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.

§

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.

§

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.)

§

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.

§

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.

§

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.”