Semifinalists for the 2023 Regeneron Science Talent Search were announced last week, and the 299 brilliant young scientists attend 193 high schools in 35 states. The 300th winner is a senior at an international high school in Beijing, China.
Almost 2,000 participants from approximately 600 American public and private high schools conducted college-level research in 21 disciplines, including medicine and health, neuroscience, and cellular and molecular biology.
New York State leads with 85 semifinalists; followed by California with 50; Massachusetts, 17; and Texas, 15.
New Jersey schools rank fifth with 14 semifinalists; North Carolina has 12; and Florida and Connecticut are tied with 11.
The North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics ranks first this year with a sensational 10 semifinalists, and the public boarding-school's 680 juniors and seniors hail from each of the Tar Heel state's 13 congressional districts.
Ranking second nationwide with six semifinalists each are four metro New York high schools: Bronx High School of Science; Ossining and Scarsdale in Westchester County; and Syosset in Nassau County.
Also nurturing six semifinalists this year are Bergen County Academies in Hackensack, New Jersey, and The Harker School in San Jose, California.
Harker, located in STEM hothouse Silicon Valley, is the only private school among the Top 23 with the most semifinalists since 1999.
However, 58 semifinalists in 2023 attend private high schools, as compared to 44 in 2019. This fantastic development is partly attributable to the massive exodus of hundreds of thousands of families from the nation's dysfunctional, urban public schools, triggered by the tyrannical, unnecessary COVID closings in Democratic-dystopian cities.
Other private schools performing admirably on this year's Regeneron include Jesuit High School in Portland, Oregon, with four semifinalists; and with three each are Phillips Academy Andover in Massachusetts, Boston University Academy, and American Heritage Schools in Florida.
Unsurprisingly, the more than 500 public high schools in New York City, operated by the mayoral-controlled Department of Education, have managed a paltry eight semifinalists in 2023: Bronx Science's six; and Stuyvesant and Brooklyn Tech, one each. Two semifinalists are seniors at Manhattan private Columbia Grammar & Prep, and one attends Brooklyn's non-public Packer Collegiate Institute.
By contrast, in the annual contests between 1997 and 2002 during Rudy Giuliani's great tenure as mayor, NYC's public high schools averaged 46 semifinalists per year.
But between 2004 and 2008, the average number of annual semifinalists plunged to 24, during Michael Bloomberg's overrated, 12-year tenure.
During Bill de Blasio's catastrophic mayoralty, in the contests between 2015 and 2022, NYC public high schools averaged only 14 semifinalists, with Bronx Science achieving a nation's-best 11 annually.
While Manhattan's elite Hunter College High School averaged an excellent four semifinalists yearly during this eight-year period, it is ably directed by Hunter College of the City University of New York.
Many of America's other most-populous cities, which are also controlled by incompetent Democrat mayors and city councils, have few, or no, Regeneron semifinalists in 2023. Los Angeles, Baltimore and Pittsburgh have two each; and Charlotte and San Francisco, one each.
With none from public schools are Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, Dallas, Boston, Detroit, Philadelphia, Seattle, and D.C.
The nation's top localities in 2023 are NYC's contiguous suburbs of Long Island (Nassau and Suffolk counties), with 38 semifinalists, and Westchester County with 32.
A newspaper article on Jan. 10 lauds the "more than 30 Indian Americans" who were selected as Regeneron semifinalists.
But the article actually lists all Indian American winners, who add up to an incredible 79 semifinalists, or 26% of the nation's total.
Tragically, three weeks before the announcement of the 2023 Regeneron semifinalists, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJHSST) began receiving intense, nationwide publicity.
But the Fairfax, Virginia, top-ranked school wasn't being recognized for its four semifinalists in 2023; it wasn't being recognized for its third-place ranking, tied with NYC's Stuyvesant High School with 195 semifinalists, during the last quarter century.
Instead, Virginia's attorney general announced that he will examine if the administration's decision to withhold National Merit Scholarship honors from students and the school's new admissions policies violate the Virginia Human Rights Act.
As Asra Nomani disturbingly reported in a City Journal article in late December 2022, for years two administrators at TJHSST "have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school's families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships."
As of Jan. 17, according to an article in the Washington Examiner, 20 other high-performing high schools in the northern Virginia suburbs of D.C., in addition to TJHSST, have also delayed notifying seniors and their parents of National Merit awards.
Since the 1999 Science Talent Search (then sponsored by Intel), Montgomery Blair High School of Silver Spring, Maryland, leads with 235 semifinalists, and Bronx Science is second with 215.
Finally, the venerable Science Talent Search, founded in 1942 by Westinghouse Electric, must be celebrated for recognizing America's brightest young scientists, regardless of their race, ethnicity, creed or gender. The contest's alumni include 11 Nobel laureates, of whom six are graduates of once-great NYC public high schools.
Mark Schulte is a retired New York City schoolteacher and mathematician who has written extensively about science and the history of science. Read Mark Schulte's Reports — More Here.
© 2023 Newsmax. All rights reserved.