Clarity on Race/SAT and the Texas model

 NYT - new clarity on SAT and race based admissions 

The Texas model

The situation has become clearer because the Supreme Court last week declined to hear a lawsuit against a public magnet school in Northern Virginia — Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known as T.J.

Until recently, T.J. admitted students based on a mix of grades, test scores, student essays and teacher recommendations. This process led to a student body that looked very different from the area it served.

About 5 percent of T.J. students were Black or Hispanic, even though the surrounding area is about 37 percent Black or Hispanic. The school also enrolled few low-income students of every race, as Richard Kahlenberg of Georgetown University has noted. Only 2 percent of Asian students at T.J. came from low-income families, compared with 20 percent of Asian students in the surrounding area.

In 2021, though, T.J. switched to a new admissions policy. It was modeled after a bipartisan plan that Texas created in 1997, under Gov. George W. Bush. In T.J.’s version, the school filled most of its freshman class by accepting the top 1.5 percent of students at every public middle school in the area.

The underlying idea is simple enough. Many communities in the U.S. are economically and racially homogenous. But a policy that accepts the top students from every community can create diverse classes. The policy is defensible on meritocratic grounds because it rewards teenagers who excel in every environment — and on political grounds because it gives all communities access to desirable schools.

Once T.J. changed its policy, the school became much more diverse. The share of students from low-income families rose to 25 percent from 2 percent. Racial diversity also increased:

Source: Fairfax County Public Schools | By The New York Times

“I love T.J.,” Kaiwan Bilal, one of the students accepted under the new policy, told The Washington Post. “It’s even better than I expected, better than my parents told me it would be.” Bilal also said that he was struck by the school’s diversity.