Today is January 20, meaning we are now halfway through President Biden’s term. On the menu today: It’s a very personal edition of the Morning Jolt, in which we look at the recent spate of Fairfax County Public Schools’ failing to inform students of their National Merit Scholarship recognition and lousing up their college applications, and district administrators’ discomfort with the spectacular achievements of Asian-American students.
A Fiasco in Fairfax County
You’ve probably heard that here in Fairfax County, Va. — the county I’m typing this newsletter in — a bunch of the local high schools failed to inform students of their National Merit Scholarship recognition “in time for important college scholarship and admissions deadlines.” As National Review’s editors declared, “Whether by negligence or explicit intent, school administrators in the district denied their most academically exceptional students the status and recognition provided by the prestigious scholarship — just as those students were filing their college applications.”
Our governor, Glenn Youngkin, is spitting hot fire — well, amiably, because he’s still Glenn Youngkin — and our state attorney general, Jason Miyares, has launched an investigation to determine if the schools violated the rights of their students: “My office will investigate the entire Fairfax County Public Schools system to find out if any students were discriminated against and if their rights were violated.”
One of our local papers reviewed the data, and determined that, yes, the students who weren’t being told of their achievements were overwhelmingly Asian American:
An analysis by Fairfax County Times reveals that an estimated 75 percent of National Merit Semifinalists — a notch above Commended Students — are of Asian heritage, validating the questions raised in a new civil rights investigation by Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares.
In fact at Marshall High School this fall, 71 percent of National Merit Semifinalists are minority students, with most of them Asian American.
A multi-school effort to sabotage the ambitions of students who are mostly Asian American fits with the philosophy at work among some Fairfax County school administrators, who have treated the high achievement of these students as a problem to be solved instead of an accomplishment to be celebrated.
One of the schools which failed to notify the students was Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology — usually just called “TJ” around here. Thomas Jefferson is arguably, perhaps likely, the best public high school in America. The school boasts state-of-the-art facilities, a low student-to-teacher ratio, and lots of kids heading off to the Ivy Leagues. Back in 2013, TJ students helped build a satellite that NASA sent into space. Alumni have gone on to become federal judges, CEOs, Hollywood screenwriters, and Rhodes scholars, and one even ended up as the governor of New Hampshire. It’s the Harvard or MIT of public high schools.
Unsurprisingly, lots of parents around here would love to see their kids get into TJ. One of the best parts of living in Fairfax County is that you are surrounded by parents who are extremely invested in the education and well-being of their children, and who make that a priority. Also, one of the worst parts of living in Fairfax County is that you are surrounded by parents who are extremely invested in the education and well-being of their children, and who make that a priority. This is definitely an environment that cultivates “Type A” personalities, for good and for ill.
The school admits students who are residents of Arlington County, Fairfax County and the City of Fairfax, Falls Church City, Loudoun County, and Prince William County. Each year, about 2,500 to 3,400 middle schoolers apply, and anywhere from 480 to 550 students are accepted, an acceptance rate that ranges from 14 percent to 21 percent. Keep in mind, just to apply, a student must have completed a full-year course of Algebra 1, be enrolled in honors science, and have a 3.5 or higher GPA in all core academic courses — math, science, social studies, English/language arts, and, if taken for high-school credit, foreign language.
It will probably not shock you to learn that for a long time, TJ’s student population was heavily, heavily Asian American — sometimes more than 70 percent. We can argue about why this is the case, but there is no disputing that many Asian-American families drill into their kids the importance of a good education, studying and hard work, and setting the bar high. About a decade ago, the chattering class had a big debate about “Tiger Moms” and whether Asian parents (and/or immigrant parents) were geniuses or tormentors for relentlessly pushing their kids to meet the highest standards.
I am blessed with two brilliant children, one teenager and one near-teenager, who are rapidly outpacing the intellectual firepower of their father. If you’ll indulge my bragging for a moment, a few years ago, Fairfax County Public schools informed me that my teenager met the qualifications to apply to TJ. Surprisingly, my wife, who has some Tiger Mom traits of her own, doubted that TJ would be a good fit. Completing the usual role reversal, I told my older one that applying was worthwhile, no matter the outcome. I didn’t really care whether my child was accepted or not; I just want my children to set their sights high, so that they never have to ask themselves, “What would have happened if I had tried?”
