On the destruction of America’s best high school | Hacker News Reader

On the destruction of America’s best high school

scottaaronson.com

222 pointsclircle212 comments

Here's the archive.org version in case the link is still down: 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-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-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?

> It was the high school with the highest average SAT score

It also shouldn't be that surprising that a school with an SAT-like admission test would produce graduates who have incredibly high SAT scores. It is an admission process that highly selected for great test takers.

I think in my year, the admission test _was_ the SAT, just taken in 8th grade. (Class of 90)

What was the cutoff score?

They never said, but at the time it was a full application package, essay, recommendations, and such.

My year was approx 800 applicants for 400 places, that ratio skewed significantly harder, Quickly, as years went on. (I was in the second class)

> My year was approx 800 applicants for 400 places, that ratio skewed significantly harder, Quickly, as years went on. (I was in the second class)

By the time I went there, it was roughly a 5:1 application ratio.

The TJHSST admissions procedure when I did it was basically the same as the college admissions procedure, complete with SAT-like test, grade submissions, letters of recommendations, and the essays.

Which can also be a very good predictor for success in college.

My understanding is that SAT + grades is a better predictor of college graduation than grades alone.

I initially thought this was a guest post by Elezier Yudkowsky as well, but I believe this is Scott Aaronson’s post and the previous post on his blog was a guest post by Elezier.

Fellow TJ grad here ('99). I also entered this conversation proud/grateful for my experience, and worried about the politicization of the entrance process. (I also believe in structural racism and have been concerned about the ethnic balance at TJ, but I would have said the solution should come way earlier in the educational process, and still think that most effort should go there.)

However, I think treating this as the abandonment of meritocracy is a straw man. Discourse with other grads changed my mind. A key factor is how much the test is now being gamed.

Based on some facebook polls of ~500 alumni (not scientific but moreso than any other direct evidence presented!), the percentage of accepted students going through specialized test prep has climbed from <2% in my day to >50% today. Some of these programs cost thousands of dollars for a chance to change your admissions outcome.

A test that draws this much financial investment is no longer a tool of meritocracy. And the plan that replaces it is not devoid of meritocracy. It includes a baseline GPA requirement, a holistic application package, and a lottery. I think we can and should do better than the lottery, but the test isnt it.

Those of us who are activated about keeping TJ meritocratic and advanced, let's put energies into fairer approaches than this test, which wouldn't be viable with Covid anyway.

> However, I think treating this as the abandonment of meritocracy is a straw man. Discourse with other grads changed my mind. A key factor is how much the test is now being gamed.

> Based on some facebook polls of ~500 alumni (not scientific but moreso than any other direct evidence presented!), the percentage of accepted students going through specialized test prep has climbed from <2% in my day to >50% today. Some of these programs cost thousands of dollars for a chance to change your admissions outcome.

The median income for a family in Fairfax county is over $140,000. A few thousand dollars isn’t a lot of money for them. It surely is for some people, which is why I would support a holistic admissions system. But I’m not sure why, for everyone else, we can’t just treat that as the cost of doing business. Especially if, as you say, everyone is doing it. Everyone studies for the LSAT, the MCAT, etc.

Now, if your point is that it’s a bit mental to treat admissions for a high school like admissions to medical school, in sympathetic to that argument.

Your comment got me interested in FCPS income distribution, which is indeed skewed high (although I couldn't find $140k median [1]). If you're in the 20th percentile at $54k, or even the 40th at $94k, you have significantly less available after the many living expenses that don't scale with income.

With that said, I recognize that household expenditure on education is going to play a role in preparedness for an advanced curriculum. But I think expecting folks to shoulder an early test prep burden (with uncertain result) is directionally un-meritocratic. For me it raises the evidence necessary that the test is playing an otherwise useful role. What's the best argument you've seen there?

[1] https://statisticalatlas.com/county/Virginia/Fairfax-County/...

Those are medians for all households, which includes say a recent college grad living alone. The median income of a family with kids in Fairfax County is close to $140,000: https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/9184-median-inc.... Probably well over $150,000 for people with high-schools aged kids, who tend to be at peak career earnings.

Thanks for the refs - that makes sense.

The brutal truth is that shelling out that kind of money for test prep might actually result in academically better prepared students.

In other words, if the test prep leads to learning the material more thoroughly, it may still be a good predictor of who is going to thrive in an advanced educational environment.

It’s not clear that any system that accurately predicts future student success, cannot be games by parents throwing money at it.

I think the current proposal agrees - "Minimum bar plus lottery" caps the returns on spending money, but also other forms of merit.

I also agree that it's impossible and probably undesirable to keep folks from investing in every kind of preparation they can.

However, I think the test is a uniquely concentrated opportunity to invest in swaying the admissions system rather than in preparing more holistically. What I'd love to see explored are:

- A more holistic admissions packet that includes evaluation beyond GPA. - Public resources on advanced education earlier in the curriculum. - Some examination of Chicago-style admissions, which ranks students within local geographies to pick highest achievers from many backgrounds (yes, I'm aware of many arguments from both sides against this structure).

You're starting with the assumption that you can't buy merit. But you absolutely can. At every opportunity in my life where the resources available to me did not support further growth, someone else could have bought more merit. It's still a meritocracy when that person is selected.

What it isn't is a pontetial-ocracy or a inherent-worth-ocracy, and I don't understand the argument for those models.

And you are starting with the assumption that admissions should reward merit rather than produce it. If a public school is not intended to convert potential to merit, I don't know what is. A school is not actually an "-ocracy" of any kind and this is a weird semantic argument.

If one were going to take a fundamentalist view of merit and exclude potential (again, weird choice for a school!) it would be especially important to define what merit it is you think you can measure. Are you sure the test (+ prep system) do that well? Does spending money on a specialized prep that improves your score translate to producing the merit you are talking about? Or are you retroactively defining merit as "the thing you can measure", because measuring is itself the appealing part?

I would agree with you if this were the national or even regional model, such as the case in some countries in East Asia. But it's not. This is a single school with a unique model that has proved succcessful and is being torn down. No one was being denied a highschool education or a chance to succeed over this.

Questioning the measurement of merit is easy when you don't have to offer an alternative. There's always something to pick at in every methodology, including every alternative you may think of.

If test scores didn't correlate to academic performance that would be embarrassing and really easy to show. But they do. Test prep is just focused studying. It doesn't have any hacks or shortcuts other than learning the material better.

And how is this any different than what has happened with high-school athletics over the same time-frame?

Parents regularly now spend thousands (tens of thousands!) of dollars on elite athlete training for 5th-8th graders in order to make the varsity team once they hit high-school. In my state (MN) it's not unheard of to rent an apartment in a desirable (aka good athletic) school district to play for that team.

