Q & A

What is School of Dreams about?

School of Dreams is the story of our 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, 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.

School of Dreams is set at Whitney High School in Cerritos, California. What's the school like?

Whitney High School has been the top-ranked public school in California for years. It has a modest campus and budget, a school born of an unusual evolution that began with a failed and nearly shuttered vocational school which evolved into a prep-school type academic program to avoid closure. The school spans grades 7 through 12, spreading its 1,050 students over six grades, which makes it feel smaller than it really is. Test scores rival the nation's most elite private and public academies, the best colleges in the country court and woo the seniors, few years go by without someone scoring a perfect SAT — or two, or three. People don't just move from other cities to this inland L.A. suburb so they can send their kids to Whitney. They move from other countries — to attend an American public high school. The school has, literally, remade the community demographics, and today Asian-American students make up just over two-thirds of the student body.

Did anything about this school or its students surprise you?

I was surprised to find that the kids are so socially conservative. The campus definitely is more Disney-rated than Melrose Place in terms of visible boy-girl relationships, fashion, behavior. Couples are rarely seen smooching on campus, and even hand-holding seemed unusual. What relationships there are are often very secretive; the parents are the last to know.

On the academic front, there was no surprise about the high level of academic achievement. Given its built-in advantage — Whitney enrolls the top 20 percent of students from each elementary and middle school in its district — it would be surprising if test scores were not sky high. But Whitney seems to take students further and higher than most other schools — even when scores are compared only to the college-track students at other schools, who initially tested out at the same level as their Whitney counterparts. And that was a surprise; unraveling the reasons for this was part of the challenge in writing School of Dreams.

Another surprise was the genuine affection many of the students express for a school that works them so hard. Even when they complained about the workloads and pressure, many said they couldn't imagine being at any other campus. They consistently speak of their school as if it were a part of the family, a safe and familiar haven, a place where it's okay to be different, to be smart, to be themselves. They often hang out long past the last class, not for any particular activity, but because they just like to be there, to work, socialize, decompress.

How did you get the story?

I went “back to high school.” School of Dreams is the result of a year immersed at Whitney. I went to class every day. I followed a group of students through the year. I taught writing workshops to students as they crafted personal essays for college applications — and found that nothing terrorizes kids more than writing a few coherent paragraphs about themselves. The school gave me complete access, and the students and teachers were gracious enough to share their time and stories with me over the course of the school year.

There are a number of lessons that can be drawn from your experience writing School of Dreams. What's one that stands out?

Whitney transformed itself into one of the best schools in the country without any special funding, charters, vouchers, union concessions or private enterprise takeovers — none of the most-touted cures for what supposedly ails public education. There are no uniforms, no scripted lesson plans, no zero tolerance policies. It’s nobody’s political cause, and if its principal is treated like a celebrity abroad, he remains anonymous at the local supermarket, and his school is virtually unknown in California, despite its top ranking. Whitney instead seems to rely on an uncommon, yet commonsense, mix of high expectations, family involvement, strong counseling for struggling students, and making academics a top priority for six years of hard work. It's not just a school, it's a culture, one that is constantly reinforced at home. And the rest of our schools are not going to get there through our current national efforts at school reform and accountability, which emphasize detection of failure rather than success.