I told the hubby this story and he said it's like if there's a highschool track team and they told the fastest runner in the front "Stop! Let all these other people pass first. Ok now you can go". They wouldn't do that. Val I love your idea of helping disadvantaged kids by making the free lunches better. If it's eat fresh healthy vegetables or starve they'd be a lifelong change for the better. Lucounu ITA if the school's so great they should make copies of the school, not change it.

Of course, but some of the remedial students might also have depressed achievement because of lack of opportunity before getting in.


The criteria for entry to TJ under the old regime didn't include intelligence scores, as I understand it, but achievement.

While it's fine to set schools up to serve high-achieving children, an exclusive focus on high achievers who have been given every opportunity before entry, while excluding children who show promise but may need some remediation to rectify years of poor schooling due to their parents' low income, perpetuates injustice and inequality in the school system.

The first op-ed piece, so eager to return to the old ways, even notes that a lot of Chinese wealthy parents seek ways to move to the area so their children can get in. This isn't just innate ability of the children at work.


Nah. It's just a realization that being given lots of advantages from birth can have an effect on achievement. I'm also thinking that schools like TJ are simply doing things better than inner-city Title I schools, and could probably benefit lots of the children from poorer schools who happen not to be well served. Wealthy intellectual giants surely deserve a fair shake, but so does everyone.


Is it? Sure, plenty of money may be wasted on inefficient attempts to improve test scores due to NCLB, but that doesn't mean that there are no better methods. Maybe schools like TJ are simply superb, and even children with low achievement would benefit from it.

I'm guessing that there are some pretty terrible math teachers sucking up paychecks in Title I districts. I live in a Title I district (for math) where a person I consider to be incompetent has been hired as the district math consultant. His first move was to take a good number of weeks, IIRC about two months, at the start of every school year to have the chilren focus on math drills to memorize math facts better, taking away from the time devoted to conceptual math instruction. Do you think a highly gifted child would perform to his utmost abilities under this program?


I'll take your word for it, but that doesn't mean they were doing the best job possible, or that the students in that program were just like the remedial TJ students either. I'm guessing that relaxing the entry criteria at TJ a bit has resulted in entry for some students who need extra instruction with the goal of hopefully filling gaps not afflicting the average TJ student, not that those new admittees are poor prospects for getting into college at all. And honestly, I think I could take lots of disadvantaged but motivated children and get them ready college, given three years, in the absence of severe developmental problems. I don't have a shred of proof, though I've tutored before with good results.


They certainly didn't belong there under the old admission criteria, but now they're there; and I think that whether they belong depends not on whether some other excluded child could have gotten benefit there, but whether they can. That's what I'm mainly curious about: how much TJ is benefitting the new admittees.


Some of those children who "deserve" to go there apparently deserve it only because their wealthy parents moved to the area just for that purpose. This is economic advantage directly resulting in educational advantage, and it's unfair. Measures should be taken to increase fairness. This new admission policy is an attempt to do that, to spread the impact of a wonderful working school with proven results a little bit to other ethnic and economic groups, in the hopes that it will work. I don't see it as harmful to devote a percentage of the admissions at such a hugely successful school to this experiment, especially since those wealthy giants aren't going to be exactly disadvantaged elsewhere, and so many of them are excluded already.

Right. That is one of the links I posted. That is part of why I say the question is about whether or not TJ is currently a STEM school for gifted students or a high school for gifted students. No one is saying that the students who are getting in aren't gifted, or that they need remediation at the basic/below basic level. Just that the math scores aren't what they used to be.

Uh, if you are focused on achievement, you are focusing on something money can generally buy.

So, a school that is for high-achieving students is going to be filled with people who got advantages in life, generally associated with large amounts of money and parental involvement.

Achievement isn't potential achievement, it's actual prior achievement.

