The kids who thrive at a place like TJ are not the kids that were accelerated a year or two ahead due to pushy parents. It is the kids that showed such a natural affinity towards math that they picked up algebra on their own by 4th grade or possibly earlier. Their parents are accelerating them as much as possible in school mainly to avoid boredom.
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What are your recommendations on how to do this?
For example, I think it makes perfect sense for a free set of high quality prep materials to be made available to all school systems starting in sixth grade, and a set of qualified teachers that give scheduled zoom tutoring sessions on how to prepare for the TJ test. The goal is to allow bright students that come from lower income backgrounds to get up to speed and pass the same test as everyone else.
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Throughout the pandemic, many kids learned via online with mixed success. I can see that online learning is definitely not for every kid but I hope that school districts can experiment and have more offerings than currently available. Many of the accelerated kids could perhaps do online learning with periodic days in class?
DS learned most of his math via AoPS as it was not offered locally and the level of math knowledge of his parents was quickly surpassed. We were fortunate to have a monthly math circle meeting that was about an hour away.
I think enabling online learning could be part of the solution for improving the system for many. That accompanied with severing the cord between age and math instruction would help many IMO.
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Perhaps the best thing that Virginia could do is hire the AoPS people to create and teach the prep materials to anyone in Virginia with the interest to take them. Their teaching is good enough for IMO winners, so itās certainly good enough for entrance to TJ.
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School is where this education takes place. Standardized tests should not be a primary or even secondary determinant of who gets into a public k-12 school. It is the act of being chosen for this type of stimulating reduced class-size environment rather than the entrance requirements, that decides the āwinnersā - meaning this school doesnāt offer an early way to identify superstar college applicants, it creates them. That is a crucial distinction. Thus it is unfair to create and continue to use a system that discount students on the basis of an faulty criteria.
The parents of the children know their children arenāt infallible surefire future T30 university-attending future leaders of the world. These parents are trying to gain their children entry into T30s, and they know getting into this high school is a good way to aid that process. These parents know this school creates the great 12th-grade college applicant. Itās time the administrators admit the school is what creates these academically talented 12th graders (not what a child had accomplished by age 12) and work to ensure all students have a better chance at admittance.
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This doesnāt work at the tails, and TJ is selecting for the upper tail. The reason it doesnāt work is because school is age-based, and by definition, there are few students at the tails. So therefore a school aims its education for the median student and those at the tails are inevitably shortchanged unless the school is mandated to provide education for their specific abilities.
Math talent in particular varies greatly. There are kids capable of doing algebra by first grade, and others who will struggle with it in high school. There is no open-admission school system that can handle that range of students so that everyone learns to the limits of their ability.
Students that are fortunate enough to attend high performing school systems benefit because the median is shifted upwards in that school. Therefore it is less of a stretch to educate kids capable of high performance. In contrast the very bright kids in low performing school systems may have few peers of their ability and few teachers that are capable of teaching them.
So I believe that your approach of āSchool is where this education takes placeā hurts the kids that need it most. It is precisely those high ability kids in low performing school systems that would most benefit from above level teaching from exceptional teachers like those that work for AoPS.
Actually, I suspect that the majority of TJ students face worse odds at elite colleges than if they stayed and excelled at their local high school. Certainly the top third of TJ students do quite well, but the middle and lower third who might have been the top students at their local high school may end up getting shut out of T20s. I have no doubt that many parents put their kids into TJ thinking they would benefit in terms of college admissions, but for many the result is not what they expected.
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Some numbers are below, showing admit rates for the most applied to colleges among TJ students. At the time TJās test score averages were 34.4 ACT and 781/734 SAT. The admit rates generally seem reasonable for the listed score range ā not especially high or especially low. Kids who attended the basic public HS I formerly attended during this period and had scores in this range generally had a higher admit rate ā far higher for Cornell, which is the only one of the listed colleges with a decent sample size of students with this high scores.
Thomas Jefferson Admission Stats: 2017-19
UVA: 79% applied, 56% admit rate, 32% yield, 14% attended
Cornell: 37% applied, 16% admit rate, 52% yield, 3% attended
CMU: 32% applied, 26% admit rate, 42% yield, 3% attended
Stanford: 28% applied, 6% admit rate, 83% yield, 1% attended
Penn: 28% applied, 13% admit rate, 40% yield, 1% attended
Princeton: 25% applied, 8% admit rate, 67% yield, 2% attended
Duke: 23% applied, 13% admit rate, 54% yield, 2% attended
MIT: 22% applied, 11% admit rate, 80% yield, 2% attended
Harvard: 21% applied, 7% admit rate, 67% yield, 1% attended
Yale: 17% applied, 11% admit rate, 50% yield, 1% attended
That said, I think that attending TJ can be a great choice for students and horrible choice for others. It depends on many factors, including how the student functions as a big/small fish, whether the student will take advantage of the additional resources, etc. The decision can influence college admission for particular students, even if overall admit rates are similar to other HSs, after controlling for scores.
