I remember how it was -- JR
A Racist Virginia School Board and Principal Get Called Out
In a terrific win for parents, hardworking students, and those who want to end discrimination in our schools, a federal judge has thrown out the racist admissions policy of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a prestigious public magnet school in Fairfax County, Virginia.
On Feb. 25, federal district court Judge Claude Hilton granted summary judgment to the Coalition For TJ, a coalition made up of Asian American parents with children who had applied for admission to Thomas Jefferson High School or were planning to do so. They were represented by the Pacific Legal Foundation.
The parents challenged the change in the school’s admissions policy implemented by the elected members of the Fairfax County School Board in 2020. Hilton concluded that change was made with a clear racist purpose:
Board members and high-level FCSB (Fairfax County School Board) actors did not disguise their desire for TJ (Thomas Jefferson High School) to represent the racial demographics of Fairfax County or Northern Virginia as a whole.
Despite their efforts at ensuring “holistic” admissions, Hilton found the policy to be “racial balancing for its own sake,” and therefore, “patently unconstitutional.”
As internal emails and other evidence showed, the 12 members of the school board were upset that so many Asian American students, and so few black and Hispanic students, were accepted at the school. So was Thomas Jefferson’s principal, Ann Bonitatibus, who seemed more concerned with the race of her students than their individual character or education.
In the 2020-21 school year, before the policy change, the racial makeup of the student body was 71.9% Asian American, 18.34% white, 3.05% Hispanic, and 1.77% black. The defendants expressed their anger that the Hispanic and black racial makeup of Thomas Jefferson did not reflect that of Fairfax County, which is 19.8% Asian American, 36.8% white, 27.1% Hispanic, and 10% black.
With the implementation of the new admissions policy, which resulted in 64 more students being admitted than in previous classes, the percentage of Asian American students in the class of 2025 still fell to only 54%.
The change in the admissions policy was prompted, in part, by George Floyd’s death in May 2020. Bonitatibus sent an email a week after Floyd’s death to the Thomas Jefferson community about “black citizens facing death and continued injustices” and complaining that the high school “did not reflect the racial composition” in the Fairfax County school system.
Other board members expressed similar sentiments, with one saying she was “angry and disappointed” about the old admissions policy and saying they had to “address the under-representation of black and Hispanic students.” While white students are also “underrepresented” at the school, that apparently wasn’t a concern to the board members.
But Hilton found that “board member communications show a consensus that, in their view, the racial makeup of TJ was problematic” and they “set out to increase and decrease the representation of certain racial groups at TJ.”
The school’s original, rigorous admissions policy explains why it has been regularly rated as one of the top high schools in the country. Students from five different school districts are eligible to apply. But in addition to requiring applicants to have a minimum core 3.0 grade point average, the school also required students to take three standardized tests: the Quant-Q, the ACT Aspire Reading, and the ACT Aspire Science tests.
Students who met certain minimum scores advanced as semifinalists for another review that evaluated their GPA, test scores, teacher recommendations, responses to three writing prompts, and a problem-solving essay.
The daughter of one of the authors went through this tough process and graduated from Thomas Jefferson in 2012.
Keep in mind that in the case against the school board, there was no evidence produced of any kind that the preexisting admissions policy, including the battery of tests that was administered to applicants, was at all discriminatory. It is simply that this objective process did not produce the racial proportions the school board and the school principal wanted.
Instead, the board eliminated the standardized tests in their entirety, got rid of the multistage review process, and implemented a “holistic” (i.e., subjective) evaluation that included “Experience Factors” such as “(a) attendance at a middle school deemed historically underrepresented at TJ; (b) eligibility for free and reduced price meals; (c) status as an English language learner; and (d) status as a special education student.”
The school board also guaranteed seats for 1.5% of the eighth-grade students at each public middle school, creating a pool for the remaining unallocated seats.
Hilton concluded that there was “no dispute” that the board was “racially motivated” and “acted with discriminatory intent” when it changed the admissions policy. It implemented, according to Hilton, a policy that “does not treat all applicants to TJ equally,” where Asian American students are “disproportionately deprived of a level playing field.”
Moreover, the board short-circuited the usual process for making policy changes in order to dampen public opposition, going out of its way to prevent input from stakeholders—something Hilton himself noted. He found that “the process was rushed, not transparent, and more concerned with simply doing something to alter the racial balance at TJ than with public engagement.”
