Disputing moderation outside ATMB is against the rules, as is ignoring moderator instructions. You are suspended pending discussion of your posting privileges. This is also an official warning.
Colibri
Might as well suspend me too , if moderation is this fucking blind to see the actual culprits that LEAD to this type of exchange are whole-heartedly defended by the moderation shown here.
Fair enough. That will also be a warning for disputing moderation outside ATMB.
I see no reason why an area cannot have an “elite” school where only its best and brightest can qualify to attend. Now no system of selection is going to be totally fair. However the most important thing is to keep the quality of the school high enough to deserve its reputation.
Perhaps if there is enough applicants there could be a similar school opened or other elite programs could be added to the various local schools.
This is the true crux of the matter - the progressive CRT devotee cannot admit that there is such a thing as “the best” on merit. Everything is a race war and your side is either winning or losing; there is no such thing as an individual who has demonstrated a better capacity to learn advanced math or has earned anything by their own achievement. This dovetails nicely with the typical educrat hatred of excellence or accountability to create an alliance within the Democratic coalition devoted to destroying any school designed to meet the needs of an academic elite.
As mentioned, many of the local public schools that practice ordinary open admissions are extremely “elite” by national standards. We hear a lot about how unfair it is to send a black student who just barely misses the cutoff on the TJ exam to Langley or Marshall or Woodson - they are allegedly being deprived of something unfairly. We don’t talk about how no student in the entirety of Nebraska, or South Dakota, or Alaska has the opportunity that hypothetical black student has, because the #1 school in those states isn’t as good as any school in the next tier for the area serviced by TJ. A minority student who is truly “95% as good as the last person admitted to TJ” and spends four years excelling at Langley is going to have his pick of any college in the world.
It’s not good enough to offer a range of excellent options to a range of skill levels, though - anything with Too Many Asians and anything that doesn’t reflect the orthodoxy of “there is no merit, everything is a white supremacist conspiracy” simply has to be annihilated. There’s no compromising with these people. They are fanatics driven to destroy.
I don’t think the schools reputation is very important. What I think is important is making sure that level-appropriate instruction is available to interested students. At the extremes, it becomes challenging to offer this without some concentration of students.
The five districts feeding into TJ do offer advanced and special-interest material, both in regular schools and (in Fairfax) at “academies”. E.g. there’s enough ability and interest to offer calc BC broadly. But (apparently) not so much for complex analysis and differential equations.
I’m still waiting for the cite where the CRT proponents are involved in this case and what is their opinion.
Incidentally, in the Harvard case, (Yale’s case is a related one but in a different circuit) merit is a factor, again it is clear that the error is to continue to insist that race is the only factor being considered by Harvard or Yale.
Can you provide your cite(s) for there being no school in these states that is the equal of any school in the tier below TJ.
Dig into the sites that purport to “rank” high schools - this is an inexact science for sure but you can go beyond the idea that you can really determine which of two schools in far-apart states is “#19” versus “#23” and look at some of the underlying data.
Look at indicators of how well top students are served - the easiest direct comparisons are AP courses offered and the enrollment/pass rates in those courses, and median scores on SAT and ACT.
In Nebraska, the top 1 or 2 schools are on par with the top 25 schools in Virginia (look how many “A+” schools Virginia has, and almost all of them are in areas where students are eligible to apply to TJ). If you aren’t a resident of Omaha and in one of those top 1-2 schools there, you have nothing comparable to something like even Grassfield or Lake Braddock, which are not even in the top 20 for Virginia.
What’s really interesting is how much better the Virginia schools serve the entire population. The gap in quality for elite education starts around 3 or 4 on the list and diverges slowly. The divergence in measures of educating all tiers starts right away. The overall math/science proficiency scores at the Nebraska schools are startlingly bad. AP and SAT/ACT data only measures people who are thinking about going to college - marginal students don’t take those tests. The mandatory proficiency testing applies to everyone, and at even the best school in Nebraska, there appears to be a huge underclass of people outside the gifted program who are washing out of education entirely. The Virginia schools do not show this - their best high schools seem to have almost no one missing the benchmark proficiency standards.
To a limited extent, the number of good schools can be explained by a population difference; the state of Nebraska has about 50% of the number of people as the area generally considered “Northern Virginia,” which in turn makes up about 40% of Virginia as a whole. And there are likely somewhat more high school students per capita in NoVA as it is a net destination area for raising families in a way that Nebraska generally is not. However, this would be the end of the explanation only if NoVa had 2 to 4 times the number of programs serving top students the way Nebraska’s best school does. It doesn’t explain why the actual number is 20 to 40 as many, or why the Virginia schools do a better job educating average to below average students also. Consider also that the top 1-2% of students who “should be” attending those Virginia schools are attending TJ instead, and they still get these results even without those “best of the best.”
Clearly there’s a bigger structural difference creating excellence - one that the progressive race warriors are going to root out and destroy.
Thank you for the work you did in answering my question. I learned a great deal from your post.
The teenager who shares my. Home will be attending our #3 ranked high school. She’ll get a good education because she will be immersed in an enriched and empowered home life that values education and humanity.
That is where logic shows how poor is that reasoning. If that was so then after years of what Harvard and others did it should had lead to their destruction.
Since that did not happen the ongoing litigation actually shows that the ones demanding to destroy diversity are there because they do know that that excellency was not destroyed, because they still want more access to those “destroyed” institutions.
Well in some ways it has. Harvard, while still being a top school, cannot anymore say it is the VERY best.
Be honest. Of the Harvard graduates you know are they THAT much better?
Havent the programs and graduates of other schools increased to where you can say they are as good as Harvard?
Now granted Harvard and Yale will always have a great reputation and alumni. But I think they peaked long ago and other schools have caught up.
Frankly in my local district we dont need a school like this since our regular public schools have the “Honors” classes for those advanced students.
Now there have been complaints that there are not enough black students in say honors math. But those classes are totally voluntary and the work is hard and if you fail, you fail. That way they self regulate so those complaints have little traction.
Of course another implied point that I made is that the apocalyptic vision of the harm caused alleged by the ones pushing the cases is very limited or missing, just as the Judge concluded.
I taught Yale premeds. I realize the ones who eventually went to med school had years to mature and learn after my time with them, but holy shit that was not a confidence-inspiring experience.
And at the end of the day, I think we can all agree on the simple truth that every good academic program should be able to self-regulate by removing any and all traction from equality-related concerns.
Right, just the same as some physical fitness programs I have done where I quickly realized I would not be able to hack it.
But I never sued anyone because they did not accommodate me.
Wait, so you did not think they were that smart or better than others? Could you give some examples?
Maybe it was just that the quality of their instructor was lacking 
The school never claimed to be selecting people purely on raw intellect or academic achievement. And while I did encounter a few truly brilliant students, they were just the tail of a broad distribution.
The disconcerting behavior included things like cheating (reported, but nothing done), disregard for safety (we try to sanitize organic chemistry for undergrads as much as possible but you can still light things on fire), and apparent inability to read anything.
But it’s not like I conducted a systematic survey across schools, so YMMV.
With the destruction of Thomas Jefferson a fait accompli, the Critical Race Theory playbook is now being deployed at similar institutions across the country. Lowell High School in San Francisco is the next target and the timeline is almost a carbon copy of the TJ process - meetings at which only the pro-race war side is allowed to speak, racist speeches denouncing “toxic” Asian culture, low-intelligence educrats abusing the process to ram through the end of merit admissions, and finally, votes taken over Zoom at 12:30 in the morning so that the type of people who have real jobs to do during the day can’t attend.