My sister was an elite athlete and spent a few post college years at a specialized training academy. Multiple professional athletes trained here in the off-season.

She had multiple classes of middle school children to run training sessions with. Some of these middle schoolers even paid for 1 one 1 training with her for even more money.

Replace "Admission test" with "varsity tryouts" and you have basically the same system, with the same gamesmanship and money being spent.

What's disturbing to me — and this cuts both ways — is the subtle shifting of what's meant by "meritocracy".

Here, on HN and on Scott's post, there's an implicit equating of "meritocracy" with "test score."

Do people here really think test score and ability — to say the least of merit per se — are equivalent?

Go find a scatterplot of some data correlated 0.80 (e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3576830/). That's a very generous estimate of how correlated that test score will be with actual ability, whatever that means. The correlation probably is lower, like 0.50-0.70. Look at the y axis. Now cut it and take the upper fraction of your choice. See how wide a range of the x axis is represented?

That's the problem.

The reason why test scores are a problem is because when you select on an imperfect indicator, at some level you are randomly selecting with regard to actual ability, which is even further removed from merit. Throw in any kind of bias of any sort associated with anything, and the problem gets worse.

The truth is, it was already a lottery before. It was just a lottery that everyone pretended wasn't a lottery, and that's the problem people have with it.

The problem with meritocracy isn't the idea of selecting people based on merit, it's the idea that test scores or other such quantitative metrics are equivalent to merit.

The analogy with sports is fundamentally flawed because, among other things, the metrics are the thing of interest in sports. If you are interested in who can swim 50m the fastest, then your speed on the 50m swim is the metric of interest. In school, though, presumably you're not interested in test score, you're interested in someone's ability to solve problems, or create things, or be productive, or whatever. And we're not talking about sport, we're talking about gateways into careers in general. If we are selecting into schools to maximize ability to achieve high test scores on standardized tests per se, then at least be frank and honest about that, and accept that what you are arguing is that the school is an institution whose purpose is to achieve high standardized test scores, and nothing more. But if you want to argue that the school should produce people who are solving problems, innovating, and so forth, then you need to be honest about selection based on test scores, because the scores aren't what they intend to measure.

Scott laments the loss of the ability of some kid to work their way into the school based on some test score. But shouldn't he be screaming about a system that doesn't provide resources to kids where they're at? That assumes the kid's ability is equivalent to their score on some entrance exam? What about those problems?

I agree that throwing out test score and relying on GPA per se is a problem; relying on GPA alone is just as much of a problem as relying on test score alone. You could, for example, have a lottery for everyone whose score is above some generous threshold, or for everyone whose GPA or score is above some threshold. But staying with the system as it is seems at worst like turning a blind eye to systemic injustice, and at best like missing the forest for the trees.

You’re kinda smushing together two different things: reliability and merit. The SAT (which is similar to the TJ test) is highly reliable—meaning that it’s measuring something real, and not just producing a “random” result.

https://joss.tcnj.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/176/2012/04/2...

> How reliable is the SAT? The College Board website reports that a student’s true score is within 30 points of his or her measured score (SEM = 30; College Board, FAQ, 2005). A test with a standard deviation of 100 and a SEM of 30 has an internal consistency coefficient of .91 (α = .91). In a study specifically investigating SAT I score change upon repeated testing, 1,120,563 students in the 1997 college- bound cohort who took the SAT I one to five times in their junior and senior years gained an average of 7 to 13 points on the verbal section and 8 to 16 points on the mathematics section (Nathan & Camara, 1998). Thus, a student who retested at the higher end of both ranges still would not breach the standard error of measurement, indicating high test-retest reliability. Additionally, in a study of the effects of commercial coaching on SAT scores, Powers and Rock (1999) found that the average increase in student scores after intensive coaching was only 30 points on the verbal section and 50 points on the mathematics section, demonstrating that SAT scores remain relatively stable even with intervening practice.

With an SEM of 30, there is less than a 1% chance that a 100 point difference, between a 600 and a 500 on a section is due to random chance. The difference between a median score and and a TJ level score is 250.

Validity, whether the test measures something we care about is a separate issue.

Metrics aren't the thing of interest in sports. Randomly looking at the justifications for some of the top high school athletics programs in California:

"Honor, Glory and Love... the school is dedicated to the development of the whole person: spiritual, intellectual, physical, emotional and aesthetic"

"students learn lifelong lessons in teamwork, discipline and leadership"

"We encourage the development of team collaboration, communication, and characteristics that foster empathy, tolerance, personal growth and positive citizenship."

I mean, it's all bullshit. Or at least, people aren't buying expensive houses in good school districts just so their kids can learn the value of teamwork. But if you take athletics' programs words at face value, winning and metrics aren't the primary objective.

Specialized high schools are intended to build impressive application packets for college, which in turn is meant to get access to elite jobs and social opportunities. Indeed, that's one of the major reasons parents even try to get their kids into sports! One of the easiest ways into an elite university is to become an above average athlete in an obscure sport (this is the go-to approach for well-off but academically mediocre white people, actually). And so the admissions process for these high schools is geared toward facilitating that objective.

TJ provided a pathway for academically gifted first generation Asian immigrants to achieve social mobility. And with this new process, many won't have access to TJ, to mostly be replaced with mediocre white kids (and a couple more token underrepresented minorities).

I have an honest question. In the US, all sports teams emphasize one word: mileage. That is, one is expected to prep hard. You practice free throw 10K times in the summer, and you’ll be a role model for your fellow team members and basketball fans. You work your ass off to squat with 300 pounds and now you can vertical jump 120 cm, again you're the role model of your fellow sportsmen. Now how is it different from I spending my entire fucking summer finishing 1,000 AOPS math problems and completing Jackson’s Classical Electrodynamics and get ahead in all the tests? If story of the month is that James LeBron spends 1.5 million dollars a year to keep him fit, why is it wrong for me to spend 10K a year to find a private tutor so that I can learn abstract algebra in grade 7 while other kids are still confused about fractions? Or put it another way, it’s American spirit if a middle-class mom quits her job so she can take her kid to all kinds of tournaments, but it’s disgusting elitism if a mom in Chinatown takes three jobs so her daughter could prep for AIME? Why is practicing really hard on STEM is "gaming the system", while practicing like crazy in sports is hailed as heroism?

I see some serious hypocrisy here.

Oh, as for SAT. Come on, that's bottom line. If you get perfect scores, it does not mean you'll excel in college, but if you get really low score, you're just not that good academically, at least statistically speaking. Why is it so hard to understand the some tests are designed to be a filter with low false negatives? If anything, SAT is too simple for it has only standard questions.

