Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott and his lieutenants should pop open the champagne: Two more graduates of the city’s public high schools just won Nobel Prizes.
Last week, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Dr. Robert Lefkowitz, a graduate of Bronx Science and Columbia’s undergraduate and medical schools, was the co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. He joins seven Bronx Science alumni who received the Physics Nobel.
Yesterday, the Economics Nobel was shared by Professor Alvin Roth of Harvard, a graduate of Martin Van Buren HS. This eastern Queens school has another Nobel laureate, physicist Frank Wilczek.
A recent Daily News article incorrectly stated that “roughly 30 city grads have won the award.” In fact, 42 graduates of New York City public high schools have won a Nobel Prize. Two other winners from the city attended Manhattan private schools (Physics laureate Murray Gell-Mann, a graduate of Columbia Grammar, and Economics laureate Robert Aumann, a graduate of the Rabbi Jacob Joseph School).
Bronx Science’s eight laureates lead the city, but Stuyvesant HS and James Madison HS have four each. Far Rockaway HS and Abraham Lincoln HS have three apiece.
Townsend Harris also has three — Herbert Hauptman (Chemistry), Julian Schwinger (Physics) and Kenneth Arrow (Economics).The school, which was the all-boys prep school for City College until Mayor Fiorello La Guardia foolishly closed it in 1942, was resurrected in Queens in 1984; it’s now that borough’s leading academic high school. (Jonas Salk, co-creator of the polio vaccine, is the most prominent Townsend Harris grad who didn’t win the Nobel.)
Nine of these laureates graduated from City College, two from Hunter College and one each from Brooklyn College, NYU, Brooklyn Poly and Cooper Union. An incredible 19 attended Columbia (undergraduate and/or graduate).
Three female graduates of NYC public high schools won the Nobel in Medicine: Rosalyn Sussman Yalow and Gertrude Elion (Walton HS) and Barbara McClintock (Erasmus Hall).
The breakdowns by discipline of the 44 New York City Nobel winners are: 17 for Physics, 14 for Medicine, six for Chemistry, six for Economics and one for Peace (Henry Kissinger, of George Washington HS).
By borough of the schools, it breaks down to: Brooklyn and The Bronx with 13 each, Manhattan with 11 and Queens with seven. (I counted Townsend Harris’ three laureates in Manhattan.)
Some 17 winners hail from the city’s specialized or elite high schools: eight from Bronx Science, four from Stuyvesant, three from Townsend Harris and two from Brooklyn Tech.
Which means that 25 other Nobelists attended neighborhood public high schools that didn’t have stringent entrance requirements.
That’s of interest in light of last month’s filing by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund of a civil-rights complaint against the city Department of Education for relying solely on a written test of math and English for entrance into Bronx Science, Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech and five smaller specialized schools.
Also of interest: New laureate Alvin Roth designed a system of high-school admissions for the city’s 80,000 public-school eighth-graders that is much fairer than the previous one.
The Department of Education should erect a monument on the grounds of its Tweed Courthouse headquarters, inscribed with the names of the 42 brilliant New Yorkers who graduated from city high schools and won the Nobel Prize — but leave plenty of space for more names to be added in the future.
Mark Schulte is a Bronx Science graduate and a retired city public schoolteacher.