Reply to Coalition4TJ’s request to block TJ admissions process DENIED 6-3 by Supreme Court

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This whole debate fails to address the fundamental question - what is the mission of a school like TJ? Is that mission still valid 30 years after its founding? If we can't agree on the mission of the school, we will not agree on how the school should be run or whether such a school should even exist in this era.

If the mission is to group academically advanced kids - who would otherwise be bored in the base-school curriculum - together in a single school with difficult and challenging classes, then the job of the admission should simply be identifying such kids who are advanced learners and need that challenging environment. The racial makeup of such a school shouldn't be of any concerns. The school doesn't provide "better" education. All it does is providing more challenging and difficult classes. The "education" or the teaching quality is the same for base school and such a magnet school. Getting into such a school is not some kind of "benefit" or a "resource" to be hoarded. Putting more URMs into such a school doesn't necessarily benefit them.

If the mission has changed, the SB has not articulated what the new mission of TJ is.[/quote]

The new mission of TJ is to serve as a demonstration project that kids from diverse economic backgrounds and middle schools that generally have poor test scores can graduate from TJ.  It advances the equity agenda because it serves the narrative that talent is equally distributed across geographic and SES lines and that any differences in observed outcomes elsewhere in FCPS must be due to systemic issues requiring constant attention.

To fit this narrative it will be critical that kids who enter TJ under the new admissions criteria graduate from the school, and the courses will be less rigorous if necessary to achieve that end.  The notion that TJ exists to educate students who would not be challenged elsewhere will either be dismissed as antiquated or hold out as still valid - just without any real evidence that it applies to an ever-increasing percentage of students, who in reality would have been just as well served at their base schools. [/quote]

A middle class kid who has fluent English speaking parents who constantly provided extra educational enrichment for the child is NOT congenitally more intelligent or talented to the ESL poor kid whose parents work 60 hours weeks just to put food on the table.

Equity is about removing all those environmental factors that make a difference so that an inherently smart poor kid can best a mediocre rich kid on the merits.[/quote]

OK so you agree the mission of TJ from 1986 has not changed, i.e. identifying advanced learners who need difficult classes to challenge them. But you believe before the admission change, we had many unidentified advanced/intelligent URMs who were bored at the base school and needed a challenging environment like TJ. If this were the issue to be solved why then the new TJ lowered its standard and offered lower-level math classes that were readily available in the base schools. Perhaps the mission did change and FCPS wanted a new school that's slightly more advanced than base schools but not as rigorous as the old TJ.

It does feel like FCPS has a goal in mind for improving the percentage of certain racial groups and then work backwards to make that happen. These changes may not provide better education experience but achieve the racial quota.[/quote]

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