Right. Do all the kids do calculus? I’m pretty sure that was A level maths, so most kids in the UK would never learn it.
Maybe. Not everyone learns well from books though. But I agree there’s no point sending a student who’s too far behind to the school; I was wondering if it contributed to the disparity in admissions.
It’s good that students can to some extent go at their own pace by taking different classes at different times, and that you have these AP classes for the ones who’re ahead, rather than making them sit around bored.
The entire question of why there are group differences in performance on, e.g., the TJ admissions test (for those who aren’t ideologically required to answer that and all other questions with “because of the conspiracy of white people against black people”) has been largely avoided in this thread and could certainly sustain its own separate topic.
I wasn’t thinking of group differences. Unless the group is ‘nerds who love STEM subjects’, you’re always going to find a fair proportion of people who hate maths.
This is the fairfax county website’s page on math course progression. I think this is not uncommon throughout the country.
To get higher level math you have to be in the gifted and talented program, you can do this by showing an aptitude for math.
One of the benefits was that I got to make this transition in high school rather than college where to be honest I think the competition was a bit easier.
Yes I went to a school that didn’t typically send any kids. I was a poor immigrant with non-english speaking parents, I would never have been able to navigate a complicated holistic admissions process. The sacrifices my parents made for my education make me cry sometimes.
As the link above shows, the typical math curriculum stops before calculus.
For the typical tjhsst student it is taken in their sophomore year.
So first it was just “maybe we reserve a few seats for this or that group,” then it became a lottery, and finally we get a “holistic review.”
The absurd lie that the “holistic review” will be “race-neutral” is already being propounded in the article, despite the fact that this started with school board members openly saying “we need to get rid of the Asians” and that the same resolution establishing the “holistic review” system calls for a bevy of
regular reports to make sure racial balancing is being achieved.
That’s about it for the school, unless they can get enough teacher buy-in to maintain existing standards for coursework even if that means failing out the 95% of admitted students who don’t belong there until the school board relents. I doubt that will happen.
I’ll also reiterate that Virginia administrative code 8VAC20-40-40.D.4 clearly, directly and unambiguously states that any program like TJ must use an admissions test. The holistic review plan is facially illegal. One should ask why the Fairfax school board is so hellbent on its “fuck the Asians” policy that they are opening themselves up to criminal and civil penalties over it.
The lawsuit from the current parents and prospective applicants will likely move forward, and if they draw a “progressive”-sympathizing judge the contortions needed to ignore the plain meaning of the law and the way it’s always been applied will certainly be a sight.
The competition was easier in college? I don’t think that’s most people’s experience.
Damn. Why can’t we ensure every child gets a great education without their parents having to make huge sacrifices? That probably goes a long way to explaining the disparity in admissions. But improving education and building more magnet schools costs money, whereas tinkering with admissions requirements is free.
‘Holistic review’ probably will get better-qualified students than a lottery, and I expect the mathematics essay will count as an admissions test for the purpose of the lawsuit. It will be interesting to see what happens to dropout rates, though.
So you are saying that Fairfax school board member and chairwoman Ricardy Anderson did not go to an anti-TJ rally on October 4, 2020, stand in front of a sign listing the percentages of the TJ student body by race, and give a speech accusing Asian parents of “pay to play” and calling for TJ to have “demographics reflective of our schools”?
You are saying that fellow Fairfax school board member Karen Keys-Gamarra did not speak at the same rally in front of the same sign and explain that the initiative is about racial “equity?”
Fairfax county teacher Matt Levi didn’t go online to call the black and Asian parents leading the pro-TJ group “motherfuckers,” echoing VA education secretary Atif Qarni’s labeling them “white supremacists,” and “a hate group” on his Twitter accounts on November 14, 2020, that he maintains during instructional time and is followed by the anti-TJ faction of the school board?
Another Fairfax teacher, Patricia Heining, didn’t deliver a speech to the Virginia Senate on January 25, 2018 about “certain communities” that are “ravenous” and need to be opposed “however they come here”?
Before you deny these things, do you want to consider that the inclusion above of the names of the people who did them, the fora they did them in, and the exact dates they happened might indicate that there is video and other primary evidence that they happened?
Again you just try to waste time in bad faith - 632 posts into the pro-racism side explaining in circles why we must support kicking out the Asians, on the day after the school board votes to kick out the Asians, you want to pretend no one ever wanted to kick out the Asians and debate whether the situation under discussion even exists.
