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On the destruction of America’s best high school

• HenryKissinger 6y ago
  HN hug of death?
  • djaque 6y ago
    It 504s for me.
  • jimhefferon 6y ago
    On the destruction of America’s best high school Children with special abilities and skills need to be nourished and encouraged. They are a national treasure. Challenging programs for the “gifted” are sometimes decried as “elitism.” Why aren’t intensive practice sessions for varsity football, baseball, and basketball players and interschool competition deemed elitism? After all, only the most gifted athletes participate. There is a self-defeating double standard at work here, nationwide. —Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1996) I’d like you to feel about the impending destruction of Virginia’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the same way you might’ve felt when the Taliban threatened to blow up the Bamyan Buddhas, and then days later actually did blow them up. Or the way you felt when human negligence caused wildfires that incinerated half the koalas in Australia, or turned the San Francisco skyline into an orange hellscape. For that matter, the same way most of us felt the day Trump was elected. I’d like you to feel in the bottom of your stomach the avoidability, and yet the finality, of the loss. For thousands of kids in the DC area, especially first- or second-generation immigrants, TJHS represented a lifeline. Score high enough on an entrance exam—something hard but totally within your control—and you could attend a school where, instead of the other kids either tormenting or ignoring you, they might teach you Lisp or the surreal number system. Where you could learn humility instead of humiliation. When I visited TJHS back in 2012, to give a quantum computing talk, I toured the campus, chatted with students, fielded their questions, and thought: so this is the teenagerhood—the ironically normal teenagerhood—that I was denied by living someplace else. I found myself wishing that a hundred more TJHS’s, large and small, would sprout up across the country. I felt like if I could further that goal then, though the universe return to rubble, my life would’ve had a purpose. Instead, of course, our sorry country is destroying the few such schools that exist. Stuyvesant and Bronx Science in New York, and the Liberal Arts and Science Academy here in Austin, are also under mortal threat right now. The numerous parents who moved, who arranged their lives, specifically so that these schools might later be available for “high-risk” kids were suckered. Assuming you haven’t just emerged from 30 years in a Tibetan cave, you presumably know why this is happening. As the Washington Post‘s Jay Matthews explains, the Fairfax County School Board is “embarrassed” to have a school that, despite all its outreach attempts, remains only 5% Black and Latino—even though, crucially, the school also happens to be only 19% White (it’s now ~75% Asian). You might ask: so then why doesn’t TJHS just institute affirmative action, like almost every university does? It seems there’s an extremely interesting answer: they did in the 1990s, and Black and Hispanic enrollment surged. But then the verdicts of court cases, brought by right-wing groups, made the school district fear that they’d be open to lawsuits if they continued with affirmative action, so they dropped it. Now the boomerang has returned, and it’s time for a more drastic remedy: namely, to eliminate the TJHS entrance exam entirely, and replace it by a lottery for anyone whose GPA exceeds 3.5. The trouble is, TJHS without an entrance exam is no longer TJHS. More likely than not, such a place would simply converge to become another of the thousands of schools across the US where success is based on sports, networking, and popularity. And if by some miracle it avoided that fate, still it would no longer be available to most of the kids who‘d most need it. So yes, the district is embarrassed—note that the Washington Post writer explains it as if that’s the most obvious, natural reaction in the world—to host a school that’s regularly ranked #1 in the US, with the highest average SATs and a distinguished list of alumni. To avoid this embarrassment, the solution is (in effect) to burn the school to the ground. In a world-historic irony, the main effect of this “solution” will be to drastically limit the number of Asian students, while drastically increasing (!!!) the number of White students. The proportion of Black and Hispanic students is projected to increase a bit but remain small. Let me say that one more time: in practice, TJHS’s move from a standardized test to a lottery will be overwhelmingly pro-White, anti-Asian, and anti-immigrant; only as a much smaller effect will it be pro-underrepresented-minority. In spite of covid and everything else going on, hundreds of students and parents have been protesting in front of TJHS to try to prevent the school’s tragic and pointless destruction. But it sounds like TJHS’s fate might be sealed. The school board tolerated excellence for 35 more years than it wanted to; now its patience is at an end. Some will say: sure, the end of TJHS is unfortunate, Scott, but why do you let this stuff weigh on you so heavily? This is merely another instance of friendly fire, of good people fighting the just war against racism, and in one case hitting a target that, yeah, OK, probably should’ve been spared. On reflection, though, I can accept that only insofar as I accept that it was “friendly fire” when Bolsheviks targeted kulaks, or (much more comically, less importantly, and less successfully) when Arthur Chu, Amanda Marcotte, and a thousand other woke-ists targeted me. With friendly fire like that, who needs enemy fire? If you care about the gifted Black and Hispanic kids of Fairfax County, then like me, you should demand a change in the law to allow the reinstatement of affirmative action for them. You should acknowledge that the issue lies there and not with TJHS itself. I don’t see how you reach the point of understanding all the facts and still wanting to dismantle TJHS, over the desperate pleas of the students and parents, without a decent helping of resentment toward the kind of student who flourishes there—without a wish to see those uppity, “fresh off the boat” Chinese and Indian grinds get dragged down to where they belong. And if you tell me that you yourself were once that type of kid—well, isn’t that more contemptible still? Aren’t you knowingly burning a bridge you crossed so that a younger generation can’t follow you, basically reassuring the popular crowd that if they’ll only accept you, then there won’t be a hundred more greasy nerds in your tow? And if, on some level, you already know these things about yourself, then the only purpose of this post has been to remind you of them. As for the news that dominates the wires and inevitably preempts what I’ve written: I wish for his successful recovery, followed by his losing the election and spending the rest of his life in New York State prison. (And I look forward to seeing how woke Twitter summarizes the preceding statement—e.g., “Aaronson, his mask finally off, conveys well-wishes to Donald Trump”…)
• ed25519FUUU 6y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20201004204824/https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4979 https://web.archive.org/web/20201004204824/https://www.scott...
  • underdeserver 6y ago
    Maybe a comment will float this up - Everyone - please use the web archive link.
  • engineer_22 6y ago
    Yep
• lacker 6y ago
  It's ironic that all their talk about diversity and inclusion is being used so that they can increase the number of rich white people they admit.
