Top high school’s standards slip following DEI policy
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, one of the top public schools in the US, has seen a major decline in academic achievement since implementing new admissions standards in pursuit of racial equity in 2020.
In the days after George Floyd’s death, leaders began assessing the underrepresentation of black and Hispanic students at the magnet school, and discussed how to move “towards greater equity, to be clearly distinguished from equality.” Soon after, the school updated its highly competitive admissions process, replacing standardised tests with a holistic evaluation that rewarded students on the basis of having attended underrepresented middle schools and qualifying for free lunch — considerations that critics have called racial proxies.
School leaders had repeatedly complained that the student population, which was majority Asian-American, did not match the racial demographics of the surrounding area. After the implementation of new admissions metrics, the admission of Asian students declined from 73% to 54%. Critics, including parents of Asian students, have pointed to this statistic as evidence of discrimination.
