Posted on 06/02/2025 11:44:29 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Thomas Jefferson High School has been subjected to left-wing education policies and is uniquely situated to display how destructive those policies are.
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) in Fairfax County, Virginia, became something of a household name in recent years, with a challenge to an allegedly racially discriminatory admissions scheme nearly reaching the U.S. Supreme Court and the school essentially selling proprietary education information to the Chinese. Despite the high court refusing to take the slam-dunk affirmative action case, the school is now being investigated from multiple angles by the Trump administration.
In the past two weeks, the Department of Education and the Department of Justice have opened tandem civil rights investigations into TJ, often called the country’s top public high school, and most recently, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) received a request to investigate the school’s ties to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“Through a jaw-dropping series of emails and documents by way of a public records request, Defending Education has uncovered what appears to be evidence of multiple violations of federal tax law in Fairfax County Public Schools,” Sarah Parshall Perry, vice president and legal fellow at Defending Education, the group that filed the IRS complaint, told The Federalist. “Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology — one of the nation’s elite high schools — appears to have allowed China-affiliated groups to use the school’s name and likeness to create similar schools in China in exchange for payments reported as ‘charitable donations’ by Thomas Jefferson’s affiliated non-profit fund.”
According to the complaint, the elite school gave things like curricula, syllabi, and even building plans for schools to CCP-linked organizations, which returned...
(Excerpt) Read more at thefederalist.com ...
Typical of the public schools.
The thing that tickles me here is that the Chinese would pay for the detailed info on TJ. Yes, it is an outstanding high school. But it is still a high school. Nothing being done at TJ is top secret, national security type stuff. We’re talking curricula and syllabi. TJ’s senior teachers and administrators probably present this information at conferences with great regularity. Attend a conference. Ask for a copy of the powerpoint presentation, and keep the three ring binder of samples that got handed out. Maybe even invite some of the TJ people to come over to China for a year on an exchange program.
Does TJ have a magical ingredient that catapaulted it to the forefront of U.S. schools? Yes, and it’s not a secret. TJ has — or had, before the Fairfax County Board of Education got drunk on DEI and went to war with excellence — an extremely selective, merit based, exam driven admissions system. And it rigorously screened faculty as well.
TJ’s other “secret” is that it is located in NOVA, which has become one of the country’s top tech hubs. The DC area is also a major player in biomedical and other STEM fields due largely to the DOD, NIH, NSF and other federal funding streams. There are a lot of really smart people in the area, and selective admissions created a magnet for their kids.
This could be done anywhere in which a critical mass of smart people develops. Of course the Chinese want to copy success. The shameful disgrace is that the American educational establishment has gone woke and is reflexively hostile to excellence, because the lefties don’t like the demographic correlates of objective testing and performance based evaluation.
A century ago, the top prep schools and colleges all wanted to copy Oxford. Since I like Collegiate Gothic campuses, I always thought that was a fine model. It’s kinda cool that an American high school became such an icon of excellence that it developed that kind of sex appeal. It’s said that Fairfax County now wants to throw it away.
We’ve long been selling the rope with which they intend to hang us.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.