I guess the point is, the 100m sprint is about as objective as you can get when it comes to testing short distance running ability. A shorter time means a faster person, no exceptions.

There is no such academic test, so there's always a gap between 'test prep' and 'learning'. The best prepared student may not be the best student.

To me at least, there's nothing depressing about working hard for some goal. There is something depressing about learning something ultimately meaningless (the contents of a test) so you can make the test itself meaningless.

Paraphrased: "Sports do this so schools should also work this way."

For me this is a bizarre leap, but many people love the sports analogy. I think these are the drivers and please tell me if I'm wrong.

(1) Sports clearly do a good job of finding exceptionally talented people, so maybe we should follow their playbook.

(2) People like and accept competitive sports, so emotionally they should have the same reaction to competitive academics.

On (1), there are so many ways that STEM success is not like sports.

- On an individual level, sports are literally engines for scoring performances, so progress towards success is completely observable. The highest levels of STEM success are defined by doing never-previously-observed things in highly collaborative environments with no opportunity for an exact head-to-head comparison. There is zero reason to believe that your 1,000 AOPS math problems are the best way to advance your STEM education towards real success, even though it may help you outcompete your neighbor on a single test.

- On an industry level, sports are entertainment businesses that only needs to find enough exceptional individuals to create events people will pay to see. Participation as both a spectator or contestant are voluntary. Public education is a social investment in economic opportunity for its citizens. It needs to succeed for far more people, and the definition of its success doesn't stop at finding a few stars who fill stadium seats.

On (2), there's a difference between rooting for the participants and rooting for the system. We like seeing people overcome obstacles whether they are fair or not. I bet a lot of people would enjoy a movie about the Chinese family you describe building a better life for their kids. I like movies about people overcoming gangsters, nazis, and tornados. It doesn't mean I want to fund gangsters, nazis and tornados to make more great stories.

Finally, I unequivocally agree on flipping the bird to anyone who judges the Chinatown mom for doing the best for her kid. The issue is that a similarly brilliant kid shouldn't be held back because they don't have the same awesome mom. And hey, maybe there are other great ways that three-job mom could be investing in her family and herself.

> Paraphrased: "Sports do this so schools should also work this way."

That's actually not what I meant. Granted, though, my question, for its not so accurate writing, can easily lead to such generalization. I was wondering about a much narrower difference: Americans value toiling in sports, yet despise similar practice in STEM. Toiling is a personal choice, as no one forces a student to practice hard, certainly not in American schools. So, why is it a bad thing if a student chooses to get better, sometimes much better, at math by solving more challenging problems?

> (2) People like and accept competitive sports, so emotionally they should have the same reaction to competitive academics.

Not sure if it matters, but I do think that competition is of secondary importance here. What matters is practice makes a better student, at statistically speaking -- this holds true for both sports and academia.

> On (1), there are so many ways that STEM success is not like sports.

There are. Practice is necessary but not sufficient. And I'm not saying practicing guarantees success. Instead, it's more like conditional probability: some people will get ahead by practicing, and I don't see how it's morally wrong if that happens.

> The highest levels of STEM success are defined by doing never-previously-observed things in highly collaborative environments with no opportunity for an exact head-to-head comparison.

I'm more concerned about the majority of the students. The US is a great place for truly talented few. They have access to vast resource: clubs, communities, online groups, local colleges, and at least dozens of programs and awards.

> There is zero reason to believe that your 1,000 AOPS math problems are the best way to advance your STEM education towards real success, even though it may help you outcompete your neighbor on a single test.

I guess this is where we differ. Why does it have to be the best way? I can also say there's zero reason to believe that 10K free throws is the best way to advance one's basketball career. We choose the best way to our best knowledge. And everything has a marginal return, I get it. I was simply comparing toiling in sports with toiling in STEM. You practice until your marginal return approaches zero, and you move on to the next level fo drilling. For elementary students, it can be getting really familiar with multiplication table. For student in junior high, it could be deep understanding of algebra and calculus, for high school student, it could be entry-level research with collaboration with other people.

> Public education is a social investment in economic opportunity for its citizens. It needs to succeed for far more people, and the definition of its success doesn't stop at finding a few stars who fill stadium seats.

Agreed.

> there's a difference between rooting for the participants and rooting for the system.

This is a really nice way of putting it. I just didn't understand why on individual level, Americans value personal effort in sports yet treat personal effort in education as "elitism" or "gaming the system".

> The issue is that a similarly brilliant kid shouldn't be held back because they don't have the same awesome mom. And hey, maybe there are other great ways that three-job mom could be investing in her family and herself.

I guess this is where we differ too. I think the K-12 education of the US is so bad that it does not hold back brilliant kids, but hold back millions of ordinary kids by not pushing them hard enough. See, it's like any college entrance exam in East Asia. Passing the exam does not necessarily mean you're good, but failing it means you're a lousy student. The problem is that more than half of American students couldn't even do well in SAT, which is a very, I mean very, low bar for STEM students.

Thanks for expanding your points, and apologies that I was glib in the synopsis.

Your point is taken on free throws vs test prep. But I think the underlying issue is actually that you are focused on what kinds of prep we should respect, and I'm focused on what kind of admissions we should expect. I do think kids show an admirable and relevant grit by any kind of practice. But we do them a disservice if we overindex on a single method, and should adjust - just as you'd require a coach to adjust if they based team membership.

That amounts to an argument against overweighting the test, and not one in favor of the lottery. But I think the other piece is that if the test does more harm (in making things harder for otherwise qualified kids without access to prep) than good (in detecting the grit that will lead to success), it's better to retire it then keep it. Either way we shouldn't stop with the lottery.

Finally, this point is really interesting:

> the K-12 education of the US is so bad that it does not hold back brilliant kids, but hold back millions of ordinary kids by not pushing them hard enough

I agree that way more kids should have an opportunity to have effort and capabilities recognized with more opportunities all along the education track. I'd be really interested in finding ways to do this that are less dependant on the parents.

People of color (which in practice excludes Asians) are over-represented in sports, but under-represented in academia. A lot of people see the former as desirable and the latter as indicative of systemic racism. I suspect that if sports were dominated by Asians, the people who oppose standardized testing would feel the same way about sports.

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.

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.

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

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.

Funny how perceptions changed over time. I attended in the early 90s and back then I was not aware of any philosophy to treat the kids as adults. We did not have an off-campus lunch program; I got detention one time when I got caught sneaking off campus. And there was definitely a vibe of gifted and talented across the board. The labs were not as sophisticated as they are now. My classmates had broad interests and ended up with achievements across many professions. Just within the few folks I’ve kept track of, there are successes in science and tech but also theater, TV, movies, writing, restaurants, politics, etc.

