EDUCATION WATCH : Taft’s Example
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Taft High School in Woodland Hills has done a marvelous job this year of reclaiming a measure of pride for the much maligned Los Angeles Unified School District. This past weekend, for example, nine Taft students represented the state of California in the U.S. Academic Decathlon in Phoenix and came within two correct answers of winning the title outright.
Students Mara Weiss, Chris Hoag, Adam Caress, Robert Shaw, Leonard An, David Bronstein, Evan Daniel Dodge, Alex Jacobs, and Joshua Stempel were competing against schools representing 42 states and the District of Columbia. They finished a close second to a school from Texas, with 47,072 total points compared with 47,485 for the first-place finisher.
For the Taft students, the weekend-long event capped months of effort in which it first won city and state titles against California’s best public and private schools.
In the decathlon, won by Taft in 1989, each school is represented by three A students, three B students, and three C students who are required to excel in everything from academic subjects to speech-giving.
Individually, Taft students also brought home 19 medals in such areas as chemistry and the fine arts. Among them was Mara Weiss, who had finished the local and state contests with the lowest scores of Taft’s A students. This time, she finished as the second-highest-scoring A student in the entire competition. Her persistence and perseverance is admirable, and she and her teammates have set a fine example for the rest of the LAUSD to follow.
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