Home › News › News Archives

FROM THE HEAD OF SCHOOL (December 2006)

The Fall is certainly a long haul on the school calendar! I know that faculty and students alike are looking forward to a few days of rest and relaxation before returning to work in January. I am sure that all of you are looking forward to the same kind of rest from your work.

The end of the Fall also brings news from former students, especially those seniors who have applied for Early Decision or Early Action to colleges and universities. Just yesterday a former Friends School parent proudly showed me the acceptance certificate that his son received inviting him to join the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (M.I.T.) class of 2011. In addition to being impressed with M.I.T.’s slick acceptance certificate, I was also impressed that his father indicated that now his son could wait to hear from Princeton and Penn, knowing that he already had a place reserved at one of America’s finest universities.

Gaining admission to the most competitive schools has never been more difficult. More students are applying to colleges than ever before. And U.S. Census Bureau data clearly shows that until 2009, there is no demographic relief in sight. I know from my work on the Boards of Westtown and Moorestown Friends Schools that the stress level reported by students and their parents is higher than it used to be, and a simple Google search will connect you with hundreds of reports indicating that this stress exists nationwide.

There is some good news for you all. No, the cost of college will not be coming down; there will be, however, a decline in the sheer number of 17 and 18 year olds after the class of 2009 graduates. And that number will continue to decline every year after. That means that all of our current Friends School students will face less competition for college spaces than their counterparts who have graduated from our school and then high school over the past ten to fifteen years.

I think the better news is contained in information that is not widely reported, but widely true of all of the most selective colleges and universities. I went to the websites of the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Swarthmore College, and, for good measure, Harvard University, the other day to study the profiles for their current freshman classes (the class of 2010). These schools are four of the most competitive in the world. At Penn, 48% of the current freshman class attended an independent school. At Princeton, the figure is 40%, at Swarthmore, 26%, and at Harvard, 34% (sources: www.upenn.edu; www.princeton.edu; www.swarthmore.edu; www.harvard.edu). As a point of information, there are currently Friends School Mullica Hill graduates at three of these four schools.

These figures are most impressive when you consider one additional statistic: In the United States, only 8 to 9% of all students attend a private school!

So why is it that the college admissions odds become significantly better for private school kids? Rather than answering for all private schools, I will answer just for Friends School. Friends School students study more topics, in more depth than their counterparts. I am fully confident that our students do more writing, study more science and foreign language, and complete more detailed mathematics assignments than the kids in their neighborhood. In other words, it’s not enough to say that you study foreign language or that you’re on chapter 22 in the math book; it’s about the amount of time per day, per week, per year, spent studying your math or speaking the language. It’s about the amount of time you’ve spent applying the math concept you’ve learned, not simply reporting that those concepts have been “covered.”

It’s also about the level of academic expectation we have for our students. Friends School values the divine spark within all children. Each of our students have an aptitude and ability with reading and math and art. Friends School obligates its teachers to seek that spark, and to cultivate that spark as fully as possible. The bar is high for all of our students every day. And we believe helping them rise to that high level, having experience achieving success with an academically difficult challenge, goes a long way towards building the kind of scholarly confidence they will need as students in high school and beyond.

I think most importantly, Friends School seeks to develop well-rounded students. Almost all of our students will have performed multiple times on stage, learned to play a musical instrument, played on a sports team, and presented their ideas multiple times in front of a significant group of their peers and teachers, by the time they have completed eighth grade. We will have asked them to consider seriously their place in the community and the world, urged them to monitor their own moral compasses, shown them how to serve others, and insisted that they represent themselves, their families, and their school in a graceful way.

These things are not the norm. But these are the things that set Friends School students apart from their peers.

As we end another successful Fall at Friends School, all of us wish you and yours a happy and joyous holiday season. We are grateful for your children and look forward to their return in January!

(top)

FROM THE HEAD OF SCHOOL (April 2006)

The top priority for Friends School is to insure that the program of study and learning for your children is first rate, and worthy of the material sacrifices that you make to send them here.

We also want you to feel as though you are making an informed decision about the 2006-2007 academic year.

To that end, I am offering this update to you regarding improvements and changes for the 2006-2007 academic year:

Fourth and Fifth grade parents should take note of the fact that the school has added 3 or 4 students each to the 6th and 7th grades every year for the past five. We fully anticipate adding these students to your group. This will mean two sections for these groups in middle school.

A couple of weeks ago, middle and lower school students received last minute instructions for completing their ERB tests. They spent two mornings with their trusty #2 pencils, filling in empty ovals on answer sheets, and making no marks in the booklet! Our students repeat this ritual every April.

The ERB test is not widely administered in our region. The test was initially developed at the request of a group of private schools who felt that other standardized tests, like the Iowa Test, were not an appropriate measure of what private schools teach their elementary students. In simplest terms, those schools believed that most standardized tests were not difficult enough to either challenge their students, or to provide the school with accurate information about the school’s curriculum.

ERB’s are administered to public and private school students in 41 states. You may not know that in order to qualify to administer the test, a school, or school district, must send 75% or more of their students on to a four-year college or university.

Right now, Friends School Mullica Hill is the only school in Gloucester County that qualifies to use the ERB test.

