Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology

Based on Wikipedia: Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology

The High School That Launched a Satellite

On November 19, 2013, at 8:15 in the evening, a rocket lifted off from Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia's Eastern Shore. Tucked inside was a small cube, about the size of a grapefruit, built entirely by high school students. When it reached orbit and began transmitting, TJ3SAT became the first satellite ever launched into space that was constructed by teenagers.

The students who built it attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a public magnet school in Fairfax County, Virginia. In the world of elite American high schools, Thomas Jefferson—known universally as "TJ"—occupies a peculiar position. It has been ranked the number one public high school in the United States. Its students routinely score in the 99th percentile on standardized tests. Its alumni populate the upper echelons of technology companies, research universities, and government agencies.

But TJ is also a flashpoint for some of the most contentious debates in American education: Who gets access to elite public schooling? How should we define merit? And what happens when efforts to diversify a school collide with accusations of discrimination?

Origins in the Reagan Era

The story begins in 1983, when Fairfax County's superintendent William Burkholder started sketching plans for a science-focused high school. The timing was not coincidental. America was in the grip of anxiety about falling behind in technology and manufacturing. The Reagan administration had released "A Nation at Risk," a report warning that American schools were drowning in "a rising tide of mediocrity." Japan seemed poised to dominate the future of electronics and automobiles.

Burkholder announced his plans in January 1984. Six months later, the school board selected the existing Thomas Jefferson High School—a conventional public school built in 1964—as the location for the new magnet program. The building would keep its name but transform its mission entirely.

What made TJ unusual from the start was its funding model. Yes, it received money from the state and county. But the business community contributed around three million dollars before the school even opened. Hazleton Laboratories, Honeywell, AT&T, Dominion Energy, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, and Xerox donated equipment and cash. The defense and technology industries, clustered around the Pentagon and the nascent tech corridor along the Dulles Toll Road, saw a direct pipeline of talent.

Virginia Governor Charles Robb designated TJ as a regional Governor's School, which meant students from surrounding jurisdictions could attend. Arlington, Loudoun, and Prince William counties joined in, along with the independent cities of Fairfax and Falls Church. This regional structure remains in place today.

TJ opened in fall 1985 with 400 ninth-graders and 125 seniors, selected from 1,200 applicants. From day one, getting in was harder than getting into most colleges.

What Makes TJ Different

To understand TJ, you need to understand what happens inside its walls.

Every freshman participates in something called IBET, which stands for Integrated Biology, English, and Technology. The name sounds like corporate jargon, but the concept is genuinely innovative. Instead of treating biology as separate from writing as separate from computer skills, teachers coordinate so that students might analyze genetic data, write about their findings, and present them using technology—all as part of a single integrated project. The point is to show fourteen-year-olds that knowledge doesn't come in discrete, disconnected boxes.

The real action, though, happens in senior year. Every student must complete an original research project. Not a term paper. Not a book report. Actual research, the kind that gets published in journals and presented at academic conferences.

Students work in one of nine specialized labs: Neuroscience, Computer Systems, Energy Systems, Biotechnology, Automation and Robotics, Chemical Analysis, Oceanography and Geophysical Systems, Prototyping and Engineering Materials, and Quantum Physics and Optics. Some students secure mentorships with professionals at nearby research institutions or corporations, conducting experiments outside the typical school environment.

The year culminates in tjSTAR—the Thomas Jefferson Science and Technology Advanced Research symposium—where students present their findings. Imagine hundreds of seventeen-year-olds explaining their investigations into bacterial resistance, neural networks, or quantum entanglement. Some of these projects lead to patents. Some get published in peer-reviewed journals. A not-insignificant number contribute to actual scientific knowledge.

A Supercomputer in the Basement

In 1988, a team of TJ students won an ETA-10P supercomputer by placing in a national competition called SuperQuest. This was not a metaphorical prize or a software simulation. It was an actual supercomputer, the kind that at the time would have been the envy of most universities.

The ETA-10P met an ignominious end in the 1990s when a roof leak damaged it. But in 2002, Cray Incorporated—one of the most storied names in supercomputing, founded by Seymour Cray, the "father of supercomputing"—donated a replacement: an SV1 supercomputer that the students named Seymour in his honor. As of 2024, it sits on display in the computer systems lab, a monument to what high school students can do when given serious tools.

The school has also received significant grants from Sun Microsystems, including one for $388,048 that was written by students themselves. That money paid for workstations, servers, and thin clients distributed throughout the school. The technology has evolved over the years—those Sun Ray terminals eventually gave way to Linux-based thin clients—but the underlying philosophy remains: give students access to professional-grade equipment and see what happens.

