Thomas Jefferson High students, parents and alumni protest a plan to drop the admissions test and admit students by lottery to the prestigious public high school.
Seventy-nine percent of students at an elite public high schools are “of color,” but the school board plans to drop the admissions test in favor of a lottery for eighth graders with a 3.5 grade point average. Most non-white students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Virginia are Asian American, often from immigrant families. They’re the wrong “of color.”
Now a “meritocracy melting pot,” “TJ” will admit far fewer Asian Americans — and far more whites — under a lottery, write Asra Q. Nomani, a TJ parent, and Max Eden in City Journal.
School officials estimate “that a lottery would have reduced the share of Asian students in the class of 2024 from 73 percent to 54 percent,” they write. “TJ parents project, based on public-records data, that the share of Asian students would actually be slashed by more than half, to 33 percent,” while white students, now 18 percent of enrollment, would increase to 45 percent. The number of black and Hispanic students would increase slightly.
Two weeks ago, in a town hall with TJ students, Virginia Education secretary Atif Qarni compared students who study with private tutors to athletes who take illegal “performance enhancement drugs.”
. . . (In a letter to a parent) Qarni labeled the objections of the mostly Asian immigrant parents as “white supremacist” rhetoric.
How did Asians become white? Too much studying.
TJ is in Fairfax County, which recently paid $20,000 for a 45-minute speech to school leaders by Ibram X. Kendi, author of How To Be An Anti-Racist. He also took questions for 15 minutes.
Kendi argues that anyone who claims to be “non-racist,” as opposed to “anti-racist,” is racist.
His remedy for discrimination is discrimination against whites, writes Hans Bader on Liberty Unyielding. That’s illegal.