"Fairfax County’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) used to be the #1 high school in the country in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings. It achieved this status in three consecutive years — 2020, 2021 and 2022. But it slipped to #5 in 2023. And it has dropped to #14 in the just-released 2024 rankings."
On its face 'equity' means treating people unequally to achieve the same outcomes for all. That means giving a greater advantage to some and therefore penalizing others.
It’s worse than that. Equity is insulting, blaming and punishing people for things that they did not do and might have happened decades or centuries ago. DEI is un-American.
Nothing new. I once did a short tour at HQ Air Force ROTC in the scholarship branch. We had four-year scholarships set aside exclusively for black applicants, which of course reduced the number of scholarships available for non-black applicants. But it became quite embarrassing when an Air Force officer would show up at the home of a black family to congratulate the applicant and his/her parents and discovered a white family. The kid knew he didn't stand a chance unless he marked black on the application. It's straight up discrimination based on race but it's been around a long time.
What’s messed up the throttling of educational opportunity. Why only one good high school in a district? Those 20% of Asian applicants turned away. Why can’t they have a good public school too? Same for the white and black kids turned away before. What sort of messed up system only properly educates some of the students? This public school district knows how to run a good high school, the question is, why just one?
Schools within a district were built to supply a demand, that is, an increase in population. People within a district tend to fall into disparate socio-economic groups due to the price of real estate. Those groups tend to group by externally identifiable traits (fill in the blanks). A particular school might be in an area with more well-to-do and stable families. The kids might have had early advantages. Some of that by wealth, by the values inculcated by parents, maybe the wealth of the family was gotten by way of a good work ethic, even intelligence and that was passed on to the kids. Should any blame accrue for that? The flip side of all that is too obvious. A school in an area with smart kids wanting to learn who have much parental involvement in their education is going to attract (better) teachers who do not want to deal with juvenile indifference to learning and often outright thuggery. It can be no joy to any teacher to try to educate undisciplined recalcitrant dullards. So, within a district, you'll have good schools and bad schools. Unless of course you have bussing and the leveling of the playing field, which often leads to all the schools getting dumbed down. Simply put, you cannot have a good school in an area where people poop where they eat. Harsh, I know. But it's one of those It-Is-What-It-Is situations.
My two daughters are half Asian, though they have always identified as American. They competed for slots in the local magnet school. We were told that the criteria for selection was past performance in grades 1 through 5, testing and teacher recommendations. That pool of winnowed candidates would then be selected by an anonymous lottery for the number of available slots. OK, so there was some merit in that. The best of the best from the 8's, 9's and 10's on the 10 scale had a random but equal chance of getting picked. However, there was also a rule that the number of minority students ("minority", back then, being a group that did not include Asians, Jews, Eskimos, Pacific Islanders, Native American Indians or Hispanics.) That guaranteed that 18% of the Magnet school students would be Black. Fortunately, my girls didn't get bumped. I know for a fact that the same thing has happened on Navy E-9 selection boards. Have a good friend who promoted to EWCS(SW) at 11 years. First time up for E-9 the board selected him but he got bumped for the best qualified EWCS who wasn't White. EW was small rating, had a very shallow pool of non-White EWCS's. Screw equity...even back in the late 80's. If the system is not merit based it is not entirely fair.
I reject that entirely. The solution to racism is egalitarianism.
Anti-racists used to be concerned with “Equal Opportunity,” which is at the core of egalitarianism. Black people are equal to white people and deserve equal rights and opportunities. You can flip that notion around, and nobody gets hurt. “White people are equal to black people and deserve equal rights and opportunities.”
You posit a society where the poor remain disadvantaged - - locked in their class by poverty. A Dickensian world of really rich and desperate poor. That's European class bullshit and it will result in a, deserved, bloody revolution. There are good kids in every public school. Every kid deserves an equal opportunity.
And let's be clear, equal opportunity does not mean equal outcomes. Letting every kid in a town play Little League baseball does not mean every team wins. What it means is every kid is included, every kid has the same opportunity. Real equity is equal opportunity; good ole' American egalitarianism. "All men, are endowed by their creator . . ."