What happens, often, is remarkable.

The Satellite Program

The satellite project that culminated in the 2013 launch began years earlier, in 2006, when Orbital Sciences Corporation donated a CubeSat Kit to TJ's Systems Engineering course. A CubeSat is a miniaturized satellite, typically a cube measuring ten centimeters on each side. The format was developed at Stanford and California Polytechnic in the late 1990s as a way to make space accessible to universities and research institutions that couldn't afford traditional satellite programs.

The students spent years designing, building, and testing their satellite. They had to meet the same rigorous standards as professional aerospace engineers—space doesn't care about your age or your excuses. When TJ3SAT finally reached orbit, it carried a four-watt transmitter operating on amateur radio frequencies and a text-to-speech module. Anyone with the right equipment could send an ASCII-encoded message to the satellite and hear it broadcast back from space.

The school didn't stop there. A second satellite, called TJREVERB, launched aboard a SpaceX rocket on November 26, 2022. This one took six years to complete, a timeline extended by the COVID-19 pandemic. REVERB was deployed from the International Space Station a month after launch and is designed to test Iridium satellite radio communications. Amateur radio operators around the world help track its position through crowdsourcing.

Two satellites, built by teenagers. It sounds impossible until you remember that the teenagers in question attend a school specifically designed to make the impossible routine.

The Numbers

By conventional metrics, TJ produces extraordinary results.

The average SAT score for the graduating class of 2020 was 1528 out of 1600. The average ACT score was 34.5 out of 36. To put that in perspective, a 1528 places a student in roughly the 99th percentile nationally. Nearly every TJ student outscores nearly every other student in America.

In 2014, students took 3,864 Advanced Placement exams. Over 97 percent earned a score of 3, 4, or 5—the scores that typically earn college credit. In 2007, TJ had the highest-performing students worldwide in AP Calculus BC, AP Chemistry, AP French Language, AP Government and Politics, and AP U.S. History among schools with more than 800 students in grades ten through twelve.

U.S. News and World Report ranked TJ the best public high school in America in 2021 and 2022. Newsweek named it the top high school for three consecutive years starting in 2014. The Intel Science Talent Search—one of the most prestigious science competitions for high school students—regularly includes TJ students among its semifinalists: fourteen in 2007, fifteen in 2009, thirteen in 2010, and seven in 2024.

When President Barack Obama wanted to sign the America Invents Act—a major reform of U.S. patent law—he chose to do it at TJ. The date was September 16, 2011. The symbolism was clear: this school represents America's innovative future.

The Admissions Controversy

Here is where the story gets complicated.

From its earliest years, TJ's student body did not reflect the demographics of the region it served. Black and Hispanic students were significantly underrepresented. After the first few graduating classes, Fairfax County implemented a race-based affirmative action program for the classes of 1997 through 2002. The program worked, after a fashion—minority enrollment increased. But legal challenges to similar programs elsewhere made the county nervous, and they ended it.

The effects were immediate. The share of Black and Hispanic students dropped from 9.4 percent in the 1997-98 school year to 3.5 percent in 2003-04. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, these numbers remained stubbornly low.

In 2012, an advocacy group called the Coalition of the Silence, led by former school board member Tina Hone, joined with the local NAACP chapter to file a civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education. They alleged that TJ discriminated against Black, Hispanic, and disabled students. The Office of Civil Rights opened an investigation.

Then came 2020.

The school board made sweeping changes to the admissions process. They eliminated the application fee. They increased the number of admitted students from around 480 to 550. Most significantly, they eliminated the entrance exam entirely and replaced it with a "holistic review" that considered essays, problem-solving assessments, grade point average, and "experience factors" including whether students were economically disadvantaged, English language learners, or special education students. Each middle school in the region was allocated seats equal to 1.5 percent of its eighth-grade population.

The demographic shift was dramatic. The proportion of Black and Hispanic students admitted jumped from 4.52 percent to 18.36 percent. The proportion of Asian American students dropped from 73.05 percent to 54.36 percent. Female students also increased, from 41.80 percent to 46 percent, and then to 55.45 percent the following year.

The Lawsuit

In March 2021, a group called the Coalition for TJ sued the Fairfax County School Board. They argued that the 2020 changes, while facially neutral, were specifically designed to reduce Asian American enrollment and therefore constituted illegal discrimination.

The Pacific Legal Foundation, a libertarian legal organization that has challenged affirmative action programs across the country, represented the plaintiffs. In February 2022, Judge Claude Hilton of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled in the Coalition's favor and ordered the school to return to its previous admissions process.

