TJ Success Wilting, Some Parents Say

Report Faults Required Course Load

In an article for Thomas Jefferson High's newspaper, Heather Burrell and Lauren Ruth wrote about the school's slipping Intel contest results. (Kevin Clark -- The Washington Post)

Many people believe that Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology is the best school in America.

Its average SAT score is 1482. Last month, the College Board said Jefferson had the highest success rate in eight college-level Advanced Placement tests in science, math, English, government and foreign language, far ahead of the nation's other large high schools, public or private.

But no educational institution is perfect, and these days, some parents and students are wondering if the famous Fairfax County magnet school is losing its edge.

A large chart in the latest issue of the student newspaper, TJ Today, shows a drop in Jefferson's success in the Intel Science Talent Search, the Super Bowl of high school science, from 15 semifinalists in 1999 to five this year. And it had no finalists this time, while its Maryland rival, Montgomery Blair High School, had four -- tops in the nation.

At a school that has been seen as a model for education of gifted students for two decades, the news has not been well received. Some parents say they are beginning to wonder if it is the best place for their children. A parents' report is suggesting that the school has too many required courses and does not give students enough time for independent research. A Jefferson chemistry teacher with legendary success in producing Intel semifinalists has retired to Florida, saying he did not know of any other faculty members willing to work that hard.

"Members of the Jefferson community are deeply concerned by the performance of Jefferson, a school specifically geared towards the sciences, in recent years of the contest," sophomores Heather Burrell and Lauren Ruth wrote in their front-page TJ Today story revealing the slump.

Jefferson partisans say that the school often suffers from the popular urge to tweak any big winner, be it the New York Yankees, Microsoft or Donald Trump. And some Jefferson educators say the critics put too much emphasis on contests where success is more a measure of the judging peculiarities and luck than the quality of the schools attended by the contestants.

"How do we measure the success of our school?" asked Jefferson geosystems and physics teacher Jim Jarvis. "Intel contest results alone? Do we examine SAT scores, National Merit numbers, admission rates to certain select colleges and universities? Do we look at raw numbers or trends over several years?. . . . Certainly, to isolate one measure and not mention the others would be a caricature of narrowness."

The declining Intel success appears to have had no impact on the school's popularity. This year, 2,800 students in seven Northern Virginia jurisdictions have applied for 500 places in next September's freshman class. New labs and classrooms will soon be under construction to allow for enrollment to expand from 1,600 to 2,000 because of the demand.

Elizabeth Lodal, the school's principal since 2000, said she was not told about a fault-finding report being circulated by three parents until a teacher told her about it. Jefferson parents tend to be as self-confident as the students, and Lodal said she was accustomed to being told that "the school does not know what it is doing."

The parent report, an 11-page draft written for -- but not yet submitted to -- the school's Parent Teacher Association's curriculum advisory committee, was the work of two scientists, Frederick M. Mako and Pehr Pehrsson, and a former lawyer, Louise Epstein, who is president of the Fairfax County Association for the Gifted.

It discussed possible explanations for the decline in Intel winners, where 300 national semifinalists get $1,000 scholarships, 40 finalists get $5,000 scholarships and the top winner -- to be selected in Washington next month -- gets a $100,000 scholarship based on the quality of their research projects.

"Several TJ teachers, who were known for nurturing highly gifted students and producing many Intel semi-finalists over the years, left TJ," the report said. "TJ students were required to take four years of social studies rather than three, which reduced their ability to take advanced science and other courses."

Chemistry teacher John Lieberman, who retired three years ago after shepherding more than 50 students to Intel semifinalist scholarships, was mentioned by several parents as a key to the school's earlier success. Some suggested that he had left because of lack of support from Lodal, but reached at his home in Naples, Fla., he said that school administrators gave him all the support they could and that what really wore him down was the pressure of his success.

"I felt, no matter what I did, it was never enough," he said. He said it was difficult to find teachers willing to put in the time to help so many students. He often spent his entire summer working with students preparing for contests.

Some Jefferson students said they thought fewer course requirements would help not only Intel contestants, but also students with interests beyond science. Burrell, a sophomore, said she must take science and other courses every summer to make room on her schedule for the journalism classes she loves. "I think it would be more beneficial to students if they didn't have to take summer school and could instead have a summer internship or travel the globe," she said.

Lodal said that Jefferson's demanding course schedule was mostly in place when the school had many more Intel semifinalists and that the added fourth year of social studies was mandated by the county and the state. Some parents said, however, that it was easier for students to get out of some requirements in the past.

Brian J. Kennedy, director of the school's Chemical Analysis Research Laboratory, said: "Regardless of the number of required courses, TJ students have a very long day that for many starts early in the morning to beat the rush-hour traffic into school, then an eight-hour school day, maybe after school activities, then a possible long ride home, then a challenging homework load. If a student really wants to compete in Intel, then there are many opportunities for completing research, but the student needs to take a serious initiative from ninth grade through 12th grade."

The parents' draft report suggested that Jefferson might have suffered from a decline in the number of required science fair projects at the county's elementary and middle school gifted and talented centers, while that emphasis remained strong in Montgomery County's elementary and middle school gifted programs.

People on both sides of the Jefferson dispute said they were working to encourage students who wanted to try science fair projects.

"Research projects are a way to challenge students and spark interest," Jarvis said. "The science project contests are a subset of that. They have their place. But to my mind, they should not be a central focus, and they should not be used as a measure of an overall academic program."