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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.
Or that your local doctor won’t be bright enough to know what he’s doing.
Yes, we’ll actually NEED AI in medicine, because the human doctors won’t be capable of doing the job.
It appears
This is exactly what the left wants. They don’t care about deteriorating standards. It will reduce the amount of outsized successful people, which in their mind reduces the wealth gap.Everyone will be worse off, except the politburo who are in power.
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? American schooling is in a bad way. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/teach-your-children-well
Nothing surprising here, if you promote people with African mentality and IQ you would end up like Africa.
However, I think schools should select more on inherent ability than just exam results.
Lumpl Trust in uk did some research which shows that attending quality public school improves exam results by about 0.75 of the grade.
So strong B grade from local comprehensive might indicate greater ability than A grade from Eaton or Winchester.
UK had excellent grammar school system, which allowed children from poor and/or non academic background to move up in society.
Unfortunately, Labour socialist dogma destroyed it.
The children from Eton and Winchester will still be in the exam room taking the exams; they will still have had to learn the syllabus. What you are saying is “you might have studied more, continually, for years whilst knowing that you have these exams coming up and yes, you may have given up on other activities to do this extra work and struggled to understand the concepts but overcame the doubters that assume you are rich and so already know everything somehow, but we think these other children deserve to leap-frog you because, and yes although they are probably the highest achieving in their state school and are also probably from the most middle-class and financially secure families that can afford to play the catchment area game in that school, we think it is only fair to hobble you in this way. For their benefit.”
This is insanity.
Let’s ruin the best school in the country over some deranged concept of equity.
Life isn’t and can’t be fair without dragging everyone down to the lowest common denominator.
Unfortunately, should Kamala Harris be elected President, a woman who was imbued with Marxist ideology from both parents, this downward trend will only continue.
The best way to get rid of DEI is to implement DEI into professional football and watch it implode, which is precisely why the NFL won’t do it. Much too important to society than mere education of our youth.
And the NBA. Even Caitlin Clark (amazing though she is) would probably not fare too well against the best males in the world.
And let’s be sure that each fire department crew is at least half women…then you can watch your house burn down with the firetruck in the driveway, because the equipment/hoses are too heavy for them to manage.
I could go on, but I’ll spare us all.
Yes, I notice no one pushes equity on selecting school athletic teams.
Over here in the U.K. we are also going down the DEI path, but not for all occupations.
For instance, there appears to be very little appetite for DEI in plumbing, bricklaying or digging roads which strangely remain male dominated jobs.
Precisely. The modern Left is dragging everyone down to the same low level and the call it inclusion. I recommend reading Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut – SF came true.
Serves them right.
Job One: Retake the schools.
Everything proceeds according to plan.
Only slipping!
As someone who lives in Northern VA I will only say the following…
Fairfax County schools and their reputation is what drove so many people to move there. Lot of people have stretched their housing budgets to be able to live in that county so they can access the public schools. You save the cost of a private school at $25 to $30k a year to put it into your housing cost.
That in turn has driven up housing values. Fairfax is only just barely less expensive than Loudon County, which is the richest in the country.
BUT….once the reputation of those schools drops, so go the housing values. You would be better off moving further out to some place like Prince William or Fauquier counties where taxes are lower and the cost of housing is lower but there is access to top notch private schools like Highland or Wakefield.
That was my choice. I chose to move further out and do private schools. But my $500k house here would be over a million in Fairfax or Loudon.
I suspect that, at some point, when the schools have deteriorated more markedly, there will be some sort of backlash in the community against these policies, and new people will be elected to run the local school systems. But that may take a while.
People on the left are very vocal about their principles — until those principles really hit them in the wallet. Then,…
America is ruined. We’ll never be able to compete with countries that value meritocracy.
Used to work across the street from TJ. My son applied to TJ, but didn’t get accepted. That was ok because . . . meritocracy.
If someone just like him applied now, he still wouldn’t get in, but someone less qualified than him would. What will this do to us in the long run, and please don’t say Equity.
If recruitment into educational institutions is based on race, not assessed intelligence, then standards will decline.
This piece has triggered the usual herd response.
