Reply to TJ Falls to 14th in the Nation Per US News

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Percent total of Asians will obviously go down, mathematically, because there are many middle schools where there are very few Asians. If more Asians moved to other middle schools instead of primarily concentrating in Rocky Run, Carson, and Cooper, then the Asian percentage will go up again.[/quote]

Replace "Asians" in your quote with some other races and swap out the school names and then maybe you'll understand how not race-blind the change is.  Well, other than the fact that you are choosing to not understand and throwing out statements like this one is the best you can do.

I don't care either way - no interest in sending any of my kids to TJ.  But to pretend this change didn't have an agenda they can't admit publicly is asinine.[/quote]
The changes absolutely had an agenda that they have been very public about admitting - FCPS wanted to open access to TJ to students from all schools within the catchment area and to students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds.

The impact of this has been that now, pretty much any sufficiently motivated student can dream about attending TJ regardless of whether or not they were selected for AAP or ended up within a narrow range or schools.

And the school is fairly obviously better off for it.[/quote]
Actually, it just shows that their own processes in advanced academics are failing to lift up URMs, so they just resorted to giving spots away. It’s pretty much proof that the county can’t close the achievement gap.[/quote]

Not exactly.  The new process reflects the applicant pool - opening up the admissions process to every middle school broadly increased interest in the school, especially among students who would not otherwise have considered it.  That means that the new admissions process succeeded in broadening appeal.  Whether that's good or bad may depend on your perspective, but so far, you haven't even considered it.  So how can you have an opinon on it?[/quote]
Interest and appeal doesnt equal qualified. Luckily the changes have removed any semblance of qualification. Experience factors and a 3.5 will get you in at an underrepresented school.

Unfortunately, those students still achieve and score significantly lower than many across the county. So while they are in, it isn’t because the gap was closed but rather, they were given the spots. [/quote]

And despite that TJ still managed to fall to #14 using data from the previous admission system.[/quote]
Unfortunately, I believe this factor drove the drop:

“Underserved Student Performance (10%)

This is a measure assessing learning outcomes only among Black, Hispanic and low-income students. This evaluates how well this underserved subgroup scored on state assessments compared with the average for nonunderserved students among schools in the same state. Schools performing above the 50th percentile nationally in this comparison received the highest score, while other schools’ scores decreased the greater the distance between their underserved students and their state’s median for nonunderserved students.

This indicator is in most cases based on 2021-2022 state assessment data. In a few cases, data from earlier years was used. See Methodology Changes in This Year’s Rankings below.”

The years prior to the admission changes showed these groups scoring regularly in the 90% range on SOL Pass Advanced Marks at least far as can be known from VDOE.

After the admissions changes and the data used for the previous ranking, these groups score in the 25-30% Pass Advanced and include a failure or two.

The inclusivity of kids who perform poorly on standardized tests were obviously going to have an impact. Even non-URM SOL scores were also down compared to previous years which is another 20%.

This shouldn’t come as a shock.[/quote]

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