America’s finest public high school is in a cluttered old building in need of repairs.
But Alexandria’s Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology doesn’t need a new glass and steel structure to be the best. The challenge of maintaining its success rests with third-year Principal Evan Glazer.
“My role,” Glazer said, “is to provide the students and teachers an environment where they can pursue and share their passions, so they can do extraordinary things.”
At a time when American high school education is widely seen to be in decline, Jefferson is a beacon of excellence.
In 2007, TJ, as the magnet school is affectionately called, earned the No. 1 spot on U.S. News & World Report’s list of the best public high schools in the nation. The class of 2008 had more National Merit semifinalists — 151 in a class of 429 — than any school in the country. Among the students who graduated last spring, 19 are going to Princeton, eight to Massachusetts Institute of Technology, seven to Harvard and five to Yale.
A crucial ingredient in Jefferson’s success is keeping aspirations high. Simply put, Glazer expects his 1,800 charges to change the world. And they’re more than happy to oblige.
One group is designing a satellite to be launched into space this winter. Another is preparing to cover the school’s roof in energy-producing solar panels, purchased with $20,000 raised by students.
As the new school year gets under way, Glazer expects hundreds of his wide-eyed charges, each one selected from nearly 3,000 yearly applicants, to approach him with more starry ideas.
“”Wouldn’t it be cool if …?’ they ask. And I say, ‘Absolutely,’ ” Glazer said.
The soft-spoken 37-year-old is a Renaissance man in the mold of his school’s namesake. He is as articulate about Voltaire’s “Candide” as he is about multivariable calculus. He writes books about teaching and collects rocks from Montana glaciers. And he guides the school with one overarching principle: Ideas are powerful.
But for Glazer, a lanky man whose intense focus often gives way to a goofy grin, the prestige is less important than what it represents: a place where students ask questions, questions become ideas, ideas become projects, projects produce results and the results make the world a richer place.
Last school year, projects ranged from the design of a low-budget unmanned airplane, to the computerized rendering of a 3-D oboe, to the analysis of cell fragments in search of a cure for Rocky Mountain spotted fever.
And the ideas don’t stop with students. Milde Waterfall, an American history and literature teacher, looked out her classroom’s window last spring, saw an abandoned yellow school bus, and an idea began to form: Why not turn it into a mobile laboratory? She hopes to wipe out half of the seats and fill the space with equipment, and then roll the bus to marshes for biology projects, to historical sites for archaeological digs and to elementary schools to share experiments with younger children.
“Evan is cautious, which I like, but it doesn’t curb my potential to dream the dream,” Waterfall said. She described a principal who accepts every idea without hesitation and then spends countless hours figuring out how to make it happen.
Though the school is publicly funded at a rate of about $13,000 per student, Glazer said, there’s a need to raise an additional $1 million each year to provide students and staff with the special opportunities they require.
Once the money is in hand, Glazer has an uncanny knack for bringing their grand ideas to fruition.
This ability began to take shape in Glazer’s dream-filled childhood in a middle-class suburb of Chicago, where he grew up in a family with an unemployed father.
Randy Glazer, the eldest of three boys in the family, described a household big on hopes but low on prospects, where Evan, the youngest, felt the brunt of the family’s poverty.
“When you come from that position,” Randy Glazer said, “all I can tell you is that you work, and you know what it means to work.”
So even as a young child, Evan Glazer worked. He tutored students in math, he delivered newspapers and he washed dishes at a restaurant from the age of 13 years old.
And in Chicago he dreamed, ironically enough, of the Washington Redskins.
When Glazer was 5, his mother came home with a surprise for her three little football fans: NFL raincoats she had found on sale — meaning the lousiest teams in the league.
The youngest Glazer got stuck with Redskin burgundy and gold.
“The first time it rained, I didn’t have the guts to wear it, so I pretended I was sick,” Glazer said. But the second time wasn’t going to be so easy.
“So in the interim, I studied all about Redskins players. They were a mediocre team in the 1970s, but I just said, ‘I’m a big Redskins fan,’ and I stuck to it.”
In the 1980s, when they dominated the NFL and middle school boys judged each other by their favorite teams, Glazer could coolly say he had been a fan all along.
In high school, he became a star distance runner despite having suffered scoliosis as a child. He worked himself through college at the University of Illinois, excelling as a math and education major. After six years of teaching high school math, he went on to complete a
doctorate at the University of Georgia. He continued to publish work in leading academic journals even after taking a job as a teacher and principal at Roanoke Valley Governor’s School, a sister school to Thomas Jefferson.
“It’s easy for me to set a goal and just go after it, and be very tenacious, and be inspired by it, and accomplish it — because I feel it will benefit other people,” Glazer said.
And while no one calls him a taskmaster — or even the least bit unpleasant in his pursuits — those close to him concede his expectations for others can be quixotic.
In graduate school, “there were those students who didn’t necessarily have his same sense of purpose,” said Michael Hannafin, Glazer’s adviser at the University of Georgia. “He had some impatience for people who didn’t see themselves doing something important.”
Hannafin said Glazer’s decision to go back to a high school setting was a loss for higher education, but a tremendous gain for legions of precocious teenagers.
“Adolescents still carry hope with them, and they haven’t gotten to the point where they feel limited,” Glazer said. “In research proposals, they want to solve world problems, which I think is terrific.”
So the young principal works to create a place where they just might — and if not this year, then sometime soon.
“There’s this quality in him that I so respect,” Waterfall said, reflecting on more than 30 years in the classroom. “We don’t know if the kids that leave this school will be scientists or engineers or artists, but we do know they’ll be leaders. He understands that under this roof he’s got the leaders of the next generation. And that’s important.”