+1 to all of the above (class of 10)

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.

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.

I did some "gifted student" programs in middle school and high school, although not the specific one discussed in the article. This was my experience:

> 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.

Middle schools want to feed as many of their students to these programs as possible. When Johns Hopkins held an SAT for eighth graders, the teachers distributed flyers home and I heard about it on the morning announcements every day for two weeks. (If Virginia's middle schools aren't making students aware of their high school opportunities, that is very easy to fix.)

> It's the same as saying scoring in the top 1% percentile is within your control.

A topic of active debate within educational circles is whether we should tell students that intelligence is innate or that hard work/"grit" is the most important thing. There's some evidence that the "grit" story leads to better outcomes, so that's what educational establishments prefer to tell students.

It's likely, then, that "you can score in the top percentile with enough hard work and determination" is the official position of the school district. And who knows, it might even be true!

At my middle school, you could enroll in an afterschool prep class for TJHSST, run by the school. (And a large fraction of the GT students did!)

If you live in Fairfax County [where the school is located], it would be almost impossible to not have heard about TJHSST if you were in middle school.

I think the exam for TJ was relatively well known; but one thing I'd be interested in seeing is how much of kids attending TJ also attended a GT middle school, and how many also attended a GT elementary school. I have no numbers, but having gone through these systems myself, it seems like a lot to maybe even most. It become like a conveyer belt, and parents who understand the long term ramifications of these programs try to get their children on as early as possible.

Here is an interesting page I found on the history of the GT program for Fairfax Country Public Schools at elementary and middle school level: http://www.fcag.org/gtfcps.html

These are the names of some of the previous tests:

- Gifted Behaviors Rating Scale form

- Naglieri Non-Verbal Abilities Test

- OLSAT

Obviously we can't go back in time, but it would be interesting to know what kids at the testing eligible age thoughts/knowledge/understanding where around these tests.

I grew up in a school with a culture similar to TJ but without an admissions process. I find it sad that people are trying to get into compsci just to get ahead in their career. It's also sad that Asian parents are pressuring and coercing children and teens into high-workload test prep classes, creating a toxic environment optimizing for top colleges with stratospheric admissions criteria, at the expense of mental health. Top college admissions essays select for self-aggrandizement, and they often have stricter requirements for Asian students.

I've heard that Asian (specifically Chinese) parents push for education because it was the only path out of poverty in China and after immigrating to the US, and others saying that in the US, pursuing high-income careers is necessary in the face of racial discrimination in broader society.

Yea I have mixed feelings as well. I watched many smart and talented people develop very well through these programs. However, the inter-competitiveness at such a young age could be pretty destructive, and was largely unacknowledged and unaddressed by parents and faculty. It led to a lot of stratification in the way kids perceived their peers, and themselves.

To give a related example, my elementary school was a designated Gifted and Talented school, colloquially referred to as GT. Kids across the county who tested well enough could opt to attend; however, the school also had students who attended as their default district elementary school. For every grade at 3rd grade and above, some of the classes were designated as GT, and some were designated as, well .... non-GT. How is a 3rd grader supposed to rationalize their class being categorized as non-GT? Are they, as the abbreviation states, neither gifted nor talented?

The school's faculty would normally emphasize referring to non-GT classes as the "Base" classes, but I think the point remains in terms of what impact that has on a 3rd grader's psychology.

I suspect this kind of attitude -- that gifted programs are problematic because they imply some students are not gifted -- is the main reason why the US falls behind many other countries in measures of education quality.

Not everyone is equally good at school! Just like how not everyone is equally good at sports! We should plan around this, not drag everyone down to the lowest common denominator so we can convince ourselves it isn't true.

I don't see how programs like Thomas Jefferson High School will do much in bolstering the overall public education system. The program is ostensibly to give students with demonstrated aptitude, and an interest in STEM a dedicated environment to excel in. However, to what extent it fulfills on these goals, I would say is debatable.

But as for the general quality of US public education, I would think that to whatever extent TJ succeeds at its goal, they'd be irrelevant simply by magnitude. TJ, whilst a high performing high school, is one high school among many high schools, in a county among many counties, in a state among many states. Regardless of TJ's individual performance, they're averaged out when looking at aggregated numbers. If the goal is to generally increase US education quality, I would think programs like TJ, which are by nature exclusive, won't be successful.

The goal of TJ was to cultivate STEM graduates to help modernize what was, at the time, a fairly conventional southern state economy.

Yes, The Chinese college entrance examination has been the only hope for the huge amount of people in poverty(cheat and corruption are surprisingly rare) and the brightest ones get full PHD scholarship in the US. For those people financial safety is absolutely the No.1 concern. I’d say discrimination aside, the huge hope from their family is also a strong motivation.

Btw as someone who went through the preparation of the exam in China(tried 2 times actually), the last year of high school is like a living hell. My teacher was yelling at the class “it’s 6:30am already and the classroom is still not full. Do you fking want to go college?”

I don’t blame her, one point difference in score turns out to be 2000+ people in the regional ranking

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.

The most important net effect of abandoning meritocracy will be the degradation and debasement of the institutions in question.

>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.

Yeah the article itself speaks of the destruction of TJ, not just it's "transformation."

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?

It's as if the people creating these policies missed out on a good math education!

It's a self-perpetuating problem!

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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Certainly, but blanket, reflexive dismissal of other experiences is just exceptionalism. I’m not saying every foreign approach would work without modification, or even at all, but sheesh... at least have a look at them.

I've heard people use the two rebuttals — but America's bigger; but America's more diverse — to justify many of America's failings. They're effective, not because they are clearly correct, but because a good counter to them requires answers to many difficult-to-answer questions:

How does a large population affect policy? How much do economies of scale make things easier? How much does bureaucracy make things harder?

What does diversity mean? How much is in the eye of the beholder?

To what extent does diversity cause division? To what extent does diversity spark innovation?

In addition to these questions, the debate entails comparisons and contrasts of nations, most of which you hasn't visited. You end up trading pairs of statistics, without intimate knowledge of their correctness and equivalence.

For such reasons, I just avoid arguing about size and diversity. I'd have to write a book to provide a solid answer.

Note: Finland has the population of Wisconsin.

Both have a population of about 5 million.

And even Wisconsin is more diverse at 86% white to Finland's 96%.

Another fun note:

The population of Finland is only 20% bigger than the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, California Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is 4.1 million. If we add in the San Jose-Santa Clara-Sunnyvale, California MSA at 1.9 million, what we tend to consider the "San Francisco Bay Area" has a greater population than Finland.

How is this relevant? None of those areas you describe are uniformly academically excellent.

