I know this area, the kids, and the Parents. These Asian parents are tough. The review shows the extremes, but the kids are happy the parents were this way when they are 40.
Michael Dirda
'School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School' by Edward Humes
By Michael Dirda
Sunday, September 7, 2003; Page BW15
SCHOOL OF DREAMS
Making the Grade at a Top American High School
By Edward Humes
Harcourt. 370 pp. $25
Nearly 80 percent of the students at Whitney High School, in Cerritos, Calif., are Asian- or Filipino-American. Twelve percent are white; the small remainder Hispanic- and African-American. People move to the Cerritos area so that their children can attend this school -- provided their sixth-graders can pass the entrance exams. And by move I don't mean from Los Angeles: They relocate from India, from Korea. Whitney is the top-rated public high school in California, arguably in the nation.
Its students are formidable. Take Cecilia, who regards herself as "really pretty stupid." At Whitney this doesn't mean a C- grade point average. As a guidance counselor reminds the senior, "You're a commended National Merit Scholar. A California Governor's Scholar. An AP Scholar. Your SAT scores are a combined 1450. You took three AP tests and got a perfect five on each. Your GPA is 3.8. You volunteer at a nursing home, you're in a Model United Nations, you were part of the design team that won the NASA Space Set award last year for Whitney. You write fantasy and science fiction. And you are in advanced art this year. Where do you get this drive?"
Cecilia answers by insisting she's nothing special. "I'm really pretty average. I actually have to study for my grades, unlike some of my friends, who seem to do all this effortlessly. I have to pull all nighters." Cecilia admits that she's "okay" at art. In reality, the young woman draws "incredible anime and pointillist pictures."
You would think parents would be proud of such a child. Yes and no. In fact, Cecilia's mother and father want her to go to Harvard, Stanford or U.C. Berkeley. When she spoke to them about becoming an artist, they threw her portfolio into the street, then made her wait half an hour while cars ran over an entire year's work before they allowed her to retrieve the drawings and paintings. Similarly, when one of her classmates, Angela, asked for a sewing machine to work on an art project, her parents subjected the sensitive girl to ridicule, then reminded her that they hadn't sacrificed so that she could become a "seamstress."
Humes reveals a stressed and often desperate world -- one where even the parents feel they will die if their kid isn't accepted by MIT or UCLA: Anyplace else doesn't even count. And that pressure starts early. Each Whitney class -- 7th to 12th grade -- accepts about 150 students, and people will do whatever it takes for their children to be invited to enroll in the elite school. One father told Bob Beall, the program's founding principal, "I'm very wealthy. I"ll be happy to make a large donation once my son is admitted. What amount would you like?" Another disappointed parent, a mother, took a different tack: " 'I'd do anything to get my daughter into Whitney,' she said, closing Beall's office door, leaning close to him, and staring meaningfully into his eyes. 'Anything.' "
Nearly everyone associated with Whitney is driven. Students have virtually no social lives, they sign up to retake their SATs immediately when they score less than 1500, they fuel their days and nights on Starbucks coffee. The only drug problem around Whitney is speed -- a drug that allows its user to work round the clock.
Why, though, should the rest of us care about these whiz kids, their grotesquely ambitious parents or this academy for overachievers? For three good reasons.
First, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes describes this high-school world brilliantly. Throughout, he moves back and forth among a dozen or so troubled, smart and surprisingly innocent young people, offering anecdotes, vignettes, even examples of their writing. One comes to know and like these kids. At the same time, he mixes in scenes with Whitney's savvy current principal, its hard-working guidance counselors and some of its superb faculty. In particular, he highlights the former actor Rod Ziolkowski, who teaches physics with games and challenges; the strict and traditional history intructor, Dave Bohannon, who disdains computers and announces that they'll have to pry the pencils and three by five cards from his cold, dead fingers; and the devoted Debra Agrums, who spends thousands of dollars of her own money on paints and drawing supplies while fighting for the arts in a school where Advanced Calculus rules. All three teachers are adored by their students.
Humes also builds the story of a year at Whitney (2001-2002) into a series of mini-dramas -- the impact of Sept. 11, the big physics project; the trauma of writing the personal essay for college (Humes works as a coach); prepping for the standardized tests; waiting for admissions results; the hilarious visit of Neil Bush, promoting a program called Ignite!