  • someguydave 6y ago
    actually the opposite is likely to happen, as Scott posits.
    • Barrin92 6y ago
      no OP is right, that's actually what Scott says "In a world-historic irony, the main effect of this “solution” will be to drastically limit the number of Asian students, while drastically increasing (!!!) the number of White students. The proportion of Black and Hispanic students is projected to increase a bit but remain small. Let me say that one more time: in practice, TJHS’s move from a standardized test to a lottery will be overwhelmingly pro-White, anti-Asian, and anti-immigrant; only as a much smaller effect will it be pro-underrepresented-minority."
      • someguydave 6y ago
        yes but what reason is there to think they will be rich whites?
        • Barrin92 6y ago
          my guess would be that moving to a lottery is going to drastically shift the demographics of the school to the general demographics of the region, which would be affluent white people. Scott's saying that the rigorous testing regime got a lot of Asian kids into the school because they tend to do very well on tests, the affirmative action helped minorities, what is presumably the political majority felt left out.
          • jcranmer 6y ago
            > the general demographics of the region, which would be affluent white people. FCPS is actually probably the largest diverse school district in the US. It's about 37% white, 27% Hispanic, 20% Asian, 10% black, and 6% multiracial. (Although affluent still holds true--Fairfax County is the second-highest median household income county in the country).
• will4274 6y ago
  This topic really hits home for me. I went to a 'magnet' middle school on the other side of the river from TJ. I don't know that a more nerdy group of 300 students existed anywhere - or that any other group of people aged 11-14 had such a high portion of having submitted patches to open source software. It was, frankly, the only place in the world where I was ever told it was ok to be nerdy, where geeky obsession with learning about technology was praised rather than mocked. The anecdotes are amazing in themselves - I taught myself the difference between assembly and BASIC so I could write faster games on my TI83; the 8th graders built a mesh network in 2005; most of us had websites written in php or perl; we wrote guides on reverse engineering instant messenger protocols. It was truly a phenomenal place and the forcing of these brilliant and motivated students back into an environment where they will be mocked for their intellectual interests is a great loss.
  • mensetmanusman 6y ago
    The current educational strategy seems stacked against what you experienced. ‘We don’t want a diversity of schools, we want students to all learn the same things to these standards!’
• dnautics 6y ago
  My parents really wanted me to go to TJ; I lived in the county next door, took the test, and was awarded one of the first four berths to go to TJ from my county (I think it was the first out-of-county program for TJ). I chose to stay where I was and continue going to the magnet school I was going to, which was a creative arts/freedom oriented school, but plenty of the students like myself went on to get degrees in the hard sciences. For reference, my school also switched to a lottery system the year after I was there (so I guess it was 20 years "ahead" of TJ; incidentally it was also one of the first public "charter" schools in the strict sense of the word, a school with an educational charter). It's easy to say that things are only getting worse, I feel that way about my college, and so have alumni of that school for at least a hundred years. In the case of my high school, I think other more secular things have changed the character of the school far more than switching over to the lottery system (for example mass paranoia over child abductions, and school shootings).
• yostrovs 6y ago
  The author suggests that because affirmative action was deemed a poor solution to the "problem" that too many Asian kids attended the school, the only choice left was to abandon the entrance exam. Maybe the racist "problem" wasn't actually one and so racist solutions wouldn't be appropriate.
  • saxonww 6y ago
    Not a poor solution, but one that was likely to (edit: administration feared would) result in lawsuits.
• Animats 6y ago
  The elephant in the room: average east Asian in US IQ 105, average white IQ 99, average Black IQ 85-90. You're not supposed to talk about this.
• jdkee 6y ago
  Eliminating meritocratic school admissions in favor of balancing the school population bases on immutable characteristics such as skin color or "race" is the antithesis of the American ideal. It simply sows distrust and division between fellow Americans.
• rbecker 6y ago
  > Let me say that one more time: in practice, TJHS’s move from a standardized test to a lottery will be overwhelmingly pro-White, anti-Asian, and anti-immigrant; only as a much smaller effect will it be pro-underrepresented-minority. So we're only pro-diversity and representation when it's anti-White, not pro-White, got it.
  • Green_man 6y ago
    I think a good faith interpretation of this section requires the context: >the Fairfax County School Board is “embarrassed” to have a school that, despite all its outreach attempts, remains only 5% Black and Latino—even though, crucially, the school also happens to be only 19% White (it’s now ~75% Asian). The initial motivation in changing the school was (at least partially) to increase specific nonwhite minority student representation. Aaronson is pointing out that removing the entrance exams will likely not achieve these goals, though it will remove any negative attention from the school. I don't think Aaronson is advocating that good schools should all have smaller white student populations, instead he is criticizing methods that don't achieve their goals and have significant negative effects.
    • rbecker 6y ago
      > The initial motivation in changing the school was (at least partially) to increase specific nonwhite minority student representation. I.e. even though white students were under-represented, improving their representation was never a goal, and when it happens as a side-effect, it's presented as a negative.
      • Green_man 6y ago
        presented as a negative because it is contrary to some group's views, not Aaronson's. Or to use a phrasing from his line of research, relative phase matters, not global phase.
  • zepto 6y ago
    Who’s ‘we’? That’s certainly not Aaronson’s point of view.
• seibelj 6y ago
  I personally don’t care about affirmative action, but if you truly care, shouldn’t you be focused on income diversity over skin diversity? We know a lot of very well-off minorities (my wife for starters) and advantaging their children because of skin color doesn’t make any sense to me. An upper middle class black family and an upper middle class white family have way, WAY more in common then they do with a poor family of any race.
  • HideousKojima 6y ago
    You're assuming that those pushing for affirmative action do truly care about helping disadvantaged people. Attempts have been made to do affirmative action by income, but were halted because they were helping poor southeast Asians and eastern Europeans, not Blacks and Hispanics. Affirmative action is pretty nakedly a system of racial spoils.
    • deleted 6y ago
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  • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    The term "affirmative action" is generally used only to refer to the race bits. Every organization I'm familiar with that uses affirmative action also has outreach programs for poor people, generally called "nontraditional backgrounds" in business and "underserved communities" in academia.