Is Finland uniformly academically excellent? Are Finns in America performing similar to Finns in Finland? Wouldn't it matter?

Yes, there might be better policy choices. However, even with good policy decisions we would have to see them through while grappling with the extremely different demographics and other widely varying conditions. One of my education professors at Rice felt strongly that the USA needed a "Marshall Plan" for educational funding across the nation. I've always thought this sounded like a dream come true, but even I have to admit that one thing that makes wrestling with educational reform in the USA so different from most places is that Americans have historically been highly opposed to centralized control of how children are educated and favor more local decision-making and funding. It seems very messy compared to the streamlined top-down approaches in many other countries. So somehow one would have to win Americans over to accepting more centralized control and funding of schools, or get them to somehow ensure that schools in under-funded districts get the resources they need to enjoy whatever we all decide is the baseline for an excellent education. It seems like it would be much easier to go with the first option since we have over a thousand school districts in the country, but millions and millions of people feel that would be an overreach by the government. I'm all for learning from other places, but when those other places don't have to overcome the same problem it's hard to figure out how to replicate the things they are doing right.

What makes you think that "educational funding" is a problem, or that other countries have "centralized control and funding of schools?"

In all but a few states, poorer school districts receive similar funding to rich ones: https://hechingerreport.org/in-6-states-school-districts-wit.... In several, poor school districts receive more funding.

Also, the U.S. is more comparable to the EU than to any individual EU country. Obviously, EU countries make their own funding decisions. But many EU countries push funding decisions even further down to individual localities. Germany and Sweden, for example, have highly decentralized education systems. The same is true for Canada. Indeed, in Canada, an even smaller percentage of school funding comes from federal sources (just 2%) compared to the US (about 5-10%).

Wow, rayiner - you're almost at 100,000! Well, that's interesting how decentralized Germany is. I'm not an expert, but I live in the 4th largest city in the country and am aware of a lot of problems. Texas is not one of the ones mentioned in your link - no danger of the poorest getting the most here!

https://www.texastribune.org/2019/02/15/texas-school-funding...

This article mentions multiple times how some funding calculations have not been adjusted in decades and ends with, "Most agree that the patchwork set of calculations for how to distribute money to Texas’ schools is ready for a major facelift." Convoluted formulas are piled on top of one another without achieving the goal of well-funded school systems, so I'd be all for throwing those out and going with something straightforward.

I'd guess that poor kids are likely to be more expensive to educate, but maybe it's a toss up. Some factors I'm aware of in my locale:

* Poor kids are more likely to require special-needs programs and other kinds of extra attention.

* The district has different maximum class sizes for lower and higher income schools.

* On the other hand, the system lets teachers apply for transfers while keeping their seniority, so the higher income schools (where it's easier to teach) end up with higher salary costs.

So I'd have to see a breakdown on actual costs to know whether the general level of funding is actually a measure of whether rich and poor schools are receiving comparable funding relative to their actual needs.

Explanations that are explanatory tend to be used to explain things.

Yeah, frankly I think it’s because we do a horrible job of maintaining a basic level of economic security and opportunity for huge swathes of our population. Western European countries generally do a much better job of that.

As someone who moved to the US from Europe and has spent decades living in both, I would say that it’s not a lack of humility driving these comments. The US really does have different characteristics and a different society, based on different values. It’s very easy to overlook the complexity of US society and culture.

It’s a trope in itself to see the US as dumb for not simply adopting ‘sensible’ policies that seem to work elsewhere.

I think you've gotten faulty information. Finland's high schools are explicitly tracked, as is common in Europe; about half of students attend vocational schools that don't offer college preparatory education.

> It would help America more to have universally "pretty good" schools, than a few great schools in a sea of "pretty bad" schools.

Ok, sure, but we don't need to destroy the great schools in order to work on making more pretty good schools.

If you want to turn bad schools into pretty good ones, please leave the great ones alone, while you go about that.

Yes, but the "pretty good" schools come from kids and families taking academics seriously. In Finland that's the default, but in the US you need an entrance exam to keep the jocks out. It's no surprise that middle-class white kids are underrepresented and would like to get in without all the hard work and discipline.

Can’t you fail them during the previous year, where they don’t have enough grades to graduate ?

That’s the system in France, where public schools can’t refuse kids, but those kids can only move classes if they passed. If you aren’t interested in studying you’ll spend your life in middle school until you’re 16 and just drop out.

In the US, graduation rate is seen as the primary metric of public school quality, so policies that encourage people not to graduate aren't feasible. (One of our most famous educational reforms was named the No Child Left Behind Act, on the principle that in an ideal world not a single child would fail to graduate high school.)

> Can’t you fail them during the previous year, where they don’t have enough grades to graduate

Theoretically this can happen, but in practice it is very rare.

A school not graduating a child essentially admits its teachers are not good enough to put some basic knowledge into this child's head.

No school wants to be in such position.

Are you saying that the students bear no responsibility, or that it’s our current attitude that teachers can somehow coerce people to learn?

The really scary thing is that world-wise bloggers like Scott Aaronson and Siderea think that bullying is an inevitable fact of going to school. Those of us that grew up outside the US know different.

Where, pray tell, do you live that bullying is nonexistent?

The surveys that I've seen show that bullying is pretty universal. About ⅓ of students worldwide are bullied at some point in their education, and these rates don't change all that much from country to country, although the form of bullying does have drastic differences. (Notably, Europe and the US tend to have less physical bullying and more psychological bullying compared to the rest of the world).

That's surely where the financing model is important. Schools here get money based on the number of students, and the dispatch of teachers is done at a region level depending on the needs.

A school with "bad" teachers would just get better teachers if it was warranted (in practice, everyone understands why kids are failing, and they'll send low experience teachers instead, because fuck them, I guess)

> but in the US you need an entrance exam to keep the jocks out

This comment is unnecessarily and rudely exclusive.

I went to a county-wide gifted magnet school that was a satellite to one of the regular county high schools. The athletes played sports at the main school, and non-athletes took gym classes there. About 20% of each class were varsity athletes, and the athletes fit in quite nicely with the non-athletes in academic and social settings.

It’s sad that you added this line, since your first sentence regarding the need for kids and (most importantly) families to take academics seriously is a very important point.

> > but in the US you need an entrance exam to keep the jocks out

> This comment is unnecessarily and rudely exclusive.

Indeed. It's also completely wrong about TJ, just as it is about the school you went to. From my experience (graduating in '02), lots and lots of TJ students played sports -- and quite a lot of them were very serious about it and quite proud of how well they did. I believe our crew teams, in particular, were nationally competitive.

This is counter-intuitive to a lot of people who don't expect "nerds" to be interested in sports or "jocks" to be good at math, science, or technology. (Including me when I first got there.)