The process suggests—as one board member said in an email—that the board was moving “quickly” because it was “currently incurring reputational/political risks,” meaning that “now is better timing.”
Hilton contrasted the fact that the school board held “full, public meetings” on renaming two schools named after Confederate generals with the fact that the “public did not even see the proposed plan that the Board actually adopted for TJ admissions until 30 minutes before the final meeting.”
He said that the board could not “transform racial balancing”—discriminatory conduct forbidden by the Constitution—by “simply relabeling it ‘racial diversity.’” And it didn’t even consider alternatives “like further increasing the size of TJ or providing free test prep … before the Board defaulted to a system that treats applicants unequally in hopes of engineering a particular racial outcome.”
What is crystal clear from this decision and the evidence that was introduced is that the members of the Fairfax County School Board, the principal of Thomas Jefferson High School, and numerous others inside the school system had no hesitation in implementing a racially motivated, discriminatory admissions policy intended to achieve a racial quota system that would allocate seats in the entering class based not on the qualifications, credentials, and hard work of those students, but their skin color.
All of them should be ashamed for betraying the public trust and engaging in such egregious conduct.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/03/02/a-racist-virginia-school-board-and-principal-get-called-out
*****************************************Another Loony Lib Teacher Caught Wishing Death On Conservatives…
A liberal Texas middle school teacher was caught telling two other women that “conservative Christians” needed to “get COVID and die” because of their political opposition to coronavirus mandates, which she says has “impacted” the “rest of [her] life.”
Parents have identified the teacher as Lisa Grimes, who used to teach at Colleyville Middle School. She was reportedly upset over political opposition to pandemic-related restrictions and blamed conservative Christians for prolonging the pandemic.
I mean, nobody was stopping her from living her life except for her. She is the type of person who thinks that your freedoms stop because of her fear.
A hidden video captured while talking with two other women, Grimes starts going off on a rant about vaccines and their importance:
“We have a political system that will not allow us to [inaudible] so we’re vaccinating like the flu … which is, you know … get the flu vaccine if you want but you can’t — don’t ‘tread on me.’ But it’s too late. It would have had to have been immediate. If we would have done it immediately, it’d already be gone. That’s what’s frustrating. The rest of my life is impacted because of politics?”
Grimes, before she walked away, chose to make one last scathing comment that she will likely regret:
“Because of conservative Christian crap?”
“I’m telling you, those conservative Christians … they need to die … they need to get covid and die.”
100 Percent Fedup reported:
Grimes was recorded by an anonymous school parent who wishes to remain unidentified at this time.
According to LinkedIn, Grimes attended a Graduate program at Texas Christian University. She is also a fitness and nutrition coach who, according to her bio, wants to “live a happy life and influence others to do the same.”… well, as long as they’re not conservative or Christian.
Her social media is also littered with posts that are clearly meant to convince others that she is a good person, with a ton of posts about BLM and how to not be a racist. The majority of content on her accounts is either virtue signaling, social justice, or yoga.
One of her Twitter posts is captioned “Only Love.” and includes a quote from MLK which reads, “And may the appalling hate of others fuel you to step more deeply into your work as a warrior of love, justice, and freedom in the fight against oppression and bigotry.”
Pretty ironic considering she just admitted to wanting Christians and conservatives to die because they disagree with her political views. If that isn’t bigotry then what is?
Not to mention the “appalling hate” that Grimes holds against such a large number of people based on their religion.
But that “science” she was governed by must have changed, given that in the video above she and the other two women she was talking with were not social distancing, nor were they wearing masks.
A woman with this much hate in her heart should not be educating children, especially in such important developmental years.
https://theinformedamerican.net/another-loony-lib-teacher-caught-wishing-death-on-conservatives/
*******************************************Elite International Schools Have a Racism Problem
Around the world, finishing schools for the Davos class teach excellence—as long as the excellence is White, Western, and English-speaking.
The “placement gong” rings out in the offices of Teaching Nomad, a recruiter for international schools, every time the company places a teacher. The past few years it’s been ringing a lot.
International schools—private, expensive, the instruction almost always in English—were once the exclusive domain of the children of diplomats and expat executives. Today, parents everywhere want in, seeing a Western-style education as a child’s pathway to success. On average, two new international schools are opening a day, and the demand for teachers is insatiable. Teaching Nomad’s website features hundreds of job openings, from Panama to Vietnam.
