The War on Asians, the Death of Meritocracy, and Assault on STEM
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FAIRFAX COUNTY, Va. — This past weekend, about 100 families, students, alumni and community members Thomas Jefferson High School for School and Technology stood on the grassy lawn in front of the school and held a symbolic memorial service for the nation’s No. 1 high school.
“Remember the glory of TJ,” said Yuyan Zhou, a Chinese-American alumni mother, as friends stood around her with trophies and medals that symbolized many of the shining moments from the school’s history. “How many of you know that a high school can launch a rocket into space?” she asked, holding a medal around her neck and saying, “I have the medal…Help us preserve that spirit and keep TJ alive!”
They (and I, as a TJ parent) were also grieving something else: a war on Asian Americans by educrats and activists pushing the controversial ideology of critical race theory that is sowing racial discord and division in K-12 school districts around the country. Today, parents and community members launched a Change.org petition to have Fairfax County Superintendent Scott Brabrand and TJ Principal Ann Bonitatibus lose their jobs, following months of behind-the-scenes activities by the two officials supporting the anti-Asian attack on the school’s students and families. Yesterday evening, the Chinese American Parents Association of Fairfax County sent a three-page letter to the Fairfax County Board of Education, opposing the lack of “respect” that Asian Americans have been facing in the debate over TJ admissions.
Since the school’s birth in 1985 as a “Governor’s School,” specializing in science, technology, engineering and math, it had taken the community 35 years to build the school’s reputation as a premier high school. But it took the 12 Democratic members of the Fairfax County School Board only 12 minutes and 11 seconds in the dark of the night on Tuesday, October 6, during an online meeting in the middle of pandemic, to kill the school, eliminating its race-blind, merit-based admissions test.
Ideologues in the dangerous philosophy of critical race theory had just scored a major victory in their war on Asian-Americans. Like bigots and racists in the 20th century targeted Jewish students who secured admission to America’s Ivy League schools, activists are putting a hit on Asian-Americans who defy their thesis that “systemic racism” and “white supremacy” so oppress minorities that they cannot advance.
National War on Asians
This war on Asians is spreading nationally, with schools with large Asian student populations under fire to be decimated. In California, the San Francisco Unified School District is set to vote tonight to replace the merit admissions process to Lowell High School with a lottery. As I write, educrats there a ramming a lottery through a Zoom call, attempting to shame the school’s Asian American parents and students and others opposed to the lottery and blasting the racist “toxic culture” at the school, where Asian American students are 61 percent of the student body — rhetoric identical to the anti-Asian campaign in Virginia. In New York City, parents are facing a campaign to remove the academic test to the city’s selective STEM schools, including Stuyvesant High School and the Bronx High School of Science.
In Massachusetts on Sunday, as families in northern Virginia held their memorial service for TJ, parents, students and community members in the Boston Public Schools system held a protest to oppose a plan proposed last week for a “racial equity planning tool” to eliminate the academic exam to the school district’s three top schools, including the O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science. Like educarats in San Francisco, northern Virginia and New York City, Boston school officials argue that STEM school’s racial demographics “don’t mirror” the district’s demographics. They note “Asian and white students” are “meeting or exceeding expectations at higher rates” than Black and Hispanic students.
This summer, leaders at the Illinois Math and Science Academy, the state’s No. 1 STEM school, circulated a PowerPoint that reprinted the claim, “Math was never neutral.” They cited critical race theory and the “implicit bias in STEM,” to allege that “white male identity” dominates “what it means to be a scientist,” that “feminine and ethnic identities are not valued” and that mathematics should be called “mathematx,” to “signify a humanizing re-imagination of mathematics free from dominance of Eurocentric and White culture.
(Read more at Bacon’s Rebellion)
