It is one thing for administrators to change a school’s admissions policy to make the student body reflect the community it serves. One way they do that is to get rid of test scores to make it harder for some racial groups to get into selective schools. But however bad one thinks such moves, it is surely worse to deceive parents outright, hiding from them what their children have accomplished, harming their futures.
Fairfax County Public Schools turned Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology into a selective magnet school in 1984. From that time until the 2020 murder of George Floyd, admission to TJ was largely determined by the results of a standardized test covering math, reading, and science.
2023 POISED FOR PARENTAL RIGHTS
But during that ghastly summer of rioting, administrators decided (illogically) that because student achievement in standardized tests did not reflect the racial mix of Fairfax County, the tests must be racist.
“Our 32 black students and 47 Hispanic students fill three classrooms,” TJ Principal Ann Bonitatibus wrote in a June 2020 email announcing the school’s move away from standardized testing as a component of the admissions process. “If our demographics actually represented [Fairfax County], we would enroll 180 black and 460 Hispanic students, filling nearly 22 classrooms. The most recent TJ admissions trend, unfortunately, does not close the equity gap.”
After dropping the testing component, the racial composition of TJ changed. The percentage of black students in the freshman class jumped from 1% to 7%, the percentage of Hispanic students rose from 3% to 11%, and the percentage of white students inched up from 18% to 22%.
In the zero-sum world of racial equity, someone must always be made to suffer if others gain. While the percentage of every other demographic went up, that of ethnic Asian Americans fell from 73% to 54%.
Fairfax parents have sued the Fairfax County School Board alleging that the change in admissions policy was racially motivated. They won in federal district court, and an appeal is still pending in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
As bad as the changes to TJ’s admissions policy are, Bonitatibus and other TJ administrators are accused of doing even worse in the name of yet more officious racial equity.
Since 2020, they have apparently withheld notification of National Merit awards from students’ families. These awards, attained by scoring well on the PSAT, can increase a student’s chance of getting into a selective university and open the door to hundreds of scholarship programs.
The school has admitted delaying the notification of students and their families for weeks this school year, and it is alleged it has held all notifications from families in previous years.
“We want to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,” one school administrator admitted to parents in an email. The principal didn’t want to “hurt” the feelings of students who didn’t get the award, he explained.
Hurt feelings of some are no reason to deny opportunities to others. If TJ administrators have been withholding information from parents that could help their children succeed academically, they must be held accountable. People who deliberately sabotage students’ life chances have no place in schools.
