Articles

Barbara Grutter was no stranger to a challenge. She worked in a doctor’s office while getting her Bachelor of Science degree in 1978, when few women did. She raised two small children while learning information systems, when the concept barely existed. Later she founded and ran an IT consulting business, training healthcare companies to manag ...

Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is in hot water with parents again. Administrators used “equity” as a justification for withholding information from students that may impact the trajectory of their academic futures. In the final weeks of 2022, Thomas Jefferson parent Shawna Yashar made an odd discovery. Her son h ...

At Thomas Jefferson High School in Fairfax, Virginia, it no longer matters that one of the eighth graders applying for admission this fall has been building robots in his garage since he was 10, or that another won her middle school’s Math Olympiad last year and dreams of working for NASA someday. All that matters … ...

Two hundred and four. That’s how many times the word “diversity” came up during the recent marathon Supreme Court oral arguments over whether to end affirmative action in college admissions. With characteristic bluntness, Justice Clarence Thomas remarked about midway through that, “I’ve heard the word ‘diversity̵ ...

This week, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in a pair of cases asking whether affirmative action in college admissions violates the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. If the court says yes, the question on everyone’s mind – from constitutional law scholars to high school seniors – will be: What will universities ...

Envy: a feeling of resentful longing aroused by someone else’s possessions, qualities, or luck “I walked into Stuyvesant High school and I thought I was in Chinatown,” Milady Baez, then-deputy chancellor of the Department of Education in New York City, complained to colleagues at a 2018 meeting. Baez’ point was clear: There ...

How long does it take to destroy a high-performing, beloved public high school? Fortunately, San Francisco residents won’t have to find out. Last month, by a vote of 4-3, the San Francisco Board of Education reinstated merit-based admissions at Lowell High School, the city’s premier public school for academically gifted students. As the ...

Will 2022 be the year we finally see an end to discriminatory racial preferences in education? There are welcome signs of change in the air. In February, parents of students at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) in northern Virginia racked up an important win in a federal lawsuit challenging the school’s … ...

There’s no mistaking the message Tuesday’s recall election sent to the San Francisco Board of Education: focus on education, not racial politics. In addition to the Board’s myopic focus on renaming schools instead of reopening them last year, the landslide results were also motivated by the Board’s decision to scrap competit ...