  • Gimpei 6y ago
    Depends what you see as the point of affirmative action. One of the primary benefits so far as I see it is that it helps make the country's ruling class more reflective of the underlying population. There's a lot of research that increasing representation of disadvantaged groups improves their outcomes. 1. Gender: https://economics.mit.edu/files/792 https://economics.mit.edu/files/792 2. Caste: https://www.uh.edu/~achin/research/w16509.pdf https://www.uh.edu/~achin/research/w16509.pdf 3. Policing: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-01/how-to-make-a-police-force-more-diverse https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-01/how-to...
• rebelos 6y ago
  Asians are also 73% of Stuyvesant, rather like TJHS. Any purely merit-based educational institution in the US invariably skews in that direction. And, because Asians don't have the same political agency that Jews achieved many decades ago, very little is being done in their defense. But Jews had a much easier time than Asians ever will because they could mostly blend in with White people. They now get counted as "White" in the statistics. This is the uncomfortable truth of the new racism. This country is hellbent on disenfranchising high-achieving Asians, who have the misfortune of looking too "Other" and get marked as such in racial composition stats. Stop using skin color and race. Just stop. The only consideration that's remotely permissible, beyond merit, is financial posture. "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." EDIT: Removed the use of caps, as requested by @dang. However, he seems to have ignored my appeal to restore this comment to where it was prior to moderation (it was at the top and quite popular). See @dang's auto-collapsed reply to this comment for more details.
  • ponker 6y ago
    I am an Asian American with kids in school. I am a fierce opponent of race based affirmative action but a huge supporter of income/wealth based affirmative action even knowing that it will make life tougher for my kids. The way I figure — my wealth has given my kids an unfair advantage over their peers. A poor kid is reading about polar bears in a 1985 World Book encyclopedia while I take my kids to Churchill Manitoba to see them in person. So the wealth based affirmative action will help drive home for them that because the road was smoothed for them, they will he expected to run farther on it.
    • bdangubic 6y ago
      Might not seem that way to you but poor kid reading about Polar Bears has a huge advantages over your kids seeing them in person. For your kids polar bears are a vacation trip, little annoyance that has to be done in-between watching netflix or playing video games. Poor kid reading about them on the other hand can enter a mystical world of flying polar bears fighting fire-breathing dragons... ;)
• ultrasounder 6y ago
  Website down! HN effect?
  • engineer_22 6y ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20201004204824/https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4979 https://web.archive.org/web/20201004204824/https://www.scott...
    • ZephyrBlu 6y ago
      Ah, I was wondering why the live site looked like an unreadable mess.
• deleted 6y ago
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• tomp 6y ago
  I'm mildly appalled by this blog post. The author seems to prefer the "affirmative action" solution which would result in increased uptake of Black & Hispanic kids, over the proposed "lottery" solution that would result in increased uptake of White kids. I guess this is quite in vogue nowadays, but personally I still oppose racism on principle, even the pro-Black, anti-White (and often anti-Asian) racism.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    The value Aaronson sees in the affirmative action solution isn't the precise racial balance, which you and I and I'm sure he all agree doesn't matter. It's that it might be able to preserve the school's character as a place that values and demands academic excellence, whereas a lottery of 3.5 GPA students almost surely won't.
  • Green_man 6y ago
    the "'affirmative action' solution" would allow the school to keep its rigorous entrance exam system in place, which is what Aaronson seems to actually care about, not some demographic percentages.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • MattGaiser 6y ago
    Affirmative action means that the exam remains in place. You have to be interested in going to the school to get in. You can't casually be accepted by having a 3.5 GPA or over (which probably 20 or so percent of people have).
• rfw300 6y ago
  The author touches on a really important shift in how diversity advocates have approached their goals in recent years: the relative abandonment of meritocracy as a desirable thing. Whereas before, they advocated affirmative action and similar solutions as ways to slightly tweak merit-based systems to benefit historically disadvantaged populations, there seems to now be a more widespread rejection of those systems as inherently discriminatory. The only transformative net effect, it seems, will be to significantly reduce the proportion of Asians across elite institutions.
  • baggy_trough 6y ago
    The most important net effect of abandoning meritocracy will be the degradation and debasement of the institutions in question.
  • frank2 6y ago
    >The only transformative net effect . . . You write as if our institutions will always remain healthy and the only uncertainty our future holds is which groups or which individuals will get which share of the "pie" (or "prosperity") produced by our healthy institutions.
    • notabene77 6y ago
      Yeah the article itself speaks of the destruction of TJ, not just it's "transformation."
• MattGaiser 6y ago
  This is one of the reasons I can’t get fully behind public education because in a democracy, everything government operated must eventually revert to the mean. Excellence is not prized in government.
  • jacquesm 6y ago
    It's the only way to ensure that the school system continues to function. Otherwise you'd have great schools for the rich and terrible schools for the not-so-rich and horrible schools for the poor (assuming they'd have an education at all). As it is there is still lots of skewing but by having the rich kids go to the same schools as the poor ones at least the divide is a smaller one (of course, neighborhood and town/city still leave plenty of room for differences, as does the existence of home tutoring for wealthy people's kids).
    • tupputuppu 6y ago
      No, you'd actually have gifted schools for gifted children from gifted parents, unrelated to how rich they are. IQ is highly hereditary. Asians which now dominate these schools weren't rich, they were both economically as well as socially disadvantaged as a population because of racism.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • wiredfool 6y ago
    It’s had 35 years of being an outlier, I don’t think that the mean is really in view quite yet. On the other hand, look at what public education can actually do when it works. We need more of these schools, not fewer.
    • MattGaiser 6y ago
      A 3.5 GPA is what? The top 20%? It is crashing towards the mean.
• deleted 6y ago
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• eikenberry 6y ago
  The gist of this article seems to be that it is bad that this high school changed its entrance criteria from being based on exams to GPA and that this will ruin the school. GPA based entrance (w/ a lottery if there are to many applications) doesn't sound terrible to me. Seems like eliminating exam bias would make this a net gain, but the author obviously disagrees.
