The purge of Asian American students at Thomas Jefferson High School has begun | Hacker News Reader

The purge of Asian American students at Thomas Jefferson High School has begun

washingtonpost.com

47 pointsfarmerstan43 comments

Such a purge, given that the representation of east and south asian students in incoming class remains considerably above local data.

The new system does not consider race explicitly. The largest change in demographics is on students on free-and-reduced lunch, so the usual concerns of "but you should consider class rather than race" don't make much sense here. We've also seen huge increases in the number of neuro-atypical admits. Concerns that the system would just replace asian students with white students were also unfounded.

Further, the system proposed by activists (the merit lottery, which was rejected in large part due to opposition by folks like Asra) does not even include the "holistic" elements that critics claim hide anti-asian bias, yet this system was called racist all the same. I've personally had people call me a racist as well as somebody who "hates excellence" for my support of the merit lottery. Asra (the author of this piece) has specifically called several of my friends a lot of very nasty names.

I am also a TJ grad. I also personally think the fact that there is limited access to the education offered there is fundamentally stupid and that people should step back and consider why 13 year olds (and younger, my parents were provided a path to TJ for me when I was four) need to compete over this access.

Are you suggesting that Asians should be kept at the equivalent ratio of their population, ie. 20%?

No. I am suggesting that Asra's suggestion that any policy change that reduces the south and east asian demographics at TJ can be considered a "purge" is ridiculous.

Targeting and cutting 25% of a single race is a purge. More will get cut next year and the years to come.

> Targeting and cutting 25% of a single race is a purge.

Targeting?

The change proposed by activists (and opposed by the author of this piece) was to introduce a lottery admissions process that involved all students who met a certain minimum threshold of GPA and accelerated math enrollment. That is the polar opposite of "targeting". I am curious what a policy change you wouldn't consider to be "targeting" looks like.

> More will get cut next year and the years to come.

How? The policy is the same for next year.

This is exactly what targeting is. Arbitrary GPA thresholds with low ceilings to achieve desired ratios. You can bet there is some rigging in the background for "special" families. Racism is only acceptable against asians, no one dare point out the extreme overrepresentation of the most privileged and hateful minority creating a lot of these policies.

Yes, targeted. Asians were the only demographic that dropped precipitously. Even White enrollment went up. So it was specifically targeted against Asians because it was “too high”.

Can we get "Op Ed" put in the title?

If one school out of 100 has a race-blind and merit-based admissions process it will quickly end up with way more discriminated people than the population levels of qualified applicants would suggest, because they are being actively pushed out of the other 99. That is probably how this high school ended up with a 70% Asian figure; I've heard the stereotypes about Asians and math but I doubt the differences are that big.

> If one school out of 100 has a race-blind and merit-based admissions process it will quickly end up with way more discriminated people than the population levels of qualified applicants would suggest, because they are being actively pushed out of the other 99. That is probably how this high school ended up with a 70% Asian figure; I've heard the stereotypes about Asians and math but I doubt the differences are that big.

This does not make sense given TJ and FCPS. There are no other local schools similar to TJ that have similar admissions systems that could exclude asian americans. Further, many people do not believe that the old system was "merit based", given the widespread proliferation of test prep that does not focus on actual knowledge useful for a STEM education but instead focuses on test taking strategies. You can think of the TJ-Test as the LeetCode of high school admissions tests.

When I took the TJ test ~25 years ago it was much like every other standardized test I took in school like the Iowa tests and the SAT, which are generally regarded in the field of education not as measures of mental capacity or scholastic aptitude, but of test prep, whether direct or indirect. Or put another way, they are known to have cultural bias.

Are you saying that the tests were purposefully biased in favor of Asians? Were they written in China so that Asians would have a benefit that lead to 73% demographics at TJ?

Purposefully, no. In the same way that Leetcode style interviews are not purposefully biased in favor of young people.

But there shouldn't be an axiom that standardized testing is the best way to gauge merit and (more controversially) I believe that there shouldn't be an axiom that merit is the most effective way to choose what students have access to accelerated schooling.

Test prep barely works, the entire field of psychometry is dedicated to this topic. How about looking into actual science instead of writing nonsense to justify your racism.

How effective is test prep? That's a serious question because yes, we see a lot of emphasis on it in societies that put a lot of emphasis on tests, but I am not aware of any serious trial of its impact on test scores.

This is a 26% drop in the Asian population at the High School. That is a pretty big drop in what was a purposeful policy change. If we were to replace Asian with some other ethnicity in this circumstance, where the institution decided there was too many of X, and changed policies for it to be more "equitable" I believe there would be a much larger outcry, and not just from people that support meritocracy.

Because this piece is an op-ed, they've only told their side of the story. It is also true that the number of Black students admitted went from 6 to 33, an increase of 550%, and Hispanic went from 16 to 62, an increase of 288%.

And further, the number of economically disadvantaged students went up by a factor of 50. It becomes difficult to argue that the equity changes only applied to specific races.

They increased not because they deserved it, but because of their race and the change on policies. If Asians werent being specifcxally targeted but Blacks increased because their test scores increased, no one would complain. That’s what competition is all about. Everyone would celebrate their success.

But stacking the deck against Asians and letting in people via lottery strictly to change the skin color statistics is abhorrent.

No one cares if Asians are discriminated against, even though they deserve their place at TJ through hard work.

> If Asians werent being specifcxally targeted but Blacks increased because their test scores increased, no one would complain.

Sort of. The problem is that many people do not believe that the test scores are an accurate representation of merit or an effective way of distributing the limited enrollment slots. People take it as a given that there must be an enrollment test but that itself is a policy devised by humans rather than something handed down from heaven.

