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Between the Lines |
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Interview with Edward Humes |
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School of Dreams
Making the Grade at a Top American High School
Edward Humes
School of Dreams is the story of high-achieving high school students, set at one of the nation's top public high schools, where kids have a love of learning, a sense of mission, and SAT scores to die for—and where families move from around the world for a chance to enroll their children. But it is also the story of a generation stressed, over-tested, over-pressured, and over-exhausted; a generation for whom the admissions process has become an arms race, and obsession over grade point averages and test-taking strategies can take precedence over real learning. Today's high school experience is a world apart from previous generations', and even their own parents don't always see what these kids go through. School of Dreams is their story, a very personal and human account, but one I hope also sheds light on the state of education in America today—and where it may be headed. –Edward Humes
Book Review on EducationNews.org
Edward Humes on NPR's Talk of the Nation |
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Biography |
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| Edward Humes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who has written for numerous newspapers and magazines, and is currently writer at large for Los Angeles Magazine. He has written seven nonfiction books, including Baby E. R. and the bestselling Mississippi Mud, Mean Justice, and No Matter How Loud I Shout, winner of a PEN Award A graduate of Hampshire College, he lives in Southern California with his family.
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Interview |
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Q: School of Dreams, along with your previous books including Baby ER and No Matter How Loud I Shout, are nonfiction subjects told in a creative way—true storytelling as it were. What do you consider to be the primary form of your writing?
A: I’ve been writing what is sometimes called narrative nonfiction—the idea being that it’s possible to write journalistically sound, interesting, and hopefully valuable nonfiction that gives readers the feel and the enjoyment of something that’s close to a novel.
Q: Do you ever think about veering off into the fiction genre?
A: I think about it, but I haven’t exhausted my enthusiasm for writing this type of nonfiction. I think it’s the most exciting genre going—there’s such wonderful talent writing in this area now, and there’s much to cover. I like to think it offers the best of both worlds. When it’s done well, it can really be like a page-turner of a novel with the added attraction that it is true.
Q: Let’s talk about School of Dreams, your newest endeavor. How did you get there and where will you go next?
A: What’s most interesting is how I got to School of Dreams. My first books revolved around crime and the criminal justice system. In my last book, I branched out to write about a very intense part of the medical world—neonatal intensive care. And now here I am with high school students. I see it as an evolution. Part of this evolution may be my evolution as parent—my own kids are out of their diapers and into the educational system. But I’m also drawn to subjects where I have the opportunity to enter a world unto itself—places that generally exclude the general public and press–and to explore the inner workings of those places. To me, schools are omnipresent parts of all of our lives, yet not really open to the outside observer who isn’t part of the system, to the fly-on-the-wall journalist That’s the sort of landscape that draws me as a writer. Whether it’s writing about the incredibly rich and corrupt landscape of Biloxi, Mississippi, where one of my books was set, or this amazing world of high school—where kids perform at such a high level and yet endure schedules and pressures that would stagger most of corporate CEOs. I find these to be fascinating places to experience and to share with others through my writing.
Q: Is it true that in your effort to enter the private world of education that you joined in the classes and performed the same schoolwork as the students at Whitney High School?
A: Yes. Without the teenage angst, which was a relief. It was also cool for the kids. At first it was probably strange to have this forty-something journalist sitting in the classes taking tests and wanting to know all about their lives. But after awhile I think they were fascinated by the idea that an adult wanted to listen to them—an adult who didn’t grade them and had no authority over them. It provided them with a different level of interaction with adults.
In the course of doing my research, I followed a group of students in a set number of classes. I kept a schedule like any student would do—finishing assignments and taking tests. The art teacher was the first to suggest this. Basically she said that if I was going to take up room in her classroom, I was going to take the class. I did all of the assignments and took many of the tests in art. Of course the physics teacher heard about this and then the Civics teacher, and pretty soon I was taking tests all over the place. It was hilarious because it taxed my memories of high school and college. But it was also a great opportunity for breaking down barriers because suddenly I was enduring some of the same things as the kids—and I think it made some of the students more comfortable with sharing their stories.
