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Official TJ Admissions Decisions Results for the Class of 2025
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Anonymous
Pretty much this. The "experience factors" of some children don't matter to this School Board. It's all politics so someone like Ricardy Anderson can tell some Holmes and Poe parents she scored seats at TJ for their kids. |
Anonymous
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There's a few things I haven't been able to quite square away yet.
Picture some hypothetical situation where a teacher, as an experiment, introduces some brand new subject which nobody in her class has ever heard of before. On a preliminary test, everyone in the class gets similar grades, since they're all starting from the same place. Then, a handful of students start studying for it, and a few weeks later, they do another test, and for some reason, those kids are scoring a lot better than everyone else. The teacher gets panicked, and says, "the grades aren't evenly balanced anymore - I have to change something to take away the advantage from the small group of students who are doing disproportionately well." Or even worse, "Those students are only showing good test-taking skills, so that most likely means that they're actually mediocre compared to everyone else." How is that fundamentally different than what we're seeing here? Ok - people would point out that there's the money that is involved. That might even approach fair. On the other hand, last I checked Fairfax County was one of the - if not the - wealthiest counties in the nation. The Curie students are mostly grouped by ethnicity, not by wealth. I don't have the numbers, but I'd intuit that the group in question is at best only moderately wealthy compared to the rest of the county. That would mean that for the vast majority of the county, prep would be seen as an option rather than a privilege. Those taking that route would probably see it as pursuing an opportunity that's available to many - a far cry from the haves vs have nots rhetoric that we're seeing dominating this board. Does that mean that there aren't any students for whom there is a true wealth barrier? Sure there are - but I'd assume that it's a special case, not a representative one. Just like the "super-nerds" who need TJ and who seem to be left out of the revised system. The "anti-prepper" posters often pretend these kids don't even exist. I don't want to sound callous, but if is a forced choice between trampling the nerds and trampling the poor, I'm not sure why it's necessarily more right to side with the poor. |
Anonymous
| In response to the above example prepping is fine. That’s not the issue. The school loves when you prep and do their job for them. It makes their lives easier. The issue is should prepping get your more? If I teach my kid multiplication in first grade am I then entitled to demand he get taught division in second? Do I get more? If I prep my child for TJ am I entitled to TJ for my kid? Do I get more? The answer is no. Public school doesn’t work that way. Very few privates do either. |
Anonymous
Governor's schools do. |
Anonymous
The money is the problem. Parents are entitled to spend their money in any way they want to to enrich their children’s lives - more power to them. But there simply shouldn’t be a market for parents to spend a couple of mortgage payments - or for poorer families, several month’s rent - explicitly for privileged access to TJ. And that’s what’s happening right now - regardless of how effective these companies’ products are, there is clearly a belief that they are, and that creates an elite market. And even though they were the only ones to market as explicitly as they did, let’s not pretend that Curie is the only one out there. Kate Dalby, Optimal TJ Prep, Sunshine - there is a ton of money to be made off of parents desperate for a leg up in TJ Admissions. And an admissions process that incentivizes that behavior is a non-starter if there is further reform to be done. Spend your money however you want, but don’t expect it to do your resource hoarding for you. |
Anonymous
Perfectly stated. +1000000 |
Anonymous
You're looking at things the wrong way. Asking the school to meet your child where he is academically isn't asking for more. It's asking for the same thing that every other kid is receiving, which is an education targeted at least somewhat toward the child's current skill level. Your multiplication example would be akin to teachers forcing kids who are fluent readers in K (largely due to parents reading to them) to do BOB books rather than read materials appropriate to their level. Teachers instead have reading groups and allow kids to select appropriate materials. Teachers and schools should always be looking for ways to meet each child wherever the child is academically, and they should not at all be looking for ways to hold a child back because the child might have been prepped or enriched. For your TJ example, there's no point in providing really neat chemistry/physics/engineering labs for kids who are unlikely to meet the prerequisites for the classes and be able to take advantage of them. The same is true for the TJ math classes. |
Anonymous
TJ has always served students at varying levels of advancement and will continue to do so. This is a red herring argument. There’s no need for ALL, or even MOST, of TJ’s students to take its most advanced classes. |
Anonymous
You didn't bother to take the effort to read the article, did you? Just came up with a glib social engineering diktat. The evil, lazy solutions in California is very similar to what's happening in TJ and over the long term benefits no one. In fact it hurts most the group it is trying to ostensibly benefit, and is definitely negative for overall society. Only people who win are politicians and officials who want to show easy equity wins. |
Anonymous
From article: There is an ongoing discussion within progressive politics as to whether Asian Americans are a reliable part of the Black-brown coalition or whether they have been—to use another weird but fashionable term—“whitened.” Does the UC think it’s a good idea, in this era of racism and hate crimes against Asian Americans, to promote the idea that these students are hoovering up an unfair proportion of a precious resource? These students are not faceless “grinds”; they are teenagers, each one with talents and interests as varied as those of any other applicant. It is immoral, and ought to be illegal, to treat them as a menace to be contained. They happen to be the majority of our highest-achieving students, and they belong at the University of California. In short, this decision will probably hurt thousands of Asian American teenagers, backfire for Black, Latino, and low-income students, and make little difference for affluent whites. The futility of the mission is so staggering that you have to ask: What will dropping the tests really accomplish? It will give cover to the many forces invested in not improving the state’s K–12 education, especially in the poorest districts. Those include: Republicans, who don’t like pouring money into public education; taxpayers, who don’t like their dollars being spent on other people’s children; Democrats, who serve the teachers’ unions; and the mighty unions themselves, which seem more interested in protecting failing teachers than in reforming a failing system. “California is America, only sooner.” Californians are proud of that expression, and it still holds up. What’s happening out here—a homelessness crisis that turns deadly when the summer heat climbs; soaring crime in the cities; fires and coastal erosion spurred by climate change; strong students denied college admission because of the color of their skin and the “foreign” sound of their names; and a great research university obscuring, rather than revealing, the truth—all of that will happen where you live, too. We just got here first. Someday, in a textbook on world history, there will be a chapter about all of us—you, and me, and our shared moment. The title of that chapter will be American Decline. |
Anonymous
That's certainly one way to look at the situation. A different way would be to say: if we want to counteract a disparity in how much money different cultures are willing to invest in education, we should start by alleviating the concerns that people certain cultures have about the degree of seriousness of base-level American education. |
Anonymous
That’s a fancy way of saying “fix the pipeline” - but it’s a false choice to suggest we should do one or the other, or one THEN the other. Creating additional opportunities for demonstrably excellent students (a 3.95+ average unweighted GPA is exceptional no matter how you slice it) who happen to be born into less wealthy families energizes the pipeline work. |
Anonymous
Continuing - another answer, since right now we’re discussing families of significant means who are “willing to invest in education” - there are many private schools that offer exceptional academics that are more than happy to take students who used to be able to ride advancement and paid prep into TJ. |
Anonymous
Not a false choice. Just a lazy solution by gaming the system. You could have worked on a better test and kept teacher recommendations. Instead you used Covid to do your nasty business so that TJ spots could be gifted by the politicians, to their constituents. Ironically, reduces the incentive to fix the pipeline. Why fix pipeline when you can game the process to punish a certain race. You can never ever defend evil, even if you sometimes get away with it. Truth stands on its own! |
Anonymous
Your hateful nonsense aside, I personally believe in teacher recs. I think it was a mistake to remove them. |