Some applicants are novices looking for an overseas adventure. Others are veteran educators seeking to burnish their credentials. Few of them understand, however, that their chances of getting a job might come down to the photo they upload with their résumé. It’s been an open secret in the industry for decades that parents, and therefore schools, demand Caucasian teachers and administrators.
Teaching Nomad responds to that with a simple system: Candidates are categorized Level I for Whites, Level II for all others, according to four former employees who logged and classified applicants at the company’s offices in Denver and Shanghai. The agency also notes what kind of teachers each institution seeks, with a drop-down box that offers the option “White Only,” say the ex-employees, who asked not to be identified, citing concerns about legal retaliation for violating confidentiality.
Brett Isis, Teaching Nomad’s founder and president, says the ex-employees misunderstood. Teaching Nomad does separate candidates into tiers, he says, but the levels have nothing to do with race—they’re an assessment of a candidate’s “hireability,” based on many factors. He acknowledges that the system notes schools’ requests for only White candidates but says Teaching Nomad forwards all qualified applicants to those schools, regardless of their skin color. “The reality is that we’ve helped hundreds, if not thousands, of minorities to achieve their teach-abroad goals,” Isis says, pointing to the company’s reviews on goabroad.com and gooverseas.com. “Many, many of those are African American or Black candidates.”
Teaching Nomad isn’t an outlier. Teach Away, a competitor in Toronto, has worked with local recruiters and partner schools in China that categorize candidates by race: A 2019 spreadsheet seen by Bloomberg had a column labeled “skin color”—with A for Black, C for White, and B for the rest. Teach Away said in an email that since August 2018, it’s required all clients to accept a school diversity pledge and that schools which don’t follow best practices on diversity and inclusion risk having their contract canceled.
These are just two agencies, doing what’s expected in an insular system that’s only beginning to examine itself. The racial reckoning that swept schools across the U.S. in 2020, calling attention to the White privilege and systemic racism endemic in academia, initially went unheeded at international schools. It was an American problem, irrelevant in their enlightened halls. But as the Black Lives Matter movement rippled abroad, students, alumni, and teachers began to peel back that worldly patina. First-person testimonies about racial discrimination emerged from schools on six continents, inspiring a movement calling on international schools to expand beyond their Western-centric biases.
Interviews with dozens of teachers, administrators, and recruiters reveal hiring tactics unheard of in almost any other industry. International schools overtly prize White skin and calibrate salaries accordingly. Ads for teaching positions are blunt about what kind of candidates should apply: “White only,” reads a recent one for a school in China. Another, for a Saudi school, states, “Must—Native American (Fair and Blonde).” In the U.S. such practices would be illegal. But abroad, discrimination laws differ, enforcement can be negligible, and the schools are largely unregulated. There’s a rule of thumb in the trade: The more elite the school, the less diverse the staff.
David Stewart, a former Teach Away recruiter, says he tried repeatedly to place qualified candidates of color but found it too hard. After two years he left, dispirited. “Racism” he says, “is just baked into the business model.”
International schools trace their roots back more than a century and a half. They were born of a certain idealism. In 1864, Charles Dickens urged his countrymen to take note of a new international school established right outside Paris—the first in a program that planned to rotate boys through schools in Europe so they could learn alongside classmates of all nations and acquire the local language in each country. The result would be “a citizen of the world at large,” Dickens wrote.
As businessmen and diplomats increasingly began venturing abroad with their families, there was also a practical need for schools that allowed children to continue their education overseas. A group of enterprising women in Tokyo banded together in 1902 to create what would become the American School in Japan. Two decades later, Royal Dutch Shell set up a school on Borneo, where it had struck oil, to attract engineers from Europe.
International schools today guarantee children will emerge speaking fluent English, the language of aspiration and a prerequisite for a shot at the Ivy Leagues and Oxbridge. Power coheres early, and children establish lifelong ties with peers groomed for the global elite. The notables who’ve emerged from such schools include Rockefellers and Rothschilds, former chief executive officers of Nokia Corp. and Standard Chartered bank, the king of the Netherlands, and U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson. North Korea’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un, attended the International School of Berne in Switzerland.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
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