Q: So what was your GPA?
A: Well, I didn’t take it quite that far. The experience revealed to me that I pursued the proper direction in life by going into humanities and communications!
Q: Whitney High School is a top-rated public school in Cerritos, California, and it is a school that preps for admission to Ivy League and top-rated colleges. Although a public institution, Whitney requires an admission application and acceptance for attendance. How does this work?
A: Whitney only accepts students who live within its school district—and the school generally offers spots to only those students who score in the top 20% of each of the middle and elementary schools in that district. But being a top student is different in different elementary schools, and that creates a broad spectrum of academic preparation for kids coming into Whitney. Some of the students need a lot of help when they arrive to prepare for the rigorous academic environment. The school tries to create an equitable system so many types of students have the opportunity to get in. But that said, the overall population of the place resembles the college-track population of other high schools—if you take all the college-bound students and put them into one school, that would be Whitney. I’m talking about academics here. In terms of the diversity of the student population, I describe the campus in School of Dreams as looking like a mini-United Nations. Cerritos is considered one of the most diverse cities in the nation—there’s no language that can’t be spoken and no cuisine that you can’t find. It’s an interesting place.
Q: As a top-rated public school, does Whitney get more funds than schools performing at lower levels?
A: No. Less actually. An academic magnet program like Whitney’s doesn’t qualify for any of the special funds many other schools receive. They get less per student than other schools in the district. Whitney received about $5,500 per student the year I was there.
Q: If the funding is the same, why can’t all the public schools achieve the same excellence level as Whitney?
A: To be fair, you have to remember that Whitney is selecting students rather than just taking everybody who wants to come—they have the advantage that all the students have shown a certain level of academic ability. Secondly, it’s a choice school—a magnet school—and as soon as a family makes a choice to go out of the way to attend a certain school, the dynamic changes. The kids and parents are involved, they’re not just passively going to the school down the street. But beyond these advantages, it became clear to me that there are elements at Whitney that could easily serve as a model for other schools of all types, namely the culture of the place. This school exists to set very high expectations for all its students regardless of their backgrounds, and you have families who buy into this culture of high expectations, investing more time and money in the education of their children. So you get a synergy between what’s happening at home and at school—academics become a huge priority. Everything else becomes secondary—from getting your driver’s permit to going to the prom to playing sports.
Q: But School of Dreams isn’t just about the programs of Whitney High; it’s also about, as you mentioned, the tremendous expectations of the parents whose kids are attending. Did you find in your research that these kids are living their parents dreams rather than their own?
A: In some cases, yes. Cecilia comes to mind, one of the seniors I wrote about. She is a very talented artist, and she wanted to pursue art in college. Her parents were against this. They felt she needed to be more “practical.” She was not necessarily going to be allowed to go the college she preferred. I remember when she had a long string of battles with her parents. A year’s worth of work—her entire portfolio—ended up being thrown in the street and she was forbidden from picking it up—she could only watch as the cars kept running over it. That’s how high the emotions were running. She had just begun trying to assert herself and tell her mom and dad, “I’d like to have a say in my future.” How things turned out for her, and some of the other students in School of Dreams who faced similar conflicts, is an important part of the story.
Q: As a father yourself, were you personally affected by these stories?
A: To write well, to bring the setting and characters to life in the narrative form, you have to take the time to get to know the people you are writing about, to reach a level of trust where they can share more than superficial insights and comments (and be willing to see those insights and comments in a book some day). I don’t think it’s possible to write about the lives of young people in this way without being affected. Cecilia is a very talented artist and a bright young woman—not the top test scorer but always doing well—and yet she would say, more than once, that she felt stupid, that she never could do anything well enough to please her parents. There was a time a year or two ago, when she would just comb her hair in front of her face, so people couldn’t see her. She really had a difficult stretch getting through her last year of high school.
