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Students can Succeed, If We Give them the Opportunity
WASHINGTON, D.C.,
July 19, 2022
With Democrat-run school districts canceling gifted programs and math scores falling across the country, there exists a bright spot in Gainesville, Florida, where one exceptional educator has revamped a high school’s entire math program, creating a nationally recognized competitive math team in the process.
This story should be a wake-up call for the rest of the country, demonstrating what our country’s students are capable of if given the opportunity. It also demonstrates what educators can do if school administrators are willing to step out of the way and allow innovation in the classroom. In Case You Missed It via the Wall Street Journal, an educator in Florida bucked the education establishment and developed his own innovative system for teaching competitive math.
July 13, 2022 By Ben Cohen … The Buchholz High School math team is a dynasty built by one teacher with a strategy for identifying talent, maximizing potential and optimizing the American system of education. Will Frazer… took a job at Buchholz coaching golf, switched to teaching math, quickly formed a math team, applied the lessons of his experience in finance and turned a bunch of teenage quants into a fearsome winning machine. … Buchholz is an outlier in more ways than one. The math team’s run since 2007 coincides with the U.S. slipping to 37th place in the latest international rankings of teenage math performance and China starting to produce more STEM doctorates than American universities for the first time. … “My thought was I should find out what the best are doing and then figure out what the flaw in the model is,” he said. With the backing of his school principal and the cooperation of his superintendents, he set about overhauling the Buchholz math department, implementing his own curriculum and hunting for talent at younger ages. He believes the pipeline for the high school’s math team must begin long before students reach high school, so Mr. Frazer searches for prospects in elementary school and steers them to accelerated math classes in middle school. … Mr. Frazer’s insight was to connect four levels of education: The kids he scouts in elementary school develop in middle school, compete in high school and take specialized classes from college professors that he brings to Buchholz’s campus. As soon as the system was in place, the team started winning and never stopped. It turned out there was value in putting a bunch of smart kids in the same room: They feel empowered to make each other smarter. … The mathletes who try out for the team and make the cut are combined into one class section and fly through competitive algebra, geometry and calculus during the school day. Mr. Frazer essentially bends the rules to move faster through harder material and pack more than two years of math into one school year. “I cover everything the state wants me to cover,” he said. “But there is no restriction on covering extra material.” … For someone always on the lookout for the latest edge, the pandemic unexpectedly presented Mr. Frazer with one. After the school shutdowns in early 2020, he feared more disruptions in 2021, so he made a curious decision: He resigned from Buchholz—and he kept teaching. He rented an empty wing of his church and told parents that he would be teaching his usual curriculum in person as if it were a normal school year. Their kids could learn from him and take the rest of their classes remotely or carpool back and forth to Buchholz. Mr. Frazer says he invited 145 students. His friends thought 20 or 30 would come with him. His pastor was optimistic and predicted 80. He got 140. The math team proceeded to win last year’s state and national titles by the widest gaps in the history of the program. The average margin of victory in Buchholz’s previous national titles was 315 points. Last year, it won by 920. Total freedom from bureaucracy was tempting, but Mr. Frazer missed school enough to return to Buchholz and his old classroom right in time for politicians around the state to pay attention. “The Buchholz math program should serve as a national model for other schools and districts to follow,” Florida education commissioner Manny Diaz Jr. said. Read the full op-ed here. |
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