I gave an opinion and I believe it a credible assessment, Tom. Rejecting it is fine with me but I think you may have some astigmatism going on and view what I say in a too slantendicular fashion. Look at what happened to "liberté, égalité, fraternité" when the Jacobins got a hold of it. Further, the fallacy of equal opportunity is that TPTB and the recipients of E.O. largesse often refuse to accept "unacceptable" outcomes. Yeah, poor outcomes are always unmerited, right? Nope.
Have to agree with it. Having moved a few times and having had district and school boundaries redrawn that affected where my kids went to school, I can totally agree with how things are on 'both sides of the tracks', or in our case, "in the valley, or up on the hill".
The uphill kids had a better tax base, better funding, better teachers, nicer schools/equipment, and generally were a more upstanding group of kids. I dont recall any of those kids making the papers, outside good achievements. But the down in the valley kids? A good percentage of them are frequently in the police blotter, in between stays at the prison up the gorge....
Thankfully my kids knew the difference and didnt join into the mentality/behavior before we left the valley.
This might be anecdotal, but its quite real, and more the rule than exception im sure...
Dismissed? Huh? Pilloried more like it until your public apology was deemed sincere and convincing. I hear that those doing the deeming are a tough crowd, Mr Orwell.
I'm reading George's "Homage to Catalonia" currently. It's an interesting memoir as he's a young idealistic leftist, learning a bit about the "real world" of idea implementation.
Interesting that the far left Guardian a few years ago led with the subtitle "The author of ‘Homage to Catalonia’ did not grasp the wider context and provided a partial, partisan version"
To be fair, some of the comments in the Guardian were valid, with respect to George's limited purview of the conflict while immersed in it, but still, Guardian is gonna be the Guardian.
Whether you are hiring firemen, warship captains, or setting admission standards, America needs the best. If some groups are under represented in some occupations or schools then let concerned groups tutor them to meet the standards. We don't improve as a nation by promoting mediocre people. DEI is destroying schooling and the military. Generals and admirals are being made by belonging to the right ethnic group or pandering to politicians. And it shows.
Latin sloganeering is part of the Eurocentric Patriarchy, Pete. It'll go into the dustbin of history just like old-timey statues that glorify war and slavery. Embrace the Plain Vanilla new America.
Mein Gott! Did I just say "Plain Vanilla"? Sorry. I meant to say "Reignbeau".
The Left created a BLM Frankenstein monster in 2020 and now the monster is turning on its creators. And the monster is very hungry.
I feel sorry for the kids who go to an Ivy League college for a career in business, science, engineering, etc. only to be harassed by these useless gender studies majors.
At the same time, I suspect their parents voted for and poured money into the current regime. They probably approved of the lawfare being waged against Donald Trump. Now they are starting to see what they have wrought. I hope it's not too late.
The far Left was never content with pulling down statues of Robert E. Lee or removing the Bars and Stars. They were always after the statues of George Washington and the Stars and Stripes.
Once the summum bonum of honor “I will not lie cheat or steal nor tolerate those that do.” has been reduced to an antiquated creed applicable to small pockets of society.
Yes. That slogan now seems so quaint. When I see it or hear it, I think of an Amish farmer sitting on his buggy, holding the reins of the horse pulling the contraption down the road.
Have any failed diversity candidates sued their college for accepting them knowing they were unqualified and were going to drop-out leaving them with large school loan debt? Perhaps a good lawyer could start a class action suit and retire off their share of the punitive awards. This could be worth billions.
Young man I taught to fly and helped get into USAF flying Mud Hens (yeah I know) resigned recently. Top of his class. Test pilot school grad. Combat tours. Reason? Military brass has gone too woke. :(
Like logistics and maintenance, keeping up standards ain't sexy, but more important than the sexy stuff.
maintaining standards is ...just...too...darn...hard.
"Fairfax County’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) used to be the #1 high school in the country in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings. It achieved this status in three consecutive years — 2020, 2021 and 2022. But it slipped to #5 in 2023. And it has dropped to #14 in the just-released 2024 rankings."
https://fairfaxschoolsmonitor.com/tj-drops-in-quality-rankings-again/
Diversity is our strength...