How could you not be affected by a story like that? I thought it was important to share her story in School of Dreams because, while there are so many positive things going on in her school, there is also a price that is being paid for that success. What are the unintended consequences of all the parental involvement and high expectations and stress and all-nighters? Cecilia is one of those who was caught in the crossfire—walking a tightrope between her parents’ ambitions and her own dreams.
Q: Does the combination of school and parental pressure make Whitney a winning school or just a hotbed of stress and overwork and overachievement?
A: Both. The teachers and counselors and principals spend a considerable amount of time worrying about and looking for some balance between the two. They have a saying at the school: one of the best things about Whitney is the parental involvement, but one of the worst things about Whitney is the parental involvement. There is a certain obsession, not just at Whitney, but all over the country, with getting into name-brand universities—kids being put on the college track when they’re six or seven, the hiring of consultants to help them perform on standardized tests, the SAT academies. There are parents who want the best for their children, and who can be hyper-ambitious about it, and in varying degrees this affected the kids I met at Whitney. Some kids would hang out at school for hours after the last class because it was a more relaxed atmosphere than home. Can you imagine staying at school instead of going home, not for some activity or club, but just to hang in the halls and decompress? It seemed Whitney had become a second home to some of these highly-pressured students. That was a surprise to me –the kids would complain about the classes, the all-nighters, the homework, but then they would also talk about the school as if it were part of the family. They’d say they couldn’t imagine being any place else.
Other students and parents struck more of a balance between high expectations and a recognition that children need to have a childhood—they still need to relax and play and spend time with friends as well as their books. So there was also a middle ground. It isn’t all cracking the whip
Q: Is it too much? Or is it the best preparation you can give your children to do well and be successful?
A: On balance, I think what Whitney has accomplished, its best qualities, its culture of high expectations and emphasis on making academic achievement the true priority and mission of schooling, could serve as a model for school reform. But that isn’t happening. Success in public schools is not often talked about or reported; bashing public education, however, is something of a national sport, from the White House on down. Toward that end, we have a growing national obsession with standardized testing as the driving force behind educational policy these days – tests that are about identifying failure, not success, and that are primarily political inventions, not educational tools. It often seemed to me that the No Child Left Behind law ought to be renamed the No Test Left Behind law.
The problem is, standardized tests don’t measure everything that is important about learning. They don’t even tell us what’s going on in our kids’ classrooms –the results of most of the statewide standardized tests aren’t available until months after the test is taken. In California, kids have moved on to the next grade before the test results are available. What they end up measuring is who is the best test taker—which increases pressure for kids, especially at places like Whitney, to make the grade, rather than the learning, their top priority. They would talk about this often how a good test taker doesn’t take any risks. Many students would choose to go for a sure A in a course they didn’t particularly like, rather than take a chance on a challenging course that interested them, but where their grades weren’t a lock. And so they would turn down opportunities because they didn’t want to spoil that resume. On the one hand they take on immense workloads and do a tremendous job, and on the other hand, it’s sometimes all about the scores and not the learning. And I fear for an education system that encourages these sorts of priorities.
Q: For whom did you write the book? The parents who are obsessive about performance, the educators, or the kids themselves?
A: I hope School of Dreams is written for everyone who is affected by the education system.
We have created a Generation Stressed—overtested, overpressured, and over-exhausted kids. Most of the people who went to high school 20 or 15 or even ten years ago have no idea of what these kids lives are really like, what we are asking of them, what they are giving us, and what they are losing in the process. That’s one of the fundamental stories within School of Dreams—it ain’t your father’s high school anymore. People should really see it from the inside out to understand where we are and where we are heading.
There’s a very verbal group who view teachers in the public schools as poor educators with no thoughts for students. But at Whitney you bring forth a new perception— the teachers come across as truly wonderful educators who care about educating the students and perhaps more importantly, care about each student as a person. Do you find that Whitney is unique in this regard?
