Metamorphosis: from statistics into cockroaches, a response to Professor Cohen's a study of invidious racial discrimination in admissions at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology: Monty Python and Frank Kafka meet a probit regression.

• Author: Domenech, Daniel A.
• Position: Response to Lloyd Cohen, Albany Law Review, vol. 66, p. 447, 2003

In a recent Albany Law Review symposium issue regarding diversity, (1) Dr. Lloyd Cohen argued that the process used by the Fairfax County Public Schools to select students for admission to the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology ("TJ") results in invidious racial discrimination. (2) He claimed that the TJ admissions process, even if facially neutral, is calculated to admit substantially more African-American students than would be chosen on merit alone, in violation of both the Equal Protection Clause of the United States Constitution and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (3) Cohen bases his argument on the result of a regression analysis of admissions data for the TJ class of 2006, to which TJ offered admission to 449 students, ten of whom are African-American. (4)

As Superintendent of the Fairfax County Public Schools, I must respond to the offensive and untrue implication that the African-American students at TJ are less qualified than their white counterparts. The regression analysis conducted by Cohen is fundamentally flawed. Careful analysis of the data demonstrates clearly that there is no meaningful difference between the test scores and qualifications of the African-American students and those of most of the white students admitted to TJ.

1. FLAWS IN COHEN'S ANALYSES

   The TJ admissions pool consists of 800 semifinalists, all of whom are qualified to attend the school. Relying on the fact that some African-American students who were admitted ranked lower in the pool of 800 than some white students who were rejected, Cohen asserts that his regression analysis shows that the differences in academic merit between these two groups were so disparate that the only plausible explanation is that the admissions committee used race as the predominant factor in making its selections.

   Cohen's article is rife with statistical and analytical errors, (5) but the most significant flaw is his failure to account for the standard error of measurement ("SEM") when considering the students' performance on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (6) as well as their resulting rankings. This failure fatally undermines his conclusion that significant differences exist between the academic merit of the African-American students admitted to TJ and white applicants who were rejected.

   1. Taking the SEM into Account

      The SEM is a fundamental statistical concept, universally considered by professional researchers when considering student performance on assessments. It represents an estimate of the error around an individual's score. If an individual were to take a test multiple times, that person's...