I finished School of Dreams by Edward Humes and found it a fascinating read all the way through. The stats are great, the anecdotes are great. The book is the story of Whitney High School in Cerritos, California, the top-rated public high school in the state and possibly in the country, with test scores that rival the elite prep schools. (You can see how your local California schools rate with this handy set of pages from the Associated Press.)
A couple of elements come through loud and clear in the book as to why Whitney is so successful. The first is that the school is selective: students have to take a test to get in, they have to keep their grades up (or get kicked out), and they have to be college-bound—there are no vocational tracks here. And the second is the large Asian population that makes up the student body: expectations are high that the children will achieve what their parents have set out for them to achieve…in some cases by taking drastic steps:
Another call comes in a short time later, an anxious woman speaking in a thick accent. “How can I get my daughter into Whitney?”
“Well, what school is she in now?”
“She’s in sixth grade here, where we live,” the caller says. “In India.”
India? India? A family would uproot itself and move to another country to partake of an American public school? But this isn’t at all unusual for Whitney. Not in the slightest:
Thousands of Korean and Chinese immigrants have chosen Cerritos over other communities in the United States because of Whitney’s reputation. Several real estate agencies in town have focused their businesses—and made their fortunes—courting future immigrants by placing advertisements in South Korean newspapers listing homes for sale in Cerritos.
Don’t we keep hearing how Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, etc. schools are better than ours? What is the attraction of the American school? I don’t think Humes answers these particular questions and I wish he had.
One thing he does go into quite often is how overbearing the Whitney parents are. From arguing for higher grades for their kids to offering bribes of all types to demanding their children attend the college of the parents’ choice and study what the parents want them to study… Man, I was certainly left wanting to shoot a number of these parents, which is undoubtedly what Humes intended the reader to feel.
School of Dreams initially had me very worried about what the hell are our elite schools expecting of students today, but as I read I got the idea (possibly correct, possibly not, I have no idea) that the heaviness of the workload and the lightness of the sleep schedule are more about students wanting to show how hard they’re working…and about how poor their planning skills are. Humes mentions multiple times that students spend much of their evening time on Instant Messenger together socializing instead of doing their homework, and when the students do get together to work on one of these heralded “group projects” they spend as much or more time eating pizza and talking as they do working. It sounds as if the students were a little more disciplined, they could get a few more hours a night.
Which is not to say that it isn’t hard—just that it isn’t impossible.
Whitney students are high achievers who get into great colleges and score well on tests, but the book leaves some question as to whether they’re learning anything. Of course, this is the big criticism of all American education at the moment (possibly of education around the world, though I doubt it). Whitney kids take a lot of Honors and AP classes for their transcripts, not because they actually want to know anything:
Kids are learning to pass a test on French or biology or civics, but their interest in the subject may go no further, or may even be extinguished, by the rigors of the AP, especially in recent years, as the number of such classes that competitive colleges have come to expect on students’ transcripts has gone from one or two to four or six. There are students at Whitney with ten or more. Tony’s reaction after taking an AP test at Whitney is fairly common: “Now I’ll never have to speak French again.” It wasn’t about learning the language and taking that knowledge with you for life, he explains: “It was about memorizing enough to do well on the test, then putting it behind you. I just took it to increase my chances of getting into a great college.” (114)
Not that these kids are stupid, by any means. They demonstrate that over and over. Particularly fun is the segment in which Neil Bush, Dubya’s younger brother of Silverado Savings and Loan fame, comes to Whitney to push his education program Ignite!, which proposes to make school “fun.” He gets taken to town by the Whitney students, who show no fear of telling him exactly what they think of his program and what school should be.
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One of the best sections of the book, in Chapters 19 and 23, details an experiment the physics teacher gives his class: he shows them an experiment and tells them they’re going to spend the quarter figuring out how it works and then they’re going to teach him about it; he doesn’t know how it works.