I write about this in the book. Teachers have taken their share of unjust hits. But teachers compare quite favorably with other professions, such as attorneys in terms of their aptitude and performance on tests., contrary to conventional wisdom among public school critics.
The teachers at Whitney are like those at any other school—there are superb ones, not so great ones, and those in between. If this group of teachers stands out, it’s in their support for their school and its unique program. A good example would be the physics teacher, Rod Ziolkowski, who never teaches a course the same way twice and who pushes his students toward independent studies and creative projects, looking for ways to free them from the rigid test-taker’s mentality. Ziolkowski is certainly not in it for the money. He had a very lucrative career as a chemical engineer. But he didn’t like the work and he quit to pursue a dream to be an actor. He made pretty decent money in commercials—but, again, he found it unrewarding. He eventually moved into teaching and has discovered his passion. He teaches because he loves it and feels he’s making a contribution. I don’t know if that is so rare among teachers.
Q: Some of the students you profiled have expressed that, on leaving Whitney High, they were not at all prepared for the real world, the social world of college. How is Whitney addressing this?
A: Six years in the Whitney “cocoon” is a long time, many of the kide would tell me. The academic pressure of college isn’t the problem. It’s the lack of structure they can encounter– away from parents, from the environment at Whitney, which feels small and intimate, compared to a large university. The realities of college social life, of dorm parties and living on your own, can be overwhelming to these socially conservative kids, who went to a school where few openly date, where smooching on campus is unheard of and even hand-holding is rare. Dorm life at a typical major university can lead to something of a meltdown for some kids. To their credit, the Whitney counselors and teachers have started trying to prepare the students a bit more for life after Whitney—they’ve brought in some graduates to speak with them and also have held a number of some retreats to discuss these issues away from the school, in a more relaxed setting.
Q: Is that really Whitney’s responsibility? Or the parents?
A: I think the school is seeing it as a responsibility. They’ve created a long-term learning environment—7th grade though12th grade—the time when kids really move from being children to adolescents to young adulthood. The school is the biggest thing in the students’ lives for those six years. You could argue the responsibility, but the programs are voluntary with parents’ approval, so it seems like a laudable idea.
Neil Bush came into Whitney with a computer-based educational program that was going to be better for students because the new system would take the “boredom” out of learning. His position being that traditional learning was boring to students because they were not being taught in ways that were natural to their learning personalities—and that schools as they are conceived are “prisons.”
Q: Yet the system failed at Whitney and the students were quick to point out that the lessons were too easy for them. Is there a propensity for lawmakers and people who are interested in these issues from a political perspective to simplify the education process and forget how complicated it is to learn—and to throw in a lot of simplified mechanisms to help students do better on tests rather than learning?
A: This gets to the crux of what’s going on with our schools and the very real turning point we are reaching in our national education policy. On one hand there is a solution that makes sense, that works, that makes parents, students, and schools all partners in education. This is what has happened at places like Whitney, and it’s not an easy path, it’s hard – because you have to change the priority, not just of the school but of the families, of the public. The Whitney students and families have decided their priority is education and they are going to reorganize their lives—even to the point of moving from a different country—to meet that priority. That’s one solution. We should change our national attitudes about learning—in a very big way. It can be done: in the sixties we had a very effective national campaign to combat litter – remember the image of Iron Eyes Cody paddling his canoe in a trash-strewn river, a single tear on his seamed face?—and it worked, we changed our attitudes about litter. And again in the eighties, with the campaigns against drunk driving—we changed the way people think about that issue, Behavior and expectations changed. That’s what schools like Whitney have done with education. The average household in America spends more on hair care and video rentals than education and reading. The average kid reads less than an hour a week, but watches twelve hours of television. Turning around those priorities would do more to improve public schools than a thousand No Child Left Behind tests.