  • floatingatoll 6y ago
    GPA is a biased criteria in an education system where some people have disproportionate access to educational resources. The United States is one such system, with white people and affluent people having considerable advantages^ over others. The post’s author correctly observes that the resulting random lottery will accurately represent the biases that influenced the applicant pool, and therefore the outcome will be a school that reinforces societal biases rather than weakening them. The error in reasoning here is in the relative evaluation of “bias in entrance exams” versus “bias in GPAs”. The school has thrived under the former bias, and the essence of the issue is simple: Which biases are healthier for students and society? The biases of school’s exam process, or the biases of GPA? And that phrasing highlights a particularly ugly truth that most of the citizens supporting this change will do everything in their power to refuse recognizing consciously: “A system that’s biased towards my family’s skin color and/or wealth level is better for my family than any system that is not biased in my family’s favor, no matter how good it may be for society in general.” ^ For example, “test prep” biases GPAs towards students with wealth and free time, against students with evening/weekend jobs and family responsibilities.
    • eikenberry 6y ago
      Personally I think that if the school is that good and popular it should expand and accept everyone who applies. Dropping kids that can't keep up back to the standard school system. Eliminating entrance bias completely.
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• jacb 6y ago
  This is really upsetting. I didn't go to TJHS, but the sense I got from the three people I know who did was that it had that critical mass of nerdy science-and-tech-obsessed teenagers. At least in Canada, it's more common to have smaller programs operating within a larger high school - my program was 30 people, mostly humanities kids with maybe 8-10 STEM kids. There wasn't anything approaching that sort of critical mass. Plus, as a subset of a smaller school, you still had to play politics with everyone else. TJHS always sounded like one of the only places that, somehow, did have that critical mass and managed to maintain it for decades. Maybe this sort of public school is just politically infeasible now - which is a pity, since locating and nurturing the talents of disadvantaged youth benefits all of us.
  • wiredfool 6y ago
    Critical mass would be one way to put it. There was also a willingness to let the kids do what they were interested in and provide support for it. For example, in 10th grade, 4 of us got together and decided we wanted to make a new high temp superconductor. (87-88, around the time that the first LN2 one was out there). With the support of a couple of the labs, we researched it, ordered chemicals, made a pill press, mixed it, pressed it, baked it in a o2 rich environment, and then tested with ln2. I think at the time it was the first high school to make one. None of that was something that was part of the classroom flow, it it was absolutely something that was supported.
• uniqueid 6y ago
  I disagree with the way the article frames the issue. It would help America more to have universally "pretty good" schools, than a few great schools in a sea of "pretty bad" schools. So, like many other American issues, the argument reminds me of two people in a tiny parking lot squabbling angrily over who is at fault for boxing the other in. If the business that designed and painted the lot allocated insufficient space, neither driver should blame the other. The premise that there are groups in America who need saving from poverty and lousy schools is true, but why save only a few of them by sending them to a school for gifted students? Deal with the inequality of income and of the school system. Last time I checked, Finland does pretty well with that strategy.
  • notabene77 6y ago
    Unless Finland had similar demographics to the US, which it does not, it's hard to try to transplant policy decisions from there to the US and expect similar outcomes. Maybe as Finland's non-Finnish population grows significantly in the coming decades, the two countries can compare notes more easily.
    • rfrey 6y ago
      It seems like every attempt to learn from other systems when discussing American issues, from education to public transit to healthcare to gun control, is met with a wave of “yeah that could never work here because we’re too [big, diverse, spread out, individualistic]. Have some humility and consider that other countries might have better outcomes in some things due to better policy choices, not just because they’re smaller, more homogeneous, colder, warmer, or whatever.
      • darkhorse13 6y ago
        I am not American but the parent comment definitely has a great point: homogeneity, population size, and various other factors can drastically affect the outcome of such policies. So this may not be a lack of humility, but simply naivety on your part.
• wiredfool 6y ago
  Tj was absolutely amazing when I went. (‘90) It is, in my experience, the existence proof that public education can be effective. I’m not sure what was the key component, but one of them was that every single person was there by choice. I don’t pretend to know what would be the maximally fair distribution of places, but I am disappointed that that there one seem to be a spawning/cloning of the concept so that the experience can be spread to more students. We learned things, there were special people there, but its not something that’s unique to that building, staff and students.
  • tssva 6y ago
    "I’m not sure what was the key component, but one of them was that every single person was there by choice.' I can tell you for a fact that wasn't true then. It likely isn't true now. I was forced by my parents to apply for admission to TJ and was accepted. I ultimately refused to attend despite the great pressure from both my parents and school officials. I know several people who were in the same boat as I was but gave into the pressure and attended hating doing so. This would have been during the same time period you attended.
  • deleted 6y ago
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• jcranmer 6y ago
  Speaking as someone who actually went to the school in question (class of 2008), here's my thoughts: TJHSST has been going downhill for a long while. Probably Lodal leaving as principal was a catalyzing factor, as she was much more adept at insulating TJHSST from school system politics than her successor was. The philosophy of treating the students as adults was under fire from parents of students at other schools for reasons I don't completely understand. (e.g., they forced the school to cancel all off-campus lunch privileges). Another issue I saw was that the school generally trended away from a science & tech magnet to a more generic gifted & talented school. Instead of getting in because you were passionate about, say, programming or robotics, and the school's tech labs were a good fit for you; you are now going there because it's the best school in the country and you're top in the class, even if you don't much care for the enrichment activities that are provided.
  • UNSCSpirit 6y ago
    Governments ruin all good things.
  • rayiner 6y ago
    You missed the golden era by a bit. I was there during the Geoff Jones era, and Lodal was the beginning of the end. Fairfax County got tired of TJ telling them to f--k off, and installed Lodal. She was a bit of a "company woman" in terms of appeasing the county, but apparently not as bad as who came after.
  • helen___keller 6y ago
    I don't know anything about the school but it sounds like the prestige took over- like with harvard, MIT, etc all, it's a great school but that's as much being driven by it's reputation for being a great school, attracting the most ambitious students in the world
  • jwoglom 6y ago
    I would argue that the most recent principal has likely done far more destruction than the Lodal -> Glazer transition did, but I have heard that sentiment before from older alumni. (I was a student near the end of Glazer's tenure.) As to the latter point, the school has definitely been trending in that direction. In my time, I would wager that around 50% of students had primarily a science interest, 35% had primarily a technology interest, and the remaining 15% had no strong inclination between the two. (From what I have heard, in more recent classes the tech has become more popular than the other sciences.) At the end of the day, though, as long as the curriculum still requires sci-tech rigor, it's entirely beneficial that the school also have strong humanities and arts programs. 13 year olds are applying to this school, and people's interests change throughout high school in unpredictable ways.
