The valedictorian has disappeared from some area high schools.
At Burtonsville’s Paint Branch High, they have been replaced by an awards dinner recognizing the top 5 percent of seniors — nearly 20 students.
At Silver Spring’s Montgomery Blair High, no one sits at the top of the class. The school is broken into a handful of “academies,” and choosing the highest flier would detract from the feeling of school community, a staff member explained.
Quince Orchard High School, across the county in Gaithersburg, still honors its valedictorians — this year five students were named, instead of the traditional one.
The increasing number of students being recognized for reaching the highest ranks of their class underlies a trend in K-12 education away from one-person honors and toward honors for all.
“Everyone craves recognition, and that’s particularly true in this generation,” said Bill McClintick, president of the National Association for College Admissions Counselors and a counselor at the prep school and college level for the past 30 years. “There’s this feeling that we want to give everyone a pat on the back.
“Even going back 30 years, there were plenty of awards, but not the plethora we seem to have now,” he said.
At Prince William County’s regional science fair, judges still award a blue ribbon with a handful of runner-ups, but instead of one top spot, the county gives awards in 14 categories. “Candy Confusion” took the award for behavioral sciences, “Calorie Content in a Chip” for medicine and health and “Dog Talk” for animal sciences. Overall, 72 students from Prince William County and Manassas took home awards, instead of the top three.
Fairfax and Montgomery county schools, with 300,000 students between them, post near-weekly updates on their Web sites boasting about dozens of National Merit Scholarship winners and finalists in dozens of local and national competitions, as well as the soaring numbers of students passing Advanced Placement exams.
At Fairfax’s McLean High School, an online “Kudos Index” lists pages of students from participants in the 2009 National Latin Exam to a junior who scored a near-perfect 2,390 on the SAT, which now includes an 800-point writing section in addition to math and reading.
A similar site spotlights award-winning student speakers, essayists, poets and scientists at Montgomery’s Bethesda-Chevy Chase High, awarded by countless community groups, school publications, national associations and academic departments.
Joel Best, chairman of the sociology department at the University of Delaware, called the phenomenon “prize proliferation” and said it’s been going on for nearly 40 years.
“It’s very easy to add awards, and they make people feel great,” he said. “And then it’s very difficult to bring them under control.”
Honors have grown in tandem with clubs and associations feeling more empowered, he said. The Hispanic Chamber of Commerce scholarship is an example, and so is the creation in the mid-1960s of a National Merit Scholarship program specifically for black students.
An analysis of a list of hundreds of scholarships available to Washington-area students shows many were established in the past 20 years as local wealth multiplied and as school officials started treating college as a must-do for all students.
But while critics bemoan the end of true excellence in favor of an everyone-wins kind of academic laziness, Best said they’re overreacting.
“There’s a lot of time spent talking about how schools are failing, and then we ask, ‘How can we give out so many awards?’ But in fact it’s very difficult to find evidence for that,” he said, explaining that over the long term, standardized test scores have been rising for all demographics, and IQ scores have been climbing at a rate of three points per decade.
“If you have five valedictorians instead of one, the title presumably doesn’t denote exactly what it once did, but it doesn’t denote that you’re stupid,” he said.