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You make a lot of assumptions I donāt necessarily agree with.
- āSchool is age based.ā and using this to insinuate if one student knows 7th grade math while in the 6th grade, that student is obviously a better candidate for high schools like TJHS than the 6th grader who is good at 6th grade math.
- the application of the ātailsā in this scenario
- The implication that the methods of choosing students (and the types of students chosen) are what makes TJHS better than other local options, not the other qualities of the school.
- That school districts must choose some schools to cater to āgood studentsā and send the ānot good studentsā to inferior or even substandard schools. And that if they do this the district is wholly justified in using unfair methods to determine which children are chosen.
- That I would believe your closing implication that students attending TJHS somehow end up with a lesser chance at attending a higher echelon college. This one is kind of hilarious.
These are only a few of the barrage of different points you asserted. Honestly, Iām not sure which one to address, if I should address any, or if these are even points to be addressed or if I should address some of the other things you said.
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We certainly see the world differently. But I think that part of the reason is the misconception you have that a school like TJ improves admission chances.
Letās review a few things from Data10ās post re TJ:
Translating this to percentiles, we can see that the average TJ student is at the 98th or 99th percentile. Given this, you would expect really good outcomes from these students, no? But a later part of the same post shows the admit rates are not exceptionally high.
By comparison, my kids attended a very good open admission high school with an average SAT score of about 1350. I would estimate that only the top 10% of students in our high school matched up with the typical TJ student. And yet our admit rates for these exact years were higher than TJ to some of those same colleges, including Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, and CMU, and lower for others.
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You miss the point.
The bigger picture is that the average test scores at TJ are 34.4 and 781/734. Thatās not a small thing to overlook, or to use as the support for another point. It is a very important fact in and of itself.
My assertion is if TJ tweaked their selection criteria and ended up with a student body that was composed of 100% of students who were not admitted the first time, the average test scores would be very similar. My assertion is the benefits of the school create great students. All your statements indicate you believe the selection process creates the high average test scores.
Going back to my assertion, if it is the school that creates the results (and acknowledging this is a public school), it is unfair to create an admission process that eliminates 90+% of potential applicants based on inequitable criteria.
An admissions process like that of TJ increases inequity under the guise of being ācompetitiveā or whatever crock of crap is being touted. TJ is a public high school widely acknowledged for having great programs and producing great graduates. All students in the district should have a fairer chance at being selected to enjoy its benefits. For a school with such demand, a lottery is one fair way to admit students. I donāt have all the details, but it certainly seems a lottery could be created with 5X the enrollment number and the lottery could be used to fill enrollment from a wider swath of applicants than is currently considered.
Admission to a public high school should not be an arms race. It is fine to create a pseudo cut-off point and say applicants below X have to provide extra reasons to be admitted into the lottery round. However, it should not be a process where the top X scoring students are the only ones admitted, because we know standardized tests do not accurately indicate ability and do not accurately predict outcomes. And it is heightened irresponsibility to use standardized tests as a determining factor at younger ages such as 13.
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I really wonder about what type of experience some have with children, their own or anyone elseās. Two of mine are as different in math ability as night and day. Same teachers, same school, and for one it didnt matter much how hard she tried or how much work or tutoring or extra help she received, she frankly never really understood math, could never perform above a mediocre-average level, and found a college that worked with that. The other child, much younger, found math to be both intuitive and obvious and breezed through college level math courses in high school with little effort or work, finding her niche in an Ivy physics department where she is surrounded by some of the best mathematical minds in her generation. Both are happy and successful.
There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that there are different levels of ability in different things. Neither would have benefited from your proposed lottery system. One would be bored to tears, the other constantly frustrated. Yes, standardized tests do show they have vastly different math ability, and guess what? Those tests were right. To pretend otherwise is ridiculous.
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Recent discussion in this thread speaks of a sixth grader doing seventh grade math and standardized test scores. I believe many of the TJ kids are not reflected in this discussion as the sixth graders are doing 11th grade or better and the standardized test scores do not touch on the math they are capable of doing. Schools like TJ need to exist for kids that are not taught otherwise.
