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The results are in for at least one school: After four years of DEI-driven, functionally race-based admissions, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, known as TJ, in Alexandria, Virginia, has seen its national ranking fall to 14th place and its number of National Merit Scholar semifinalists cut nearly in half.
And according to the Virginia Attorney General, as of May 2025 it is in violation of the Virginia Human Rights Act and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 for discriminating against Asian American students in the admissions process at the school. TJ is also under federal investigation. It is steadfastly sticking to its radical admissions policy despite the negative effects. Given T.J.'s role as a STEM feeder school into the Ivies and Big Tech, this is more than another culture war battle. It affects national security.
Until four years ago the only way into TJ was via a rigorous entrance exam. Then in 2020, following the death of George Floyd, TJ officials became concerned about their negligible number of black and Hispanic students and changed admissions standards. The test was gone, replaced by a “holistic review” to include more “students who are economically disadvantaged [who now make up over 11 percent of the student body] English language learners, special education students, or students who are currently attending underrepresented middle schools.”
Without the entrance test, the black student population grew to seven percent from one percent of the class, while the number of Asian American students fell from 73 to 54 percent, the lowest share in years. A group of mostly Asian American parents objected to the new plan and started the Coalition for TJ. The coalition filed a lawsuit with the help of the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation. Instead of seeing weighting of experience factors as a way to level the playing field for underrepresented groups, they saw racism. The experience factors were just a work-around for straight up race-based decisions.
In 2022, a federal judge found the school board engaged in impermissible “racial balancing” when it overhauled admissions. In May 2023, however, the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit ruled in favor of the new admissions process, finding TJ had not discriminated against Asian American students in its admissions policies. The appellate court found that there was not sufficient evidence the changes were adopted with discriminatory intent. The court said that the school had a legitimate interest in “expanding the array of student backgrounds.”
Too bad for the Asians, America’s on-and-off minority; there are only so many seats available at TJ. The court found TJ’s essay-based admission policy was not a proxy for race-based decisions. TJ was thus able to make racially-motivated decisions without appearing legally to make racially-motivated decisions. Because of this twist of logic, Supreme Court decisions in key affirmative action cases, Students for Fair Admissions Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, did not apply.
The Supreme Court then declined certiorari—it would not hear the case—in Coalition for T.J. v. Fairfax County School Board. The conservative Court’s denial left in place the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals affirming the discriminatory policy. The declination is in contrast to the Court’s earlier rejection of affirmative action, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard, and of race as a primary admissions factor. TJ was free, for all intents and purposes, to discriminate in its admissions process.
One factor TJ would rely on was an applicant’s public middle school zip code, a good indicator of race in a divided Fairfax County. Zip code was to become one proxy for race, a work-around to Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. Harvard, which supposedly outlawed race alone as a primary admissions factor. Schools like TJ may use race as an admissions criterion so long as it is not the only basis for a decision, with the implied so long as the goal is diversity (supposedly good on its face) and not whitewashing (naughty.)
It is this policy the Supreme Court refused to review. “The holding,” Associate Justice Samuel Alito added in his dissent, “effectively licenses official actors to discriminate against any racial group [Asians, in the instance of TJ] with impunity as long as that group continues to perform at a higher rate than other groups.”
That is all history because enough time has passed that we now know the results of this legal tomfoolery. Once the top-ranked public high school in the nation, T.J. fell to 14th place in the 2024 U.S. News rankings. According to the U.S. News Best High School Rankings Methodology, academic performance constitutes at least 50 percent of a school’s overall ranking. This includes standardized test scores and participation and success rates in advanced courses like IB and AP, contributing to two categories that hold significant weight in determining a school’s ranking: college readiness and state assessment proficiency.
Also, the school, which once boasted 157 National Merit Scholar semifinalists in 2020, saw that down to 81 for the 2025 scholarship competition. (The school says the data may also reflect educational disruptions during the Covid pandemic.)
“The decline is the inevitable consequence of elevating ‘equity’ over excellence,” wrote Mark Spooner on his blog, Fairfax Schools Monitor. “In 2020, then-Superintendent Scott Braband announced the School Board’s determination that DEI would no longer be ‘a thing’; it would henceforth be ‘the thing’ in the Fairfax County public school system. T.J. was the obvious first target for this 'social justice' initiative because more than 70 percent of its students, admitted under rigorous academic criteria, were Asian Americans. The racial imbalance was deemed unacceptable.”
Spooner went on to write,
We are more than three years into the T.J. experiment, but the Fairfax County School Board hasn’t yet addressed its successes and failures. Whether an objective analysis will ever be conducted is questionable, for the program was adopted primarily for ideological reasons, and the Board may be reluctant to subject its ideological assumptions to scrutiny.
The elimination of entrance exams and other academic criteria forced T.J. to introduce remedial math courses for academically unprepared students. How many students needed to be enrolled in these programs? And did the programs succeed in rapidly bringing students up to speed so they would thereafter thrive at T.J.? We don’t know, but there are disturbing clues. Information has emerged that the drop-out rate at T.J. has spiked, particularly among some minority groups. If this is true, it suggests that the softened admissions standards may have hurt the very students who were intended as beneficiaries.
Though it appeared to have been settled by the Supreme Court’s non-intervention, the Virginia attorney general’s recent move may reopen the issue. According to the AG, Asian American students received 56 fewer offers of admission immediately following the shift in policies, after consistently making up more than 65 percent of admitted students. He said the school was already a “minority majority high school,” but the board “determined it was the wrong minorities. The board abandoned a race-neutral, merit-based system that previously was in place, and they adopted a policy structure specifically designed to reduce the number of Asian American students.”
The attorney general referred the matter to the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice for further enforcement under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act as a next step. The Trump administration has threatened to withhold money from schools and colleges over DEI efforts that amount to discrimination, and has opened an investigation into TJ’s admissions policy.
It seems that even as the influence of DEI wanes across the country, some schools just haven’t learned. Based on the test scores, perhaps neither have their students.