• rayiner 6y ago
  Here's the archive.org version in case the link is still down: https://web.archive.org/web/20201004204824/https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4979 https://web.archive.org/web/20201004204824/https://www.scott... I attended TJ from 1998-2002, and my brother attended a few years later, and I've had a lot of conflicting thoughts about this over the last few months as I have watched the decision unfold. To begin, whether TJ was "America's best high school" depends on what you mean by "best." It was the high school with the highest average SAT score--similar to several Ivy League universities. It had some amazing programs: you could take classes in quantum mechanics as a junior or senior. It had great connections with local private and public research labs for students to do their senior projects. You were surrounded by kids who were smart, dedicated, and competitive. All that is not necessarily what makes for a great school, at least not in every situation. (For my own kids, I preferred to send them to a small K-12 private school in Annapolis--which has less competition, tiny class sizes, and a lot more art and theater). And obviously some of the things that were good about TJ will be affected by getting rid of the admissions test, such as the SAT scores, while others will remain the same. I tend to agree with Scott that getting rid of the test entirely was an overreaction, and a hastily-done one at that. What precipitated the change was, around the same time George Floyd was killed, news came out that the incoming class at TJ had no black students. (It turned out not to be quite true, but the number was very small.) People were broadly supportive of reforms. Many supported a holistic admissions process which considered racial diversity. Such a policy had been in place prior to 2003, when the school moved to a race-blind process. Under the prior policy, the percentage of Black and Hispanic students was twice as high, and the percentage of Asians was about 30-40%. To my knowledge, few actual students, parents, and alumni supported the substantially more radical decision to abandon the admissions test entirely. The Fairfax County Superintendent made the decision with little input from TJ parents and the community as a whole. And, as Scott points out, the primary beneficiary under the specific lottery-based approach the county adopted will be upper middle class white students, who are significantly underrepresented currently. More troubling I think is the fairly radical ideology underlying the change. Solid majorities of all groups, including Black and Hispanic people, oppose using race as even a "minor factor" in admissions: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americans-say-colleges-should-not-consider-race-or-ethnicity-in-admissions https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ.... Asians are actually the most supportive of considering race, and even then under 40% of people support the practice. At the same time, most people continue to think that high school grades and standardized tests should be the main criteria for admissions: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-want-grades-not-race-or-athleticism-to-decide-college-admissions https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/americans-want-grades-n.... Northern Virginia being, in the last decade or so, a fairly liberal place, a holistic admissions process that considered race to built a diverse class--similar to those used universally by colleges--could have gotten buy-in from the community. More evidence of the radicalness of the approach was the accompanying rhetoric: "meritocracy is a lie" and "admissions tests are racist." Not more nuanced views, such as "some people are excluded from the meritocratic system because of structural disadvantages," or "not everyone can afford test prep." Many people can get on board with such ideas to support things like the prior holistic admissions system. Instead, you had a full-frontal assault on the notion that standardized testing means anything at all, to support abandoning it entirely to move to a pure lottery system. Fully embracing those notions may well result in the "destruction" of TJ as it used to be. Throwing away the idea of meritocracy entirely is probably not going to have outcomes that we desire, and will be prejudicial to the kids of high-skill immigrants in particular. It is quite remarkable how many doors are opened in this country by being at least middle class and doing well on standardized tests. When I worked at a "white shoe" New York law firm, I had a colleague who had gone to one of "the" New York City private schools. I had never heard of it before. (I'm an immigrant rube, so much so that I had to sell my parents on the idea of my brother going to Yale, which because it isn't an engineering school isn't well known in Bangladesh.) But I could tell it was a big deal by how other people from obviously well-off New York families reacted when he dropped the name. Back in the day, the firm was almost entirely comprised of people like that. Today, the firm is full of people who got there by getting a high LSAT score and getting top grades in law school and cleaning up well enough to look good on the firm website. And while that's not a perfect meritocracy--everyone comes from a solidly middle class family--what would happen if you take away those objective indicators? The ones that compel a hiring partner to pick based on numbers on a transcript rather than recognizing where someone went to high school?
• neonate 6y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20201004204824/https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4979 https://web.archive.org/web/20201004204824/https://www.scott...
• hungrygs 6y ago
  Will this type of move inevitably trickle down to the best public CS undergrad programs? Berkeley and UCLA CS are almost entirely Asian (east and south) with a sprinkling of mostly Jewish Americans who fill the "white" category. That reflects in part California's demographics but even less heavy Asian American places like UT Austin, UW Seattle, and UIUC are 50%+ Asian in undergrad CS.
  • notabene77 6y ago
    A good bet is "yes." If not this year, then next. See also Proposition 16 (https://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/propositions/16/index.htm https://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/propositions/16/index.htm).
    • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      It's worth noting that polling suggests Prop 16 is quite unpopular (https://edsource.org/2020/california-ballot-measure-to-lift-ban-on-affirmative-action-widely-opposed-by-surveyed-voters/640237 https://edsource.org/2020/california-ballot-measure-to-lift-...), despite its strong showing in the legislature.
• xiaolingxiao 6y ago
  This is the money quote about lottery: "In a world-historic irony, the main effect of this “solution” will be to drastically limit the number of Asian students, while drastically increasing (!!!) the number of White students. The proportion of Black and Hispanic students is projected to increase a bit but remain small. Let me say that one more time: in practice, TJHS’s move from a standardized test to a lottery will be overwhelmingly pro-White, anti-Asian, and anti-immigrant; only as a much smaller effect will it be pro-underrepresented-minority." Personally speaking I went a competitive college where many of my classmates were from such H.S., they really were a cut above in terms of math and science. Of course I don't think STEM is the end-all-be-all, and I don't think getting rid of TJHSST is going to solve the country-wide equity problem due to race. But if there's sports magnet schools like Montverde and Sierra Canyon, then maybe there could a be a place like TJHSST and such?
  • anm89 6y ago
    It's as if the people creating these policies missed out on a good math education!
