Reply to Reflections on the "TJ Papers"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Wow lots to read but thank you for the summary. Early identification of URM students and early mentoring can help achieve equity without discrimination against another group.  [/quote]

Whenever someone says this, my sense is always that what they really want is for admissions to stay exactly as it is so that kids who already have the advantage of early “mentoring” (in the form of parents who are highly interested in education) will continue to be the ones who go to TJ. 
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And to add, they don’t really have a strong interest in helping kids who have fewer advantages than their own kids. 
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I think realistically, people are all for the idea of having more underprivileged SES or racial minorities at TJ, and the real concern is just the watering down of standards. (The idea is that we should be ensuring that all kids have the education they need to do well at TJ, not just giving up and saying, eh, these kids can't compete so we'll lower the bar.)

[b]The root (or a root) of the problem seems to be that some kids get more of a head start than others,[/b] and so realistically it seems like the best solution to this is to help give kids who aren't getting a 'leg up' from their parents to get that leg up as quickly as possible from the schools - through extra early resources. That's not a solution I've heard anyone rally against, which is what I'd expect if parents with more advantages were truly trying to keep kids with fewer advantages down. But it's also not a fast solution, and thus not popular with the district. [/quote]

There are different opinions about this.  Some experts have argued that the real problem is that bright minorities - the ones who would most benefit from being nurtured in a place like TJ - aren't always recognized as such.  From that perspective, actions which would further obfuscate the landscape - like making the admissions process more promiscuous and flooding the school with marginally qualified students - would only serve to aggravate the fundamental problem.

In some ways, the picture we've been given has been self-contradictory.  On one hand, the students we're supposed to be helping are the bright, motivated ones who, due to poverty, have no time to invest in their studies.  We've heard stories about how they're working odd jobs, babysitting siblings, and so on, meaning that their academics suffer out of practical necessity.  At the same time, the students who the system is set up to help are lower income students with perfect GPAs, which seems to catch something entirely different from what the previous example said we were missing.[/quote]

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