Four of the strongest students in the class band together in one of the groups and figure this is going to be easy. So easy, in fact, that they do little to no work on it. In fact, it becomes clear they don’t know how:
“There’s plenty of time,” Cher says (after the group gets a dressing down from the teacher), a phrase that soon becomes the group’s unofficial mantra. But her tone seems to lack conviction. The group is floundering; they all can see it. But none of them is sure why.
This is pretty much a first for them: They have always had success in their academic careers. But now they are on unfamiliar terrain, with no tests to ace, no one riding herd on them every day with incremental lessons, no spoon-feeding. They are used to cramming at the last minute, not setting a pace for six weeks of sustained investigation, Irene complains.
The end result of the teacher’s you-be-the-teacher experiment is great stuff. I hope it inspires a teacher or two out there to try something similar in their own classes.
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One thing I’ve heard over and over again of late is how students graduating from our schools these days have poor writing skills. School of Dreams has a great demonstration that this is, in fact, true, and why it might be. The writer, Humes, teaches a class to juniors on how to write the personal essay for their college applications. He discovers something very interesting about his students:
As we work through their drafts, it becomes clear that the underlying problem is as basic as it gets: Many of these students simply don’t know how to write a logically constructed essay, or how to unfold and develop a story, and this is only complicated by their discomfort at being their own main character. Many of these students, though they are impressively advanced and sophisticated in their academic pursuits, well-read, and possessed of vocabularies that would shame most adults, have never had to develop their writing skills. Writing just isn’t considered crucial during much of their schooling, it isn’t tested for, and their preferred method of communication these days—the barely literate venues of e-mail and online chat—is only making matters worse. Even the kids see that. “I used to write better before Instant Messenger,” David says. “Now I don’t always remember to use complete sentences—you don’t need them online.”
…
Amy Palmieri thinks she knows one reason why a majority of her seniors’ writing skills aren’t as advanced as their other areas of scholarship: Group projects. The widespread classroom practice of letting groups of students produce their major papers and projects has left many of them ill-prepared to write individual papers or even simply punchy essays on their own.
“They complain about the workload,” Whitney’s newest English teacher says, after a particularly tendentious round of griping from her AP seniors. “But I’m really not asking that much of them. They should at this stage be able to string together a few well-written paragraphs. Many can’t. There are some good writers in here, but many of my seniors are going to be eaten alive in college if they turn in papers like this.” She holds up a sheaf of essays. “I was really quite shocked.”
Palmieri has observed that her students excel at the toughest multiple-choice tests she can find, and that they are close, good readers with excellent comprehension, even with notoriously dense works such as Heart of Darkness. Consequently, she has dismissed her initial theory that language barriers in a school of many immigrant families might be causing the writing difficulties. Language isn’t the problem, she says, and that leaves simple lack of practice as a likely cause.
A group writing project?
In my dreams.
These kids are complaining about how much work they have to do and they have group writing projects?
Hey, not only did I have to walk uphill through the snow ten miles in each direction, but I typed up my papers on a typewriter. Of late I’ve thought that writing skills might be improved exponentially by making people do a first draft on paper; the computer lends itself too much to tweaking and editing as you go along, so instead of just finishing the damn thing and then beginning to edit, you meander along, never quite finishing. I also never get as good a mental picture of the piece I’m writing when I write on a computer—with a long entry like this one I have to continually preview it to see how it reads. (I should probably also outline once in a while. Enh.)
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And, for Calpundit, here’s the bit about how much math to take in high school:
For all the testing and accountability-driven reforms aimed at bolstering student achievement around the country, the 2002 National Assessment of Educational Progress revealed these depressing facts: Eight out of ten American high school seniors cannot pass a basic science test. Sixty-three percent of seniors cannot perform simple fourth-grade multiplication necessary to determine how much postage is needed on a package of a given weight. Nine out of ten cannot say how much money they would earn in interest from their savings accounts—even with a calculator. This is why hundreds of thousands of college students must take remedial math classes (often taught at the middle school level), why there are ever-fewer American-born math, science, and engineering majors, and why Whitney is so keen to have all its students take one, if not two, years of calculus: because if they do, the colleges treat them like gods. (pg. 304)
Damn. If only I’d known. Oh wait—I did. Never mind.
