Shooting for the Academic Stars

When the Soviet Union launched the first satellite into space, Americans were awestruck. Few would have guessed that now, just 50 years later, backpack-toting 16-year-olds would be taking their own space shots in high school science class. But in Fairfax County, Va., at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, "TJ" for short, that's exactly what's happening. Working in conjunction with Orbital Sciences Corp., a nearby tech company, students in Adam Kemp's Energy Systems class are designing their own state-of-the-art satellite, complete with a Web interface and voice digitizer that would allow science students at schools around the country to enter strings of text for broadcast.

"We want students getting their feet wet and muddy doing fun things with science in a vigorous way," says Principal Evan Glazer.

Building satellites is certainly a hands-on approach. But TJ is not, admittedly, your typical high school. Established in 1985 during Northern Virginia's population boom, TJ was designed with the area's emerging tech and science industries in mind. Tech corporations poured millions into the project. TJ, for its part, took the support and ran with it. Today, it tops our list of America's Best High Schools.

The building itself is remarkably unimpressive. With its chipped paint and trailers that serve as classrooms, it looks very much like many other public schools. That is, until you meet the students.

TJ draws applicants from across five counties and two cities in Northern Virginia, selecting 500 students from a pool of several thousand applicants. Admission is based primarily on a general achievement test and prior grades. To give a sense of student caliber: Of the 432 seniors in the Class of 2007, 158 were National Merit semifinalists, more than any other school in the nation. And the average student SAT score was a 2155 (on a 2400 scale). When they aren't shouldering their science-heavy course load, TJ students participate in a slew of extracurriculars, choosing from some 25 varsity sports and 85 clubs, including the Investment Club, the Neuroscience Society, the Entomology Club, and the Forensics Sciences Society.

People power. So the kids are smart, but what makes it a great school? The students come from the D.C. suburbs—an area with more Ph.D.'s per capita than practically anywhere else in the nation—thus many of them hail from highly educated, affluent families. And from this population, TJ collects the teen braniacs. So the important question becomes: How much educational value is added at TJ?

Well, high-powered peers are one asset. "They feed off each other and create a kind of synergy for thinking," says Glazer. Beyond that are specialized course offerings such as Artificial Intelligence, DNA Science II, and Advanced Optics with Research Applications. Matt Pearce, the mentorship coordinator, works with the school's science lab directors—whose expertise ranges from oceanography to microelectronics—to forge connections between students and some two dozen corporate, government, and university laboratories. These partner organizations—which include the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Naval Research Center, and the U.S. Naval Observatory among others—donate laboratory facilities, research space, and sometimes tutoring expertise. TJ even has a full-time fundraising director. One of the school's distinguishing features is the Senior Tech Lab, a capstone project in which students focus on a scientific area of interest, and their research culminates in a paper and presentation. Projects run the gamut, from building underwater robots to the chemistry of art preservation.

But if the sciences at TJ are strong, it's not at the expense of the humanities. "People look at our school's name on the front of the building and they focus on the 'Science and Technology' part, but they forget about the 'Thomas Jefferson' part," said Cathy Colglazier, humanities division manager. "Well, Thomas Jefferson was a Renaissance man: The way you live life fully is to study broadly!" And students do. The class listing reads like a college course catalog, with offerings in Latin, AP European history, globalization, and economics.

Students salivate for these opportunities, even though they often find the workload taxing. "The stress on a TJ kid is almost too much," says senior Ariel Lepon. "I'm really happy I'm here. This is the best place for me to be. But I wonder if I'd gone somewhere else, would I be this stressed out?" Another student responded that the pressure helps improve time management skills. "You fail or you figure it out," shrugs senior Marina Arnold. "And by fail, we mean B+," adds Lepon.

After they've graduated, many TJ alums keep up a network, and even if they lose touch, they say they know where to find one another. "Lots of TJ kids are running around elite academic institutions and also major new economy centers like Silicon Valley, New York, Washington, and Boston," says alum Andrew Winerman, class of 2000. He explains that TJ connections are like college connections, only perhaps deeper, because high school is even more formative and emotionally weighty than college for a lot of people.

Work harder. TJ does seem to work well for students and alums, but does it work well for the larger community? Some school districts are chagrined to lose their top talent to TJ, not to mention the roughly $8,000 per student in tax money for public schools. What about the economically disadvantaged? Admissions tests at TJ are based solely on academic merit, while minority enrollment remains at under 5 percent, with blacks and Hispanics conspicuously underrepresented.

Whatever the criticisms of TJ's admissions process, one thing is true: Once they get in, these kids work hard. And there's no better example of this than in their athletic programs. Unlike some private high schools that recruit athletic as well as academic talent, TJ can't rely on stars. The students find ways to win nevertheless. TJ particularly excels in endurance sports like cross country, crew, and swimming.

"We sweep everything," says senior Alexis Brown, who rows for the girls' crew team. "Some people think we must be cheating. But what they don't get is that we just work harder. We're passionate, and we work harder."

America's Best High Schools

There are more than 18,000 public high schools in the United States. What if you could take a snapshot of each one and capture, at a particular moment, what kinds of students were enrolled there and the caliber of the education provided them? If you were to collect these individual snapshots into one huge national yearbook, which high school would be chosen as "Most Likely to Succeed," meaning that it set the best example of how to prepare students to achieve their post-graduation goals?

We've attempted to answer that pivotal question in the following pages, our first ever ranking of America's Best High Schools. Using a formula produced in collaboration with School Evaluation Services, a K-12 data research and analysis business run by Standard & Poor's, we put high schools in 40 states through a three-step analysis. First, we measured how each school's students performed on state tests, adjusting for student circumstances. We next evaluated how well each school's disadvantaged students did. Finally, we looked at whether the school was successful in providing college-level coursework.

The 100 schools that did the best in this analysis earned gold medals. The next 405 schools were awarded silver medals, and an additional 1,086 schools earned bronze.

Like any good photograph, the details of the data gathered for this project reveal a number of fascinating stories. Most notable is the variety among the schools that have earned the highest honor. Our first-place winner, Thomas Jefferson High School in suburban Washington, D.C., picks its students from the children of the nation's leaders. Yet just 10 slots lower, Hidalgo High School on the border of Texas and Mexico has found success educating a student body comprising the children of challenged immigrants. And in Boston, the nation's oldest school carries on an exemplary tradition while a new charter school explores innovations such as housing tutors in dormitories on the third floor of its building.

A good high school can open worlds of opportunity for its students.