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Exactly. And attending TJ is not going to turn an average ability kid into a math genius, regardless of the schoolās resources, just as I wont become a basketball player regardless of any practice time with the NBA.
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Honestly, I cannot think of a worse way to do admissions to a selective school like TJ than to use a lottery.
To illustrate why this is a bad idea, I will use how TJ students did on a set of nationally recognized math contests. The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) runs a series of tests with the eventual goal of finding the six strongest math kids in the USA to compete in the International Math Olympiad. High school students take the AMC-10 or AMC-12. And a small percent of the best performers are then invited to take the AIME. And a small percentage of them qualify to take the USA Math Olympiad. Each year, only about 270 students qualify from across the nation. Itās a major award, and historically this has led to very good college admission results.
In 2021, out of the roughly 270 students, I counted 11 just from TJ. Yes, this one high school has about 4% of the nationās strongest demonstrated math talent.
If you instead admitted by lottery, most of these students would not be at TJ, and they would not benefit from having peers that they could learn from. But fortunately they are there, and have a critical mass that teachers can push the boundaries in terms of accelerated learning and research.
As an aside, I hope you can appreciate these are not kids that were doing 7th grade math in 6th grade due to pushy parents. Instead, these are the kids that were capable of doing high school math by first grade.
Note that above I put demonstrated in italics, because I recognize that only a small percentage of the population has been exposed to the AMC tests, and there could be other math talent out there that is not recognized. This is why I support methods to find this talent that could be languishing in poor performing school systems.
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Again, you seem to miss the point.
You focus on math tests and math events. And you further focus on the percentage of national contestants who qualify from TJ. At this point we should stop and consider a few questions.
Do 4% of those contestants come from TJ because Philly has a concentrated base of people with ānaturalā math ability? Or maybe itās because the school has one of the best programs in the country for taking students and improving them to that level? Or maybe itās something different, or a combination of factors?
If the reason is the school is operating at a higher instructional level than other such schools, that means the district owes it to its citizens to ensure more students have a fair chance at being admitted.
OTOH, if one believes so many Math Olympiad students come from TJ because Philly has more
ānaturally giftedā math children than anywhere else in the country, then your assertions may have more weight.
Thatās an interesting list, but I am not sure which side of the nature v nurture argument it supports. My impression is that the math competitions require many years of prep and training, and certain high schools have programs that draw those students, TJ being one of them. Not saying there isnāt natural talent involved, but it is also an acquired niche skill.
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Since some users, myself included, seem to be āmissing the point,ā Iām putting the thread on slow mode to allow other users to create posts that allow them to get the point across without having the thread devolve into debate.
Top Math Olympiad kids are mostly coached at a very high level from a very early age. In addition, while there may be a larger number of kids who could do advanced math at early ages, without and unless they have access to specialized programs, they will NEVER reach those levels in high school.
In addition, there are many kids (girls) whose parents are not pushing them into these programs and if you look carefully many parents are first gen American/immigrant parents with math/engineering backgrounds from countries where there is a high stakes test for university ( Iām thinking of two nations in particular). This mindset makes them very different from other American parents who would never push and focus so early. That doesnāt mean the American kids have less ability or skill. It means they have less depth based on what they have been taught. I donāt think Math Olympiad kids are good to use as any kind of metric.
To say that one high school has 4% of the demonstrated math talent in the US, is not factual. There are many kids who are doing highly advanced math who have zero interest in math olympiads. Zero. I can think of at least a dozen. Some pursue other STEM programs at a very high level.
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This may happen occasionally (as you have often described regarding your son) but the reality is that the vast majority of kids who end up in these programs are economically, educationally, and culturally situated to become more āadvancedā in math relative to those in less advantageous situations. In other words, most arenāt there because of some innate math superpower. Plenty of kids in less advantageous situations would be just as āadvancedā were they brought up in a more advantageous situation. Where is the path for success for these kids, if not through a high performing public school?
What is proper role of a school like TJ?
- Do such schools exist to further reward those families who are already in a strong position (financially, educationally, and/or culturally) to help their kids excel academically?
- Or do such schools also exist to provide elite educational access to talented but less well-positioned kids?
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Working class kid, who got into a t20 back in the 80s, here! 
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I will limit my many thoughts about this thread to saying that I was able to defy the odds without a TJ by 1) winning the DNA lottery for academic ability, and 2) the sheer luck of living in a heterogeneous NJ community where the professional class kids were my peers in elementary, middle school, and (fewer in) high school. From them and their parents, I observed and gleaned how to play the high achievement game.
While we canāt control for natural ability, we can at least try to create diverse environments where all kids can flourish.
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