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Humes has excellent criticisms of the No Child Left Behind Act, which I think should be called the Stealth Vouchers Act. (There may be good reasons to have vouchers—let’s not get into that here—but the underhandedness of NCLB is simply breathtaking.) This book was obviously printed before the revelations of how the Texas Miracle was accomplished in Houston under Superintendent of Schools (now Secretary of Education) Rod Paige, but the small section on page 335-338 is good reading.
The book even includes a few questions from the Texas High School exam that are embarrassing in their simplicity: check them out on page 357. What this shows, of course, is that if you lower the bar enough, of course you show greater and greater achievement. If your reading test consists of “the cat sat on the mat,” everybody’s probably going to be considered literate. Probably.
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School of Dreams is a fascinating look at an amazingly successful American high school, but I don’t think any of its lessons are necessarily applicable to America’s public school problems as a whole. If schools get to be elite and select their students, rather than accepting everyone is eligible for school. If parents are uniformly demanding and high-pressure. If students are, on the whole, geared toward going to college (and if all high school students are headed for college, won’t that make future applications to college all the more fun?).
But it’s certainly a different look at American public education than we’re used to hearing—an overwhelming success rather than “yet another failure.”
It’s all so strange. I got accepted by Stanford and Caltech in 1976, and when I read stuff like this I’m pretty convinced that the Kevin of 1976 could not get into either place today. So standards at elite universities, at any rate, seem to be much higher, even though the pool of applicants is not all that much bigger.
And yet, it sure sounds like the Kevin of 1976 was a better writer than these kids. Why, why why? Why don’t kids get writing assignments throughout all grades? I just don’t get it.
And that NAEP stuff is just depressing.
So in the end I still don’t know what to think. Why does that happen so often?
(Oh, and Cerritos *is not* a suburb of Los Angeles, Ms. Patterson! I grew up just a few miles from Cerritos in lovely Garden Grove, and we definitely don’t consider ourselves a suburb of LA. So there.)
Kevin, Kevin…*San Francisco* is a suburb of Los Angeles. This is Los Angeles’s world. We just suffer through the politicians they give us.
I think the kids don’t get writing assignments through the grades because a)they’re not required on those damned standardized tests and b)writing is the hardest type of work to judge (IMO) — it’s easier to give the kids a multiple choice test where they just have to have the answers. Or test them by computer. Or…
Based on your precis of the book, this elite US high school is quite reminiscent of a private school in the UK. My brother, who’s a teacher in the private sector, has complained about parents who think that it must always be the teachers’ fault if their son isn’t performing well enough.
I found it astounding that students at Whitney aren’t expected to write essays individually. If they are as clever as they appear to be and they were taught the art of essay writing, they shouldn’t find it a problem. I’m grateful that my teachers did make me write properly argued essays.
Well, I remember that the teachers of my honors courses at a very ordinary high school in 1976 also complained that parents were constantly blaming them for poor grades. I have a feeling this isn’t confined to elite institutions….
Thanks to CalPundit’s, errr, Kevin’s link, I’m here. I teach at a private university in Japan, a country which is experiencing massive angst about education at the moment, and I have a 4 year old daughter, so I’m experiencing massive angst at the moment. I won’t be able to get the Humes book for a while, but you may want to look at Thomas Rohlen’s _Japan’s High Schools_. One of the institutions discussed there is in some ways very reminiscent of Whitney and because Rohlen is approaching the school as an outsider, it might be interesting to compare and contrast.