Equity means payback not equality and oh by the way you are not included.
On its face 'equity' means treating people unequally to achieve the same outcomes for all. That means giving a greater advantage to some and therefore penalizing others.
discrimination on its face
It’s worse than that. Equity is insulting, blaming and punishing people for things that they did not do and might have happened decades or centuries ago. DEI is un-American.
Nothing new. I once did a short tour at HQ Air Force ROTC in the scholarship branch. We had four-year scholarships set aside exclusively for black applicants, which of course reduced the number of scholarships available for non-black applicants. But it became quite embarrassing when an Air Force officer would show up at the home of a black family to congratulate the applicant and his/her parents and discovered a white family. The kid knew he didn't stand a chance unless he marked black on the application. It's straight up discrimination based on race but it's been around a long time.
We need to revise the honor code to say “…not lie cheat or steal or place anyone in a situation where they feel they must do so.”
I suspected this was the case with these scholarships!
What’s messed up the throttling of educational opportunity. Why only one good high school in a district? Those 20% of Asian applicants turned away. Why can’t they have a good public school too? Same for the white and black kids turned away before. What sort of messed up system only properly educates some of the students? This public school district knows how to run a good high school, the question is, why just one?
Schools within a district were built to supply a demand, that is, an increase in population. People within a district tend to fall into disparate socio-economic groups due to the price of real estate. Those groups tend to group by externally identifiable traits (fill in the blanks). A particular school might be in an area with more well-to-do and stable families. The kids might have had early advantages. Some of that by wealth, by the values inculcated by parents, maybe the wealth of the family was gotten by way of a good work ethic, even intelligence and that was passed on to the kids. Should any blame accrue for that? The flip side of all that is too obvious. A school in an area with smart kids wanting to learn who have much parental involvement in their education is going to attract (better) teachers who do not want to deal with juvenile indifference to learning and often outright thuggery. It can be no joy to any teacher to try to educate undisciplined recalcitrant dullards. So, within a district, you'll have good schools and bad schools. Unless of course you have bussing and the leveling of the playing field, which often leads to all the schools getting dumbed down. Simply put, you cannot have a good school in an area where people poop where they eat. Harsh, I know. But it's one of those It-Is-What-It-Is situations.
My two daughters are half Asian, though they have always identified as American. They competed for slots in the local magnet school. We were told that the criteria for selection was past performance in grades 1 through 5, testing and teacher recommendations. That pool of winnowed candidates would then be selected by an anonymous lottery for the number of available slots. OK, so there was some merit in that. The best of the best from the 8's, 9's and 10's on the 10 scale had a random but equal chance of getting picked. However, there was also a rule that the number of minority students ("minority", back then, being a group that did not include Asians, Jews, Eskimos, Pacific Islanders, Native American Indians or Hispanics.) That guaranteed that 18% of the Magnet school students would be Black. Fortunately, my girls didn't get bumped. I know for a fact that the same thing has happened on Navy E-9 selection boards. Have a good friend who promoted to EWCS(SW) at 11 years. First time up for E-9 the board selected him but he got bumped for the best qualified EWCS who wasn't White. EW was small rating, had a very shallow pool of non-White EWCS's. Screw equity...even back in the late 80's. If the system is not merit based it is not entirely fair.
I reject that entirely. The solution to racism is egalitarianism.
Anti-racists used to be concerned with “Equal Opportunity,” which is at the core of egalitarianism. Black people are equal to white people and deserve equal rights and opportunities. You can flip that notion around, and nobody gets hurt. “White people are equal to black people and deserve equal rights and opportunities.”
You posit a society where the poor remain disadvantaged - - locked in their class by poverty. A Dickensian world of really rich and desperate poor. That's European class bullshit and it will result in a, deserved, bloody revolution. There are good kids in every public school. Every kid deserves an equal opportunity.
And let's be clear, equal opportunity does not mean equal outcomes. Letting every kid in a town play Little League baseball does not mean every team wins. What it means is every kid is included, every kid has the same opportunity. Real equity is equal opportunity; good ole' American egalitarianism. "All men, are endowed by their creator . . ."
