School of Dreams Making the Grade at a Top American High School [Paperback]

The pressure to succeed in our nation's most competitive public high schools is often crushing. Striving to understand this insular world, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Edward Humes spent a year at California's Whitney High, a school so renowned that parents move across town-and across the world-hoping to enroll their children. That's because schools like Whitney deliver everything parents want: love of learning, a sense of mission, and SAT scores that pave the way to elite universities. Attending such a school, of course, carries its own toll: High-achieving, pressured kids survive on espresso and four hours' sleep a night, falling into despair if they get a B.

Lively, personal, and very readable, School of Dreams uncovers what works-and what doesn't-at this model high school, offering parents, students, and teachers some powerful messages about public education today.

PRAISE FOR SCHOOL OF DREAMS
A masterly example of passionate yet even-handed reporting . . . Deserves an A+, even without grade inflation. -Michael Dirda, The Washington Post book world

Engrossing . . . Deserves credit for showing that a fine public school education isn't necessarily an oxymoron. -The Boston Globe

We have great kids here, wonderful students. The best. I love teaching here. The drama teacher hurls the obligatory praise over her shoulder like a trail of bread crumbs as she leads the fresh arrivals on a quick tour of their new school. Then she gets to the inevitable but, her voice a stage whisper now, forcing the six new teachers hurrying after her to crane forward. But there are two things you really, really have to remember about this place....

Jodi Improta heads Whitney High School's drama department with good reason: She knows how to set up a line. First, these kids are messy, she tells them. She bobs her blond head at a Coke bottle and some crumpled papers scattered on the ground outside the library, lsB