I’d also recommend the WaPost’s regular column about education. Though it is now buried in the archives, there was a very enlightening article about how high school students cheat in ways that were simply not possible. (not to keep you in suspense, they download the texts from the web, add a few more details to throw the teacher off the scent and then run it through Word’s summarize function to avoid plagarism)
I graduated from Whitney in 1998. To get the record straight, the only group essays we had were 25 pages not including cover page, end notes, and bibliography. The individual ones were usually 3 – 10. In AP English language we wrote, on average, an essay a week in class; on top of that we had essays for homework. I’m sure that a Pulitzer prize-winner would be dramatically underwhelmed by our pitiful writing skills but we still do quite well on the AP English language and literature exams, which include writing components.
wanna know the truth about the school of dreams? i go to Cerritos HS and lets just say the school of dreams and Cerritos HS is neck to neck when it comes to academics… Whitney just gives a bunch more crapload of homework to do every night… and Cerrito’s MUN program can whip Whitney’s MUN program anyday anytime anywhere because ours is soooo much better… i know a grip of students that go to Whitney and transfered out because it was so hard… its better to go to a school that you can get good grades in then Whitney and get bad grades… because when colleges look at it all, their more impressed with a 4.0 from Ghar or Artesia or Cerritos then a 3.5 from Whitney. so my conclusion? Cerritos kicks Whitney’s butt anytime anyday all the time… even our swim team is better!!! 🙂 yeah~! Cerritos beats Whitney in all aspects…our high school is larger and our academics as well as sports and clubs are better. all asian parents just want their kids going to Whitney because they need a test to get in and eveyone thinks its good… but the pupils know the truth… Cerritos High School is better then Whitney~! YEAH~!
wanna know the truth about the school of dreams? i go to Cerritos HS and lets just say the school of dreams and Cerritos HS is neck to neck when it comes to academics… Whitney just gives a bunch more crapload of homework to do every night… and Cerrito’s MUN program can whip Whitney’s MUN program anyday anytime anywhere because ours is soooo much better… i know a grip of students that go to Whitney and transfered out because it was so hard… its better to go to a school that you can get good grades in then Whitney and get bad grades… because when colleges look at it all, their more impressed with a 4.0 from Ghar or Artesia or Cerritos then a 3.5 from Whitney. so my conclusion? Cerritos kicks Whitney’s butt anytime anyday all the time… even our swim team is better!!! 🙂 yeah~! Cerritos beats Whitney in all aspects…our high school is larger and our academics as well as sports and clubs are better. all asian parents just want their kids going to Whitney because they need a test to get in and eveyone thinks its good… but the pupils know the truth… Cerritos High School is better then Whitney~! YEAH~!
What I heard was, “if you can’t cut it at Whitney, go to Cerritos.”
Whitney, by itself, isn’t nearly as hard as the book tries to pretend. Getting As is mostly about being motivated — it’s still the overwhelming grade in every class because there’s a set level of performance for each grading tier. 10% of each graduating class are valedictorians because they all have 4.0s. It only really becomes difficult when your goal is to destroy the test, simply because you aspire to that ability. Sure, we all could have gotten by at easier schools, but is that any way to live? In an age of robber barons, do-what-you-can-get-away-with policies, and take-advantage-of-the-system mentality, what is the right attitude?
More importantly, the world is so much bigger than the little nothing town of Cerritos. If you want to compete at that level, Whitney is just a very small taste of what’s out there — especially once you get to college or medical school. In my experience, the people who have achieved the most and done the greatest things are from all over the place, and the thing they have most in common — more than natural ability or Herculean effort — is a sense, a vision, and a true desire of what they want to achieve.
As someone who just graduated from Whitney last year (the book was written mostly about the class of 2002; we were juniors at the time), I want to set the record straight:
The book is good, but it exaggerates a lot. First of all, Whitney is not nearly as exciting as the book makes it sound. Like any author, Humes did a good job of cutting out the boring, day-to-day parts and focused on the stand-out events, so don’t SoD presents a good picture of daily life at Whitney.
Secondly, we did have individual essays plenty of times; Humes was definitely exaggerating when he gave the impression that Whitney NEVER gave out individual essays until senior year. I wrote my first individual essay at Whitney the fourth week of school in Brown’s 7th grade English class (and yes, she finally left last year, to other alumni who were wondering). We had many group projects that had group essay components also, along with many group projects with individual essay components, but I never felt like group essays were dominant in any way.
