-
The Wages of DEI at Thomas Jefferson High School
The results are in for one school — after four years of DEI-driven, basically race-based admissions, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known as T.J., in Alexandria, Virginia has seen its national ranking fall to 14th place and its number of National Merit Scholar semi-finalists cut nearly in half. And according to the Virginia Attorney General, as of May 2025 it is in violation of the Virginia Human Rights Act and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for discriminating against Asian American students in the admissions process at the school and under Federal investigation. It is steadfastly sticking to its radical admissions policy despite the negative effects. Given T.J.’s role as a STEM feeder school into the Ivies and Big Tech, this is more than another culture war battle. It affects national security.
Until four years ago the only way into T.J. was via a rigorous entrance exam. Then in 2020, following the death of George Floyd, T.J. officials became concerned about their negligible number of black and Hispanic students and changed admissions standards. The test was gone, replaced by a “holistic review” including “students who are economically disadvantaged [who now make up over 11 percent of the student body] English language learners, special education students, or students who are currently attending underrepresented middle schools.”
Without the entrance test, the black student population grew to seven percent from one percent of the class, while the number of Asian American students fell from 73 to 54 percent, the lowest share in years. A group of mostly Asian American parents objected to the new plan and started the Coalition for T.J. The coalition filed a lawsuit with the help of the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation. Instead of seeing weighting of experience factors as a way to level the playing field for underrepresented groups, they saw racism. The experience factors were just a work-around for straight up race-based decisions.
In 2022, a federal judge found the school board engaged in impermissible “racial balancing” when it overhauled admissions. In May 2023, however, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in favor of the new admissions process, finding T.J. had not discriminated against Asian American students in its admissions policies. The appellate court found that there was not sufficient evidence the changes were adopted with discriminatory intent. The court said that the school had a legitimate interest in “expanding the array of student backgrounds.” Too bad for the Asians, America’s on-and-off again minority; there’s only so many seats available at T.J. The court found T.J.’s essay-based admission policy was not a proxy for race-based decisions. T.J. was thus able to make racially-motivated decisions without appearing legally to make racially-motivated decisions. Because of this twist of logic, Supreme Court decisions in key affirmative action cases, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, did not apply.
The Supreme Court then declined certiorari—it would not hear the case—in Coalition for T.J. v. Fairfax County School Board. The conservative Court’s denial left in place the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals affirming the discriminatory policy. The declination is in contrast to the Court’s earlier rejection of affirmative action, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard, and of race as a primary admissions factor. T.J. was free to not really/but really discriminate in its admissions process.
One factor T.J. would rely on was an applicant’s public middle school zip code, a good indicator of race in a divided Fairfax county. Zip code was to become one proxy for race, a work-around to Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard which supposedly outlawed race alone as a primary admissions factor. Schools like T.J. may use race as an admissions criterion so long as it is not the only basis for a decision, with the implied so long as the goal is diversity (supposedly good on its face) and not whitewashing (naughty.) It is this policy the Supreme Court refused to review. “The holding,” Justice Alito added in his dissent, “effectively licenses official actors to discriminate against any racial group [Asians, in the instance of T.J.] with impunity as long as that group continues to perform at a higher rate than other groups.”
That is all history because enough time has passed that we now know the results of this legal tomfoolery. Once the top-ranked public high school in the nation, T.J. fell to 14th place in the 2024 U.S. News rankings. According to the U.S. News Best High School Rankings Methodology, academic performance constitutes at least 50 percent of a school’s overall ranking. This includes standardized test scores and participation and success rates in advanced courses like IB and AP, contributing to two categories that hold significant weight in determining a school’s ranking: college readiness and state assessment proficiency.
Also, the school, which once boasted 157 National Merit Scholar semifinalists in 2020, saw that number nearly halved for the 2025 scholarship competition (the school says the data may also reflect problems during Covid.)
“The decline is the inevitable consequence of elevating ‘equity’ over excellence,” wrote Mark Spooner, on his blog Fairfax Schools Monitor. “In 2020, then-Superintendent Scott Braband announced the School Board’s determination that DEI would no longer be ‘a thing’; it would henceforth be ‘the thing’ in the Fairfax County public school system. T.J. was the obvious first target for this ‘social justice’ initiative because more than 70 percent of its students, admitted under rigorous academic criteria, were Asian Americans. The racial imbalance was deemed unacceptable.”
Spooner went on to write “We are more than three years into the T.J. experiment, but the Fairfax County School Board hasn’t yet addressed its successes and failures. Whether an objective analysis will ever be conducted is questionable, for the program was adopted primarily for ideological reasons, and the Board may be reluctant to subject its ideological assumptions to scrutiny. The elimination of entrance exams and other academic criteria forced T.J. to introduce remedial math courses for academically unprepared students. How many students needed to be enrolled in these programs? And did the programs succeed in rapidly bringing students up to speed so they would thereafter thrive at T.J.? We don’t know, but there are disturbing clues. Information has emerged that the drop-out rate at T.J. has spiked, particularly among some minority groups. If this is true, it suggests that the softened admissions standards may have hurt the very students who were intended as beneficiaries.”
Though it appeared to have been settled by the Supreme Court’s non-intervention, the Virginia Attorney General’s recent move may reopen the issue. According to the Attorney General, Asian American students received 56 fewer offers of admission immediately following the shift in policies, after consistently making up more than 60 percent of admitted students. He said the school was already a “minority majority high school,” but the board “determined it was the wrong minorities. The board abandoned a race-neutral, merit-based system that previously was in place, and they adopted a policy structure specifically designed to reduce the number of Asian American students.” The Attorney General referred the matter to the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice for further enforcement under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act as a next step. The Trump administration has threatened to withhold money from schools and colleges over DEI efforts that amount to discrimination, and has opened an investigation into T.J.’s admissions policy.
Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Buy Peter’s Books on Amazon!
