F.C. Education Foundation's 2nd Annual Gala Marks Announcement of $500,000 Wollenberg Endowment

By Nicholas F. Benton

An endowment fund to the tune of $500,000 in the name of the late J. Roger and Patricia A. Wollenberg of Falls Church was announced at the second annual fundraising gala of the non-profit Falls Church Education Foundation last Thursday at the Tower Club in Tysons Corner.

The fund will provide an annual, renewable scholarship for a student at Falls Church’s George Mason High School to attend a higher education institution in Virginia. Roger Wollenberg was a member of the Falls Church School Board beginning in 1961. The announcement was made to over 160 persons who attended the event, which raised over $70,000 in on-the-spot contributions, pledges and matching funds.

One anonymous $10,000 contribution was announced, as well as the fact that all money pledged during the event would be matched by an anonymous donor.

Since its founding just over a year ago, the FCEF has raised a total of $1.3 million to fund special projects for the Falls Church City Schools.

Jay Matthews, education writer for the Washington Post and Newsweek, was the keynote speaker for last Thursday’s event. Mathews became a household word in the late 1990s in Falls Church when he published articles in the Post and Newsweek naming George Mason High the best in the region and the second best in the nation.

Mathews developed the concept of the “Challenge Index,” which rates schools by the percentage of overall students participating in Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate courses.

Mathews, who obliged by wearing a cruise tour hat during his remarks last Thursday, in keeping with the gala’s theme of a “Launch Party,” told the audience he came up with the concept as the result of two earlier career experiences.

The first, he said, involved a series of stories we wrote for the Los Angeles Times on the now-famous Garfield High School in East Los Angeles and its teacher, Jaime Escalante, who challenged all the students there to master calculus. “With time and effort, a higher percentage of students at that low-income high school, where 85% of students qualified for free lunches, completed AP calculus courses than at any other school in the entire U.S.,” Mathews said.

He then found that at schools in affluent areas, the approach was entirely different. In most all cases, students had to take an exam to qualify to take an AP course, and all advanced courses were simply ways to reward “A” students.

On top of that, Mathews said, he found that teachers of advanced courses often adopted the “ Mt. Olympus syndrome,” which involved making the course so difficult in the first days that most would drop out.

Before coming to his current education writer position, Mathews’ took career turn to become a reporter covering the stock market. That gave him the idea of creating an “index.”

So, by combining his earlier exposure with challenging all students and his stock market experience of “indexes,” he devised the notion of his “Challenge Index.”

That was in 1998, and based on a survey of Washington, D.C., area schools, that’s how he “discovered” George Mason High School.

“I’d never heard of the school, and I was completely surprised,” he said. When he contacted the school’s International Baccalaureate coordinator Erin Albright, he learned that 75% of students took the IB exam, four times the number of any other school.

He then decided to try to take the exam, himself, to test its difficulty. “I took if for five hours. It almost killed me,” he said.

By contrast to rich communities “that like pecking orders” and think of AP and IB courses as rewards for their best students, George Mason “has a remarkable system of participation and was way, way ahead of the curve at the time.”

Now, he noted, more schools are doing the same thing. The latest “Challenge Index” reported in Newsweek this month lists every high school in both Fairfax County and Montgomery County as among the best in the region, and George Mason’s relative position has dropped considerably.

“But the notion was first imparted here at George Mason High School,” Mathews said.

The master of ceremonies for the gala was Molly Henneberg, a George Mason High graduate of the Class of 1992 who is now a reporter for Fox News. Developer Bob Young, president of the FCEF made introductions and important announcements.

It was also announced that the Nicholas F. Benton Diversity Affirmation Education Fund set up through the FCEF for the Falls Church schools would continue special fundraising efforts to ensure the return of the highly-acclaimed “Challenge Days” to GMHS next spring.