Besides golf courses and women's clubs, today's Suburbia has some of the nation's most advanced public schools. The great migration from the cities to commuter-land, bringing hordes of new students in its van, has subjected suburban education to great strains. Many schools have responded to and grown with this challenge, however, and today a good number of suburban high schools are rated among the best in the country.

Scarsdale High School, about twenty-five miles north of New York City in Westchester County, is certainly not typical, but many of its problems and methods are representative of the suburban high school in general. Along with others, such as Newton, New Trier, and Shaker Heights, Scarsdale is considered by many educators as one of the nation's finest public secondary schools. Like most of these communities, Scarsdale has one main advantage in the effort to secure good educational facilities--it is a very wealthy village.

Educated Community

The ability to pay for the steep expenses of good education is, however, certainly not the sole reason the village maintains a fine high school. Most residents of this town of about 14,000 have had college educations themselves and are highly concerned with providing a good education for their children. With a large proportion of educationally minded and well-to-do residents, Scarsdale thus has the will and the means to provide top schooling.

The high school itself includes the four pre-college classes with an enrollment of about 1300. Its system of grouping classes represents a departure from usual junior and senior high divisions. Until last September, the school also handled the seventh and eighth grades, but enrollment reached over 1700 in a building which should not have held more than 1400. Scarsdale voted to erect a junior high school which was completed for use this year. The new multi-million dollar building includes sixth, as well as seventh and eighth graders, thus also easing the squeeze in the elementary. The four-year high school has today approximately the same enrollment as did the six-year school five years ago, an indication that enrollment has jumped by about 50 per cent since 195. At no time, however, did the typical academic class include more than about 24 pupils.

Scarsdale High Principal, Oliver W. Melchior, welcomes the new four-year arrangement. The more volatile seventh and eighth graders no longer race around the halls, and Melchior says, "given our circumstances the four year organization is more desirable in that it groups the college preparatory work after eighth grade under the same roof and in the same departments."

For Scarsdale is practically a college preparatory school. Of the class of 1956, 97 percent of the students went on to continue their education in college or junior college in specialized training. The following year saw about 90 per cent of the graduates go on to further study--in both cases a very high proportion for a public high school.

Competition Strong

As a preparatory institution, Scarsdale is highly competitive for both "honor-roll" and average students. There is an intensive scramble among bright pupils to "make" a good college, and one of the hardest tasks of the deans is advising students to look colleges other than the traditional ones in the East. Of 194 graduates in 1956 who went on to further schooling, forty-six ended up at Ivy League institutions or one of the "big-name" schools for girls.

The prestige element assumes much significance in college choice motivations, especially when parents steer their children towards schools with which mom and dad are familiar. In Scarsdale the important question is not whether you go, but where you go to college. The records for 1956 and 1957 do reveal, though, some trend toward a wider distribution of colleges attended by the school's graduates. More students have been directed toward two year schools: only six per cent of 1956's graduates went to junior colleges, while in 1957 13 per cent continued their education at a two-year school. The increasing competition to get into college will probably widen further the distribution of schools chosen by seniors and also weaken some of the prestige criteria held by pupils and their parents. In this sense the growing competition may be healthy.

But for the average student Scarsdale presents an already fiercely competitive system. From the ninth grade on, pupils are constantly spurred by reminders of the admission hurdles which lie ahead. Teachers not infrequently employ the threat to mark infractions on a student's "college record" as a disciplinary persuader. Gradually through a student's four years the pressure of getting into a choice school builds up until it reaches a peak of tension in the winter and spring of his senior year. There seems to be, in general, too much of a stress laid on achieving college admission as the "be-all and end-all." Although the rivalry to enter a good school necessitates some atmosphere of competition, the tendency on both the part of some students and teachers is to see college admission, and not intellectual growth, as the goal of secondary education.

On the other hand, Scarsdale's function as essentially a preparatory institution is one of the factors which contributes to its high standards when compared with most public high schools. Opportunities for honors work are offered to the brighter students from the ninth grade on. The school curriculum has included "honors" sections for more than twenty years, and the able student has the chance to do more concentrated work in English, Mathematics, American and World History, and foreign languages. In addition, a full program of Advanced Placement courses is available for qualified senior. These courses cover material equivalent to what an introductory college treatment of the field would include, and successful completion of an Advanced Placement course counts for credit at some colleges. These courses probably provide the most rewarding academic high school experiences for the pupils who take them. English, American history, and French used to form the original nucleus of the Advanced Placement program at Scarsdale, but Mathematics was added in 1956 and physics and Chemistry will also soon be available.

The honors program, for all four years, is highly flexible. Since students enroll for honors only in individual courses, no early commitment to an overall program is needed to take advantage of the advanced course efferings. Mathematics is an exception, because the pupil who wants to study calculus as a senior must accelerate all along the line.

New Summer School

Responding to the national cry for more science education, Scarsdale has instituted a modified summer school session for those who want to take advance biology, physics, or chemistry. Because there is not enough time to take a full Advanced Placement course in any of these subjects in one year, students take the elemntary portions over the summer to qualify for the higher-level courses during the regular term.