The Changing Face of a Top High School

The Washington Post has written about an interesting development at our reigning America's Best High School. This fall, the freshman class at Thomas Jefferson High School in Virginia will be predominantly Asian-American for the first time in the magnet school's history. The incoming class is 45 percent Asian-American and 42 percent white.

The news further fuels the debate about how magnet schools pick their students and whether such schools are obligated to be representative of the communities that fund them. In Fairfax County, the suburban Washington, D.C., neighborhood where "TJ" is located, people of Asian descent make up only 16 percent of the population, according to census data.