    • 0-_-0 6y ago
      It's a self-perpetuating problem!
• darkhorse13 6y ago
  Are people from the Indian subcontinent counted within the 75% Asian majority? This may be a silly question but I am not American, so I don't know how the grouping works.
  • SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    They are - in general, Indian people will be counted as Asian in modern American statistics. (Historical statistics are much more muddled, in some cases even categorizing them as white.)
    • darkhorse13 6y ago
      So the majority situation could be easily explained using the positive stereotype of Indian and Asian kids taking their academics very seriously, partly due to the support (and pressure) they get from their families.
      • aerioux 6y ago
        TJ Grad from '14. The school when i entered was mostly white kids + indians/east asians who spend a lot of time studying.
• benlivengood 6y ago
  It sounds like the bigger problem is routine bullying and denigration of math and science enthusiasts in public schools, and possibly an overload of 'normal' subject work to meet standardized tests. I was homeschooled K-12 and jumped into a state university without any difficulty and ended up at a couple FAANGs (as an arbitrary measure of educational success). I definitely benefitted from a lack of bullying and some extra time to explore my math and computer interests in high school. TJHS may have helped me if I had that opportunity, but it wasn't a requirement. I think as nerds we will generally be okay as long as we're left alone and given resources for self-study. That said, my experience is probably not in the majority and maybe it doesn't work for the average nerd.
  • xkcd-sucks 6y ago
    I went to public school in the USA and nobody (at schools in the region) was bullied simply for being good at math and science; in fact the social "top tier" students got straight As in the hardest classes, were varsity athletes, and of course, were social. The only differentiating factor of the pariahs is they were generally ugly-weird. This trend continued in college: Those who excelled in academics got middle-class intellectual labor jobs, those who partied all the time were their bosses, and those who did both really made it big.
• eli_gottlieb 6y ago
  > Now the boomerang has returned, and it’s time for a more drastic remedy: namely, to eliminate the TJHS entrance exam entirely, and replace it by a lottery for anyone whose GPA exceeds 3.5. Excuse me if I just don't see anything wrong with this. Sorry, but we all know these scores are less meaningful on the extreme high end. If you can scoop up everyone two standard deviations above the mean and select randomly from them, you're doing fine, and the poor kids get a break from the the grueling regime of trying to rank higher than the other kids who are trying to rank higher than the other kids who are trying to rank higher.
  • SamReidHughes 6y ago
    Two standard deviations above the mean is too low a bar, not really TJ material.
• sudosteph 6y ago
  I'm not a fan of having dedicated "gifted" schools at any level. I attended a small magnet middle school that was ranked as the best public school in the state, but it was still the most toxic experience of my educational life. It's false to assume that gifted students don't bully other gifted students, and it's false to assume that the teachers at these schools care more about students than they do about their own sense of status. When I went to a high school where half of my classes were with the "gifted" kids from middle school, and others were with "normal" students (especially electives like debate) - I realized that many of the "normal" kids were actually pretty cool and more relatable to me in many ways (similar economic class, having divorced parents, more open to punk/hippy/counter-cultures). I still learned fine in classes with these kids, and nobody bothered me for being "smart" (ie, getting good scores on tests). Probably because I wasn't a condescending jerk who only ever socialized with other kids in the gifted program (like some of my other post-magnet school peers were). The truth is: kids who are able to go to these specialized gifted schools, regardless of if the schools are merit-based or lottery - are frequently the same people who would have academic success anywhere. It's people who have learned to pass tests, and people who have parents who take an active role in advocating for their child's academic success. All this said, one program I'm a huge advocate of having available for gifted kids: the option to attend community college instead of High School. Since community college students are there by choice, they tend to be both motivated and more mature than average high school students. They also tend to reflect the diversity of a community better than highschools which often serve specific, segregated areas. Many of the community college professors I've had are extremely talented people (Retired professors from 4-year schools, working professionals) who only teach 1 or 2 small classes per semester, and do it out of love for teaching. In fact, I've taken probably 8-10 CC classes in my life and can't remember a single bad professor. The same cannot be said from my experiences at a very well-regarded state university. Also, community college credits transfer easily to a 4-year college down the road. Even the non-transferable, vocational-type courses can be extremely rewarding for the experience, and they are often much better quality than what you can get at a high school anyhow.
  • price 6y ago
    > I'm not a fan of having dedicated "gifted" schools at any level. I attended a small magnet middle school that was ranked as the best public school in the state, but it was still the most toxic experience of my educational life. It's false to assume that gifted students don't bully other gifted students I hear you that you had a terrible experience at your magnet middle school. I'm glad that your high-school experience was better. My own experience at TJ was that it meant having a group of peers who were just as enthusiastic about things like math, and physics, and computer science as I was. We learned a tremendous amount from each other, and gave each other the confidence to push far beyond the curriculum or what anyone would normally expect from high-school students. That's something that simply would not have been possible if we were all scattered in our respective local high schools; it's something that most of my friends from elsewhere never had until college. I don't assume that there was no bullying at TJ, or that the teachers are angels. But please hear that for many people it means an experience that we're very grateful for, and that would not have happened without it.
• scudd 6y ago
  I grew up in Northern Virginia, and went to a GT (gifted and talented) elementary school and middle school. I did not go to TJ, but knew many kids from my middle school who did. The GT program in many was a natural precursor to what TJ was. One thing that I think the author fails to accurately reflect is how fierce the competitive process to get in to TJ is. And moreover, the culture within middle and elementary schools which this competition breeds. When he states: "Score high enough on an entrance exam—something hard but totally within your control—and you could attend a school" This is frankly a far cry from what I actually observed. There was an exam to qualify; however, so many extremely smart and tenacious people attempt to do well on this test, that to outperform all/most of them would make you a prodigy among prodigies. It was not uncommon for parents to pay for tutoring specifically oriented around this exam. I feel like saying that this is "totally within your control", is not literally false, but grossly misleading to the actual situation. I can't stress enough that the competition to get in to TJ was like the competition to get in to Ivy league colleges. In fact in many ways, the competition around getting in to TJ was not just analogous to the Ivy league competition, but a direct extension of it, as going to TJ would make your college applications more competitive. And naturally this extends back even before TJ, going to placements tests in the 2nd grade to qualify for GT elementary schools. I feel (and can attest with my own experience) that kids at this age have no conceptualization of the long term consequences of these kinds of gateway moments. More often than not, success at these stages is more a reflection of parental coaching (or lack thereof) and familiarity in navigating their children through these gateways.
