Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion In Defense of NYC Elite Public High Schools

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Those of us who believe in the merit principle, and who have seen firsthand how these schools can improve the lives of the students who attend them, should raise their voice in defence of the current system.

That would include me. In early 1961, when I was a ninth grader at a Bronx junior high school, a teacher suggested that I take the entrance exam for the Bronx High School of Science, one of the city’s elite high schools (both then and now). Like most of the other kids who were encouraged to apply, I was a Jewish kid from either a working-class or middle-class household. Few of us had parents who’d attended college, and we had all seemed to have a knack for science.

Back then, there was no such thing as “test prep”: You simply showed up, took the test, and went home. Several months thereafter, some of us were informed we’d been accepted to “Science,” as the school was known colloquially. My attendance would require an hour of travel by two buses, rather than a short walk to the local high school, but I found the idea exciting. My parents encouraged me, and I entered 10th grade at the Bronx High School of Science in September, 1961.

My class of 700 or so was at least 80% Jewish. Perhaps a quarter were girls. The one constant among all students was unusually high intelligence. Of all the institutions I’ve gone on to attend or work at—including Harvard Medical School, where I served as dean—this was the place that featured, on average, the smartest people. The main currency in this realm was academic performance: Grades were published to two decimal points in the school newspaper twice per year (I could have done without that), and our heroes were the math team rather than the basketball team (we had no football team).

Like a good minor-league baseball player who faces a true major-league pitcher for the first time, I quickly realized that many of my classmates possessed brute intelligence that was simply on a higher level than my own—especially in math and physics. It was a safe school full of well-behaved bookworms. And not everyone pursued science. The class produced high achievers in every sphere—including future poets, writers, musicians and lawyers. One of ’64 classmates was famed mathematician Gregory Chaitin—after whom is named the Chaitin constant in algorithmic information theory. (He sat next to me on my first day of class in 1961. He was the one writing out long equations for fun during English class.) Another was science writer Dava Sobel. In all, the school’s alumni have earned eight Nobel Prizes, eight Pulitzer prizes, two Turing awards and, yes, Two Emmys. (I haven’t won any of these prizes.)

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