National Merit Scholars

 

The National Merit Scholar Program is pure meritocracy in action.  Once upon a time I was a semi-finalist in this countrywide contest.  Once a young person scores high enough on the tests in this competitive program to be named a semi-finalist, then the essential criterion for award of moneys becomes need.  This is an excellent process by any measure for judgment.

Semi-finalists who do not receive significant funding in this program are the targets for scholarship money and management training programs from all across the great world that waits beyond high school graduation.

It is interesting to compare the number of semi-finalists in this article who are from very expensive private schools to the number of those who, for example, attend Thomas Jefferson High School in Northern Virginia.  This is a public school.  pl

http://washingtonexaminer.com/local/2011/09/areas-national-merit-semifinalists

Comments

[charlie]

Thank god for Asian people!

[Norbert M Salamon]

Colonel:

would it be possible for you, Sir, to mark the private schools on the list? And perhaps indicate the size of their senior class, for those of us who are not familiar with with the schools cited in the list.
Thank you.

[William R. Cumming]

I believe it is high school juniors not seniors that take the Merit Exam!

[turcopolier]

NMS

I don't have time for that but as an example, "Sidwell friends" is private, "Quaker run," and thought of as one of the better schools in the country. it has about 250 seniors in the upper school.

TJ High School has about 400 seniors and is public. (chartered) pl

[Norbert M Salamon]

Thank you Colonel

[William]

My younger son missed the cut by ONE point. Argh.

Older son is a 2009 TJ graduate. It's important to make the distinction--it is "public" in that it's not private, but it is a Governor's School, drawing students from a multi-county/multi-city region, and very selective. SAT score averages in the high 2200s. The demographics are now such that the younger classes at TJ are now majority Asian.

http://www.tjhsst.edu/

[Pan]

My son was just admitted to TJ on his second try as a Froshmore. It is a unique place, and even mure intense than The Bronx High School of Science, which I attended.

[scott s.]

Probably the best measure of academic rigor for HS? At any rate, I think we all agree TJ is not your typical high school.

[mbrenner]

A few words in regard to the mention that Thomas Jefferson is a Charter school. I hope that that fact is not taken as evidence that charter schools are the answer to what ails American education. A select student body recruited from across the state would produce the same results whatever the administrative structure. The number 2 school in the United States was Stuyvesant High School in New York. It is a public school run by the NYC Board of Education and all its teachers are unionized. The same for the Bronx High School of Science which is nearly as accomplished academically.

The charter school movement is a fraud - based on dogmatic ideology. Diane Ravitch was the philosophical and intellectual god mother to the charter school movement. She now has broken completely with it and its ideology. She did so in a book that appeared a year or so ago and in articles in the New York Review of Books (including the current issue). Her grounds? One, the record shows that the performance of students in charter schools overall is 3% Inferior to that of students in public schools. Cherry-picking students (no trouble-makers)veiled that truth for awhile. Two, they are more EXPENSIVE to the taxpayer. Three, they undercut the integrative role of the public high school that has been so crucial to creating Americans. Just another slick sales job by those who profit from a fad - whether financially, politically or ideologically. These faddists include Barack Obama and Arne Duncan. Here is some info on the two NYC schools.

STUYVESANT has contributed to the education of several Nobel laureates, winners of the Fields Medal and the Wolf Prize, and a host of other accomplished alumni. In recent years, it has had the second highest number of National Merit Scholarship semi-finalists, behind Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, in Alexandria, Virginia,.[75] Over the past nine years (2002–2010), Stuyvesant has produced 103 semi-finalists and 13 finalists on the Intel Science Talent Search, the second most of any secondary school in the United States (after Maryland's Montgomery Blair High School).[76]
For most of the 20th century, the student body at Stuyvesant was heavily Jewish. A significant influx of Asian students began in the 1970s. For the 2010 academic year, the student body was approximately 69.3% Asian and 25.7% Caucasian, 1.7% African American and 2.9% Hispanic

The BRONX HIGH SCHOOL OF SCIENCE counts seven Nobel Prize-winning physicists among its graduates:
• Leon N. Cooper 1947, Brown University awarded the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physics
• Sheldon L. Glashow 1950, Boston University, awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics[45]
• Steven Weinberg 1950, University of Texas at Austin, awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Physics
• Melvin Schwartz 1949, Columbia University, awarded the 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics[46]
• Russell A. Hulse 1966, Princeton University, awarded the 1993 Nobel Prize in Physics[47]
• H. David Politzer 1966, California Institute of Technology, awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physics
• Roy J. Glauber 1941, Harvard University, awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics[48]
No other secondary school in the United States has as many alumni who have won Nobel Prizes.[11] If Bronx Science were a country, it would be tied at 23rd with Spain for number of Nobel laureates (as of 2008). Were Bronx Science a university, it would be tied for 58th place, matching UNC-Chapel Hill, UMD and McGill.

Six alumni have won the National Medal of Science, the nation's highest scientific honor bestowed by the U.S. President and thus far awarded to 425 scientists and engineers. Bronx Science also counts among its graduates twenty-nine current members of the United States National Academy of Sciences (NAS), an honor attained by only about 2,000 American scientists. Twenty-two Bronx Science graduates are current members of the United States National Academy of Engineering (NAE), ten are current members of the Institute of Medicine (IOM), and at least one is a current member of the Royal Society of Canada.

[Pan]

TJ, Stuyvesant and Bronx Science are all public schools with very selective admissions criteria for applicants. Bx Sci and Stuy admission is based on an entrance exam only. TJ has an entrance exam plus consideration of school GPA and a written application (with essays). It's really a misnomer to say TJ is a charter school. It is run by the Fairfax County Public Schools, but accepts students from adjacents counties because it is a state Governor's school (hence the charter). In all aspects it is a public school funded by local and state taxes.

[Fred]

mbrenner,

Thank you for this response.
" ... they undercut the integrative role of the public high school that has been so crucial to creating Americans...."

I'm coming to the belief that the last thing our political and economic elite want is 'Americans'. They want pliant employees and consumers, not Americans.

[William]

Evidently the President was at TJ this morning to sign the America Invents Act....

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