  • withdavidli 6y ago
    Had the same reaction when I read that line. It's the same as saying scoring in the top 1% percentile is within your control. And how are kids even suppose to know about these schools at a young age? I would assume it's the parents that needs to be knowledgeable and push their children to those admission exams. The author certainly seems to have a tormented school career. It's to be reminded that when in that situation, survival and escapism often takes priority than figuring out the best high school to go to.
    • csande17 6y ago
• lordnacho 6y ago
  Maybe someone in the US system can explain it to a European. I don't get why a lottery of GPA > 3.5 is so different from an entrance exam? Isn't it hard to get a high GPA? If Asian kids are better at the entrance exam aren't they also gonna have the highest grades? Is it that the entrance exam is very topic specific compared to general grades? Also, if you want the best kids at some subject, why would you think that would give you the same profile as the average population? Unless you do an unbiased sampling of the population, whatever your high school is for is going to have a lopsided distribution.
  • lacker 6y ago
    A 3.5 is a pretty low bar for a school like TJ. The problem isn't switching to GPA per se, it's that this is a massive lowering of standards.
  • detaro 6y ago
    (non-US, but don't think it's relevant to the answer. Other countries have similar scenarios) It's not specified how the entrance exam exactly worked - if the exam + maybe other inputs are used for a ranking in which the best are picked, the group forming the top X students in that ranking can be quite different from X students randomly picked from the Y students with a good enough GPA (Y is substantially larger than X). In addition to that, an exam can prioritize things through its design. The obvious one is fields (a school can focus on STEM, or language skills, or ...). But it can also target other skills: a simple example would be stacking it with questions that require more cross-discipline thinking, or quickly working with previously unknown things, which normal school exams don't tend to particularly test for. And it has a chance of picking up people who fit the profile for the school, but whose GPA is not good enough because they struggle with some subjects or with their current school - people can be gifted but do quite badly in traditional schooling. An extra entrance process at least gives them a chance to jump past that. Random choice from "good enough" GPA just gives you a random set of generally good students. If you have a focus in mind for your school, you probably can create something more extraordinary by stricter targeting (although that's not without its problems and challenges!)
  • ghgdynb1 6y ago
• anm89 6y ago
  This is the inevitable outcome of social justice, equality of outcome politics. Every time you don't speak up when someone pushes for one of these policies because they are scared of being canceled or fired, we move a little bit closer to this worse world.
  • ggghhhfff 6y ago
    It’s far more convenient to propose affirmative action plans than to address the elephant in the room, which is that generally speaking, being a poor person in a poor community with a poorly funded school makes it difficult to compete academically with individuals who were raised in environments with more resources across the board (ie better teachers, safer communities, and more parental involvement due to not having 2 stressed out working-class parents). Why don’t we simply address the quality of children’s lives and schooling in those less affluent communities?
    • scudd 6y ago
      How? Not trying to be asinine, but it's not actually a simple/easy problem to solve. Many have tried.
• tootie 6y ago
  Has any other exclusive high school with a standardized admission test dropped it? I know that NYC is currently considering dropping theirs as well. I agree with all the criticism of how testing isn't an optimal selection process, I'm just not convinced we've come up with anything better. Can we not apply some data science to this? Go look at all the data we have on 8th graders from 10 years ago and match it up to how they performed in high school and college. Try to pin down what signals point to optimum learning environments for different kinds of kids.
• blueblimp 6y ago
  Technical education should be considered an investment in the future of innovation, which benefits everyone in society, not as a goodie that must be distributed equitably.
• resfirestar 6y ago
  The same thing happens to every gifted student program in America, not always so dramatically. One example is how many public schools now push uninterested students who lack the preparation to succeed into AP classrooms. Usually not for diversity, but to meet targets set by the state education department, or the nonprofit funding the AP program in states where the education department's main priority is killing the public schools. It comes from the same place as the diversity-based campaigns, though: the belief that everyone is entitled to, literally, the "same education". Whether you measure it as a percentage of the student body or by how well its demographics match the student body's, a program that aims to provide specialized education to a select group that wants and needs them isn't going to look productive through that universalist lens. The problem is, the universalists are kind of right. If you reserve a disproportionate share of increasingly scarce resources for the top students, it will tend to perpetuate whatever inequalities exist in the rest of society. The individual success stories might make nice reading, but the statistics usually tell a different story. So I think what's really needed is first abandoning the idea that educational equality means everyone gets the same lessons and support and so on, and then make reforms that make the system better at cultivating a wide range of talents and interests, instead of the current system that's only capable of giving meaningful support to people who aspire to go to college for STEM, music, or athletics.
• deleted 6y ago
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• Jyaif 6y ago
  A good illustration of the western world sabotaging itself.
• deleted 6y ago
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• fma 6y ago
  As a parent with toddlers, I've wondered what makes a good school and whether I should move to the county over which has some of the best schools in the state (according to Great schools, mine are 8/9s..so not too bad!). If every kid in the school is smart and motivated, and their parents can afford tutoring, spend time w/ them etc...naturally the school scores will be higher. The teachers might suck. Would an average student going there become smarter/more motivated by being around peers who are driven? Or would that average student be better off in a school that has average students with lower income, but great teachers?
