Classes for Future Nobel Winners : Education: Specialty schools have long offered innovative math and science programs for top-notch students. Now some are broadening their admission policies.

Ask any prominent American scientist or mathematician where he or she went to high school and you’re likely to hear one of two places: Bronx High School of Science or Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan.

Between them, these two New York public high schools have graduated half a dozen Nobel Prize winners. In their more than 100 years of operation, they have by most measures educated more top-echelon scientists and mathematicians than any other schools in the United States, public or private.

While these schools, with their innovative curricula and highly gifted students, have become a subject of enormous scrutiny and controversy in recent years because they systematically exclude the vast majority of students, there are many scientists and educators who extol high-powered specialty science high schools as one of the most important solutions to the nation’s growing problems in science and math.

Only by identifying “the best and the brightest students” in a city or region and giving them “heavy doses of science and math at an early age” can the nation hope “to avert a crisis in science and technology,” argued Nobel laureate Glenn T. Seaborg.

Seaborg, the son of poor, Swedish immigrants, began his scientific education at David Starr Jordan High School in Watts in the 1920s. He managed to rise above his humble educational beginnings to go on to be a member of the Manhattan Project, chancellor of UC Berkeley, chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and winner of the 1940 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery of plutonium. But his early schooling was not, he said, “the sort of beginning anyone can count on to produce a scientist or mathematician.”

Believing as Seaborg does that highly competitive specialty schools may be among the best and most reliable places to produce world-class researchers and inventors, many states over the last decade have been creating new schools modeled after Stuyvesant and Bronx Science.

In 1980, the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics, the country’s first public boarding school, opened in Durham. In 1982, another public boarding school, the Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts, opened in Natchitoches, La. In 1985, a regional public day school, the Thomas Jefferson High School, a Governor’s School for Science and Technology, opened in Alexandria, Va. on the outskirts of Washington. In 1986, the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy began operations in Auroa, Ill., outside Chicago.

Two years ago, the South Carolina Governor’s School for Science and Mathematics was created in Hartsville, S.C., and the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science started in Columbus, Miss. Just this fall, California opened its first public, competitive science and math high school, the California Academy of Mathematics and Science at Cal State Dominguez Hills, near Long Beach.

“These schools do not represent what’s going on in the rest of the country, but they do represent our best hope for the future,” said E. G. Sherburne Jr., publisher of Science News magazine and president of Science Service Inc., which administers the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, a prestigious nationwide competition for teen-age students of science.

“The reason these schools work is quite simple,” said Abe Baumel, who has been principal of Stuyvesant for more than two decades.

And despite what most people think, it has nothing to do with the qualifications of teachers or the quality of equipment or even the design of the curriculum.

“Look at this place,” Baumel said. “The building is as old and broken down as I am. We have one chemistry lab and one physics lab, and they are both in abominable shape. The equipment is older than I am--and in worse shape. The oak tables date back to 1904. The machine tools are so obsolete, they belong in the Smithsonian.”

The key to the success of a school is simply a matter of the quality of the student body.

“It’s the kids,” Baumel said. “They’re incredible. . . . There is a joke that it’s harder to get in here than it is to get into Harvard. But it’s no joke.

“When you bring a group of these kids together, when you get a critical mass of them in one place, magic starts to happen.”

While not wanting to dilute this magic in any way, many of the specialty schools--old as well as new--are trying to reach out to students who might not ordinarily be expected to excel in science and math.

Bronx Science, for example, has begun a special admissions programs for disadvantaged students and summer classes for students in regular public high schools who are interested in science and math, but who do not score high enough on entrance exams to be admitted to the regular academic program.

Thomas Jefferson has been trying to devise entirely new admissions criteria that emphasize motivation and grades rather than scores on standardized admissions tests. And the California Academy of Mathematics and Science has insisted on recruiting its first class not just from the top 1% or 2% of the student population but from the top 25%, drawing no more than two or three from each of 60 feeder schools in Los Angeles’s South Bay.

The result is that nearly 70% of the 116 entering freshmen are members of under-represented minority groups--blacks, Latinos, Cambodians, Vietnamese--and over half are female.

Most specialty schools have been able to get as many as 80% of their graduates to pursue scientific careers, said Kathy Clark, principal of the new academy. “If we get anywhere close to that and yet serve the kind of population we are serving, surely we will have proved something very important.”