I gave an opinion and I believe it a credible assessment, Tom. Rejecting it is fine with me but I think you may have some astigmatism going on and view what I say in a too slantendicular fashion. Look at what happened to "liberté, égalité, fraternité" when the Jacobins got a hold of it. Further, the fallacy of equal opportunity is that TPTB and the recipients of E.O. largesse often refuse to accept "unacceptable" outcomes. Yeah, poor outcomes are always unmerited, right? Nope.
Have to agree with it. Having moved a few times and having had district and school boundaries redrawn that affected where my kids went to school, I can totally agree with how things are on 'both sides of the tracks', or in our case, "in the valley, or up on the hill".
The uphill kids had a better tax base, better funding, better teachers, nicer schools/equipment, and generally were a more upstanding group of kids. I dont recall any of those kids making the papers, outside good achievements. But the down in the valley kids? A good percentage of them are frequently in the police blotter, in between stays at the prison up the gorge....
Thankfully my kids knew the difference and didnt join into the mentality/behavior before we left the valley.
This might be anecdotal, but its quite real, and more the rule than exception im sure...
I'm too conservative to be considered for a teaching position at a university... USN (ret.), PhD.
I'd be dismissed the first week for "misgendering" some lunatic on the off chance I was hired for the position
Dismissed? Huh? Pilloried more like it until your public apology was deemed sincere and convincing. I hear that those doing the deeming are a tough crowd, Mr Orwell.
I'm reading George's "Homage to Catalonia" currently. It's an interesting memoir as he's a young idealistic leftist, learning a bit about the "real world" of idea implementation.
Interesting that the far left Guardian a few years ago led with the subtitle "The author of ‘Homage to Catalonia’ did not grasp the wider context and provided a partial, partisan version"
$6 for a new paperback of it at Amazon. I'm in.
To be fair, some of the comments in the Guardian were valid, with respect to George's limited purview of the conflict while immersed in it, but still, Guardian is gonna be the Guardian.
Whether you are hiring firemen, warship captains, or setting admission standards, America needs the best. If some groups are under represented in some occupations or schools then let concerned groups tutor them to meet the standards. We don't improve as a nation by promoting mediocre people. DEI is destroying schooling and the military. Generals and admirals are being made by belonging to the right ethnic group or pandering to politicians. And it shows.
The antidote to toxic diversity is “e pluribus unum.”
Latin sloganeering is part of the Eurocentric Patriarchy, Pete. It'll go into the dustbin of history just like old-timey statues that glorify war and slavery. Embrace the Plain Vanilla new America.
Mein Gott! Did I just say "Plain Vanilla"? Sorry. I meant to say "Reignbeau".
The Left created a BLM Frankenstein monster in 2020 and now the monster is turning on its creators. And the monster is very hungry.
I feel sorry for the kids who go to an Ivy League college for a career in business, science, engineering, etc. only to be harassed by these useless gender studies majors.
At the same time, I suspect their parents voted for and poured money into the current regime. They probably approved of the lawfare being waged against Donald Trump. Now they are starting to see what they have wrought. I hope it's not too late.
The far Left was never content with pulling down statues of Robert E. Lee or removing the Bars and Stars. They were always after the statues of George Washington and the Stars and Stripes.
Once the summum bonum of honor “I will not lie cheat or steal nor tolerate those that do.” has been reduced to an antiquated creed applicable to small pockets of society.
Yes. That slogan now seems so quaint. When I see it or hear it, I think of an Amish farmer sitting on his buggy, holding the reins of the horse pulling the contraption down the road.
Have any failed diversity candidates sued their college for accepting them knowing they were unqualified and were going to drop-out leaving them with large school loan debt? Perhaps a good lawyer could start a class action suit and retire off their share of the punitive awards. This could be worth billions.
Young man I taught to fly and helped get into USAF flying Mud Hens (yeah I know) resigned recently. Top of his class. Test pilot school grad. Combat tours. Reason? Military brass has gone too woke. :(