The school board appealed. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay, allowing the new admissions process to continue while the case proceeded. When the Coalition asked the Supreme Court to vacate the stay, the Court declined.

The Fourth Circuit heard arguments in September 2022 and issued its decision in May 2023. By a two-to-one vote, the appeals court reversed the district court and upheld the new admissions system. The majority found that the plaintiffs had not proven discriminatory intent.

The Coalition appealed to the Supreme Court. In February 2024, the Court declined to hear the case. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented from the denial, indicating they would have taken the case.

The new admissions system remains in place.

Other Controversies

Admissions was not the only source of turmoil in the 2020s.

In December 2022, reports emerged that for at least five years, some students who had been named National Merit Scholarship Commended Scholars had not been notified of their achievement until months after the school received the information—too late for students to include the honor on their college applications. A lawyer named Shawnna Yashar, whose son was among the affected students, called it "theft by the state."

School officials initially claimed it was a "one-time human error." But investigations revealed the problem extended beyond TJ to at least seventeen schools across Fairfax County. Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares launched a civil rights investigation. Governor Glenn Youngkin proposed legislation requiring immediate notification of merit awards to parents and students.

Separately, it emerged that between 2014 and 2021, TJ's Partnership Fund—the same structure that had channeled corporate donations since the school's founding—had received $3.6 million from entities linked to the Chinese Communist Party. In exchange, the school had provided its intellectual property and curriculum materials. The revelation added to growing concerns about Chinese influence in American educational institutions.

In October 2024, Principal Ann Bonitatibus resigned. In an email to parents, she said she had "pursued and accepted" a "promotion" to Fairfax County Public Schools' Human Resources department. The characterization drew widespread skepticism. She was replaced in January 2025 by Michael Mukai, himself a TJ alumnus.

The Broader Questions

TJ sits at the intersection of several of America's most contested debates about education.

There is the question of whether public schools should have selective admissions at all. Critics argue that concentrating resources and talented students in a single institution deprives other schools of the peers and funding that would lift all boats. Defenders counter that gifted students deserve an educational environment suited to their abilities, just as athletes deserve competitive sports programs and musicians deserve serious orchestras.

There is the question of how to define merit. Is it test scores? Grades? Essays? Problem-solving ability? Some combination? And who decides the weights? When TJ was test-focused, it produced a student body that was overwhelmingly Asian American. When it shifted to holistic review, the demographics changed dramatically. Both systems claim to identify the most deserving students. They cannot both be right—or perhaps they are both right, measuring different kinds of merit.

There is the question of what these schools are for. If the purpose is to identify and cultivate exceptional individual talent, then creaming the top students from a six-county region makes sense. If the purpose is to improve educational outcomes across a diverse democracy, then perhaps that concentration is counterproductive.

And there is the uncomfortable question of what happens when different disadvantaged groups are pitted against each other. The 2020 changes benefited Black and Hispanic students while reducing opportunities for Asian Americans—many of whom are themselves the children of immigrants, themselves members of a minority group with its own history of discrimination in America.

The School Today

Whatever one thinks of the controversies, the school continues to operate.

Students still build satellites. They still conduct original research in quantum physics and neuroscience. They still score in the 99th percentile on standardized tests. The wind ensemble has been invited to the Music for All National Concert Band Festival in Indianapolis five times: 1997, 2000, 2013, 2017, and 2025.

The building itself underwent ninety million dollars in renovations between 2013 and 2017, adding research labs, internet cafes, three-dimensional art galleries, a black box theater, and a dome reminiscent of Thomas Jefferson's Monticello. The reference to the school's namesake is deliberate. Jefferson believed in an "aristocracy of talent and virtue," drawn from all ranks of society, that would be educated to lead the republic. Whether TJ fulfills that vision—or betrays it—depends on whom you ask.

To get in, students must be enrolled in Algebra 1 or higher in eighth grade and maintain a minimum 3.5 grade point average. They submit essays, complete a problem-solving assessment, and are evaluated on socioeconomic factors. Admissions officers see only identification numbers, not names, races, or genders. Each middle school gets a set allocation of seats; remaining seats go to the highest-evaluated applicants from the entire pool.

The current principal is Mike Mukai. The current enrollment draws from six jurisdictions across Northern Virginia. The current debate about what the school should be, and who should attend, shows no signs of resolution.

But somewhere in orbit, a satellite built by teenagers continues to circle the Earth, transmitting messages in a synthetic voice, indifferent to the arguments below.