As it happened, the year my teenager applied, Thomas Jefferson moved to what they called a “merit lottery system” where the 100 “highest-evaluated” students would be admitted, while the remaining 450 students who met the criteria would be chosen by lottery out of the remaining applicants. School staff noted they would consider a student’s “experience factors,” including whether they are low-income, learning English, special needs, or from a middle school that hasn’t historically sent many students to Thomas Jefferson.
Everyone knew that the criteria were being changed because the school’s demographics were overwhelmingly Asian American, and in order to have a student body that looked more like the county’s overall demographics, there would need to be fewer Asian Americans and more African Americans, Latinos, and, yes, whites.
As we waited for the results, I would tongue-in-cheek declare that as an oppressed white American, I was glad Fairfax County recognized the systemic inequalities that we had endured — you know, like sunburn, a purported lack of rhythm, and film titles contending we can’t jump — and was willing to lower the standards for white Americans. We oppressed whites just can’t compete at the level of privileged overclasses like those Asian-American immigrant families who came here 20 years ago with a couple of suitcases and 20 bucks.*
My teenager didn’t get in, which was fine; all I wanted to see was a swing for the fences. But under the new rules, the numbers moved in the direction the school administrators likely wanted to see. In the 2020–2021 school year, Thomas Jefferson’s student body was almost 72 percent Asian American; in the 2021–2022 school year, that figure dropped to 66 percent. Blacks increased from 1.7 percent to 3.2 percent, Latinos increased from 3 percent to 5.4 percent, and whites increased from 18.3 percent to 19.6 percent.
In case you’re wondering, the overall demographics of Fairfax County are 63.7 percent white, 10.8 percent black, 20 percent Asian, and 16 percent Latino.
Running for president in 1992, Bill Clinton promised that he would have a cabinet that “looks like America.” (After Clinton assembled his cabinet, Rush Limbaugh quipped that the president believed America looked like a group of Ivy League-educated lawyers.)
We want an environment where every child is given the opportunity to succeed, and we want to see every child thrive. But not every child is going to achieve at the same level. At some point, some of the people running this county’s schools became embarrassed and bothered by the fact that its top high school was so heavily Asian American. It accepted the best of the best, but the student body didn’t “look like Fairfax County.”
To make Thomas Jefferson “look like Fairfax County,” the school would have to dramatically cut down on the number of Asian Americans accepted and dramatically increase the number of whites, blacks, and Latinos accepted. (In fact, the most underrepresented demographic at TJ is, by far, whites.) The only way to get the school to look more like the county would be to reject a significant number of Asian-American students who had earned their way in, and accept a significant number of white, black, and Latino students who hadn’t met the established criteria.
For anyone who believes in merit, that approach is absurd. But apparently, to a lot of educators, that just makes sense. In their minds, certain groups must be punished because of their ethnicity, and certain groups — including whites! — must be given a leg up or a lower bar because of the color of their skin.
Go get ’em, Mr. Attorney General — even if your effort to dismantle this absurd form of systemic, state-run discrimination ends up removing the system’s leg up for oppressed whites like us.
*Do I need to explain this is sarcasm? You’re a bright readership. I’m sure you got it the first time. But this country is full of self-righteous rabble-rousers who get a near-erotic pleasure from deliberately misconstruing comments as overt racism to lead a social-media mob in outrage.
ADDENDUM: Our Andy McCarthy makes another good point about the documents found at the Penn Biden Center:
Documents graded TS/SCI are unusual in that, because of their gravity, U.S. intelligence agencies make an effort to keep track of exactly which officials are given access to such documents and whether they are returned to government-secured safekeeping — think of checking out a book from the library, if you were only allowed to read it in a secure setting. To be sure, Biden should get credit for his aides’ doing the right thing and reporting the violation, rather than destroying evidence of it. Remember, though, they were also undoubtedly aware — especially after Biden’s lawyers consulted with White House officials — that there could be government records showing that Biden had been given these documents and failed to return them. Of course, we can and should wonder why no one in our $67 billion per annum Intelligence Community noticed until recently that Biden still had Obama-era TS/SCI documents; still, the possibility that such records exist would have provided incentive to report the discovery of the documents.
My suspicion is that no one tracks the top-secret documents given to high-level officials because they don’t get returned on a surprisingly regular basis, and doing something about that problem would require the leaders of the intelligence community to attempt to enforce legal consequences upon the elected officials who have the authority to fire them.