Seeing Like a Magnet School

The public needs more transparency and better tools for judging attempts at reform

Attacks on Excellence is a series from Education Progress featuring critical coverage of the education policies and research paradigms that are holding students back.

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In 2020, the admissions process at Thomas Jefferson High School of Science and Technology (TJ) underwent a radical change. After voting in October to eliminate the top-ranked magnet school’s infamously demanding entrance exam, in December the Fairfax County School Board announced a new admissions policy based on “holistic review.” In addition to their GPA and coursework, applicants would also be evaluated based on a “problem-solving essay,” a “Student Portrait Sheet,” and “experience factors” such as being “multilingual learners, economically disadvantaged, or eligible for special education services.”

The overhaul at TJ was the culmination of an intense debate in Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) over how to diversify the district’s most selective public high school. While criticism over the low representation Black and Hispanic students at such elite schools is not new, the outrage and urgency peaked in the summer of 2020. Amid the protests following the murder of George Floyd, the admissions statistics TJ published for its Class of 2024 were inflammatory. While the share of Hispanic students admitted was only 3.3%, the share of Black students was “N/A”; in place of a specific number for Black students enrolled was “TS” — “too small for reporting,” a category used for amounts of “10 or fewer.” By contrast, a full 73% of the Class of 2024 were Asian American. Although the Board’s December motion would ostensibly state that the new holistic admissions process “must use only race-neutral methods that do not seek to achieve any specific racial or ethnic mix, balance, or targets,” when the admissions statistics for the Class of 2025 — the first class post-overhaul — would come out the following year, Black students would rise to 7.1% of all admits, Hispanic students to 11.3%, and Asian-American students would fall to 54%.¹

The month after the Board eliminated TJ’s entrance exam, a group of parents and alumni called Coalition for TJ filed suit against the Board, alleging that the new admissions policy discriminated on the basis of race and was intentionally aimed at reducing the number of Asian-American students in the school. Coalition for TJ argued the Board’s decision to retire the exam would mean that TJ would begin, on the one hand, admitting students who weren’t ready for the school’s advanced academic programming, and on the other, denying the opportunity to others who are prepared enough to benefit. As I’ve written before, the central benefit of magnet schools and G&T programs is that they offer advanced education opportunities to a concentrated group of prepared students. If too many students flounder in these advanced classes, or if advanced coursework opportunities must be scaled back because there are no longer enough capable students to sustain them, then the entire basis of these programs erodes.

Now, if the students admitted under the new policy don’t in fact flounder at higher rates, then there may well be far more students capable of succeeding in TJ’s rigorous program than there are seats available. In that case, the best way forward for students in FCPS would be for the district to expand the program or even fund additional magnets. But at many institutions, these sorts of admissions changes have not panned out well. Around the same time that admissions was changing at TJ, San Francisco’s Lowell High School transitioned from competitive admissions to a lottery-based process, and students’ grades plummeted. The share of Lowell freshmen receiving at least one D or F in their first fall semester more than tripled for the first class after the transition, jumping from 7.7% in fall 2019 and 7.9% in fall 2020 to 24.4% in fall 2021. After intense backlash, the policy was ultimately reversed. Meanwhile, in the now infamous case at the University of California, dropping the SAT from the admissions process resulted in a massive jump in the number of students at remedial math. At UC San Diego, that number skyrocketed from 32 in fall 2020 to over 1000 in fall 2025.

At TJ, a multi-year legal battle about the fate of admissions followed. At first, in February 2022, the District Court found against the Board: “The discussion of TJ admissions changes,” the judge wrote, “was infected with talk of racial balancing,” and communication between Board Members and FCPS officials revealed that “at least in part, the purpose of the Board’s admissions overhaul was to change the racial makeup [of] TJ to the detriment of Asian-Americans.” In May 2023, however, the Fourth Circuit reversed that ruling, arguing that Asian-American students were not discriminated against because the percentage of Asian-American students at TJ didn’t fall below the percentage of Asian-American residents in the district. Although the Supreme Court declined to reverse the Fourth Circuit’s ruling — over strong objections from Justices Alito and Thomas — last year Virginia’s Attorney General released a finding of reasonable cause that FCPS violated the state’s Human Rights Act & Title VI, whereupon the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights launched a Title VI investigation into FCPS the following day. No updates have been offered since.

