I graduated from TJ in 1996. My recollections of my time there are necessarily gauzy with age, but I feel comfortable saying that all the students understood that the school had high expectations of everyone.
That one of the admissions criteria for the school is now the need for special educational services seems antithetical to the original mission of the school, and representative of a fundamental change in the underlying model of what academic excellence means.
And perhaps most importantly, I wonder a great deal about the inner world of minority students now admitted to TJ, who must at some point recognize that they are there not because of something inherent to their individual personhood, but as representatives of a society’s sense of historical guilt. Tyler Austin Harper’s recent writing in the Atlantic comes to mind here, and it makes me profoundly sad.
There are also human/institutional factors to consider. Since the Board is leaning so far over their skis on this new policy, they have a vested interest, not in the truth, but in exercising their institutional power to secure the grading results justifying their change in admissions policy. What usually happens in similar situations is that the status quo ante in how school work was assigned, evaluated, and graded is changed in both subtle and overtly manipulated ways.
For example, look for many more class grades to be assigned not on the basis of individual efforts and work products, but rather on the basis of group work, where all individual group members (those of high, average, and lower abilities and contributions) receive the same "group grade," thus cleverly hiding the lesser effort and work product of the weaker group members by applying the stronger students' work to all members.
The incentives here are clearly and obviously misaligned; worse, careers as well as professional and community status are at stake. People will be people. Given the inability to obtain (and/or unwillingness to provide) granular and public visibility into changes brought about by the new admissions policy, mischief can and should be expected as the education of high-ability students is sacrificed on the altar of diversity.
Nice writeup, agree that we can't really tell the effect yet, which is unfortunate.
We can look at TJ PSAT scores, which we do have more data for, and I found that there was a net loss and then recovery back to pre-admissions policy change in 2025/2026: https://vanshkumar.substack.com/p/what-were-the-effects-of-tjs-admissions. But it's still too soon to fully know what the effect was.
"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"
This seems like a pretty good shape of a solution to me? Yes, I freely admit you will have some students arriving less prepared than others, but that ability to be prepared depends on how much your previous school was able to provide more advanced / faster classes, and simply skimming the top of each school (potentially offering summer school for catch-up for applicants coming from weaker schools) seems like the best way to resolve this?
To build on this from a personal perspective: despite getting at or near the top of my classes, there's no way I would have been anywhere near eligible for this kind of school from an 'absolute' perspective (and my parents, whilst lovely, were not in a position to assist). But I think I, and many like me, would have absolutely thrived from being around more high achieving (and hard working) students and, indeed, catch up (as I eventually did in later life).
I graduated from TJ in 1996. My recollections of my time there are necessarily gauzy with age, but I feel comfortable saying that all the students understood that the school had high expectations of everyone.
That one of the admissions criteria for the school is now the need for special educational services seems antithetical to the original mission of the school, and representative of a fundamental change in the underlying model of what academic excellence means.
And perhaps most importantly, I wonder a great deal about the inner world of minority students now admitted to TJ, who must at some point recognize that they are there not because of something inherent to their individual personhood, but as representatives of a society’s sense of historical guilt. Tyler Austin Harper’s recent writing in the Atlantic comes to mind here, and it makes me profoundly sad.
There are also human/institutional factors to consider. Since the Board is leaning so far over their skis on this new policy, they have a vested interest, not in the truth, but in exercising their institutional power to secure the grading results justifying their change in admissions policy. What usually happens in similar situations is that the status quo ante in how school work was assigned, evaluated, and graded is changed in both subtle and overtly manipulated ways.
For example, look for many more class grades to be assigned not on the basis of individual efforts and work products, but rather on the basis of group work, where all individual group members (those of high, average, and lower abilities and contributions) receive the same "group grade," thus cleverly hiding the lesser effort and work product of the weaker group members by applying the stronger students' work to all members.
The incentives here are clearly and obviously misaligned; worse, careers as well as professional and community status are at stake. People will be people. Given the inability to obtain (and/or unwillingness to provide) granular and public visibility into changes brought about by the new admissions policy, mischief can and should be expected as the education of high-ability students is sacrificed on the altar of diversity.
Nice writeup, agree that we can't really tell the effect yet, which is unfortunate.
We can look at TJ PSAT scores, which we do have more data for, and I found that there was a net loss and then recovery back to pre-admissions policy change in 2025/2026: https://vanshkumar.substack.com/p/what-were-the-effects-of-tjs-admissions. But it's still too soon to fully know what the effect was.
"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"
This seems like a pretty good shape of a solution to me? Yes, I freely admit you will have some students arriving less prepared than others, but that ability to be prepared depends on how much your previous school was able to provide more advanced / faster classes, and simply skimming the top of each school (potentially offering summer school for catch-up for applicants coming from weaker schools) seems like the best way to resolve this?
To build on this from a personal perspective: despite getting at or near the top of my classes, there's no way I would have been anywhere near eligible for this kind of school from an 'absolute' perspective (and my parents, whilst lovely, were not in a position to assist). But I think I, and many like me, would have absolutely thrived from being around more high achieving (and hard working) students and, indeed, catch up (as I eventually did in later life).