Outside the Beltway

Outside the Beltway

Principal Resigns After Rankings Decline

What makes a good school good?

James Joyner
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Fox5 DC (“Principal of top-ranked Virginia high school resigns“):

The principal of Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a prestigious institution in Fairfax County, is stepping down amid concerns about the school’s declining national rankings in recent years.

Dr. Ann Bonitatibus, who has served as principal for seven years, is resigning but will remain with the Fairfax County school district. She will take on a new role as the Executive Director of Talent Acquisition and Management within the Department of Human Resources, a move she described as a promotion.

[…]

The announcement of her departure comes just weeks after the school, which was once ranked the top high school in the country, saw a drop in national rankings.

This news has been met with mixed reactions from the school community.

Asra Nomani, founder of the Coalition for TJ, a parent organization, called the resignation a “win” for the school.

Nomani criticized Bonitatibus’ leadership, noting the decline in the school’s rankings and the reduction in the number of National Merit semifinalists during her tenure.

“Across the county, parents, teachers, and students are celebrating. Since Ann Bonitatibus came to the school, the rankings of the school have gone from No. 1 to No. 14. The number of National Merit semifinalists has gone from about 150 to 80, and dozens of teachers and staff have left the school. Her resignation is a perfect example of failing up – where she is now heading to the district level, ironically for talent acquisition when, in fact, she’s driven talent from the school,” Nomani said.

I honestly have no insight as to whether Bonitatibus left under pressure or truly considers her new role a promotion. But the criticism being leveled over the school’s drop in national ranking and production of National Merit semifinalists amuses me because it was completely outside her control.

TJ happens to be in Fairfax County, where I live, so I follow it with mild interest. (My kids are doing well in school but, not shockingly, aren’t STEM geniuses and are not candidates for admission.) As I noted back in June 2021, the previous county superintendent radically changed the admissions process to TJ to favor racial diversity rather than excellence on standardized testing. The first class admitted under those new procedures went from fewer than 2% economically disadvantaged students to 25%.

It’s not shocking then, that the school has fallen somewhat in the national rankings. It went from selecting the students in the second most affluent county in the country mostly on the basis of standardize test scores to guaranteeing spots to the top students in every middle school, regardless of “quality.” They’re simply no longer selecting on the basis of the thing that earns the highest national rankings.

Now, as MarkedMan, Mikey, and others noted in the discussion section of that post and others on the broad topic of the nature of our public education system, the way we rank schools is rather bizarre. At every level, from PhD to kindergarten, we do so on the basis of student quality—an input—rather than on how good they are at teaching—an output.

While it may very well be a good idea to take the top 1% of STEM 9th graders and give them a concentrated high school experience with the best STEM teachers, the fact of the matter is that those students would have graduated as elite STEM students regardless of where they went to school. It’s far more impressive—and frankly, much harder—to take students who are struggling with math and science and graduate them with sufficient proficiency in those subjects to do well in college. But we really have no metrics for judging that.

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13 responses to “Principal Resigns After Rankings Decline”

  1. Steven L. Taylor Avatar
    Steven L. Taylor

    I have long noted that that best way to be a really good teacher is to have really good students.

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  2. JKB Avatar
    JKB

    the fact of the matter is that those students would have graduated as elite STEM students regardless of where they went to school.

    That’s not true at all. If you take talented students and dump them into an environment where “blowing the curve” is singled out for abuse by less academic classmates and having to sit through hours of mediocre lessons (regardless of the teacher talent), those students will not excel.

    On the upside, it has been shown that lower-achieving males do enroll and succeed in PECS (Physics, Engineering and Computer Science) in college. Sadly, this doesn’t work with the non-achieving women as was found in an NYU study.

    But the fact of the matter is, teachers, administrators, college, and thus also parents, incentivize getting good grades, not real learning. No one cares what a student remembers after getting their grade, unless it is needed to get a good grade in the next class. Grades matter, real learning only becomes an issue after the student is done with the false reality of school and is faced with the real world realities.

    Paul Graham discussed this quite well in his December 2019 essay, ‘The Lesson to Unlearn‘

  3. Jay L Gischer Avatar
    Jay L Gischer

    @JKB: Except that’s pretty much what happened to me, and yet I graduated from college summa cum laude and got into a very top grad program, where I received a doctorate. In a STEM field.

    I’m not arguing that the math hate is good, though.

    In fact, by transforming the admission’s policy of TJ, they are probably helping more students deal with this issue, not less. It is recruiting STEM students from a broader pool, and encouraging them rather than discouraging them. If they maybe aren’t quite as accomplished, I’m fine with that. The ones who are really good will find their place. It doesn’t even matter that much what undergrad school they go to. Any of a hundred or so schools in the country will do fine by them.

    Yeah, the people who went to Ivies are good. And the reputation of the Ivies is very, very useful in some disciplines – those disciplines where there aren’t good metrics – good ways to tell the people who are good at it from the people who aren’t. In those disciplines, an Ivy-League diploma are really valuable.

    I have no idea why anybody ought to care about a high school’s “ranking”. But they do, just like they care about how well its football team does.