• smitty1e 6y ago
  >For that matter, the same way most of us felt the day Trump was elected. Aaronson, please: the same woke Borg that wants to consume TJHS is the one seeking to devour the liberty-loving Americans who elected Trump. #SayNoToBorg
• tabbott 6y ago
  I attended TJHSST from 1999-2003. TJ does have a serious diversity program, but I think it's important that readers understand just how special TJ was. Because of TJ, I became a top participant in some America's most prestigious high school academic programs (USAMO, USACO, USAPHO, etc.). Through those programs, my family met incredibly successful students from all over the country. What shocked my parents was how parents of these other top students had to do a ton of work to get their child a challenging education -- usually a mix of homeschooling, driving them to classes at the local college, working the system, scouring the early Internet for resources/summer camps/etc. These other parents (and their kids) envied our experience, because they'd worked incredibly hard to get an education experience worse than what we'd gotten from our county's public education system. (And it wasn't just TJ -- the high school I'd have gone to were I not admitted to TJ was also one of the best in the country). TJ's education was why I was able to test out of or otherwise skip more than 10 MIT classes -- more than a full year -- because I'd taken a version of those classes in high school. (Of course not every TJ student took differential equations and complex analysis in high school -- there were maybe 20 of us each year -- but where else is that possible?). AFAIK no other high school had (student organized!) after-school gatherings for 10 hours every single week to learn from each other solving interesting math/cs/physics problems, and still take the school bus home? Most importantly, it provided me with a community of intellectually curious students similar to what I found at MIT. When I think back on all my major successes in life, whether attending MIT, my published academic research, 3 startups... likely none of that would have happened without TJ and its student community. The worst part about this is that TJ's diversity was severely damaged by legal challenges back in ~1998. What was missed in his discussion is that TJ didn't just have affirmation action -- there was also this great program called Visions [1], where TJ teachers would teach middle school students from under-represented backgrounds on the weekend, a key function of which was to provide the support and encouragement for strong students from those backgrounds who could get into TJ to apply. I don't remember the precise numbers, but every year starting with my class of 2003 had something like 2-3x fewer Black students than the few classes before that. TJ admissions published statistics that made clear the school was doing affirmative action (100% of Black students who made the "top 800" test-based cut were admitted to the class of 400), so affirmative action was still in effect. But the end of the Visions program meant many fewer qualified Black students were applying. Virginia needs to fix TJ's diversity, but thinking about "TJ admissions" as a problem in isolation is ineffective (and it has been tried many times before with TJ specifically, including admissions changes motivated by improving diversity that actually made the numbers worse). I'm not close enough to the facts around TJ today to make specific proposals, but I think any overall plan should feature programs like Visions intended to market TJ to students (and parents!) from underserved backgrounds who would thrive at TJ but aren't currently applying. Folks who care about diversity at the high end of American education should consider donating to BEAM: (https://www.beammath.org/; https://www.beammath.org/; [2] in an nytimes article on it). It's an exceptional program to help underserved students access an intellectual community of fellow mathematics lovers, with impressive results. (Disclosure: the founder is a friend from MIT, whose decision to devote his career to this cause inspires me). [1] https://www.educationnext.org/stubborn-excellence-gap-despite-efforts-diversity-stalls-elite-public-high-school/ https://www.educationnext.org/stubborn-excellence-gap-despit... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/nyregion/new-york-math-camp.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/nyregion/new-york-math-ca...
• ausjke 6y ago
  Why can't we just leave the school alone? What's the point to change it now? Why it hurts anyone? Diversity should never mean race-color-gender-equality in the end. You have to earn it, isn't that what American standing for? Why do you need AA students to Harvard because their skin is darker, or someone's parents did drug or jail time so their kids went through some hardship so they have to be put into the best college and hard-working students paying the price for that? There are many other schools for them to attend, put them where they are not ready to compete is hurting more than helping. This country is so fxxxxx up by those liberals. The key reason is the population ratio changed, when those 'disadvantaged' people become more and more, they change rules to game the system instead of working hard to earn what they wanted for so long. This is essentially a revolution by the gang under the name of democracy.
• Pulcinella 6y ago
  There should be no “best school.” There should be no “good schools” and “bad school.” There should be universal, excellent public education (just like there should universal, excellent healthcare). Why spend so many words arguing that an entrance exam is the only way to protect the “best high school” when you could be arguing that we should move to a world where TJ is viewed as the minimum standard?
  • nradov 6y ago
    That's the ideal. But the reality is that good schools can only exist in areas where parents value education and are able to provide safe, stable environments for their children. Unfortunately that situation doesn't exist in much of the US and public schools can't solve the fundamental problems.
  • SecretRepub2 6y ago
    > "There should be universal, excellent public education" First there would have to be universal, excellent students
• john_moscow 6y ago
  I am quite baffled at the line of reasoning here. If you are concerned with the fact that minorities are underrepresented in a top school due to having lower scores, how about you volunteer to give extra lessons to these kids, try to popularize science (and math in particular) among them, and otherwise help them compete on par in a completely unbiased and merit-based system. But instead, left-leaning activists insist that affirmative action is the only solution to the problem, ignore its downsides (such as increased tension between social groups when you apply different rules to them), and when faced with well-substantiated objections, they burn the Rome by completely dismantling the merit-based system. And, of course, fully blame conservatives for the consequences of a decision they did not make. Especially, the head of the federal executive branch that has zero jurisdiction over the matter.
  • frabbit 6y ago
    These are not "left leaning activists". They're fuzzy, well-meaning liberals who may be right. You would not like what the "left leaning activists" propose if you are upset with the mild reforms proposed by these people.
• djmips 6y ago
  I'm sure this comment won't get noticed but my thesis is that it won't matter if it's a lottery, the kids who attend will still succeed; it's still self selecting. It's more about the education. From my anecdata the International Community School in Kirkland Washington is also a lottery school and has a very good track record of success from it's alumni. It's notable that sports are extra curricular only and are not a focus at this school. I guess I just wish there were more schools like that.
• biggermike 6y ago
  I'm not sure what's more nauseating: the fact that we're willing to destroy the best schools in the country to improve poorly defined diversity metrics or the author's sheer horror that white people may benefit from the school's proposed diversity initiative. That being said, the proposed change is one of the better ones I've seen as far as diversity initiatives go. The students are sampled at random with equal probability from a subpopulation that meets a minimum threshold required to succeed in the school (3.5 GPA but this can be tuned to whatever number/metric is more appropriate, even maybe a test score). The group selected here is likely to be far more diverse (across measured and latent categories) than it would be by simply discriminating based on basis of race as the author recommends.
• SamReidHughes 6y ago
  One entrance exam idea I like is to have a lottery for N slots where the top test scorers have 90% chance of admission, but that decays by some curve until the people in 3Nth place have 0% chance of admission. Adjust the curve to your liking. This might do a good job of fending off the parents that want to make their overachieving kids study a lot for the entrance exam, because it might all be for nothing.