Second, Humes explains -- in a long flashback -- how Bob Beall, largely through force of will, transformed Whitney from a vocational high school into this intellectual powerhouse, and how Thomas Brock continues that tradition. He also explains the pressures Whitney is under -- the accusations of elitism and racism, of cherry-picking the best students from other schools, the problematic need to stay number one. Along the way, he provides a concise history of American education, traces the dubious impact of standardized testing, explains why and how gifted students sometimes cheat to stay on top, and offers some useful ideas -- drawn from his research as well as his observations -- on how to improve our current schools. He rightly disdains most government programs and reports, which he judges as little more than smoke and mirrors. Instead, on his last page Humes offers a simple prescription for curing many of our educational ills:
"The average American child spends 78 minutes a week reading, 102 minutes a week on homework and study, and 12 hours a week watching television. . . . If households simply reversed the status quo, reducing kids television watching to 78 minutes and boosting their reading to 12 hours a week, it would do more to improve academic achievement in America than a thousand high-stakes tests and a century of No Child Left Behind measures. With such a switch in priorities, nearly every school could be a Whitney High. But achieving such a sea change would take a consciousness-shifting campaign of almost unprecedented magnitude." To say the least. Still, he's absolutely right.
Third, and not least, School of Dreams reveals, repeatedly, just how clueless, how heartless, how sheerly awful parents can be. Christine's mother and father berate her mercilessly to become a doctor -- anything else and the thankless girl will simply break their hearts. Another student nearly kills himself on crystal meth, just so he can keep studying -- and his parents never have an inkling about what's going on. Every week irate fathers or mothers barge angrily into the main office to demand that their child's test grade be raised -- usually to an A, even if the poor kid's earned a C at best. Alas, only the childless will fail to recognize their own worst selves.
But our schools themselves can be equally horrible: For hasn't the whole system grown increasingly crass? We have forgotten that the essence of education lies in floundering about, in trying out various daydreams, in failing as much as in succeeding. When our schools should be promoting mental adventure and daring, they instead promulgate a culture of calculation, of playing it safe. Whitney seniors who might actually be interested in film or engineering will check horticulture as their prospective major because it is typically under-enrolled at California universities.
Who is to blame? As parents we insist at all costs that our children look good on their transcripts, while their schools, all too often, care mainly that overall test scores go up each year so that they in their turn look good. So why should we be shocked when one Whitney student, after finishing the AP French exam, immediately announces: "Now I'll never have to speak French again." Not a word about being able to read some of the world's greatest books or understand more fully the culture of France or even about sounding suave and European to impress girls. "I just took it to increase my chances of getting into a great college." That, too often, is what high school education has sunk to.
Sadly, those "great" colleges themselves only encourage the education charade. Near the end of School of Dreams , Whitney's guidance counselor asks an admissions officer at Yale why one of his best students failed to be admitted. The Yale man pulls out a thick application packet "and a multiple choice form filled out by the young man's counselor. He pointed to one question concerning the student's leadership ability. It had been checked 'good.' "
"That put him out of the running right there," the admisions officer said. 'You didn't mark 'excellent.' "
And so "a single multiple-choice question had led to rejection, simply because it suggested that an otherwise stellar student with soaring grades and high SATs still had some room to grow as a leader." Little wonder that students and parents grow berserk at the prospect of a few Bs, God forbid a C. The kiss of death.
Cautionary tales like these crop up repeatedly in School of Dreams , but not all of them are so depressing. In one of the book's funniest sections, Humes portrays a hapless Neil Bush desperately trying to promote a computer learning program based on the theory of multiple intelligences. Bush clearly presumes that all kids hate traditional classroooms, which he dubs "boring," and that his dumbed-down cartoony alternative is bound to be appealing. Not the tack to take with the half-dozen Whitney students who've come to hear his spiel:
"One after another they decry the notion they sense is lurking behind Bush's criticisms -- the idea that school should be made easier, more entertaining. The problem, as they see it, isn't that school is too boring or too hard, but that too many young people are unwilling to work and extend themselves to master difficult subjects. Too many kids -- and parents and teachers -- have low expectations, they say. They should be urged to reach higher, not settle for less, Kosha and the other Whitney students argue.
" 'But I truly believe there is a boundary to teaching kids core knowledge, critical skills,' Bush argues. His tone is almost pleading now, as he finds himself alone, pitted against six kids with near perfect SATs."
The poor flummoxed man doesn't have a chance, and the entire scene grows ever more hilarious, as the Whitney seniors leave Bush looking like a fool, "confounded by a school that succeeds and students who excel." As for Bush's program, which actually depicts the Seminole Wars as a football game dubbed "The Jacksons vs. the Seminoles"? It made me recall the words of H.L. Mencken, who observed that all too often the programs of study in our schools "sound like the fantastic inventions of comedians gone insane."
I read much of School of Dreams on Tuesday, August 26, "the first day back," as kids like to refer to the start of the fall term. Most books about education are notoriously dull; this one -- a masterly example of passionate yet even-handed reporting -- is as enthralling as Richard Hofstatder's classic Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. It deserves an A+, even without grade inflation. ?
Michael Dirda's email address is dirdam@washpost.com. His online discussion of books takes place on Thursday at 2 p.m. on washingtonpost.com.
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