The best American K-12 schools, many of them in the New York City metro area, are fully competitive with their peers around the world, even in math and science — though experts often tell us otherwise.
Take “Schools We Can Envy” by Diane Ravitch in the New York Review of Books last year. Ravitch, a professor at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, penned a two-part paean to Pasi Sahlberg’s book “Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?”
Huh? Later in the year, we got the results from the 2011 Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. Finnish eighth-graders scored 514 in math, while America’s eighth-graders achieved a 509, a statistically insignificant gap. And eighth-graders in Massachusetts, the nation’s top-performing state, registered a 561, while those in Connecticut scored a 518.
A similarly dubious claim came from a former president of Columbia University’s Teachers College in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last November. In “The Suburban Education Gap,” Arthur Levine warned that suburban American students will have difficulty competing in a global economy that “prizes expertise in math, science, engineering, technology, language and critical thinking.”
This January, we got the first-round results for the 2013 Intel Science Talent Search, the nation’s most prestigious high-school contest. A full 117 of the 300 semifinalists came from public schools in metropolitan New York — 52 public-school semifinalists from Long Island, 26 from Westchester, 17 each from New York City and New Jersey, three from southwestern Connecticut and two from Rockland County.
The competition was sponsored by Westinghouse until Intel took over in 1998. Between 1942 and 1990, as Joseph Berger notes in “The Young Scientists: America’s Future and the Winning of the Westinghouse,” nine of the top 10 high schools for producing semifinalists of this science/math contest were public schools in New York City.
Sadly, only Stuyvesant and Bronx Science are still upholding this proud tradition of the city’s public high schools. Brooklyn Tech and other local powerhouses have been displaced by metro-area suburban schools like Ward Melville in Suffolk County, Byram Hills and Ossining in Westchester, and Paul Schreiber, Great Neck North, Great Neck South and John F. Kennedy high schools in Nassau.
Still, it’s an impressive accomplishment by the two city schools: At Bronx Science, 46 percent of students receive free or reduced-price lunch; at Stuyvesant, 42 percent. Yet these less-well-off kids at the city’s two most prominent specialized high schools are still outperforming the best students in surrounding affluent communities.
And, yes, top US students do just fine in global competition, too. Intel’s annual International Science and Engineering Fair, supervised by the Society for Science and the Public, is being held May 12-17 in Phoenix, Ariz. According to spokeswoman Sarah Wood, about two-thirds of the 1,600 finalists are American, including 88 from New York state.
Long Island’s public high schools have 41 finalists; Westchester’s and New York City’s have 18 each.
Of course, there’s plenty of room for improvement in our nation’s schools. Perhaps the scholars who downplay the achievements of our best are simply trying to rally us to do better. But it’s clear that the goal shouldn’t be to meddle with our top schools — but to push other schools to emulate them.
Mark Schulte is a retired New York City public-school teacher.