Because a police officer killed a drug addict in Minneapolis in 2020, a Virginia school district more than 1,000 miles away decided to suicide bomb the single best public school in the nation in the name of equity. Now, IRS forms reveal that while the Fairfax County School Board was dumbing down the admissions standards of the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the school’s administrators were funneling its once-world-class STEM curriculum to Chinese Communist Party apparatchiks in exchange for $3.6 million in “donations” to the school’s fundraising nonprofit organization.
The Chinese entities that donated to the Thomas Jefferson Partnership Fund from 2014 to 2021 cloned the TJHSST curriculum to create at least 20 replica “Thomas Schools” across the country.
At the same time that taxpayer-funded employees were clandestinely exporting our elite intellectual property to Asia, the public school system was immolating the very admissions criteria that created TJHSST to discriminate against Asian American students here at home. During that national humiliation that was 2020, the FCSB eliminated the standardized admissions test, created a quota for students from local public schools, and incorporated holistic “experience factors” and essays into the admissions criteria.
Despite a series of ultimately thwarted legal challenges, the awokening succeeded by the time TJHSST admitted its class of 2025. Relative to the class admitted just one year prior under the old standards, the class of 2025 was more than three times as black and Hispanic and slightly more white. Asian American enrollment collapsed from 73% of the student body to barely half. And nuking a purely merit-based standard in favor of anti-Asian American discrimination has produced the desired results.
Whereas virtually all of the class of 2024 entered TJHSST having completed Geometry and another 35% done with Algebra II, just 18% of the class of 2025 had completed Algebra II, and nearly a third had only completed Algebra I. Such delays in learning compounded over the next four years. Even though average class sizes were increased from roughly 450 students to 550, the number of National Merit Semifinalists collapsed from 165 in 2024, the last class of students admitted under the old criteria, to just 81 in 2025.
TJHSST’s ranking on U.S. News & World Report’s list of the best high schools plummeted from No. 1 for three consecutive years to fifth in 2023 and now to 14th in the country.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Fairfax County has conveniently ceased to announce average SAT scores by school, but the district results have reflected a jurisdiction that has chosen decline by design. The average SAT score for the public school system’s students fell from 1218 in 2019 to 1178 in 2024. The cataclysmic collapse of National Merit Semifinalists would portend that the worst is yet to come.
And while the school district was successfully suicide-bombing our taxpayer-funded engine of excellence and opportunity for students who might otherwise be unable to afford elite private schooling, TJHSST made millions selling state secrets to China. While we engineer the intentional dumbing down of the next American generation, public employees made a profit helping China raise its future ruling class on TJHSST’s remains.