Contest Sheds Light on L.A. Method of Teaching Science

Eighteen-year-old Bill Li-Chien Tsai is, in many respects, a typical teen-ager. He wears white K-Swiss court shoes to school, listens to rock music and is looking forward to the senior prom.

But there is something unique about the senior from the Van Nuys High Math/Science Magnet School.

Tsai was the only student in the Los Angeles Unified School District to be one of the nation’s 300 semifinalists in the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search. He was also one of the 40 finalists in the national research competition, which offers finalists college scholarships totaling $89,500.

By contrast, 65 Westinghouse semifinalists came from two New York City schools: Stuyvesant High in Manhattan and the Bronx High School of Science. Four Stuyvesant students are finalists, the largest number in the country from a single school. Two Bronx Science student were finalists.

The disparity between the number of New York and Los Angeles Westinghouse award winners illustrates a difference between East and West Coast educational philosophies and the role academic competition plays in education.

New York Tradition

New York has a long tradition of skimming off the cream of its public school students and placing them in specialty high schools, where the focus ranges from performing arts to science and math.

In the specialty schools, they are encouraged to enter national scholastic contests. The schools’ administrators say they feel pressured to make sure large numbers of students do well in the contests in order to justify the highly competitive selection and educational process.

Los Angeles, for the most part, has clung to the concept of the comprehensive high school, where students of all capabilities are taught a variety of subjects and skills. Entering local, regional or national competition has traditionally been left up to the students, teachers and counselors of each school.

Although Los Angeles became involved in specialized secondary education when it created magnet schools in the 1970s, it did so to promote voluntary desegregation. Magnet schools stress a special subject, such as computer science, or create a special learning environment, as in a school stressing fundamentals, where the social and academic atmosphere is more structured.

“We don’t give entrance tests,” said Joan Martin, magnet program coordinator at Van Nuys High. “The students who enter the math/science magnet are self-selecting. The magnet program was created to be part of the integration program. We’re not trying to be an elitist school.”

Educators on both coasts are quick to say that neither philosophy is superior to the other. Many elements--the city’s geography, socioeconomic background of the district’s students and administrative leadership--all play a major part in influencing the thrust of a school district’s philosophy.

“I’ll put any of our science students up against any of New York’s science students and I bet you won’t be able to tell a bit of difference in the quality of either student’s education,” said Paul Possemato, assistant superintendent of the Los Angeles school district in charge of the senior high school division.

In explaining the strong showing by New Yorkers in the Westinghouse contest, he cited the long relationship between the New York schools and the competition.

“Education ideas and concepts are not simple to transplant,” said Gaspa Fabbricante, principal of Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School. “The availability of rapid transit helps us to attract top students, no matter where in the metropolitan area they live. A student living in Queens is only 20 minutes from us.

“In Los Angeles, it is very different,” he continued. “A long drive on the freeway, even if the kid has his own car, could deter a student from attending a school such as ours if it was on the other side of the city.”

2 Students’ Paths

Tracing the paths of Tsai and Shin Kuo, a 17-year-old Bronx Science student, to the Westinghouse finals reflects the difference in the educational philosophies of the two school districts.

Tsai is a native of Taiwan who has lived in the United States for five years. He is as comfortable talking about hypersonic travel at Mach 5 speeds as he is describing the music of Genesis, his favorite rock group.

A resident of Northridge, Tsai was a 10th-grader when he noticed a flyer about the Westinghouse competition on a classroom bulletin board. But it wasn’t until two years later that he gave serious thought about entering the competition. That was after Tsai, working with a friend, had won second place in the Rockwell Computer Contest.

“Bill came to me and asked if we could write a letter on the school’s letterhead to the Westinghouse people saying that we had a student interested in entering,” recalled Carole Spence, an assistant principal at Van Nuys High.

For his Westinghouse project, Tsai developed a method for improving the efficiency of aerospace vehicles--conventional aircraft and spacecraft--that fly faster than the speed of sound. He had to use time from his independent study period and work after school and on weekends.

“My brother and sister thought I was crazy for spending so much time on the project,” Tsai said with a chuckle. “They said that I should pay more attention to my school work.”

Self-Motivation Necessary

Los Angeles city school officials say that students interested in entering research competitions such as Westinghouse have to be very self-motivated to find out about the competition and set aside time to work on their projects.

“We are trying to do a better job disseminating information about these competitions,” said Gerald Garner, secondary science instructional specialist for the Los Angeles school district. “But it is still up to the individual school on how competition information is given out.”

The system worked differently for Westinghouse finalist Shin Kuo.

Also a native of Taiwan, he was placed in a structured science program at Bronx Science when he entered the ninth grade. The school places an emphasis on research.

All Bronx Science ninth-graders spend a semester in a double period laboratory setting as an introduction to microbiology. By the 11th grade, some students have been directed into independent research projects in which they work in some of New York City’s most prestigious medical center laboratories. They also are offered lengthy periods for chemistry and physics labs.

“We have 70-80 students at a time working on independent projects and many of these projects turn into Westinghouse entries,” said Milton Kopelman, principal of Bronx Science. “We try to establish an atmosphere that stresses problem solving and inquiry. We never force any students to enter contests or to take on independent projects, but with the nature of our students, there is little we can do to stop them.”

Bronx Science also boasts one of the nation’s few Westinghouse clubs, an extracurricular organization for students who want to participate in the competition.

And there is an unofficial rivalry between Bronx Science and Stuyvesant over the Westinghouse competition.

Kopelman and Fabbricante, who say they are good friends and golfing partners, concede that the intracity rivalry helps to promote the number of entries and the importance the two schools place on the Westinghouse contest.

Dorothy Schiver, director of Science Search Inc., the Washington-based organization that runs the Westinghouse contest, said she is not surprised that Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, with their legacy of strong science programs, often dominate the competition.

Increased Entries

The trend that surprises Schiver is the increased number of entries and semifinalists from states that have had few winners in previous years. These states have put new emphasis--including higher allocations of public money--on high school education in science.

In Florida, for instance, the governor has made the improvement of secondary science education a priority, and the state had 19 semifinalists, the most it has had in the 44-year history of the competition.

California, with a larger population but less emphasis on improving science education, had 13 semifinalists. There is, however, a movement in California’s Department of Education to allocate more money and resources for science programs.

North Carolina had three West-inghouse semifinalists this year. All were students from the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in Durham. Established in 1981, this school recruits juniors and seniors from around the state and offers them free tuition, room and board for two years of intensive science study.

Van Nuys High’s Tsai doesn’t believe that the East Coast domination of the Westinghouse competition will come to an end soon.

“There is a difference between East Coat and West Coast,” Tsai said, recalling a science camp he attended in Ojai last summer. “When we had homework, the West Coast kids would say, ‘Let’s go to the pool first and do our homework later.’ The East Coast kids did their homework first and then went to the pool.”