Thirdly, remember that he focused heavily on seniors, most of whom (like seniors everywhere) just didn’t care about HS anymore. So if Whitney students as a whole sound like slackers in the book, that’s where it comes from.
Fourthly, he is right about the whole IMing wasting loads of time, and Whitney students treat procrastination as a badge of honor, but the reviewer apparently failed to read the part about how 8th graders at Whitney put up with 4 hours of homework a night, which is pretty accurate. Junior year can reach 7-8 hours of work a night average, including weekends and on top of activities.
Fifthly, (and this refers back to point #1) not all parents, or even most, blame the teachers for their students’ failing grades. Most students, in fact, don’t really care about getting all As, though there is definitely a sizeable minority that do. Furthermore, the figures I’ve seen hurled around here about how “10% of the class gets a 4.0” and in the book about how “frequently there are more than a dozen valedictorians” is grossly inaccurate – for the class of 2001, there were 4 valedictorians, 2002 had 8, and 2003 had 6, for class sizes of about 165-178 students.
Sixthly, Humes’ characterization of the entire Anthem uproar was accurate, but he fails to mention that the entire exercise was widely derided by parents and students, both within that specific class and within other classes as well, as being a massive waste of time, burning up an entire week of having students sit and sharpen pencils by the door for the entire period.
And one last thing: a lot of the quotes in the book are inaccurate, or at least have been touched up in some way. I spoke to the “Tony” quoted often in the book, and in fact he never did take AP French, for example.
I also attended Whitney, but left after 8th grade to attend Cerritos HS. After watching me at 12-years-old waking-up every morning at 5am to study before class, spending all my weekends attempting to memorize random details out of novels, and freaking out everytime “comps” came around, my parents thought I should consider the change. It wasn’t an easy decision (we had conferences with my teachers, advisors, etc.), but we eventually decided that because I had other interests (softball, soccer, track) it would be better for me to transfer. Although I have to admit that my first semester at Cerritos was a cake-walk compared to Whitney, I don’t feel that my decision was wrong. I was able to have more of a social-life, letter in three sports (one of which didn’t even have a girls team at Whitney) and still make it into my college of choice…and when I saw former Whitney students at this same university, I couldn’t help but feel bad knowing how much harder they probably worked to get get there.
I don’t think that the author of this book intended to pit the two schools against each other. Humes did not mean to put Whitney above all the other public schools, rather displayed how such a school could succeed on what little they had through high expectations. In response to what comments I have seen on this website, Colleges do look at what school you come from when evaluating your grades, high school isn’t everything, different people have different preferences, and that Anthem project probably would have succeeded if the students caught on to the concept earlier. Projects such as Anthem and Mr.Z’s rockets teach the lesson for life. You’ll remember experiences from those projects long before a concrete fact comes into mind. It was a wonderful book and politicians should definitly read it before running for office.
Hi. Well, just to add my comments to this rather ‘dead’ topic (seeing as to how the last postmark was May 24), I am also a student of WHS, now in my junior year. Things have certainly changed since the couple of years that the book was published. Though things are generally the same, after reading the book I was always concerned that it was biased and didn’t address everything involved. Of course Humes had to do so to gain readers and give his view, but regardless of that it is saddenning to see my school depicted this way. Even though I can be stereotyped as one of those kinds of students mentioned in the book, I am still my own unique individual in my own right. Disillusioning as this all is, I guess things have already taken their course and there is not much else to do about it. Aside from that–you don’t have to make CHS pride comments here, this is just a book review -.-;
Pardon my bad spelling. Just to uphold “Whitney reputation”, saddening is spelled this way. ^.^;
A quick answer to your question as to why Asian parents come to the US to send their kids to high school here if the Asian schools are so good. No matter how good an Asian HS might be, American Universities are still the best in the world and a degree from Harvard, Yale or even a UCLA or Berkely will open doors in any Asian company.
