Humes, Edward. (2004). School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School. Reviewed by Katy Smith, Northeastern Illinois University

Humes, Edward. (2004). School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School. New York: Harvest Books. Pp. xxx + 370 $14.00 (Paperback)     ISBN 0-15-603007-1 Reviewed by Katy Smith Northeastern Illinois University May 23, 2005 School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School accomplishes many things very well, and it offers a great deal to appreciate, for educators and non-educators alike. In chronicling a year in the life of California’s Gretchen Whitney High School, author Edward Humes—winner of the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for specialized reporting for his coverage of the military and author of seven nonfiction books—captures the business and busy-ness of the goings-on in and around an American high school, combining a journalist’s eye for detail with incredible sensitivity toward the individuals who contribute to those goings-on. The writing is superb, making for an engrossing read that should resonate with educational insiders while proving enlightening for those who have little contact with the day-to-day experiences of young people and adults inside public schools. Sadly enough, the book may realize a degree of public credibility that other education narratives fail to achieve with readers who are not (or not yet) teachers, administrators, or researchers specifically because of the author’s status as an outsider to academia. The stories told in this book provide material to help teacher education students, parents, school board members, or perhaps even legislators to learn a lot about the current state of public education and the historical and social forces that have contributed to it. If along the way it misses some of the nuances that educational ethnographers would recognize, it nonetheless depicts the successes, tensions, and ironies that abound in Whitney’s hothouse environment in ways that educators are likely to recognize as viscerally familiar and to find mostly if not completely satisfying. The book is organized as a chronological narrative of the author’s experiences during the 2001-2002 school year, interspersed with flashbacks and historical details, as well as excerpts from students’ college application essays, to provide contextual information and illustration of themes that emerged during the research. The key theme throughout is that of pressure. Whitney opened in 1976 as the Whitney Community Learning Center, an alternative high school and community outreach center dedicated to providing expanded learning opportunities through vocational programs for students who were not finding success in the district’s other schools. The problem was, enrollment was so low in the first year that the principal was ordered to figure out a way to get the numbers up or face being shut down. Under such pressure, and with a pragmatic recognition that the best way to make Whitney desirable was to make it selective, he reorganized Whitney as a college-prep magnet school for students in grades 7-12. The school quickly rose to the top of the rankings in California, becoming what Humes describes as “one of the best (and best kept) secrets in the nation—prep-school quality at public-school prices” (p. 4). This rise has led to new pressures, and Humes makes clear that all involved in the school are engaged in a perpetual balancing act as they deal with them. The current administrators’ pressures do not come from worries about keeping the school open, but from keeping it on top, making the best use of scarce resources, all the while managing the delicate balance between appropriately involved and overinvested parents. There are no worries at Whitney about lack of family involvement; rather, Humes tells of annual calls from parents whose children have not been admitted, seeking ways around the system, of families that move not only from other parts of the state but from other countries to live within Whitney’s attendance area, of parents who cover for their children when they break rules. These same parents put pressure on the teachers, who describe fielding regular calls challenging assignments, grades, and policies. In the meantime, with test scores as the primary means of identifying what counts as “on top,” teachers also feel the pressures that come from balancing instruction for understanding with instruction for test-taking success. Considering that the author conducted the research for this book just as the No Child Left Behind legislation was passed, I cannot help but wonder how those pressures have intensified in the immediate past. However, Whitney’s students, not its parents, administrators, or teachers, are the primary actors in this book, and Humes recounts the pressures that they are under in compelling fashion. He describes these adolescents as “Generation Stressed,” a new generation of high-achieving, highly pressured young people who fall into despair not from failing a course but from getting a B; who may tackle subjects and extracurricular activities not out of love and interest, but because of how they will look on their college applications; who sometimes feel that their lives will be over if they do not get into one of the top schools in the country; who may be tempted to cheat or take stimulants in order to keep up with impossible schedules and expectations; and who retake their grueling SATs, even after scoring in the 1500s (putting them in the top 99 percent of students). Why? Because an extra ten or twenty points might make the difference between receiving in the mail the thick Welcome-to-Yale-University envelope crammed with orientation materials or the horrifyingly thin Dear-Applicant-we-regret-to-inform-you envelope with just one piece of paper inside. The kids of Whitney did not give up sizable parts of the childhood