But I don't think it's a coincidence. It turns out that working hard, showing up, and keeping at it even when things aren't easy is a powerful way to get better at something. That's just as true for a sport as for an academic subject.

The anti-sports stance is deliberate. Pursuing athletics at a high level takes time and money, both of which would better be directed elsewhere in a world of limited resources. It's also sending a message: this is a school, not a sports club; if you want sports, join the sports club, there you get sports.

There are studies that school districts that dropped sports have better academic outcomes: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-cas...

Especially, what's with the focus on competitive sports? At school you absolutely want to reach the unfit kids because school sports is the only time they get any kind of exercise. You have to be inclusionary, the purpose is public health, individual fitness, not competition, but competitive sports is exclusionary.

Also, what's with the focus on team sports? American schoolkids have a staggering need for conformity, and team sports seem to feed that need.

> There are studies that school districts that dropped sports have better academic outcomes: [link]

I don't see such a study described in that article. After not finding it, I searched for "study", "studies", and "research", and still didn't. Can you perhaps quote a key sentence from the bit you're thinking of?

There is a story about one district that dropped football (not all sports), under severe budgetary pressure. Seems like the right choice. I should add some context that may not be obvious outside the US: that district is a small town in Texas, and Texas and especially its small towns are where high-school football is a really especially big deal. (My dad grew up in a small town in Texas.) In the rest of the country it's generally not so extreme as it was in that town.

The article is quoting a study saying that team sports may improve outcomes for the players but not for the rest of the students. The obvious doesn't need saying: organized sports is a moneysink that takes funding away from the core mission, which is academics.

The kids that really cause trouble aren’t usually “jocks” because in many states you have to pass classes to play sports. To play sports you also have to be disciplined and listen to instructions, and not get caught with drugs or arrested for armed robbery.

I'm from Finland and I don't understand what you're talking about. There are no gifted options in elementary school but immediately from high school onwards standardised tests rank students into better and worse schools. Everyone knows which ones are which and the entrance scores are widely publicized in the media.

And you can bet your ass the best schools and universities only have kids from upper middle class parents. Turns out free education just means subsidising rich kids' education with public money here, just like everywhere else.

It's relative. America's disadvantaged are not like Finland's. There's an underclass in the US straight out of Oliver Twist.

The essay stresses the unfairness of depriving a subset of that underclass — ie: strivers — of a chance to pull themselves up.

The goal instead should be universally to lower American inequality. We should bring it closer to Finnish levels, even if Finnish levels are imperfect.

I'm confused - are you talking about inequality of opportunities (social mobility) or inequality of outcomes?

Yes, we have really high income taxes which means our income equality is less in Nordics than in the USA. However, that also means that strivers are unable to get rich. You can't get rich by working.

That means our wealth inequality is just as bad as in the US. Our 1% has just as much of the wealth and power as in the US.

Whereas in the US, that 1% is mostly entrepreneurs with minority having inherited, in Nordics it's the opposite.

Happy to dive deeper into statistics if you want to.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/05/we...

There is definitely some kind of miscommunication here. I know the area well enough (Sverige lite bättre än ditt land men iaf...) that your comments puzzle me.

I know that you know that poverty in your country, compared to the US, is a non-issue.

I know that you know that citizens in your country don't have basic educational deficits that many Americans have.

I know that you know that your country is very capable of competing in the world market.

As a reminder of the scope of the differences, see: https://youtu.be/YEywCppqeZo or https://youtu.be/JHDkALRz5Rk

So, I too am confused.

Americans, few having visited places like Finland, have a heaven-like perception of the nordic countries. Everyone lives happy lives, powered by public transportation, true equality, and unlimited healthcare unlike almost anywhere else. I'm sure things are great there, but the perception is rarely based on reality. Rather, the Nordics are almost wholly invented by Americans in their minds based on what they imagine them to be.

That's probably a bit too dismissive in my case, but I don't want to turn the thread into my personal travelogue. You could ask tupputuppu whether his/her opinion of the Finnish system is the norm within Finland itself, though.

Fairfax County has excellent schools. In the 2013, the county participated along with several others in a cross-country PISA comparison. Herndon High school, which is not in a particularly wealthy area, performed right between Germany and Canada, and a bit below Finland: http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa/OECD%20Test%20for%20Schoo... (see page 104).

Finland has a major advantage of being full of Finns, as opposed to American demography. In broad swathes of the country there are not enough "good students" to go around.

Students need to be clustered according to their abilities and interests. Not doing so is impractical at best and wasteful at worst.

Different subsets of students require different amounts of attention, different specialties, different classes, etc. Go too fast and the bad students fall behind. Go too slow and good students will get bored and act out. One of my top students failed my class for missing too many lectures -- because attendance was written into the student contract to motivate the lower-performing students.

Certainly, and, to the extent that it (ie: separating into classes according to aptitude) doesn't railroad disadvantaged students into bad schools, I have no issue with that.

Agreed. I think schools that turns bad students into good ones deserve more funding and publicity than schools that turns good students into excellent ones.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not a poor solution, but one that was likely to (edit: administration feared would) result in lawsuits.

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.

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!’

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.

A good bet is "yes." If not this year, then next. See also Proposition 16 (https://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/propositions/16/index.htm).

It's worth noting that polling suggests Prop 16 is quite unpopular (https://edsource.org/2020/california-ballot-measure-to-lift-...), despite its strong showing in the legislature.

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.

actually the opposite is likely to happen, as Scott posits.

no OP is right, that's actually what Scott says

yes but what reason is there to think they will be rich whites?

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.

> 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).

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.

> 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.

I appreciate you engaging with me on this, and am of course happy that your HS experience was positive as well.

I guess my concern, is that it's impossible to really say for sure what either of our experiences would have been elsewhere. All high schools have some variation, and between the one I attended (with a "mixed" gifted program within an extremely large and diverse public school) vs specialized schools like TJ vs standard public schools with various levels of funding and demographics - it's hard to say which type benefits students the most. As much as we focus on gifted students having a positive experience from being around each other, I do wonder if there is also societal value from non-gifted students having the opportunity to befriend and learn from gifted students (and vice versa).

