A post from guest blogger and Fordham intern Amy Ballard.
Stafford points out the recent Washington Post article on the apparent diversity crisis at TJ. She's right: blaming the school for its demographics is ridiculous. However, as a former TJ student, I have a few more things to say about the never-ending diversity debate.
All it's doing is hurting the students. I was a member of the 2001 entering class that saw a lamentable nosedive in minority student enrollment (cited in the article as the beginning of the current diversity discussion). Yes, the numbers of African American and Hispanic students were low, but my nine black and Hispanic classmates were forced to stand under a negative spotlight for their entire four years of high school. They stood out in the crowd, not for their accomplishments or ambitions like many TJ kids, but for their race. Asian American students were forced to justify being there in numbers disproportionate to the surrounding population and endure racial jabs like "Asian F" or "Asian fail" (both referring to a B+). White students became hypersensitive to their classmates' and friends' races, a consideration neither necessary nor helpful when being assigned a lab partner or gym buddy.
At one point, the discussion got into sex (the school was 60/40 boys/girls and it had people worrying). When, during my junior year, I told my counselor during college sessions that I was more interested in the liberal arts than in science and math, I was informed that it was entirely possible that I had gotten through the second round of admissions to TJ solely because I was a girl and "there was a big push on that your year." There was even a brief uproar over the diversity of the teachers and administrators! The single-minded focus on race and sex (read: visible) diversity takes away from the rather rich diversity that does exist (my graduating class contained a concert-level pianist and violinist, several students who had completed undergraduate math requirements, a published short story author, and a student who deferred college admission to spend a year in NOLS) and is detrimental to the cultural education of the students at TJ. It's hard to grasp concepts like fairness and equality when everyone is constantly telling you your school has neither.
As an alum, people often ask me about the diversity at TJ, rather than the rigor of the all-Honors classes or the merit of the tech labs and mentorships required of seniors. Instead, they ask me if I knew any black kids or if my classes consisted entirely of Asian students. All of that detracts from the ultimate goal of schools like TJ--the academic achievement and intellectual accomplishments of the best pupils. Each time TJ posts the country's highest SAT scores or tops AP marks in both Physics and US Government, someone says, "Yeah, but where are the minority students?" Asking that question devalues the time and energy the students and teachers at TJ spend every year to produce not only top scores and future Ivy Leaguers but valuable experiences in the areas of research, writing, technology, science, and math. The admissions process is not a result of the students who participate in it or of the students who attend the high school or even of the teachers who teach there. The debate over the admissions policy needs to be kept out of the halls of the school itself. When I was a student there and people asked me about the diversity "problem" I would tell them that we weren't black students or white students or Asian students or Hispanic students or nerds or geeks--we were TJ kids and there was no problem.
Photo by Flickr user via.