most others take for granted in order to get the thin envelope. (p. xxiii) Humes is at his best when sharing the students’ stories, and his choice of vignettes and inclusion of excerpts of the students’ own writing represent these teens as interesting, complicated, multifaceted human beings, naïve and egocentric one minute and thoughtful and worldly-wise the next—just as all of us who have ever spent prolonged time with high school students know them to be. Though he pulls no punches in describing, for example, the rampant cheating that the young people engage in, fueled by heavy academic loads, parental mandates to bring home A’s, and a school culture that exists within a wider society that takes the view that ends justify means, his sympathy for the young people is obvious, and he evokes the reader’s sympathy for them as well. I could not help but feel heartache for Cecilia and Angela, for example, two girls with much in common. Both gifted artists, their parents refused to acknowledge their respective daughter’s talents or to consider that art should—or even could—be a part of the girls’ post-secondary education, although Cecilia’s parents relented and allowed her to declare a double major in English and art after she was awarded honorable mention in a national art competition. After one particularly rancorous fight about her hopes for the future, Cecilia’s parents had thrown her art portfolio into the street, so any compromise might be seen to represent a positive outcome for her; Angela’s family, on the other hand, refused to allow her to accept admission to her preferred colleges, insisting instead that she attend UC-Irvine, because “a UC has some prestige” (p. 254)—and no art program. Then there’s Kosha, a senior who was active serving as an assistant to one of the history teachers; keeping involved in cheerleading, student government, Model United Nations, and the California Junior Miss competition; and holding a weekend tutoring job—all while taking five Advanced Placement courses. As the author says, Kosha, “like many of her fellow students…maintains a level of activity and time commitments—and accepts a level of stress and exhaustion in her life—that would have been unthinkable for previous generations, and that even today might stagger the heartiest corporate CEO” (p. xx). Kosha’s classmate Charles maintained his schedule by “tweaking,” taking crystal methamphetamine in order to stay awake to study for several days running, a habit that developed into addiction. Charles’s story ended well, for he realized he was out of control and asked his guidance counselor for help; the school and family worked together to get him the help he needed; and when he returned to Whitney, his classmates were nothing but supportive. This, Humes suggests, is the paradox of Whitney High School: If the tests and the college admissions race and the homework and the parents sometimes overwhelm, even to the point of becoming risk factors for drug abuse or worse, there is an antidote: the school itself, its student body, the idea that Whitney is a community, a place that takes care of its own—cause and cure, rolled into one. (p. 216) As a reader, I found the stories of the members of this community absorbing, albeit more than a little disturbing. Equally absorbing are the details and implications of some of the major and minor events that occurred during the author’s tenure in the school, several of which serve to mirror larger educational debates. For example, in response to the funding crises that all public schools face, Whitney’s administrators have long sought outside sources to provide technology and other updates for their school. By highlighting some of the incidents and discussions that took place at Whitney related to technology use, Humes underscores both the promise and the pitfalls of the equipment and tools that so many schools are so eager to get. At Whitney, a subscription to Channel One provides video monitors for the classrooms; Humes’s depiction of the ways that this broadcast “service” is used—or ignored—in the school’s classrooms provides a material representation of the contradictions Michael Apple (1999) described in his earlier analysis of Channel One. Humes engages both the technology discussion and larger policy debates by describing visits that representatives of other technology firms, including Ignite! Inc., made to Whitney High School to promote their wares. Neil Bush, the middle of the president’s younger brothers, is the founder and CEO of Ignite!, and Whitney’s principal had agreed a year earlier that the school would pilot one of the company’s interactive software programs. Purported to have been developed based on Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences theory, this software is supposed to present historical information in multiple modes to help different kinds of learners engage with the content. Hume’s account of the younger Bush’s visit to the school is not to be missed, for he captures in full the ironies of the president’s brother’s enthusiasm for MI theory as a means to change what Bush refers to as schools’ “‘prisonlike environments’” (p. 276), his argument during his visit that “‘there is a boundary to teaching kids core knowledge, critical skills’” (p. 282), and his “hearty recommendation of a book that decries the use of standardized tests in public school, though such testing is the linchpin of his presidential brother’s education policy (not to mention the basis of Whitney’s reputation and top ranking among California schools)” (p. 275). As for the software, once the company finally got the program up and running, the students who worked with it found it to be perfunctory and limited in scope, ultimately “too easy” (p. 285) to even be interesting, and the teacher in whose classroom it was used determined that she would not use it again. So much for technology as the sole answer to getting