While you appreciated the ability to dive deep on things you were already enthusiastic about, I actually felt relieved to have some breathing room to finally learn things that had no direct academic value and as such, were looked down on by some of the college-prep crowd. I very much doubt I could have an equally broad set of experiences if I had attended a more specialized and academically intensive HS. I learned: how to start a punk rock band, how to get and maintain part-time retail/food service jobs during the school year, how charismatic people carry themselves and how to fake it (thank you speech and debate club), how to convince non-nerdy people to care about things that they don't already care about, how to make and spread petitions, how to help my peers prevent being harassed by military recruiters, how to identify situations that were likely to escalate to violence remove myself from those situations, how to make friends with people from completely different cultures than my own (including friends with recent immigrants who didn't speak much english). I also learned that people who know when and where to break rules and how to do it without hurting people (stuff like skipping class, doing drugs, cheating on tests/HW, making flamethrowers from axe body spray) - those people can make excellent friends and teach you a lot (my best friend of the past 15 years can be described this way). And those people don't tend to have great GPAs.

It's interesting, because while what you've described is something you've heard others say they didn't get until college, I've heard the exact same thing from people when I describe my experience (ie, they didn't experience feeling free enough for significant personal growth outside of academia until they started college).

In either case, it seems like college is the great equalizer. My real questions are:

1.) Is the educational experience that a gifted student receives from a gifted HS something that a similarly gifted students from a normal HS cannot "catch up with" once they're college? I don't think so, as of the 2 valedictorians in my college graduating CS class - neither went to a special school (and one, my husband - actually went to the same public HS that I did and dropped out of the gifted program before HS graduation). That said, we didn't go to MIT or Carnegie Mellon - maybe the valedictorians there are all from specialized high schools.

2. Do non-gifted students and/or teachers of standard classes have a more positive (or negative) experience from having gifted students in their classrooms?

3. Are the possible negative effects that gifted students might experience from being in a standard school (bullying, loneliness, lack of challenge) pervasive, unique to being that environment, and are they insurmountable challenges (ie, not possible to address with extra-curricular activities and by dual-credit community college coursework)?

4. Are students who attend specialist/gifted schools less able to relate to (and therefore less capable of solving) "normal people problems" in society? This one is admittedly extremely difficult to quantify - but when it comes to starting businesses and making an impact in the world, being able to relate to "average" people can be very important.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201004204824/https://www.scott...

Maybe a comment will float this up -

Everyone - please use the web archive link.

Yep

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.

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.

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.

Can you show evidence of any bias in the testing? Could it be possible its not biased?

Asians are a historically disadvantaged population who have had to ensure so much racism in USA, yet unlike blacks in recent decades they've had huge upward mobility on all social and economic indicators. So how have the supposed racist biases in tests changed to allow asians to surpass the dominant whites yet blacks and latinos continue to struggle?

Asians and immigrants tend to value education because it can offer a path to a higher standard of living and coming over to the US kinda self selected for the type of people with an upbringing that valued education and the willingness to take risks in unknown territory (even if it's because life in their country of origin was really bad). This is why Asians/immigrants and their children have a disproportionate occupation of seats in high caliber schools and jobs at well paying companies in the US.

There's a couple problems with saying this out loud though:

1. Some people are reluctant to admit that culture may be a nontrivial part of the reason why some groups of people do better than other groups in academics.

2. People are thinking too much about race when i think immigration is a bigger factor. Children of people from African countries excel in US schools too.

For those interested, you may want to look into studies relating to the 'immigrant paradox in the US' to learn more.

EDIT: just to clarify something: I'm all for immigration and I wish the current administration wasn't so anti-immigrant. This country has prospered from the work of immigrants and I absolutely think non-immigrants should compete with immigrants instead of acting entitled and pretending like some immigrants took their good jobs. Just because you were born on the right soil doesn't mean you deserve a better chance at getting a job. And immigrants pay taxes too.

A certain percentage of people just have test taking anxiety or other issues that impede their ability to test well. If you judge only on the results of a test, then you've just eliminated all those people from the start. But then our school system tends to already be biased against such people so it wouldn't really be that out of line.

It's not just moving from an exam to GPA, it's taking students above a GPA of 3.5 and entering them into a lottery. Scott seems concerned that incoming students will not be as high achieving, because they're chosen at random from a pool that's not very selective, and they won't be as interested in STEM, because the school will be using the SAT instead of their own more specific exam.

If that's the case then I agree completely. An application is absolutely necessary, otherwise you'll get a lot of kids there who don't want to be there. I also tend to think a basic interview or some other way of determining that it is the kid that wants to be there, not the parents who want the kids there.

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.

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.

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... ;)

> STOP USING SKIN COLOR AND RACE. STOP. The only consideration that's remotely permissible, beyond merit, is financial posture.

This is my stance as well, since it represents a sustainable solution to the fact that race is correlated with poverty in America.

Being poor sucks, regardless of whether systemic racism put you there or not. Being poor deprives all children of opportunities, regardless of skin color. (due to constraints on time, budget, and education of the parents)

Race-based affirmative action only solves the immediate problem that minority races are poorer on average. Financial-need-based affirmative action solves the immediate problem, in addition to guaranteeing that, if demographics shift, we are still helping the groups most in need.

I feel like whatever is happening here is more subtle than being "hellbent on disenfranchising high-achieving Asians". I think it's probably still in the category of 'racist', but works via a more complicated mechanism.

I can kinda imagine: it is ingrained in people's minds that a 'proper' institution ought to be mostly white, with some small percentages of each minority, and if things aren't working out that way the institution seems 'wrong' and becomes up for re-organization. The mindset is explicitly racist and is some sort of modern rendition of colonialism: that this country is still white society, foremost, and everyone else is here with white approval. But it's probably not that the individual bureaucrats (or whoever is in charge of this) is consciously bigoted -- it's that it's baked into society in a way that they can't see beyond.

This is an off-the-cuff unqualified theory. Would love to know if anyone with more familiarity of the situation has a more reality-based model.

Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is particularly important on inflammatory topics like this one where high emotion is already activated.

Sorry. Fixed. Could you please reverse whatever mechanism artificially pushed this down the comment page now?

I'd appreciate a response to my prior appeal. The only change I'm noticing is that you collapsed your own comment and my reply. The optics of how this has been handled seem a bit questionable to me.

The best way to contact the mods is via the Contact link in the footer.

There's no point. @dang's intervention had what may have been the intended effect (suppressing the comment). He's been doing this long enough to know precisely how the various moderation knobs he turns will distort the conversation.

The original comment had 24 upvotes and was solidly at the top of the comment page. Given its popularity, it likely would have stayed there. Mea culpa for exceeding the bounds of the Overton Window.

I reduced the downweight when you fixed the main problem with your comment. I didn't remove it altogether, though, because "Jews had a much easier time than Asians" is racial flamebait. I don't think you meant it that way, but it takes a rather close reading of your comment to arrive at that conclusion, and many readers, alas, aren't going to do that. It's our job to moderate flamebait on HN because otherwise flamewars take over everything.

I collapsed this subthread about allcaps in your comment because once you fixed the issue, the subthread was no longer relevant.