On the other hand, there is the easy solution. No one has to change their priorities this way. For Neil Bush, its about putting technology in the classrooms and telling students it’s okay not to pursue challenging material. For his brother, President Bush, testing is the solution: All we have to do is impose more testing and hold everyone accountable. But what that really means is “Let’s test them and point out the failures.” Standardized testing measures the floor instead of reaching for the ceiling. These tests are not about finding success—they are about identifying failure. And they are political tests, not educational tests. If they were educational you would have results immediately and be able to help the students that are struggling. A teacher would feed the papers into a scanner and find out, “Oh Joey needs help with reading comprehension.” “Oh, Suzie doesn’t understand how to balance equations.” That would be a useful test. But that’s not what happens. It gets sent off to some vendor who gets paid a lot of money to evaluate the tests and it takes months to get results. This doesn’t help—it doesn’t give teachers a chance to help the kids, and it doesn’t give parents a chance to find out what’s really going on at that moment in the classroom. As educational tools, these tests are useless.
The so-called “Texas miracle”—which was a big point in George Bush’s campaign for president—claimed to have turned the education system around with accountability testing. Now we’ve found out that Texas kept lowering the standards until the students did better—and that’s not improving education. It’s just lowering expectations. Now there are tests that are a better measure of what’s going on. The problem is that tests don’t fix anything—it’s what you do with the tests that matters.
Q: According to School of Dreams, Whitney also teaches kids “how” to take tests—how does that fit in with your comments on the value of standardized testing?
A: Yes, they do teach them how to takes tests because these kids have to live in the real world and they do want to get into Harvard, Yale, and UCLA. Any school can have great, innovative programs, but if the kids don’t make the cut on the test, they won’t get into the next school of their dreams. We have become obsessed with tests and at the moment the students must perform on them. The school and its students and parents do not feel they can just unilaterally disarm.
Let’s stay with the politics of education for a moment. As a Californian you know that a few years ago there was a huge budget surplus in California and some of those funds were diverted into programs for educational benefit. This year California has a huge deficit that will result in educational cuts. We talked about changing our attitude to have an effect on education, but how will more budget cuts affect Whitney and other public schools?
Whitney gets cut like all the other schools. There were position cuts across the public school system. Now we’re looking at a perfect storm of circumstances in education, some of them deliberate and some outside the realm of anyone’s control, and together they are threatening the future of public education. We have the testing obsession and all that goes with it – a testing mandate from the federal government that many schools cannot meet. Inevitably, these new federal testing requirements will leave some schools branded as failures, forcing them to transfer students or close down. That’s one part of the perfect storm facing education. Then there is the push for more privatization and school vouchers, which will gain more traction should the number of failing schools grow. There are the budget crises, not just in California but nationwide, with schools facing deep cuts in coming years. And then there is the response to budget cuts, a growing reliance, even addiction, in our schools to fundraising by parents. This is a solution in the short term, but a troubling development which is leading to a have/have not culture, where the schools that have a community of parents who can kick in extra money can keep their programs but the others can’t. The entire concept of equal education for all is threatened then. All of these forces are coming together to pose a threat to public education as we know it .
Q: And what happens then?
A: The public education system in America is one of the greatest advancements in civilization. It was a huge battle to get it in place and although we tend to deride the public schools in political discourse, and there are many real problems, it is the envy of the world and rightly so. And it needs to be protected or we will lose ground instead of gain it. But the solutions being proposed—more testing, private vouchers, and privatization — have not proven to be effective. I don’t think there’s any magic, just a long hard battle to remake our system school by school, to change the way the public thinks about public education. And lots of schools—including Whitney—are doing this and are successful in the process.
Q: What is your next project and is it in any way related to the education system?
A: I do have another book with Harcourt but my policy is not to reveal the subjects of my books until they are done. Let’s just say it is different but that there is a part of it that is very critical to our system of higher education.
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