School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School, by Edward Humes
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School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School, by Edward Humes
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What is the price of an education at a top public high school?Whitney High delivers everything we ask of a school: a love of learning, a sense of mission, and SAT scores to die for. But there are unintended consequences to attending the school of our dreams, as author Edward Humes found during his year inside this world of high achievement and high pressure.Students work nearly around the clock, building futures to please parents as much as themselves. Their drug of choice? Caffeine. Their goal? Getting into a top college. Their biggest fear? Not living up to their families' stratospheric expectations. But what these kids have going for them is the extraordinary community within Whitney High-- a school with doors open seven days a week, where teachers love teaching and the students linger long after the school day ends.
School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School, by Edward Humes- Amazon Sales Rank: #777764 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-11-10
- Released on: 2015-11-10
- Format: Kindle eBook
Amazon.com Review Journalist Edward Humes shows us a little-seen side of our nation's educational system: the side that works. Humes spent a year (2001-02) at Whitney High School in Cerritos, California, a small, middle-class suburb of Los Angeles, where he taught a writing workshop and observed the daily workings of this top-ranked public school. The book honestly examines the extraordinary effort (and elusive chemistry) it takes to achieve that status and the subsequent toll it takes on the remarkable students at the school. It also provides a wonderful portrait of American life. For all its distinction, Whitney High School reflects a cross-section of America, where immigrant families struggle with their American counterparts to guide their children toward academic excellence.
It comes as no surprise that at the heart of Whitney's success is a devoted staff of teachers and administrators who are as overworked and brilliant as their high-achieving charges. Nor should it shock us that the school's ranking does not come without a price. Whitney students are driven and well-rounded, but they are also sleep-deprived and often subjected to extreme parental pressure. The downside of life at Whitney is that a focus on high grades and college placement sometimes takes the place of the joy of learning, and worse yet, sometimes leads some students to cheat. Still, as Humes's engaging narrative reveals, the triumphs far outweigh the inevitable shortcomings. Unfortunately, the model Whitney provides is easy to identify but not easy to reproduce. As Humes observes, our nation's most successful schools "are small, intimate, and attentive. . . marked by high expectations put to work in tangible ways. . . [with] rigorous traditional studies (as opposed to rigorous drilling for annual high-stakes tests); longer hours of study and work; strong parental involvement. . . low absenteeism and few discipline problems; and leadership with a vision." --Silvana TropeaFrom Publishers Weekly Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Humes (Mississippi Mud, etc.) spent 2001 at top-ranked Whitney High School in Cerritos, Calif. While helping seniors with their college application essays, he was also trying to understand this public school's astounding success. Not only do its students, year after year, proceed to America's top colleges, but increasingly, families move to Cerritos-from all over the world-so their children can attend Whitney. The school is selective; an entrance test is required. But academic "cherry-picking" is only part of the story. Once at Whitney, students surpass similarly skilled students elsewhere-and not because of computers, standardized curriculum, "no child left behind" programs or high-stakes testing. Rather, Humes finds, it's an old-fashioned combination of high expectations and committed educators. They expect students to put in long hours, even "all-nighters." Discipline problems and drug use are unusual and taken seriously when they do occur. All Whitney's teachers are encouraged to educate for something more lasting and meaningful than the AP exams. Elsewhere in America, Humes learns, there's a "bias against the intellectually gifted," but at Whitney, students are expected to work hard, learn a lot and achieve. While Humes notes a few downsides to this culture of high expectations-stress, caffeine addiction and cheating problems-they seem fairly manageable at Whitney. As America's policy makers obsess over minimum proficiency standards, Humes, in his well-written, informative study, presents the Whitney model as a needed corrective, urging parents and policy makers to study success for a change.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist Humes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, spent a year in suburban L.A. at Whitney High, one of the most successful public high schools in the nation, to examine the relentless pressure on American students to achieve and get accepted into the top universities. In contrast to too many public schools, Whitney has everything parents and students could want--dedicated staff and a long history of high achievement--but it also has students fueled by caffeine or drugs, pushing themselves to take advanced placement courses, focusing more on grades than on learning. Humes offers portraits of individual teachers and students, from a broad racial and ethnic array, to demonstrate the dynamic relationships at play in this high-pressure school, with ambitious parents looking over everyone's shoulders, pushing for just the right high-school resume to get into HYP (Harvard, Yale, and Princeton). Humes captures the angst and yearning of high-school students who want to achieve, for themselves and their parents, but who have a vague sense that they're missing out on something less tangible than a grade-point average. Vanessa BushCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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Most helpful customer reviews