Our students are part of a national pool of students, almost all of whom are ultimately headed to college. It is critically important to keep this fact in mind when judging your child’s National Norms score. The score does not indicate how Friends School, or your child, is progressing versus other students and schools in Gloucester County, but how the school and our students are progressing versus a NATIONAL pool of the MOST ABLE students in the country.

That national pool is the same national pool of students who will eventually take the SAT as part of the college application process.

How do Friends School students fare on the SAT? We do not have data on individual Friends School Mullica Hill students, but we do have published, average SAT scores from most of the private and public schools our students choose to attend, as well as data from high schools in Gloucester County. Here is a partial list (2003-2004 average scores):

Standardized test scores are not the measure of any individual student here at Friends School, any more than they are at St. Joe’s or Washington Township; standardized testing is, however, a piece of the preparation we provide for our students so that their options for high school and beyond are limited only by their imagination. ERB test scores are not the norm for our area, but we believe they provide the best preparation for the bright future that lies ahead for each of our students.

(top)

FROM THE HEAD OF SCHOOL / March 2005

Several weeks ago the nation’s governors met in Washington for the fifth annual National Education Summit on High Schools. Bill Gates was invited to deliver a keynote address, the content of which was widely published in newspapers around the country.

It is Gates’ belief that our high schools are “designed for another age,” and that unless they are fundamentally changed “we will keep limiting, even ruining, the lives of millions of Americans every year.” Gates sited as evidence of his contention that only 18 in 100 students who enter high school go on to complete a college degree within six years of their high school graduation.

On the same day I read Gates’ comments, I picked up the latest copy of Philadelphia Magazine. I was especially interested to read the feature article entitled “Best Places to Live” to see how our region compares to others in the Delaware Valley. One of the statistical comparisons lists the percentage of students who go on to attend college from each of the school districts listed. In the townships from which we draw Friends School students, the attendance percentage ranged from a low of 29% to a high of 54%, with the majority hovering around 40%.

Graduates of the Friends School Mullica Hill attend college. 100%

Right now, former students of our school are in class at Princeton, Cornell, Bucknell, Villanova, Georgetown and Tufts universities, and the University of Pennsylvania. Right now, graduates of Friends School Mullica Hill are attending graduate level classes at Columbia University and the University of Michigan. Members of the 8 th grade class of 2001 will matriculate this fall at Smith, Williams, and Vassar Colleges, and Harvard University to name just four.

If the pattern holds, 100% of our current students, be they in pre-kindergarten or 8 th grade, will attend college. Not only will they attend college, but they will compete for spots at the most competitive colleges and universities in the United States.

The goal of our program is to provide an excellent academic foundation for your children. We know that every year students must leave our schoool to join their college-bound peers at some of the most excellent high schools in our region.

If the statistics in Philadelphia Magazine are our guide, there is no elementary district in our drawing area that experiences the kind of pressure to produce academically superior graduates that we experience here at Friends School.

With our outstanding faculty and staff, I am confident that we will be able to continue to meet the challenge presented to us by Bill Gates, by the 50 governors, and by the high schools and colleges that await our graduates.

(top)

FROM THE HEAD OF SCHOOL / November 2004

In my work as a Board member at the Moorestown and Westtown Friends Schools, I have a unique opportunity to benchmark our school’s program against those of older, more established schools. In both cases, these Friends Schools have been in business for hundreds of years. It makes our 35 years seem like we’re just getting started!

The benchmarking can be discouraging: we do not have historic buildings, exquisitely restored for use as the administrative office, or a 700 seat performing arts center, or a gymnasium with 5 courts and an indoor track, or an entire building devoted exclusively to science, or a hallowed hall, lined with photographs of graduates dating back to the 1890’s.

But I am not feeling discouraged as I write. In fact, I feel quite the opposite. Friends Schools exist to educate students. But we do have an angle. And that angle is that the simple transaction of knowledge from teacher to student is not a complete education. Our schools believe we must do more for our students. A complete education involves transacting knowledge within a community of peers. It involves the transaction of knowledge with adults who truly believe that children of every age have important and meaningful things to say and to offer the world.

When I look at the letters and statements written by our fourth, sixth, and seventh grade students, I see evidence of the experience we seek to provide: transformational. We want students at Friends Schools, at OUR Friends School, to be proactive with the facts and figures transacted in the classroom. We want them to build cases with them, to lead using them, to think deeply about how those facts and figures can sometimes represent an emotional or moral impact upon real human beings in the real world. Most importantly, we want them to use transactional knowledge of the world to learn more about themselves, and to build confidence in their own thoughts and opinions.

Evidence of a transformational education does not shoot like a can of soda from the slot after the quarter is dropped in, any more than it automatically happens in a new and grand interior space; rather it appears like seeds, one might drop unimpeded from the flower, while another floats in the air before it comes to land in an altogether new place. On the school’s good days, that evidence appears all at once on two pages of the school’s newsletter, and on other days, we wait for it until we hear the poignant speech delivered at graduation by the normally shy and reserved eighth grade student.

So transact I must as Head. I do want to work towards the day when all of the physical spaces in the school match and honor the spiritual and intellectual gifts your children bring to us everyday. But as I benchmark our program, I feel confident that our teachers and staff are helping, encouraging, and leading your children somewhere altogether new.

(top)