Has the TJ Experiment Been a Success?

We are more than three years into the TJ experiment, but the Fairfax County School Board hasn’t yet addressed its successes and failures.  Whether an objective analysis will ever be conducted is questionable, for the program was adopted primarily for ideological reasons, and the Board may be reluctant to subject its ideological assumptions to scrutiny.  Clues have emerged, however, that the downsides of the experiment may have significantly exceeded its hoped-for benefits.

In 2020 the Board changed the admissions standards for the then-elite Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (“TJ”).  Rigorous entrance exams and other measures of readiness for a demanding curriculum were eliminated.  The prior criteria had allegedly discriminated against some minorities.  The premise was that if the “discriminatory” standards were scrapped, the disadvantaged students could be successful in TJ’s challenging environment.

Has the experiment succeeded?

If the sole criteria for “success” is whether Asian Americans were disadvantaged in order to increase the admission of others, the answer is “yes.”  In the first year of the new program, the percentage of Asian Americans in the 9th grade class plummeted from 73% to 54% while the percentage of Hispanics went from 3% to 11%, Blacks went from statistically zero to 7%, and Whites went from 17% to 22%.  But has the experiment succeeded in other respects?  This question has been ignored, at least publicly.

We do know that TJ slipped from the #1 high school in the country in U.S. News & World Report’s ranking of elite U.S. high schools in 2020, 2021 and 2022 to #5 in 2023, but we don’t yet know whether this decline was a one-year anomaly or an indication of something more lasting.  In any event, the magazine’s ranking is just one small indicator of quality.

According to press reports, the elimination of entrance exams and other academic criteria forced TJ to introduce remedial math courses for academically unprepared students.  How many students needed to be enrolled in these programs?  And did the programs succeed in rapidly bringing students up to speed so they would thereafter thrive at TJ?  We don’t know, but there are disturbing clues.

Information has emerged that the drop-out rate at TJ has spiked, particularly among some minority groups.  If this is true, it suggests that the softened admissions standards may have hurt the very students who were intended as beneficiaries.  Students who might have thrived at one of the county’s 30 other quality high schools may have been placed in an environment where they have struggled to keep up.  If so, what is the benefit?  Questions like these should be carefully, objectively analyzed by a school system that truly cares about the academic achievements of all its students.

In order to obtain some answers, a Freedom of Information Act request for relevant data is being submitted to FCPS.  A copy of the request can be seen HERE.

Will the school system fight tooth-and-nail against transparency, or will it cooperate in allowing the public to see the consequences of its 2020 decision?  Will the school system be prompted to undertake an objective analysis of its own, or not?

Fairfax Schools Monitor will keep readers informed about how FCPS responds.

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