In the meantime, the new TJ admissions policy is still in place, and while its opponents remain concerned about its effects on the program, whether academic performance has actually declined remains thoroughly unclear. There simply aren’t many indicators publicly available that we can use to figure this out. The FCPS can tout that the average GPA for the Class of 2025 still exceeded 3.95, Coalition for TJ can protest that the class had only half as many National Merit Semifinalists as were in the year prior, and the general stalemate continues. Since all TJ students generally ace Virginia’s standardized state exams, comparing those scores year over year grants limited insight into how school performance has changed. We can’t compare the SAT scores of classes admitted before and after the admissions change because the former haven’t yet been published. The most recent SAT scores available on TJ’s website belong to the class of 2024.

If the current pace continues, we won’t get to see the scores of the post-overhaul Class of 2025 until 2027, even though the vast majority would have taken their first SATs during their junior-year spring in 2024. That’s a full seven years until we have the kind of data we’d need for a verdict on how TJ’s new policy affects academic performance! For now, we can’t tell whether the admissions reform changed anything other than racial demographics.

In theory, Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act should then make requesting and obtaining both current and historical data fairly simple. But data about students’ SAT scores is in fact exclusively owned by the College Board and is only released with its explicit permission. Even if we get the SAT data though, it won’t tell us anything about whether the number of students in the program taking advantage of the advanced opportunities available changed.

Public schools are a public service. They are responsible to the constituents whom they serve. And yet, between the school districts themselves and the private testing organizations assessing their students, no one seems interested in sharing the kind of information we’d need to judge their decisions. We know slightly more about the Thomas Jefferson admissions case only because there was a lawsuit and national media attention, but ordinary parents and students should not have to wait for a nationally televised lawsuit in order to get evidence on the success or failure of their local schools. Most parents do not have the time to submit FOIA requests for the information they need even if they can afford the costs; yet even when they do, red tape and ownership clauses can delay its release until well past the time when they need it.

Overly intensive transparency requirements do impose a real burden. It would be a massive waste of time and money to have district administrators compile and publish every piece of paperwork that goes through their office. But providing information shouldn’t only be a reactive measure by school districts when faced with criticism. The burden of proof is on them when major decisions are made and data should be provided to back those decisions up. This level of transparency is hardly unprecedented. Research scientists must meticulously justify their use of funds when applying for grants, for-profit companies have to demonstrate to their shareholders that they are making the most money they reasonably can — is it really so unreasonable to expect something similar from public schools?

It can be difficult to prove the success or failure of a policy change like this. Grade and AP score inflation make both those metrics problematic. A comparison of SAT scores when TJ (hopefully) publishes the Class of 2025’s next year will at least indicate whether incoming students are more or less prepared, but the SAT doesn’t measure the kind of advanced skills and content that TJ focuses on. The best assessment tool for changes in student performance on those is one we’re lacking. Optimally we would be able to see the number of students taking each class and testimony from teachers about how the difficulty levels of their classes have changed. But the burden should be on the district, whom I hope have more information available to them than the public, to prove that their decisions are sound.

The problem is fundamentally one of mindset. The goal of any school district should be to prove to its constituents that its decisions are based on sound data. The district should be eager to prove that it is doing the right thing to impress the people it ostensibly serves; if they don’t, parents might take their kids out of the district or never move there in the first place. When a school district makes sweeping changes like those FCPS made to TJ, it should then have to justify that its changes actually improved student outcomes.

It seems that optimizing for academic outcomes was not FCPS’s goal. All this opacity makes me suspect that there are students attending TJ who are not prepared to do so and there are also students who would have benefited greatly but have been denied the opportunity. But until the district becomes interested in justifying its decisions based on the outcomes of its students, we won’t know for sure.

1. The admissions process the Fairfax County School Board ultimately advanced, which allocates seats to each area public middle school equal to 1.5% of its 8th-grade population and leaves about 100 seats remaining for other applicants, was actually the less radical suggestion at the time. Some Board members initially advocated adopting a lottery-based system, believing it to be the clear option “if we are truly serious about doing anti-racism-type work.”