The instructor, who holds a master's in history from UCLA, fires questions that leave no room for faked answers: "What does Herodotus say? Plutarch? Xenophon?" demands Paul Mertens, 53. And that is just for starters. "Where do they agree and disagree?" he asks. "Why? How much of a democracy was Athens?"
Down the hall, William Fitz-Gibbon, 50, whose degree in science is from M.I.T., uses an overhead projector to sketch a physics problem about the path of a falling projectile. As he extends the trajectory, 20 students jab at their calculators, shouting the coordinates of the projectile's path. One student looks up from time to time from an Agatha Christie mystery to call out answers. A young girl interrupts the instructor. He has been applying a shortcut formula to the problem, and she points out that his solution will not work in every case.
This is material of some intellectual heft, clearly of college level. Both scenes, however, involve eleven- to 15-year-olds on the second floor of Walter Reed Junior High in North Hollywood, Calif. The youngsters are among the 150 academic superstars enrolled in Reed's Individualized Honors Program (IHP), perhaps the most successful junior-high curriculum in the U.S.
Reed's special students earned 38 semesters of college credits last year by scoring the equivalent of a B or better on the College Board's grueling advanced placement exams, which are designed for bright, ambitious high school seniors and juniors. More than 40% of Reed's honors pupils wind up in such prestigious institutions as Stanford, M.I.T., Harvard, Johns Hopkins and Yale. "When I first saw their results on the advanced placement tests, I was floored," says Jack Richards, dean of faculty at the estimable Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., a prep school that recruits at Reed. In fact, so many Reed students sit for the advanced placement tests that the College Board will soon grant the 1,760-student school the authority to administer the tests in its own building, as though it were a high school or college. This arrangement has never even been discussed with any other junior high.
During the past year, Reed's whizzes have outscored California's top high school students in the U.S. International Chemistry Olympiad and won first place against U.S. junior highs in the National Language Arts Olympiad and the Atlantic-Pacific National Math Contest. Reed graduates have also won the Westinghouse Science Talent Search and the Churchill Fellowship to Cambridge University. Perhaps most impressive, Reed has compiled this enviable record using no extraordinary funding or trendy teaching gimmicks.