Former bond trader Will Frazer turns F.W. Buchholz High School maths team into Wall Street stars

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Mr Frazer’s achievements have caught the eyes of a group of Florida state senators, who met with him last month to learn how they might replicate Buchholz’s success.

The state, led by Governor Ron DeSantis, has drawn the national spotlight for rejecting almost half of suggested maths textbooks for the upcoming school year for teaching critical race theory and for a law critics call “Don’t Say Gay”, which restricts educators from classroom instruction around LGBTQ issues.

All the while, Florida is struggling with lagging test scores and low public school enrollment after the pandemic. Buchholz has some advantages contending with these challenges, including its proximity to the University of Florida. Still, US News ranks it 66th among the state’s high schools and 1172nd nationally. (Stuyvesant is 36th. Thomas Jefferson is first.)

‘What he’s done is amazing’

“For one person to take a public school and do what he’s done is amazing,” said Keith Perry, a state senator who represents Gainesville and surrounding counties in central Florida. “That should give everybody optimism.”

After graduating from the University of Florida in 1980, Mr Frazer moved to New York to work at Lazard, an investment bank. The 1980s were a heyday for Wall Street, and few commanded as much influence as bond traders. They were dubbed “masters of the universe” in Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities.

The money was good, but Mr Frazer’s chain-smoking bosses and the late-night drinking did not make a long career on Wall Street seem attractive.

“I just didn’t feel healthy,” Frazer said.

Ferrari purchase

After a stint at the now-defunct investment firm Ehrlich Bober & Co, Mr Frazer had enough. He bought a Ferrari, drove home to Gainesville, and planned for a life of golf and sun.

He started coaching golf at Buchholz before becoming a maths teacher. He took the team to a maths competition in 1998 and got crushed, which set him on a furious mission to improve.

Fast forward to April: The Buchholz team won its 15th state title in 17 years at the Mu Alpha Theta maths competition. In the 2020-21 school year, a larger number of its students qualified for a rigorous nationwide event called the American Invitational Mathematics Examination. It accepts the top 5 per cent of scorers on a qualifying exam.

Colleagues and former team members say the success has less to do with Mr Frazer’s own technical ability – one of his former students, Ziwei Lu, actually teaches the toughest material – and more to do with a culture that resembles Mr Frazer’s Wall Street past.

“Winning and competing was so core to who he is, so for any student who had that itch it’s really a positive impact,” said Laura Chau, a Buchholz maths team alum. Ms Chau later studied engineering at Stanford and became the youngest-ever partner at Canaan Partners.

Summer camp

Ellen Li competed on the team all four years before studying maths at Harvard University and landing a job as a trader at Citadel Securities. Teamwork and solidarity were the key ingredients in the team’s success, Ms Li said – though the fact that Mr Frazer runs a 20-hours-a-week summer maths camp helps, too. Florida’s public schools on average offer about 72 hours a semester with teachers.

Yet when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Frazer took his competitive streak to a new level.

After in-person teaching was halted, he formally resigned from his job at Buchholz and snagged a space at a nearby church, where about 140 of his students gathered. He says parents were largely on board, even helping to raise funds to cover his lost wages. He has since returned to the school.

Not everyone agreed with the approach, including his competitors. But, just like on Wall Street, the results speak for themselves.

Richard Rovere, the coach of the maths team at Miami-area private school American Heritage, has adapted his own team’s methods over the years based on Mr Frazer’s success. But that latest gambit was one he could not follow.

“He gambled, he rolled the dice and he won,” Mr Rovere said.

Bloomberg

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