A new frontier in the war on excellence

Top school principal hides students’ academic awards in name of ‘equity’

The left’s war on standards is, in part, a war on excellence. For the left, it’s not enough to rewrite criminal law for the benefit of groups that, to a disproportionate degree, don’t comply with the existing code. It’s also necessary to rewrite college admissions standards for the benefit of groups that, to a disproportionate degree, fare poorly under time-tested ones — to the detriment of members of other groups who excel.

But that’s not enough, either. To spare the feelings of the beneficiaries and to obscure excellence, it’s useful to go beyond forgiving relatively poor performance on admissions tests by making the tests optional or even eliminating them.

For the same purposes, it’s important to change grading systems by compressing the range of marks students receive. Thus, when a friend of mine asked his son, a freshman at Stanford, what grades he was expecting, the student replied: “A’s and B’s; that’s what everyone gets here.” Excellence is hidden because an “A” no longer denotes it.

But even grade inflation may not suffice to spare feelings and hide excellence. Thus, the administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) — an elite and extraordinarily prestigious public school in Northern Virginia (it’s number one in the U.S. News national ratings) — found a new tool in the war on excellence. They decided to withhold notification of National Merit awards from families of students who won them.

As for the students themselves, TJ contrived for years to notify them in low-key, hit-or miss ways after the deadline for applying “early decision” to college passed. Indeed, one student says he learned he won the award through an email from the school to a school district email account that students rarely check.

TJ was already waging war on excellence by discriminating against Asian-American applicants in order to limit their presence in the student body and to increase the presence of blacks and Hispanics. In addition, to accommodate poorly qualified blacks and Hispanics admitted unfairly, it has made major adjustments to its grading system.

But what to do about awards TJ’s top students (mostly Asian-Americans) win in events over which the school has no control? In the case of National Merit awards, which schools typically celebrate and publicize, the answer was to keep them nearly secret. (The National Merit Scholarship Corporation leaves it entirely up to schools to announce these awards.)

How did the administration justify its decision on notification?

In a call with Yashar [parent of a winner of the award], Kosatka [the director of student services] admitted that the decision to withhold the information from parents and inform the students in a low-key way was intentional. “We want to recognize students for who they are as individuals, not focus on their achievements,” he told her, claiming that he and the principal didn’t want to “hurt” the feelings of students who didn’t get the award.

Why not just award them a participation trophy?

I would have thought that, once students reach high school, “who they are” in an educational setting has enough to do with what they have achieved to at least notify their parents of a major achievement like a National Merit award. TJ disagrees. For its administrators, “who students are” has much to do with their race and ethnicity and little to do with their achievements.

But the colleges and universities to which TJ students apply see a fair amount of relevance in National Merit awards (at least for now), and there are scholarship benefits associated with them. Tampering with the ability of winners of these awards to include information about it in their applications is an immense disservice to the students in question.

It amounts to the intentional infliction of harm on students who excel. And not for the purpose of providing similar benefits to other students in a zero-sum game, the way discriminatory admissions do. TJ has inflicted harm on some of its best students without providing a tangible benefit to anyone else.

This seems like a new frontier in the war on excellence.