Ending the Exploitation of Asian Parents
Conservative activist Asra Nomani has made the bold claim that Asian parents are being attacked through recent admissions changes at my alma mater, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ). She is correct that Asian parents are being taken advantage of, but it’s coming from a different source altogether: the standardized test prep industry that targets parents across Northern Virginia.
As a son to Asian immigrant parents and now a parent myself, I understand the Asian American perspective. My parents immigrated to the United States from Taiwan and felt immense pressure to provide the best for me and my brother. In the 1980s, my parents bought me a Tandy 1000 computer from Radio Shack. It was over a thousand dollars, an incredible amount of money back then. They had no idea how to use it, but had heard computers were the future, and I had shown an early interest in them. They spent this money all despite the fact that we had a very modest lifestyle. For years, we were a family of four that lived in small, two-bedroom apartments in Florida and Northern Virginia. Most of the money my parents saved went towards eventually opening up a restaurant, and someday buying a house. I ended up spending hundreds of hours on the Tandy 1000, playing games, learning QBASIC, and gaining a love for technology that continues to this day. That expensive Tandy 1000 ended up being money very well spent.
These days, however, many Asian parents are unfortunately wasting hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars on expensive tutoring and preparatory classes. This industry’s sole purpose is to train children to ace standardized admissions tests, which bar the entrance to many magnet high schools and colleges across the country. “Enroll your child, and we’ll virtually guarantee they get into the top schools!” This, of course, is a lie. For example, TJ only has a few hundred openings each year, despite the thousands of kids who apply. Starting in the early 2000s, countless Asian parents across the region were marketed to with the same message: access to TJ has to go through these test prep programs. If you weren’t willing to spend the money, then you weren’t a good parent.
Of course, not everyone who took these classes could end up at TJ. Fortunately for these test prep programs, failure can easily be redirected back to the student: they didn’t study hard enough, they screwed up on the test, etc. Never mind the fact that the real problem stems from these test academies lying to parents and pitting thousands of students against each other in a yearly standardized testing arms race with no winner (other than those making millions off parents).
Much to the chagrin of these test prep academies, the tide has started to turn. First, it was the COVID pandemic that prevented standardized testing from happening, so colleges were now accepting students who hadn’t taken the SAT. Then school districts across the country were finally realizing that these vaunted standardized tests weren’t actually testing for merit, but correlated more with race and the size of a family’s pocket book. At TJ, the entrance fee and standardized test portion of admissions were eliminated. There was still a strict GPA requirement, as well as an essay writing section, in addition to other considerations. Results of these admissions changes were promising. More students, across a wider socioeconomic background, were admitted in the first year. Racial diversity at TJ was getting closer to matching the diversity levels at the school district itself. For Asian applicants, the acceptance rate also stayed within historical levels going back 17 years.
These results should be celebrated among Asian parents and students! With these changes, an Asian applicant’s chance at being accepted into TJ has largely remained the same, and this is without spending thousands of dollars on test prep academies and hundreds of hours of tedious studying.
However, this is not what conservative activists like Asra Nomani are saying. They are misrepresenting the changes as racist in nature. It’s not a surprise, given many have ties to the test prep industry themselves and potential financial gains from resurrecting the standardized test. Despite a short-sighted court ruling that has blocked these changes, I am hopeful that common sense will prevail and the standardized test will be gone for good.
From one Asian American parent to another, I plead with you not to buy into these lies. The elimination of standardized testing is a beneficial one. No longer should you feel pressure to spend thousands of dollars on something that’s so wasteful. If your child doesn’t get admitted into a school like TJ, they shouldn’t feel shame that they “wasted” money that you spent. Furthermore, it is a lie that success in life has to go through schools like TJ or high-profile colleges in the first place. Though I cherish the time I spent at TJ, I will tell you that being an alum does not guarantee admission to prestigious universities or high-paying jobs. As a 20-year veteran of the software engineering industry, I credit my success less to my years at TJ and more to the love of computers that my parents nourished with the purchase of a Tandy 1000 when I was a kid.
— Jiunwei