean by this. The SB would be justified making these same changes based on socioeconomic or neighborhood school demographics alone and never once mentioning race.
- It's a long known phenomenon that school boards prefer a watered-down curriculum, because it represents less work from their end (less effort in preparation, evaluation, and training; and a larger glut of "happy" parents because their kids aren't having problems in school - implying a larger potential voting base). The best recourse that parents have is that they can use their child's merits to force the schools to provide a reasonable standard of education. Taking merit out of the picture disempowers families when it comes to ensuring that their kids get a good education.
Again, I have no idea what you're talking about. FCPS offers a range of advanced and differentiated curriculum options at the HS level, including academy classes, AP, and IB. For the latter two, the curriculum and evaluation standards come from external (national or international) governing bodies.
- Someone in another thread cited a similar case where the end result was destroying the school's number 1 standing, with the side effect of popularizing local private schools. If that's a realistic outcome, I'm doubtful that it's a desirable one.
The referenced case was in South Korea. I have no desire to see FCPS go the way of South Korea and its shadow network of cram schools.
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/25/world/asia/25iht-cram.1.13975596.html
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