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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]At the most fundamental level it is the woke who are racists. They assume blacks and Hispanics are not capable and hence need to tip scales in their favor.

It is not black, Hispanic, white or asian that matters in most things, but the income/wealth level.

If you look at a say just those families with masters degrees, their kids average about the same level regardless of their race. A black kid from highly educated parent would be just as capable in every single respect to a kid from other races with similarly educated parents.

Woke people would rather they feel superior than help the poor. [/quote]

People of the same income but from different cultures have different academic outcomes.
Immigrants do better than natives.
asian immigrant cultures do better than mainstream american culture at every income level

Of course income matters but culture is generally more predictive of outcomes than income level.
[/quote]

I totally understand where you are coming from.

The thing you are missing is, the metrics people of different cultures are using for "do better" are different.

This is from a chinese kid from bay area who wrote a book or an article that I read a long time back.

Say a family goes to a party, the child brings a book and sits in a corner and reads the book or does homework most of the time.

If it is an asian family, every other asian family would be genuinely impressed and openly express their admiration for the kid. What a studious kid, the kid is amazing, etc. is what they would think.

A white family would be horrified if their kid does something like that.

I stereotyped and it is a gross exaggeration. But it points to the cultural attitudes and what each mean by "do better".

In this sense, you are speaking very specifically what "do better" means and by that metric defining immigrant/culture as doing better.

I am asian by the way. I strongly disagree with the notion that any culture/race/nationality/etc. is better than the other. 
[/quote]

In this case, I think we are talking about culture as it relates to educational outcomes.

Some cultures value education more than others.
These differences in cultures create differences in incentives and incentives matter.
You just told a story about a kid bringing a book to read or study at a party and how people in different communities would react to that kids.

These cultures may not be better in every way but they do achieve better academic results.
There are a lot of knock on effects that show up in other ways.[/quote]

I would say even "achieve better academic results" is in a very narrow sense. If you are talking about GPA, Test Scores, Academic Competitions, then yes. But to me that is too narrow a focus.

Thanks for the nice exchange. I have nothing more to add, so I would stop.[/quote]

DP.  There's plenty of room at TJ to take the standouts in terms of GPA/Test Scores/Courses Taken/Academic competitions, and then fill the remaining seats more broadly.   Reasonably speaking, only 50-100 kids in the TJ catchment are academic standouts, and the remaining 450-500 seats could be allocated among qualified students in whatever way FCPS wants without greatly changing anything.

It is true that Asian culture values academics in a way that almost all of the academic standouts will be Asian.  That tracks with the fact that almost all kids earning honors at National Mathcounts, USAJMO, USAMO, USA Physics Olympiad, USA Chem olympiad, etc. are overwhelmingly Asian.  It's also true that academic standouts in FCPS belong at TJ and shouldn't be at the mercy of a sparse process that relies almost entirely on personal essays.[/quote]

I don't know if you are saying that the 450-500 students are unnecessary or unimportant to the 50-100 students you are talking about but the pond affects the fish.
If the other students don't provide enough background enrichment they will simply be a distraction.
If the faculty has to teach to mediocre students, they will not be able to teach to the students you are targeting.
You can't always tell which student will truly shine in the long run but the best bets are all at the right tail of the distribution.
Picking for something other than merit means you have created a porous filter for talent.
I[/quote]

PP here.  What I'm saying is that even in the old, merit based system, there were many, many more qualified kids than TJ slots.  Once you get past the top 100, there isn't really that much difference between #300 and #1000.  TJ absolutely should implement a baseline test and push the middle schools to stop inflating grades.  They should also consider math level and teacher recommendations.  It is likely that they could still achieve broad representation across all FCPS middle schools if they were to implement this.[/quote]

I think there is probably a difference between #300 and #1000 but lets say you're right and there isn't much difference between #300 and #1000, but we are not replacing #300 with #1000.  We are replacing #300 with #5,000.

We are seeing a small number of kids not hit the passing score on Math SOLs at TJ.  The number of kids getting advance pass on SOLs is dropping up to half.[/quote]

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