For Eugene Williams, the project’s director, the issue is not merely academic. If a shaky intellectual start portends a lackluster life, many of his students are already doomed-particularly those who come from communities where survival, not scholastic achievement, is the essential priority. Williams, however, insists that intellectual deprivation can be overcome. And his superiors are gambling that he is right. This fall Washington’s school administrators plan to expose all entering high-school students to Williams’s techniques, which place a premium on analytic and abstract reasoning. The exposure, school officials hope, will trigger an explosion of accomplishment in a school system known mostly for mediocrity.
Williams’s track record leaves ample room for optimism. In 1988, for the first time in more than three decades, the city’s public schools produced no National Merit Scholars. Deeply embarrassed, the then school superintendent Andrew Jenkins charged Williams, an assistant high-school principal, with turning things around. “I didn’t know how we were going to do it,” recalls Williams. He had heard, however, that Xavier, a small black college in New Orleans, was dramatically boosting student performance on various tests highly correlated with IQ.
Xavier’s secret was a four-week, 12-hour-a-day, intensive summer program-dubbed SOAR, for Stress on Analytical Reasoning–for high-school upperclassmen and recent graduates. SOAR treats problem solving as a step-by-step process. Students are given word problems like: “Cross out the letter after the letter in the word ‘pardon’ which is in the same position in the word as it is in the alphabet.” But instead of being allowed to guess at answers, they are forced to focus on such prosale issues as what “the same position in the word” means.
Students are given verbal analogies (“Oven is to bake” as “Dishes are to dishwasher” or as “Carry is to automobile”?). And they are forced to identify the logical relationships between words before being allowed to solve the problem. They are given jumbled sentences and told to rearrange them in logical order. They are encouraged, in short, to think a lot about thinking. Arthur Whimbey, a consultant to Xavier and the author of a book entitled “Intelligence Can Be Taught,” claims average SAT increases of more than 100 points during SOAB’s four-week program, proving, he asserts, “that the problem is in the educational system, not in the students’ genes.”
Williams brought Whimbey to Washington and adopted many of his methods, techniques that, in Whimbey’s words, aim to teach students “how good thinkers . . . reason.” In practice, that means students are divided into teams and instructed to work through math problems out loud-as their partners critique their thinking. And instead of just memorizing vocabulary lists, they are taught to create mental images of new words-often with the help of a game called pictionary. The game forces competing students to draw images that represent selected words on a blackboard as team members vie to identify the images. The winner must define and use the word.
Over the past several years, Williams has watched with growing delight as Washington served up one National Merit Scholar after another (four in 1995). The vast majority have come through his six-week special summer program. To win admission, students must test at least in the high average range and get a principal’s recommendation. They must also have the active support of their parents.
Williams credits Xavier for coming up with an antidote to educational failure. Without question, the little-known Roman Catholic college is doing something special. It has become America’s leading producer of black medical students. (Xavier expects to send 74 to medical school this year.) And it has become a major source of black science graduates. Over half its nearly 3,500 students pursue health or science degrees.
The effort to make Xavier a science-education powerhouse goes back two decades, when Xavier president Norman Francis asked a young chemistry professor, J. W. Carmichael, to improve prospects for the school’s premed students. Only about five a year were then getting into medical schools. Part of the problem, Carmichael concluded, was that too many were entering college underprepared. So he created SOAR. At the heart of Carmichael’s approach is a commitment to the idea that analytical reasoning can be taught like any other skill.
Now Maxine Bleich, president of the nonprofit Ventures in Education, is attempting to replicate SOAR’s success in disadvantaged high schools–rural and urban-across America. Early results are encouraging. Bleich is quick to concede that Xavier’s techniques are not a cure-all. Though they seem to have raised the SAT scores among Xavier’s students, the average for SOAR participants-around 1,000–is still not in the elite range. Also, SOAR’s efforts, like Williams’s, have focused on highly motivated students. Carmichael is uncertain how well the methods will work with students who don’t care-or when used by teachers who would prefer a more traditional approach.
But even if the Washington initiative collapses- under the weight of bureaucratic inertia, poor implementation or lack of student interest-Carmichael and his allies have already made a powerful point about the folly of giving up on human potential. Though many are quick to condemn the educationally disadvantaged to a life of wretchedness, Carmichael and Co. remind us that the status quo is not destiny but merely a difficult situation to change.