To get into a top American university, you need to get into a top American HS. Does this answer your question?
I’m a graduate of Cerritos HS. I remember taking an SAT prep course at Whitney HS that was open to all students in the district, Whitney just hapepned to sponsor the prep course (I don’t think they do that any more). Any how, I was first impressed by the instructor (he was a PhD teaching high school!), and then by the Whitney students who were obviously already well prepared for the SAT, much more than I was despite the fact that I also had CP (college-preparatory) and AP (advanced placement) courses at Cerritos. About an hour into the prep course, I realized that these Whitney geeks were gonna kick my Cerrtios butt on the SAT, this was as certain as the morning sunrise. My counterparts at Whitney were clearly better prepared than I was, and there was nothing I could do about it other than try my best.
But perhaps it didn’t matter, because I still went on to a top-3 university in California, and I went on to a great law school, and I studied international law at The Sorboone in Paris, and I have been practicing law for the past 8 years.
I have kept in touch with some of my friends from Whitney. The guy who graduated valedictorian from Whitney works as a senior staff computer network engineer at a university (the university I attended as an undergrad). The guy who graduated No. 2 right behind the valedictorian is a hand surgeon, but only after being rejected from every medical school he applied to the first time he applied (obviously he finally got in, but not to any of his first choice schools). Another guy from Whitney who did fairly well in high school now sells pharmaceuticals. And still another Whitney guy I know is a CPA. Don’t get me wrong, all of these guys have noble professions, they all did well in life. But as well as they did at Whitney (they all outscored me on the SAT’s, had better grades than I), as well as they did, none of these guys really went on to do anything very spectacular or noteworthy. Which is to say they did just okay. And I’m not measuring their success in dollars (the hand surgeon makes good money), I’m just saying that after all of that hard work and sacrifice at Whitney, their end result was more like a firecracker rather than the hydrogen bomb explosion we might expect from such overachievers.
Moreover, perhaps because my high school days were rather laid-back and fun (certainly not the pressure cooker experienced by the average Whitney student), I had TIME, yes, valuable TIME, to pursue and experience other things outside of pure academics that have indeed educated me and given me a much stronger platform from which to pursue life and all of its complicated issues. The point I’m trying to make is this: The education of a young adult in their most impressionable and critical years (i.e., high school) must allow for the student’s self-education through different experiences, good and bad, doing different things and going outside of one’s comfort zone. While I don’t mean to criticize Whitney students, the very program that produces excellence in academics creates an environment where the students will spend most if not all of their time with kids who are exactly like themselves, doing exactly the same things, living the exact same type of life. I’m not sure if that type of socialization (or lack thereof) really benefits the student in the long run– Reality might hit those poor kids like a ton of bricks when they finally get out of school, and when it does, many of those kids might not be able to cope with it.
I know a brilliant guy who went to a magnet high school, graduated top of his class, went to Berkely on a full ride, got his PhD at the University of Chicago, he worked briefly as an economist for a past presidential administration — but he couldn’t cope in that environment. He lost all his money daytrading and now he’s a minor partner in a dry-cleaning business. He spends his days taking in dirty laundry. And while he makes decent money, and while dry cleaning is nothing to be ashamed of, I’m not so sure dry cleaning is what his parents expected from their over-achieving son. He did everything his parents wanted him to, and now he spends his days doing the same thing his parents did as immigrants to earn the very money to put him through school in the first place.
Well, I would nevertheless consider putting my own kid through Whitney if I still lived in Cerritos, but I would try to make sure that the little bugger gets a well-rounded education for life, not just for getting high marks on exams, and put in a good dose of character building, which is really what counts in the real world. Character, good character, goes much further than good grades.
hi,
My friend’s son curretnly attends Whitney and I have to say that your comments sre unjustified. These kids really work excrutiatingly hard. Getting into Yale, harvard and Prineton is a lot more challenging and competitive. Please dont ridicule the students because they are truly amazing kids.