By Kevin Kipp
The numbers at Whitfield School make sense. So does the head of the school, Mary L. Burke, Ph.D.
First, here’s what Dr. Burke, says about successful education: “For learning to occur it must be meaningful to the learner, hooked onto what the learner knows already. And the learner must be mentally active and engaged; he must act on it so that it is transformed to become his own, not memorized.”
Now some numbers:
- Enrollment: just under 450
- Grades: 6 - 12
- Student-teacher ratio: 8-to-1
- Student-computer ratio: 3-to-1
- Average hours of science education per student: 3,000
- Class size: 15 or less
- Tuition: $13,425
- Faculty (full-time equivalent): 67
34 with advanced degrees
Required high school graduation credits: Four, count ’em, four years of English, Math, Science (biology, chemistry and physics), Foreign Language, and Social Studies (real history, not “consumer economics”).
Plus a fine arts credit, a physical education credit, and a few lessons-of-the-real-world seminars, including a community service requirement.
Curriculum like it ought to be! Rigorous, substantive comprehensive. Personal attention from qualified teachers. Access to technology.
It all adds up to an impressive college placement record. Besides all the usual suspects in the region (Washington University, Saint Louis University, University of Missouri–St. Louis, etc.) members of Whitfield’s class of ’99 were accepted at Ivy League Schools such as Yale, Columbia and University of Pennsylvania; also Cal. Tech, University of Chicago, Northwestern and Reed College; the better state universities in the Midwest; a batch of those bucolic liberal arts colleges in New England; a handful of urban universities, some Jesuit; and a long list of others, without a dog in the bunch.
But did a handful of outstanding students generate the majority of those prestigious admissions?
No, according to college counselor Debbie Greenberg: “This was a really good year. All those schools listed accepted a different kid.
“What was exciting this year is how much the national press covered the difficulties of getting into prestigious colleges, and we didn’t get burned.”
Greenberg — along with director Cynthia Alverson and counselor-cum-Latin-teacher Sheila McCarthy — is one of three college counseling staff at Whitfield.
Whitfield’s distinctiveness derives from more than the resources it allocates to college counseling or even its admirable admissions track record — parents paying more than $13,000 in annual tuition are likely to find some comfort there.
Back to Dr. Burke: “In traditional education, students are tested and sorted and then taught differently, depending on their abilities. Here, you’re tested to see if you’re smart enough to do college prep work, but once you’re in, you’re going to do it all. Everybody gets to take the hard courses.”
Aptitude, she says, is the student’s rate of learning. By changing the pace — not the teaching or content — Whitfield helps the capable, if not necessarily brilliant, student prepare for college.
“You can’t teach brilliance,” Dr. Burke says, “but you can teach for excellence. Every graduate will have legitimate college prep chemistry, but some people will have gone beyond.”
So Whitfield is not, and does not try to be all things to all students. But it believes it can prepare a broad range of students to qualify for colleges or universities of their (realistic) choice.
Greenberg points out with pride that the counseling staff works hard with each student to find a good post-secondary fit, be it Tufts or Tulsa, Oberlin or Oklahoma State.
Whitfield School distinguishes itself from other schools in yet another way: It is a member of the Coalition of Essential Schools, a nationwide league of some 230 schools (nine in the St. Louis region) that have enacted reforms based on something called “cognitive learning theory.”
According to Dr. Burke, cognitive learning theory emerged from “research in the ’60s on artificial brains for computers. They began understanding how human beings process information. They realized there are more efficient ways to teach.”
The theory has been developed over the last 20 years at major institutions like Northwestern University, Stanford University and Washington University, Dr. Burke says — where, coincidentally, she earned respectively her B.A., M.Ed., and Ph.D.
(Let’s get this out of the way, too: In the spirit of full disclosure, she proudly ac-knowledges she went to John Burroughs.)
Asked what is the essence of an essential school, Dr. Burke enthusiastically enumerated nine common principles.
“High expectations for all students is critical,” she begins.
“Secondly, the student does the work. He is not a passive receiver of information passed on by the expert. He is responsible and accountable.
“Third, the teaching process: the teacher performs like a coach. A lot of the planning goes into constructing a learning event that directs the student to be an efficient and effective learner.”
And then the numbers. At Whitfield, they’re different from many other schools. Take schedules.
“Time is reallocated,” Dr. Burke says. “Longer blocks of time are necessary for thoughtful and intensive learning.”