Optics are often going to be questionable here because the quantity of moderation actions we have to do vastly exceeds our ability to explain them all in detail, let alone answer all the additional questions and objections that such explanations invariably stir up. That constraint is a fundamental fact of the job.

On the other hand, there's no specific question you can't get an answer to. You should email hn@ycombinator.com, though, because if you ask your question in comments here, the odds are pretty high that we won't see it. Also, the guidelines ask you not to: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

> 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.

Being hyperbolic like this diminishes the rest of your point(which I'm generally inclined to agree with)

It's not hyperbolic. The school board presented it as an explicit selling point of the merit lottery program (https://youtu.be/n3FS9TY0lcg?t=1669) that Asians would be disenfranchised in favor of other races.

A policy existing which hurts your group is not the state being hell bent on disenfranchising you. Hyperbolic.

"Oppressing" is a much more fraught judgement, I agree. But it seems clear that the architects of this policy think there are too many Asians and want to see fewer of them, and I'd characterize policies aimed at excluding specific racial groups as disenfranchisement.

You may find it interesting to read the book Whiteshift - https://www.amazon.com/Whiteshift-Populism-Immigration-Futur... . The thesis of the book is that over time, Hispanic and Asian Americans will start to be considered white, similar to how the perception of Irish, German, and other nationalities changed in the 1900s.

As an Asian who has been to the USA, I find this to be highly unlikely, especially considering that Asians (East Asians, not Indians) are not even Caucasians. Whiteshift happened because all those nations (Germans, Irish, etc.) are of Caucasian European stock. Maybe it could work with Hispanics, but even that is a stretch. Many of us don't want to admit this, but our brains are wired to immediately understand how much genetic history we share with another person just by looking at them.

You make a good point, but in the past the same argument was used to say that Slavs or Latins (southern Europeans) would never be perceived as the same race as the people of Germanic descent. I think you're right that Hispanic is closer, though. Think of Hispanic people like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio, are they really perceived as so different from white? Also, speaking to your comment that you are an Asian that has been to the USA, I want to mention that the author of the book is partly of Asian descent himself. If you're curious to read it I recommend it!

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.

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.

(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!)

Here’s the problem with GPA: it penalizes the chemical engineering and economics double major who finished in four years and rewards the peace studies major who finished in five, but with a higher GPA.

A standardized test has the feature of being standardized.

That shouldn't come up much for middle school kids, presumably.

I'm making the broader point. If the concern is that middle-school kids don't self-select into harder classes, I get the concern a bit better.

The implication, which I leave unstated, is that everything becomes an arms race to see which middle school can give its students the most ludicrous GPA (e.g. 7.5/4.0). Any grade other than a perfect one becomes a disaster, but that isn't a concern for most students because they all get perfect grades. With no more meaningful feedback from assessments, in the long run such policies do about as much good as throwing out grades entirely.

At least in a standardized testing-induced arms race, you have to learn something to succeed. Even the most cynical will concede testing strategies.

If I understand the American high school system correctly, 3.5 is not a particularly high bar, especially with grade inflation in recent decades. For context, most students admitted to Harvard or Yale have close to a 4.0 weighted GPA. It would be like randomly picking among students who scored >70% on some exam, instead of picking the top x%.

Furthermore, GPA is not very comparable between different high schools.

> 3.5 is not a particularly high bar

I'm assuming that's 3.5/4.0. At least where my kids are in school in Texas, that ceiling is now 5.0: if you take honors/AP classes, they're weighted a full point above the "ordinary" classes, so if you take all advanced courses and get all A's, your final GPA will be a 5.0.

A GPA of 3.5 corresponds to an average grade somewhere between B+ and A-. A lot of students achieve this grade point average: https://qz.com/1032183/no-wonder-young-americans-feel-so-imp... claims that 47% of high school graduates achieve at least an A- average. This is almost certainly less selective than whatever they were doing with the entrance exam.

A big part of this is grade inflation -- it's easier to earn an A now than it was in 1990. https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/studies/2011462.pd... is a good report on how grades have changed.

https://web.archive.org/web/20201004204824/https://www.scott...

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.

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?

How?

Not trying to be asinine, but it's not actually a simple/easy problem to solve. Many have tried.

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.

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.)

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.

TJ Grad from '14. The school when i entered was mostly white kids + indians/east asians who spend a lot of time studying.

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.

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.

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?

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/; [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-despit...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/nyregion/new-york-math-ca...

Giant +1; I also volunteered for BEAM in grad school

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.

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.

A good illustration of the western world sabotaging itself.

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.

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.

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 2. Caste: https://www.uh.edu/~achin/research/w16509.pdf 3. Policing: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-01/how-to...

I'm not sure if I understand you: isn't it a truism to say increasing opportunities for a group increase their outcomes?

Maybe we shouldn't expect similar outcomes from different groups and shouldn't focus on groups at all?

They're quite distinct problems. Study after study shows that Black boys have much worse outcomes than white boys even when comparing families that have similar incomes: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/19/upshot/race-c.... White boys whose parents have an income at the 90th percentile (compared to all households) will statistically end up around the 70th percentile (regression to the mean). A black boy raised to parents who have a 90th percentile income will end up at the 55th percentile.

There is something unique about the economic status of Black Americans, especially Black boys. The income gap between Black and whites hasn't narrowed at all since the end of Jim Crow in the 1960s. Gaps for other groups have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing-even groups, such as Hispanics, that typically come into the country near the bottom of the economic ladder.

> The research makes clear that there is something unique about the obstacles black males face. The gap between Hispanics and whites is narrower, and their incomes will converge within a couple of generations if mobility stays the same. Asian-Americans earn more than whites raised at the same income level, or about the same when first-generation immigrants are excluded. Only Native Americans have an income gap comparable to African-Americans. But the disparities are widest for black boys.

Percent of children in single-parent families by race in the United States:

African American: 65% Native American: 53% Hispanic: 41% White: 24% Asian: 15%

https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/107-children-in...

"Skin diversity", ie racial groups, form political constituencies. In America, income categories generally do not except for at the extreme ends.

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.

> 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.

Two standard deviations above the mean is too low a bar, not really TJ material.

HN hug of death?

It 504s for me.

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.

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).

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.

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.

A 3.5 GPA is what? The top 20%? It is crashing towards the mean.

Dunno, I’m not sure I would have had that but I got in. Jr high was kind of a bad time. Times change and all, I’m not sure what the grades mean any more.

But that’s (3.5) what I got there, and and in college.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Website down! HN effect?

https://web.archive.org/web/20201004204824/https://www.scott...

Ah, I was wondering why the live site looked like an unreadable mess.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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