Well “holistic” means “white” just like “diverse” means “black.” They’re going to magically pick as many “holistic” people as they need to make sure the percentage white population at TJ matches the white population of Fairfax as a whole, and as many “diverse” people as they need to make sure the black population does the same. The pools for both the lottery and the racial quota review will be skewed somewhat away from the overall demographics of the county because a disproportionate number of Asians will want to apply in the first place, so they will really be reaching to fill those diverse and holistic spots. If we assume that “the best 100-200 students who miss the cut on a testing system” might be just as capable of succeeding as TJ and set the bar for the point where either the curriculum must be noticeably watered down or mass failure of 9th graders will occur at, say, admitting a student who is 20% or more deep into the applicant pool from the merit cutoff, then we should expect anywhere from 5% in the worst case to maybe 30% in the best case of the students admitted under the new plan to be capable of keeping up with TJ as it currently is (it would be 5% if everyone who meets the 3.5 GPA cutoff applies, but we don’t know that this will happen, and I’d say at most 1/3 of those students will decline to apply).
I’d expect a judge who is sympathetic to the race quota crusade to try to force that redefinition, and we’ll see what happens to it on appeal. The law uses the phrase “nationally norm-referenced aptitude test” specifically and under the doctrine that words in laws are chosen for some reason, they would have to explain why it says “test” if it allows for an essay and what makes it an “aptitude test” in particular.
Yes. The way it works is that you are admitted into the AAP program based largely on test scores. These students all attend schools called AAP where they are placed in AAP classes with other kids in the program. By the time you are in 8th grade, you should be 1 or 2 grade levels above your peers.
The course work in college was harder but the competition was easier.
Poverty will always have it’s disadvantages and wealth will always have its advantages. We can’t get rid of that but we can try to minimize it. I think that an income based preference at TJHSST is a perfectly acceptable and legal way of achieving diversity, you would replace a bunch of affluent white and asian kids with mostly poor asian kids but you would also get a bunch of poor black and hispanic kids. Poverty in this county is largely color coded.
Let me first say that I’m glad you are here to see what it is you were defending in other places (maybe you’ve been here all along). I am hopeful that after seeing what the issue is, you will reconsider your defense of the proponents of this change.
So do you have any position on the merits of this change?
I agree that ANY merit based standard is better than a lottery no matter how much it allows bias and racism to creep in. When harvard had implemented racist policies against jews it was still admitting a much better student body than random selection would have admitted.
This is the text of the law:
“4. If a program is designed to address general intellectual aptitude, an individually administered or group-administered, nationally norm-referenced aptitude test shall be included as one of the three measures used in the school division’s identification procedure.”
I agree that the quoted language does not appear anywhere but what do you make of the rest of it?
The phrase “without commenting on” was one I used deliberately. I don’t have a strong opinion on this specific case, and if you believe I have, in other threads, defended one side or another, you’re mistaken.
Virginia law on educational access is heavily influenced by the experiences of the Massive Resistance era. The exact sort of legalistic tricks and disingenuous claims that the Fairfax County board is using in its anti-Asian crusade were used to keep schools segregated until 1972.
The board was authorized to make decisions based on several conditions that might be used to mask decisions based on race: including the effect of enrollment on all children in the school, the health of the child, the effect of educational disparity, the availability of facilities, the aptitude of the child, and “sociological, psychological, and like intangible social scientific factors.”
Over the three years of its existence, the State Board members had decided 450,000 pupil placement applications and never allowed a black child to be assigned to a white school.
Sound familiar? This is the “holistic review” process - we list a bunch of vague criteria up to and including “intangible social scientific factors” that we claim to use, actually do nothing but engineer desired racial outcomes, and chug along until the federal courts make us stop because this is what the racist interests at the state level demand. History repeats itself, not that anyone at the new anti-merit schools in Virginia is going to learn any more about history than they do about math and science.
And the point of the thin veneer is to be not a lie, but to be bullshit - the latter being defined as something nobody believes or is even expected to believe, that is propounded basically to show that those without power can’t do anything about it.
I apologize and I will be taking a break from this board. I am taking anti-asian racism too personally and lashing out at people that don’t deserve it. I apologize for some of the deliberately hurtful things I said yesterday.
I will not be responding on this board for a while unless someone @damuriajashi a specific question.
I think you’re making a wise move. I’d also suggest that you take a lesson from this:
Be really careful that the argument you’re responding to is the argument someone is making; and
Make allowances for the possibility that those that disagree with you are doing so from a position of principle and a desire for justice, even if they reach different conclusions from yours.
I recall another recent incident in Virginia where we were told to look at a conflict between “people advocating racism” and “people opposed to racism” and instructed to believe that there were “very fine people on both sides.” No thanks.