Uh, yeap. The point is to broaden the entry criteria so some previously disadvantaged children can get some of the advantages without having to be reborn to rich mommies and daddies. If one looks not just at achievement-- because looking just at prior achievement might give the little ones of rich mommies and daddies much more of an edge than their ultimate ability to achieve in life might merit-- but at some factors indicating potential to achieve, some of the little ones with poor mommies and daddies can be given more of a chance to reap the full benefits of your tax dollar.

Of course not. But why should we react to bad Title I schools by sacrificing the needs of gifted students? What's the point of watering down entry requirements at the few public schools in this country that provide a stimulating, challenging environment for them? The system should force the crappy schools to change, not force the good schools to pick up their slack. As you said, changing the tenure system would help.

But the reality is that most kids just aren't smart enough for a school like the old Thomas Jefferson. Changing the entry requirements won't change this. As I mentioned, IMO, the best way to help disadvantaged kids would be to give them free nutritious food at school twice a day starting in kindergarten. Ensuring that they have highly capable teachers would also go a long way, but the unions won't allow it.

Are you under the mistaken impression that TJ is some expensive private school? It's a Virginia state-chartered magnet school. The cost of running the school is shared by several school districts in the area, including my own.

Edit: I see now that you don't mean to imply that the rich are directly buying their way in, but rather doing so indirectly.

It's a sad day when TJ is no longer politically correct.

My impression of education is that we have nothing for students and families to shoot for. If you score high on your state tests, it gets you is less access to education. The lower scoring kids are the ones who get the resources. If they are going to keep bringing the curriculum to the kids, make it more engaging and give you infinite ways to get those scores up, where's the incentive to work for it on your own? Oh wait, maybe incentive will come if we pay the students like they've tried in some districts. It's all wrong. We don't need to find the student's currency. We need to be the currency that students seek.

We've killed the internal drive to succeed in education. There's nothing to shoot for. I think leveled work is a great idea. You do well, you move up, you do poorly, you move down. And the kids who move down should have to work hard to move up. If people are worried about fairness, there can be a standard that the top 5% move up and the bottom 5% move down. Or each level can have qualifying criteria. But if there's nothing to shoot for, no benefit to working hard, and punishment in the form of decreased attention and society value on your head if you do well, then of course our educational achievement is going to decline.

If we give teachers motivated students and the kids want to move up, then the teachers will have incentive and feel internal reward and satisfaction when kids do well. Teaching will be more about teaching, and the profession is more likely to attract good teachers.

Said from an area where "equal opportunity" is taken to the extreme.

Where is the assumption that the new admission requirements are leading to students who are less smart? My understanding is that there are thousands of students in the cachement area who are more than qualified for admissions.

While I applaud efforts to increase the quality of school lunch programs, I really don't think that it is the surefire way to improving student achievement. Similarly, in Virginia, there are no collectively bargained union contracts, so blaming this on "the union" is an irrelevant argument.

I do think that improving math and science instruction for all students starting in kindergarten is a good first step. My understanding is that Fairfax County has a fair amount of tracking occurring under the guise of "gifted services" that may very well prevent such high-quality instruction from filtering down to the masses.

I inferred it from the high rate of remediation.

Relatively low intelligence is an elephant in the room in US education. No one wants to admit that some students aren't very smart, so we find other ways to explain differences in ability. It's the teaching methods or bad schools or socioeconomic status or whatever. We'll do almost anything to avoid saying that some students just aren't smart enough to take a rigorous physics course or go to a traditional college (and that there are lots of other ways to be a productive person). Just last night at DS's 8th grade promotion ceremony, a speaker announced cheerfully that every student is capable of doing anything s/he wants, whether it's being famous or being a scientist, or whatever. Everyone!

This is not true.

(As for the unions, I'm not trying to blame unions for everything. No way. And VA teacher unions may not have the same type of bargaining clout that other states do, but this doesn't change the fact that teacher's unions in this country do a lot of harm by retaining mediocre and poor teachers).