> But stacking the deck against Asians and letting in people via lottery strictly to change the skin color statistics is abhorrent.

How does a lottery stack the deck against Asian students?

> No one cares if Asians are discriminated against, even though they deserve their place at TJ through hard work.

If you want to fight to ensure that people who "deserve" TJ have access, then the solution is to largely destroy the magnet school model and replace it with co-education with GMU next door. But for many people, the limited access is the point, because it allows people to read in magazines that TJ is the best public school in the country.

It isn't like prior to this change that there weren't huge numbers of qualified students turned away from TJ.

> How does a lottery stack the deck against Asian students?

Enrollment dropped 25% for Asians. There’s nothing to argue here.

People argue that the tests arent “fair” because of cultural bias. So unless you think the TJ tests were designed for Asians in mind, why is it that Asians didn’t suffer from this cultural bias but others did? Or do you think the tests were written with white and Asian culture in mind?

Or maybe the idea of cultural bias in tests is bullshit since Asian students were excelling at a supposedly “white” test, and it’s really just a reflection of how hard a student is willing to study?

This just reinforces the idea that Asians are “other”. They don’t matter when it comes to diversity, all that matters are Blacks and Latinos. Even though in places like NYC, Asians are indisputably the poorest demographic.

The number of economically disadvantaged admits went up by 50x after the policy change. If you are concerned about economically disadvantaged students having access to accelerated education, this change was a win.

At the expense of Asians because Asians are always considered foreigners not minorities. Blacks and Whites only think of Blacks and Whites as Americans. Asians are called “Chinese”. So no wonder when the school board sees 75% “Chinese” at TJ they think it’s unAmerican and want to “fix” it.

> At the expense of Asians because Asians are always considered foreigners not minorities.

There are economically disadvantaged asian american students. They benefit greatly from the changes that limit dependence on test prep.

> Asians are called “Chinese”. So no wonder when the school board sees 75% “Chinese” at TJ they think it’s unAmerican and want to “fix” it.

You'll find that a lot of people on the school board, or who are active in this discussion on the side of the change, are themselves south and east asian.

The narrative that this is all white people trying to hold asian americans back is just silly.

> There are economically disadvantaged asian american students. They benefit greatly from the changes that limit dependence on test prep.

I'm not sure how to take this seriously. There are economically disadvantaged Asian students, but there is no evidence this change helped them. We have empirical evidence the change increased Black, Latino and White student counts; we also have evidence it reduced Asian student counts.

> You'll find that a lot of people on the school board, or who are active in this discussion on the side of the change, are themselves south and east asian.

That's not what I've found. Everything about the school looks extremely White. Being 'active in this discussion' is irrelevant and there is no data to support your assertion anyway.

> The narrative that this is all white people trying to hold asian americans back is just silly.

Your narrative that replacing Asian students with poor Black, Latino and White students is somehow good also seems a bit silly. It's still discrimination even with your spin.

> I'm not sure how to take this seriously. There are economically disadvantaged Asian students, but there is no evidence this change helped them. We have empirical evidence the change increased Black, Latino and White student counts; we also have evidence it reduced Asian student counts.

There are demo breakdowns. You can look at the intersection of asian american admits and free-and-reduced-lunch admits. You'll find that there are more economically disadvantaged asian american admits in the recent class than in prior years.

> That's not what I've found. Everything about the school looks extremely White. Being 'active in this discussion' is irrelevant and there is no data to support your assertion anyway.

Do you attend the FCPS meetings?

They are doing too well to be considered a minority.

Important topic with an interesting angle presented (if necessarily biased, given the authors' connection to litigation).

However, I flagged it because it doesn't seem on-topic for HN. Culture wars on this site seem particularly unproductive.

When are these tiger parents going to figure out that the objective function for any institution's admissions has multiple terms, some of which value social stability over raw IQ?

I have no doubt this'll be flagged and removed from HN but before it does, I just want to say I think it's interesting how adjustments are made to move against high percentage of Asian Americans in certain environments but really no one does the same when other non-white groups dominate other situations.

Is there another school in fairfax county where black students are overrepresented where you'd like to propose a policy change? Because that is the jurisdiction the school board has here.

His comment wasn't limited to "fairfax county", it's true of all situations. For example noone minds black overrepresentation in basketball and proposes limiting them over there.

I heard stories something similar was done against Jews in Soviet Union.

And in Nazi Germany...

That's the most inflammatory headline I have ever seen.

Well the op-ed is written by one of the founders of the movement conducting the lawsuit and their attorney, so I guess they wanted something arresting and attention-grabbing. I do hate now this kind of rhetoric style has become the norm though — it's just the perfect type of writing that's easily shared on Twitter/Facebook posts.

This modern hyperbole ends one way: with us on opposite sides of a battlefield shooting at one another.

The hyperbole will end the moment we stop rewarding it.

How do you stop millions of users on Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms from clicking on the link, engaging with the material, leaving likes/dislikes/reactions, and arguing with each other in the comments section? As long as the engagement metrics on our platforms support a style of communication that values polarization and reaction over mild objectivity, this style will propagate itself and continue, as sad as it is.

[flagged]

Flamewar comments like this will get you banned on HN, regardless of what you're flaming for or against. Would you please review the rules and stick to them from now on? We'd appreciate it.

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

Edit: actually you've been breaking the rules so much that I've banned the account (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28254220). Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.

>Wonder how they square that circle.

That's a pretty straightforward circle to square - it's apparently a good school, or at least the parents think it is, and the name doesn't change how good the teachers are.

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