68 of 85 people found the following review helpful. Simplistic and intellectually unchallenging book By Hail to Whitney High If you're interested in this book, you are, like me, probably an alumnus of WHS. Who else would want to read this book anyhow? It's not like the success of WHS can be easily duplicated in other places. There's not many places where you can have a small public school in a highly Asian demographic community with a restrictive admissions test that almost certainly guarantees a self-selecting and self-motivated student body that will excel academically. And for this reason, it's no surprise that WHS crushes all other public schools as far as standardized testing goes.And for this same reason, it's silly of the author, Edward Humes, to posit that the critics of public schools have it all wrong because WHS is proof of a public school that succeeds. You see, underlying his narrative is his thesis that WHS is proof that an under-funded, under-staffed public school with lousy facilities can nevertheless succeed. His proofs, of course, are the dazzling statistics WHS produces in terms of SAT scores, standardized tests, etc.This is rather simplistic because anyone with common sense would attribute the school's academic prowess to its self-selective and highly unusual demographic composition. I would give Humes more credit if he had the guts to admit the following: that the teachers don't really matter at WHS. Indeed, some of us would even assert that WHS students excel in spite of poor teachers. But this is a harsh thing to say and Humes has neither the insight nor the guts (nor the ability) to present it.As WHS alumni know, the self-motivated kids at WHS exceed not because of standards imposed by their teachers, but because of standards imposed by their peers/predecessors/parents. Of course, there are notable exceptions. But Humes (largely) ignores the most exceptional WHS teachers (and there are only a handful). Instead, he wastes time describing the current principal as being a huge factor of WHS's success. Really? The truth is, any WHS principal has the easiest public school job in America. Just sit back, ride the students' coattails and take credit for their achievements. This is what all the previous principals did, all of whom enjoyed terms where WHS was the #1 school in CA, and none of whom were responsible for it.To Mr. Humes credit, he does devote some attention to Mr. B, the U.S. history teacher, who is indeed one of WHS's few faculty gems. But this kind of treatment is sparse. How could there be no mention of the fabulous Mr. S, another history teacher and one of WHS's noteworthy faculty members?If Mr. Humes were intellectually critical and honest, he would also give us vignettes of some of the really lousy faculty members at WHS. It seemed like as a courtesy he just ignored those facets of the faculty completely.Another weakness of his book is that he focuses on one school year: 2001-02. I understand why he does that in terms of having a coherent narrative, but by focusing on just one year, and skipping over WHS's history (he devotes a few superficial pages to it but nothing substantive), he fails to raise and explore these issues:How has the parental/peer pressure to succeed academically affected alumni later on in their lives?How do WHS students perform in college, where success comes more from creative and original thought as opposed to rote memorization?Have WHS alumni over the past 20 or 30 years done anything remarkable or exceptional? Or have we just churned out a number of doctors, lawyers, and businessmen who have taken a safe, pre-packaged road to success?These are difficult questions, and Humes has no position, no ability, no insight, and no way to answer these. So he eschewed the more complex issues and wrote an easy book filled with easy answers. I don't blame him for this. Neither do I commend him for it.Finally, Humes has this obsession with taking cheap shots at the Bush family that manifests itself throughout the book. It's seriously annoying and his obsessiveness makes him an even less credible author.
16 of 19 people found the following review helpful. School of dreams...future of reality By A Customer It was a special opportunity to read a book about something so close to my heart. It's been more than a decade since I wandered sleepily through the halls of Whitney High School, but through Hume's honest portrayal it's as though I never left. Memories of feeling "never good enough" came hurtling back only to be replaced with the gratifying realization that like me, the kids in the book will soon find it's what they learn in the proverbial classroom of life that truly matters. Whitney gets you to college, you get you through life. I urge parents who view Whitney as the Holy Grail to read this book carefully and then read everything in quotation marks again. These are the voices of your children. These were the words in my head that never found a voice...until now.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful. A Great Account of High Achievers By A Customer This is an important, readable and incredibly well-balanced book that really brings us into the lives of students and teachers at Whitney High. You can tell that Humes cares for this school, its earnest and impressive students, and its hardworking teachers. What's most impressive about this book is that it makes an extremely balanced assessment of not just Whitney High but the entire history of and debate about the meaning and possibility of public education in the U.S., while telling an engaging story filled with sensitively drawn characters. Every educator, school administrator and concerned parent should read this book.As for the sensationalism that some readers detect, of course the book won't be representative of every single person who goes to Whitney. But it captures the contradictions inherent in the culture of high achievers, when getting the grades becomes more important than the substance of learning. Anyone who recently attended a top college (especially those who came to that college from a low-achieving public school, as I did) will recognize these students and their uber-competitive culture of studying. These are the kinds of issues that we should all be thinking about and discussing as a country.
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