I can understand why. Laurel Duggan, the author of this piece, has cherry-picked and thus distorted the issue.
For example, she links to the Washington Post in one place, but chose not to reference another Post article from April 15, 2024 by Karina Elwood, about the Asian grad of TJ who initiated the legal defence of the school, and who believes the new policy is a good one, and who continues to advocate for such changes.
Why do you think Laurel Duggan chose to omit this reference, in which this Asian grad of TJ says that a lot of Asians think the policy is a good one?
Why did she choose to only link to the Petitioner, “Coalition for TJ, a group of community members including some staff and parents,” and to their legal team, the Pacific Legal Foundation, but not to mention the salient, and hardly obscure fact that it was an Asian grad of TJ who came to the school’s defence, or to link to, or quote anything from her team’s brief to the Supreme Court?
As a corrective, I will link to, and quote from both sources. Hopefully non-herd readers, or those who have been part of the herd but have preserved at least some independence of mind, will find it helps them reach an informed opinion, regardless of what it is.
“This TJ alum helped defend the school in court. Now she’s defending DEI.”
div > p:nth-of-type(3) > a”>https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2024/04/15/april-hu-tj-high-school-admissions-policy/
Brief to the Supreme Court:
div > p:nth-of-type(20) > a”>https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/23/23-170/285825/20231023143317385_23-170%20-%20Brief%20in%20Opposition.pdf
Snippets:
Again, it is worth asking why Ms. Duggan would omit this context, which is necessary to an informed opinion on the subject.
First, thank you for providing a counterpoint. I welcome your injection additional information to the conversation, and I would not want my further comments to suggest otherwise, even if they push back on some aspects.
The issue here is somewhat complex. The UnHerd article, to my mind, centers on the question of diluting merit and academic performance in pursuit of some people’s conception of social justice. Neither you nor the courts have disputed that this degradation of education was the outcome of the new policy.
However, degrading education is not a constitutional issue of interest to the courts, so in the attempt to get court intervention, the plaintiffs focused on a claim that the policy was intended to reduce the proportion of Asian students at TJ, which is a not the core issue but is one which could concern the court. (It’s not uncommon to select a relative side issue, rather than the core issue, as the facet which would matter to a court judging constitutionality.)
In the words of the UnHerd article:
> Justices declined to weigh in on a federal court’s ruling that no discrimination had occurred so long as Asian students remained overrepresented.
I would slightly qualify that to: “a lower court had found that no actionable and unconstitutional discrimination on the basis of race had occurred sufficient to require judicial intervention”.
I do not dispute that finding, just to be clear – particularly if the same judicial restraint is exercised in other cases involving assertions of intentional discrimination but with insufficient evidential support. The TJ policy may not be a proper constitutional issue.
Notice however that all this says nothing about reductions in the quality of education associated with the policy change, which was not a question before the court, but was the central subject of the article, in my view.
Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing will depend on one’s politics and ideology, rather than being objectively determinable.
And as such, one would expect that people may differ in which course they support. I think you make too big a deal of the fact that one of the lawyers defending the new policy was a TJ graduate – especially one who has already benefitted from the formerly superior education themselves and has nothing to lose. Would you find it salient and persuasive if one of the lawyers from the other side had attended TJ and claimed in interviews that they were motivated to retain the excellence of the school? I didn’t think so. So why would you expect that to be convincing, or even relevant, to others?
You also ask about Ms Duggan’s omissions. How about yourself? Did you read only the defense brief or did you read all briefs before commenting? Why did YOU only quote only from the defense of the new policy, and not offer readers any equally honestly presented perspective from the other side? Why did you ignore the question of reduction of educational quality in your response, to focus only on the areas where you believe your side has the upper ground?
You are more than welcome to hold a different opinion than Ms Duggan, and you can selectively present only the evidence you imagine supports your pre-existing opinion here in the comments section. But it is not wise to criticize others for allegedly doing what you are definitely doing. (Remembering that UnHerd is not straight reporting, but more like opinion pieces). You seem to want the freedom to “make a case” with selective information, but expect that anybody who expresses a differing viewpoint is responsible for reporting both sides. That dual standard may be comfortable to you, but the tactics are not lost on other readers.