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September 29, 2024 - 4:00pm
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, one of the top public schools in the US, has seen a major decline in academic achievement since implementing new admissions standards in pursuit of racial equity in 2020.
In the days after George Floyd’s death, leaders began assessing the underrepresentation of black and Hispanic students at the magnet school, and discussed how to move “towards greater equity, to be clearly distinguished from equality.” Soon after, the school updated its highly competitive admissions process, replacing standardised tests with a holistic evaluation that rewarded students on the basis of having attended underrepresented middle schools and qualifying for free lunch — considerations that critics have called racial proxies.
School leaders had repeatedly complained that the student population, which was majority Asian-American, did not match the racial demographics of the surrounding area. After the implementation of new admissions metrics, the admission of Asian students declined from 73% to 54%. Critics, including parents of Asian students, have pointed to this statistic as evidence of discrimination.
In addition to changing demographics, TJ’s academic output declined drastically. The school tumbled down the national rankings of top public high schools, falling from the #1 to the #14 slot in just four years.
TJ previously boasted 157 semifinalists for the prestigious 2020 National Merit Scholarship, a number that stayed fairly consistent until this year. But the number fell by nearly half for the current senior class, students who were admitted in 2021 under the newly implemented race-conscious admissions rules. Only 81 TJ students were semifinalists for the 2025 award.
The changes have not gone unopposed. Coalition for TJ, a group of community members including some staff and parents, filed a lawsuit against the school which worked its way through the legal system before it was ultimately rejected by the Supreme Court earlier this year. Justices declined to weigh in on a federal court’s ruling that no discrimination had occurred so long as Asian students remained overrepresented.
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SubscribeSame happened to some Californian Medical School. If you lower your admission standards do not be surprised your results will deteriorate.
Sounds like this school could do with some ‘leaders’. These “school leaders” sound like the antithesis of it. They sound like ‘followers’….. the kind who latch onto any latest media groupthink fad. It takes a very low-grade type of ‘leader’ to still have not wised up to the race-bias fiction that the relatively poor academic performance of black students is due to ‘discrimination’. To be oblivious to the copiously documented data showing that they have been the beneficiaries of a raft of racial preference policies for decades now – including admission to elite institutions with far lower entry qualifications than white or Asian students. And has much good come of it….for anyone?