    9
  4. James Joyner Avatar
    James Joyner

    @JKB: I don’t contend that the learning environment is irrelevant. But elite talent, academic or athletic, will tend to emerge as elite with even mediocre teaching/coaching. Is elite-level teaching/coaching better? Sure. But my point is that emerging as elite isn’t necessarily indicative of the quality of teaching/coaching one received. Talent is far more important a variable.

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  5. just nutha Avatar
    just nutha

    @James Joyner:

    Talent is far more important a variable.

    Which, of course, is why measuring outputs, as some of our critics here would prefer*, is problematical at best.

    *I’d prefer to measure outputs, too, but they’re too easily manipulated. Teacher to student match on questions of learning style and class management/operational style are additional variables.

    2
  6. CSK Avatar
    CSK

    @Steven L. Taylor:

    That has invariably been true for me.

    1
  7. Slugger Avatar
    Slugger

    A drop from #1 to #14 in the country may not be a big deal. Ratings are not immune from manipulation, rumors, and trendiness. I’m pretty sure that Alabama still has a real good football team and that Ohio State has a good shot at beating Michigan this year despite recent drops in ratings. The fact that teachers have quit under Bonitatibus strikes me as a more important concern about her leadership.

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  8. James Joyner Avatar
    James Joyner

    @Slugger: As suggested in the OP, I don’t know the situation well enough to analyze the critiques beyond the larger point of the changed student pool. But telling me that “X number of teachers have left over a given period” is meaningless without more information. How many usually leave over such a period? Did they retire? Move with their spouse to another area? Change careers? Or were they frustrated with leadership and moved to another school in Fairfax County or its environs?

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  9. JKB Avatar
    JKB

    @James Joyner:

    Such is also true of the benefit of college. There is gatekeeping but those with the talents to be a success will be successful regardless of going to college. College is for the middlings who need magic parchment to get a place in a cube farm. Universities have benefited from 50 years of those who had the talent went to college by default, but that is changing as more and more of the talented skip the campus orthodoxy.

    In any case, the principal left because the ranking decline, which is what her bosses and most active parents apparently valued.

    The idea is, of course, that men are successful because they have gone to college. No idea was ever more absurd. No man is successful because he has managed to pass a certain number of courses and has received a sheepskin which tells the world in Latin, that neither the world nor the graduate can read, that he has successfully completed the work required. If the man is successful, it is because he has the qualities for success in him; the college “education” has merely, speaking in terms’ of horticulture, forced those qualities and given him certain intellectual tools with which to work—tools which he could have got without going to college, but not nearly so quickly. So far as anything practical is concerned, a college is simply an intellectual hothouse. For four years the mind of the undergraduate is put “under glass,” and a very warm and constant sunshine is poured down upon it. The result is, of course, that his mind blooms earlier than it would in the much cooler intellectual atmosphere of the business world.

    A man learns more about business in the first six months after his graduation than he does in his whole four years of college. But—and here is the “practical” result of his college work—he learns far more in those six months than if he had not gone to college. He has been trained to learn, and that, to all intents and purposes, is all the training he has received. To say that he has been trained to think is to say essentially that he has been trained to learn, but remember that it is impossible to teach a man to think. The power to think must be inherently his. All that the teacher can do is help him learn to order his thoughts—such as they are.

    Marks, Percy, “Under Glass”, Scribner’s Magazine Vol 73, 1923

  10. Eusebio Avatar
    Eusebio

    It’s worth mentioning that the source of the rankings is US News and World Report, which itself is a thing. It’s known that schools game the ranking factors, which is among the reasons that some schools (so far notably many top medical and law schools) have withdrawn from the ranking game in recent years by not providing data to US News.
    Back at the high school level, not all states have made all data public or otherwise available to US News, so those states’ schools are not ranked comparably. And not that I much care, but US News doesn’t rank private high schools… and I noticed on the popular ranking site Niche that TJ is ranked 12th nationally among public schools, just after the 144th ranked private school.
    Also, US News appears to give some weight to the performance of a disadvantaged or underserved student population, but I have no idea if that’s reflected appropriately in the school rankings.

    1
  11. Michael Reynolds Avatar
    Michael Reynolds

    School ratings influence real estate prices.

    3
  12. Robert sharperson Avatar
    Robert sharperson

    I live in Annandale and have followed the schools’ politics for sevral years. While I agree w your post, I wanted to add that the school had to add some remedial classes before the acceptance of economically disadvantaged students. In addition, many parents complained the selection process was too difficult and wondered why the County hasn’t created an Arts School for top students like other urban school districts.

    I bring this up because several parents blamed the initial school decline on the acceptance of economically disadvantaged student before the program was initiated.

    2
  13. TJ Avatar
    TJ

    @Slugger:
    I have a kid there, admitted after the changes.

    Fun to note that the test scores that U.S. News & World Report rankings which have shown the “slide” to date have only employed data for their College Readiness Index based on classes admitted *before* the change. Other factors could be more current

    Since the second year my attendee has been in AP classes. They’re functionally a college student now, taking 4 simultaneous APs now. The calculus is the real deal, harder than my first college calculus sequence (real analysis was another thing entirely)

    There’s also a *clear* difference between my other HS-age child’s learning environment. No fights in the halls, virtually no disruptive students ruining classes (one kid talks to much – in english – in foreign language class).

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