Examiner reporter Lisa Gartner reports that teachers at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria — recently ranked the second best high school in the nation by U.S. News & World Report — are complaining about the “profound lack of preparation and readiness” exhibited by current members of the freshmen class. In a letter to admissions director Tanisha Holland and the Fairfax County School Board, faculty members wrote: “Simply put, these students are not succeeding, and many are not succeeding in spite of the tremendous support and remediation being offered to them by their teachers.” Holland responded that the school is “looking into the admissions process” to determine whether it could have done a better job of recruiting.
But Holland doesn’t have to look beyond her own office to discover the cause of what the faculty describes as an “alarming trend” in admitting unprepared students. They determined that 50 questions on the math portion of the admissions exam reflected standards that should have been mastered in sixth grade. Instead of being at least two grade levels ahead of their peers, some students admitted to TJ were two grade levels behind.
Critics claim that TJ’s dumbed-down admissions test was designed to increase enrollment of black and Hispanic students. If that’s the case, it’s been a failure even there. Only 13 Hispanics out of 222 applicants were admitted to the Class of 2015, and just six blacks out of 224 applicants. Since about 160 out of 480 freshmen need remediation, the vast majority must be white and Asian.
A more likely culprit is the changes made to TJ’s admissions policies, starting in 2004, which eliminated raw test scores and GPAs as the main criteria for admission. By 2009, highly subjective “student information sheets,” teacher recommendations and student essays made up 65 percent of the total score, whereas the weight given to the math portion of the admissions test and the applicant’s seventh- and eighth-grade math and science grades declined to just 35 percent. Students whose lack of talent or motivation in math and science is reflected in their lower grades and test scores are currently being admitted to TJ over their more academically accomplished peers.
These misguided policies seriously undermine the fundamental mission of this governor’s school, which was specifically designed to educate Virginia’s future scientists and mathematicians. When academic merit is superseded by teachers’ subjective judgments, a decline in standards is the all-too-predictable result.