young people excited about learning, or to solving whatever other ills—whether realistic or overblown—that are plaguing schools today. School of Dreams is clear in presenting the case that educational issues are indeed complicated, that there is no sole answer for any aspect of education or educational reform. Humes paraphrases Whitney’s former principal as having said that “A school is like an organism, living, breathing, complex, impossible to know in its entirety…and this incredible human mosaic, rich and unwieldy and only sometimes expected, repeats in every other classroom, every period, every day” (p. 194). For the most part, Humes “gets it,” pointedly reminding the reader that today’s schools are expected to do much more with and for a greater percentage of their students than ever before, that schools’ resources and expectations vary so widely as to have produced “two separate and unequal school systems” in the US (p. 338), and asserting that “no amount of testing will close [the achievement gap], although the gamesmanship surrounding standardized tests may mask it for a time” (p. 338). However, it is precisely because Humes does so much so well in this book that its lapses are so troubling. For one thing, the research for this book was conducted during the 2001-2002 school year. Edward Humes was present at Whitney High School on September 11, 2001, along with just over one thousand students and a faculty and staff of one hundred-plus. Yet, only a segment of a single chapter of this book discusses the day of the attacks and the “Unity Rally” that students organized for two weeks later; one additional mention is made of the events in a description of a class session that took place shortly thereafter. Seemingly, the events of 9/11 had no impact after about the end of October. Granted, Humes’s book is not “about” the effects of the terrorist attacks on Whitney High. The author may have chosen not to focus on those events in order to reveal what was typical rather than particular about the school and the school year—or for some other reason altogether. Regardless, when I consider the multiple ways that those events reverberated throughout the school in which I taught that same year, and the ways they continue to echo in life here and abroad, I find it remarkable and incredibly sad that the lives of the individuals at Whitney High School seem to have been so untouched. That the students were so completely focused on their own futures, with no acknowledgment of the wider society and the place they will fill in it, does not speak well. That the author, who was so insightful in other ways, seems not to have noticed this void seems puzzling at best. Perhaps less puzzling, considering that Humes is not an educator himself, but unfortunate nonetheless, are a few things that the author portrays as surprising and unique. One is the level of dedication that the faculty and staff of Whitney High School display. This is not to say that those individuals are not dedicated or talented: They are indeed, and their stories are inspiring, as they strive to bring out the best in their students each and every day. However, their care and concern for the young people they serve are by no means unique among public or private school personnel, although the context in which they teach and administrate is unique among public schools. I am disappointed that the author seems to perceive that such teachers and administrators would be a rare find in other public high schools. Secondly, Humes describes one young man’s conscious effort to fail courses so that he will be dropped from the school for inadequate academic performance as a “phenomenon unique to Whitney” where “a handful” of students purposefully flunk out annually because “it’s the only way they can think of to get out of a place they don’t want to be” (p. 210), preferring the less-stressful atmosphere of their neighborhood schools. The situation at Whitney may represent an extreme, but it is not unique, for within every school are those who choose to opt out of the experiences offered. Some of these young people end up in ostensibly easier low-track courses; many of them simply leave school altogether. My biggest concern is that ultimately, although Humes is straightforward in describing the incredible pressures that the compulsion to attain high test scores and Ivy League admissions places on everyone at Whitney, the level of distance and critique with which he opens the book dissipates as the story unfolds. Sadly, in the end, the author reduces the “lessons learned” from Whitney High School and others he compares to it to the formulaic: “These are small, intimate, attentive schools…marked by high expectations…; rigorous, traditional studies…; longer hours of study and work…; strong parental involvement…; low absenteeism and few discipline problems; and leadership with a vision” (p. 342). Asserting that Whitney has been “transformed [in the years since it originally opened]…from a school for failures to a school of successes” (p. 342) begs two key questions that had been foregrounded throughout the body of the text: How is success defined, and what are its costs? It reduces the complexities that were at the very center of the stories told to a vastly oversimplified recipe for school “success.” Nonetheless, despite its flaws—perhaps even because of them—School of Dreams is a powerful read, one that has the potential to stimulate and contribute to serious conversation about public education. This story of Whitney High School can serve as both an inspiration and as a cautionary tale, for it shows the power of a strong school community as well as, in the author’s words, “the unintended consequences of building the public high school of our dreams” (p. xxiii). Reference Apple, M. W. (1999). Official knowledge: Democratic education in a conservative age (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.