http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0612/thomasson_dan.php3Quota system would dilute school's quality
By Dan K. Thomasson
Jewish World Review
One of the nation's top-ranked public high schools has run into a problem it probably never thought it would have to deal with, and many educators believe it portends some difficult times ahead for efforts to promote the nation's best and brightest students.
After several decades of rewarding excellence, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology finds itself with a third of its entering class facing remedial instruction in the very things for which they were supposed to be selected: math and related subjects. The culprit seems to be none other than political correctness, stemming from pressures to achieve diversity in its enrollment.
Administrators at the school in Alexandria, Va. -- appalled by the sudden rise of remedial instruction from just under 8 percent to 30 percent -- have rushed back to the chalkboard to find a solution to what many teachers, parents and national educators see as severely damaging the institution's elite status. It's usually ranked at or near the top by ratings agencies -- No. 2 this year by U.S. News and World Report -- and wealthy Chinese families reportedly search for ways to send their children to Northern Virginia for an opportunity to go to TJ, as it's known.
The magnet school's enrollment lacks ethnic diversity, with over 50 percent of its students of Asian extraction and only a relative handful of Hispanic and African Americans. But it was never meant to be a normal high school. Racial diversity wasn't a factor in deciding 30 years ago to create TJ, at the time merely a good secondary school in a string of them in the central part of the county. It was a roaring success because it was built on an admissions policy based solely on merit without consideration for gender or race. Going there meant a rigorous application process, followed by more rigorous classroom demands that frightened even some of the most gifted students.
But those who graduated from TJ found themselves courted by the nation's elite colleges and universities, from the Ivies to the West Coast. Harvard, it is said, has a quota on how many it will take. Is that an example worth saving and promoting across the country? Of course. And while TJ's mental giants still are being sought after and fought over, the new statistics have raised an element of doubt about how good it really is or will continue to be. If that is the case, it is a tragedy for a nation struggling to meet future needs in strategic areas.
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