Congratulations to the nearly 200 high-school seniors attending Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) who have been named National Merit Semifinalists and will compete for millions of dollars in scholarship funding to be awarded next spring.
These students deserve applause. But the bigger issue is: Why the huge drop in Fairfax students being named semifinalists? The 191 for the Class of 2025 is down from 264 for the Class of 2024.
The drop-off was most pronounced at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science & Technology, which saw its cadre of National Merit Semifinalists drop from 165 to 81.
Critics of the school’s recently changed admissions policy were quick to pounce, suggesting that admitting students based on factors not entirely related to academic achievement might be the cause.
And that’s certainly possible. But that would only account for the figures at TJ; one presumes that students who lost out on attending the school under the revamped, woke admissions policy would have done nearly as well at their neighborhood schools, ending up with FCPS having roughly the same number of National Merit Semifinalists overall, just divided among the schools differently.
But that was not the case, and it’s a head-scratcher as to why.
The way the National Merit Scholarship Corp. decides semifinalists is on a state-by-state basis. So it appears that Fairfax’s decline is because students elsewhere in the commonwealth are performing better on the qualifying tests.
Whatever the reason, this year-to-year drop is jarring. It should be cause for a conversation about what Fairfax County Public Schools is doing right, and what it isn’t, in maintaining a culture of academic rigor that challenges all students, top to bottom.
The ball is in the school system’s court. We’ll see what, if anything, gets done with it.
