A Class Apart: Prodigies, Pressure and Passion Inside One of America’s Best High Schools
By Alec Klein
Simon & Schuster, 323 pages, $25
The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle
By Dan Brown
Arcade, 267 pages, $25.95
Only Connect: The Way to Save Our Schools
By Rudy Crew, with Thomas Dyja
Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 248 pages, $24
Is there an institution in America that calls forth such universal criticism and universal hope as public school? Even one of its greatest successes, Stuyvesant High School, which is harder for outstanding New York City students to get into than Harvard University, makes us anxious. Washington Post reporter Alec Klein, a 1985 graduate of Stuyvesant, spent spring 2006 at the gorgeous downtown Manhattan campus interviewing top-flight faculty, dedicated administrators and staff, remarkable students, famous graduates and involved parents.
In “A Class Apart,” Klein shows us that even here, at the best New York has to offer, few are satisfied, fewer are happy (that is, these brainy kids are too driven; they’re too young to carry the load of their parents’ dreams; they compete as if the future is now, before their bodies are mature and their lives are independent). A student newspaper “offers remedies that would be obvious to an otherwise normal student body, like having friends. The problem of pressure even comes up at a Parents’ Association meeting, where students on a panel try to explain the Stuyvesant phenomenon. In a school of overachievers, ‘the pressure is crazy,’ one student says.”
And don’t even ask about ethnic diversity: “Today, in a school system where more than 70 percent of the students are black or Hispanic, only 2.2 percent of Stuyvesant’s students are black, a precipitous drop from 4.8 percent little more than a decade ago, while the number of Hispanics is down from 4.3 percent to 3 percent.” (Klein doesn’t mention this, but in one of the oddities of education today, many urban private schools are much more racially diverse than public schools.)
“A Class Apart” is an honest and interesting book, but Klein hamstrings himself in the ways Miles Corwin did in his popular book “And Still We Rise,” about the gifted students in a poor Los Angeles high school. Both writers are middle-age men hanging around a high school, but (perhaps it’s a journalistic reflex) they pretend they’re not affecting the actions and atmosphere on which they report. For efficiency’s sake, in a daily paper, this self-suppression is understandable, but at book length it’s annoying. We never hear the questions Klein asks to elicit the earnest or frustrated or giddy remarks and confessions, and while all the students quoted consented to participating, Klein won’t let us see or understand the relationships he has established with them. This is problematic in the case of, among others, suicidal Jane:
” ‘I represent the best and worst about Stuy,’ she says. . . .
“She’s smart — fantastically smart — but the question is, will she graduate? She thinks she will, thanks to a surprisingly respectable 86 average, due largely to strong grades she earned before diving into drugs.”
Only in the candid prologue and epilogue does Klein discuss his personal involvement in this project:
“I miss Jane. . . . She essentially stopped speaking to me after one evening late in the semester when she called my cell phone while I was waiting to board a plane. In a frenzied, nearly incoherent state, she asked to borrow a hundred dollars to pay her drug dealer. I said no. She hung up on me.”
A half-hour away via subway, in the South Bronx, a 22-year-old with a famous writer’s name, Dan Brown, graduated from New York University in 2003 and took a job teaching 4th grade in, “The worst class in the worst school in the worst neighborhood” in New York City. The school was P.S. 85-Great Expectations School, and many of Brown’s students required individual attention for learning disabilities, language deficiencies and behavior issues. Despite his intelligence and good intentions, the sensitive Brown never had a chance. Two months into the job, he tells us in “The Great Expectations School,” he found it had transformed him into an unsmiling, unstrung screamer:
“I lifted cackling Tayshaun Jackson’s desk above my head and wham! smashed it to the floor. ‘SHUT YOUR MOUTHS!’ My voice shook with convulsive intensity. The room went dead silent and motionless at my paroxysm, like a record scratching to a halt in some terrible game of Freezedance.”
The school, which “looks like a prison,” demanded that Brown prepare his 9-year-olds for systemwide tests that would help determine the school’s funding. Teaching a history lesson, he discovered his students didn’t understand that George Washington, having led the Revolutionary Army in 1776, must now be dead:
“I explained that very few people live to be a hundred. When only Sonandia and Seresa could tell me that 1904 was one hundred years before our current 2004, I realized . . . that these kids did not understand elapsed time, be it in minutes or decades. As a litmus test, I asked what time it would be sixty minutes from now. No hands. What time will it be sixty minutes from now. No hands. What time will it be one hour from now? Four volunteers. Thus, my hopes for in-depth, history-based lessons were banished to make way for my new, deceptively simple-seeming campaign for ‘Time.’ “
Brown’s persistence in the face of hopelessness earned him a range of experiences that allowed him to become a clear-eyed and trustworthy guide to the inescapable everyday social problems with which so many public school children live. If we want to ameliorate some of these problems we need to know what we’re dealing with and acknowledge the impact of poverty on students. We also need to try to keep bright young people like Brown teaching in our public schools. After his disastrous year he took time off; when he returned it was to an elite Manhattan prep school where he could simply teach and not have to manage a recurring nightmare created by the domestic plight of the students and an overwhelmed school system that focuses on rote learning.
Through his memoir, Brown reveals more to us about public education than do either Klein or one of America’s more admirable school administrators, Rudy Crew, in his book “Only Connect.”
As superintendent of Miami-Dade County schools and as a former chancellor of New York City Schools, Crew might wince at Brown’s candid account, but, as he relates in his attractive, utopian book, he knows such situations exist:
“Now, the classroom is a very scary place. When you visit on parent-teacher night, the crayon smell and piles of fresh drawing paper might stir up nostalgia, but there’s a reason many of us still have nightmares about standing in front of the class in our underwear.”
A born fund- and spirit-raiser, Crew seems to believe all our school problems are solvable if everyone, from the U.S. president to the lunch ladies and preschool children, pitch in and join his Connected Schools revolution — what he calls “a commonsense strategy to integrate education with life in a practical, effective, and yet entirely creative way”: “Whether or not our federal government or even our national will rise to the challenge of this century, if we apply the lessons of this chapter to our own local schools — wherever we are, as much as we can — we will effect a change for the better. If we bring caring, high expectations, and diverse approaches to learning to all levels of public education, we will create a new generation of mature and conscious Americans, full of the stuff that once pointed us toward the stars.”
If everyone will just be sensible and generous and smart and patient and good, schools will be better! Society will prosper! Love will rule the land!:
“Here is how the classroom must work. Each child enjoys a personal, intellectually intimate relationship with an adult who … is crazy about the kid.”
Crew’s neat talking points and to-do lists are alluringly simplistic, and his inspirational tales are so winning that if we don’t call on skepticism to bring us back to earth, we’ll forget to heed the real deals Brown and Klein describe.
The public school really is a great cultural institution, a place we can occasionally be proud of, a place we’re more often ashamed of, but also a place where we can continue to hope that the broken-down and unfair aspects of American society will begin to get better.
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Bob Blaisdell, who teaches English at Brooklyn’s Kingsborough Community College, edited “Tolstoy as Teacher: Leo Tolstoy’s Writings on Education” and has published essays in The Chronicle of Higher Education and English Today.
