Students hoping to attend Thomas Jefferson high school for science and technology in Virginia, one of the most competitive magnet schools in the US, once took a rigorous standardized test for admission. They also had to pay a $100 fee to apply. Those requirements posed a barrier for many students, particularly those who lacked access to test preparation resources and low-income students whose families couldn’t afford the fee.
As racial justice protests flared across the US in 2020, the Fairfax county school board decided to abandon the test and application fee in response to criticism that the school did not enroll enough Black and Latino students. The board overhauled the school’s admissions program, adopting a race-neutral approach and instituting a holistic evaluation of students’ grades, problem-solving skills, and “experience factors”, such as free and reduced lunch eligibility and whether they were an English language learner. It also implemented a practice of guaranteeing seats for the top students at every middle school in the county.
