The Bronx High School of Science

The Bronx High School of Science is a publicly funded secondary school in the Bronx. It focuses on a special promotion of gifted students primarily in the area of mathematics and natural sciences, and in addition, also in the humanities and social sciences. The selection of students is made on the basis of a procedure called the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test ( SHSAT ) access tests. This test, which is used in addition to the Bronx High School of Science by some other special schools in New York, all the students open to those who meet the minimum requirements in terms of age and academic performance. Because of the public financing of the visit to the school is free of charge. The instruction is given from the ninth through twelfth grade.

The establishment of the school, which was initially restricted to boys, took place in 1938 by a decision of the Council on Education ( Board of Education ) of the City of New York. From the year 1946, girls were taken. 13 years later, the school moved into the building still in use. The number of pupils currently stands at around 2,500 who are taught and supervised by about 140 teachers. The proportion of teachers who have completed their doctorate is significantly higher than in other secondary schools. New teachers will be selected on a system that is comparable to the appeal process for professors at universities. The facilities of the school in addition to computer cabinets and experimental scientific laboratories include a weather station, a planetarium, greenhouses and a foreign language center.

Almost all students in the Bronx High School of Science graduate after high school higher education, many of them in the Ivy League summarized in the universities. Among the graduates are eight Nobel laureates (Leon N. Cooper, Sheldon L. Glashow, Steven Weinberg, Melvin Schwartz, Russell A. Hulse, H. David Politzer, Roy J. Glauber, Robert J. Lefkowitz ), more than for any other secondary school in the world and also more than for many prestigious universities. In addition, six graduates have won a Pulitzer Prize in later life, six have been awarded the National Medal of Science.

Among the current members of the National Academy of Sciences are 29 graduates of the Bronx High School of Science, representing approximately 1.5 percent of the approximately 2,000 members of the Academy. Other famous graduates are the mathematician Barry Mazur, the computer scientist Marvin Minsky, Gregory Chaitin, Martin Hellman and Leslie Lamport, the synthesizer pioneer Robert Moog, the actor Jon Cryer, the writer EL Doctorow and the architect Daniel Libeskind.