CLASS DISMISSED (Review)

CLASS DISMISSED

Senior Year in an American High School

By Meredith Mara

St. Martin’s Press. 304 pp. $23.95

By Colman McCarthy,

who teaches nonviolence at seven Washington area schools and directs the Center for Teaching Peace.

Taking parental involvement to new and often praiseworthy lengths, Meredith Maran spent an observational year in the classrooms, halls, assemblies, nooks and hangouts at California’s Berkeley High School. With two sons as recent graduates, and having written about the school on a three month assignment in 1986 for the San Francisco Chronicle, Maran is on home ground. Hardly an inch goes uncovered, In 11 month-by-month chapters--August 1999 to graduation day June 2000--she reports the daily throbbings and thrivings in a public school with 3,200 students, 185 teachers, 45 languages, a principal and five vice-principals, five safety monitors, 62 sports teams and a gallimaufry of alternative programs, clubs and cliques.

With 21 National Merit Scholars in 1999, and AP classes aplenty, Berkeley High’s faculty offers all the academic excellence a community could want. The children of affluent white professionals are here, some driving to school in luxury cars and paying $8 a day to park them, as well as poor children from ill-educated families long annealed in struggle. However racially well integrated the school is, Maran, with a tinge of fatalism, states: “Most of the school’s white kids graduate and go off to four year college. Most of its black and Latino kids drop out, flunk out, or go off to low-wage jobs or jail.” Or as Thomas Jefferson, font of wisdom, foresaw in 1781 as the mandate of public schools: “the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish annually.”

To reduce Berkeley High’s size and diversity to manageableness, Maran focuses on three of its 730 seniors:

--Keith Stephens, a star football player and with dreams of winning an athletic scholarship to college, has severe reading problems. He’s into playbooks, not schoolbooks. The youngest of four in a mother-led black family, he often runs with what he calls “the wrong guys.”

--Autumn Morris commutes by train. Biracial, she works after school to help pay the bills of her family: a mother who holds three jobs, and two younger brothers she must tend. She’s had boyfriend problems, has seen her grades slip and needs A’s and B’s in her AP classes to have a chance at a quality college. The junior class president, she is religious and belongs to her church’s youth group.

--Jordan Etra transferred to Berkeley High from an exclusive private school. In eighth grade, his parents divorced. He has been in therapy since. He grieves for his father, a drug abuser, who died in 1998. Living with his businesswoman mother in a large home overlooking the bay, he has a $90 an hour private college counselor who says he is ideal for an East Coast haven like Bard.

Maran, who provides blanket coverage for the everyday doings of the three, tailing them and quoting them with the skill of a reporter zealous to dish the full story and get it right, was fortunate. The three students gave her full access to their high and low moments, a welcoming spirit matched by the faculty. How many schools have allowed in the media, only to be burned by dopey reporting.

Stereotypes about the allegedly progressive Berkeley, a town of 108,000, are removed early by Maran. True, the citizenry runs deep with old barricade pals of Mario Savio, volunteers for Clean Gene and Ron Dellums, devotees of Thich Nhat Hahn, and folkies with attics packed with early Joan Baez albums. But racial divisions are here, cops are handy with billy clubs, a low paid faculty suffers from high turnover rates, the school had a cheating scandal, and the students staged a walkout to protest the bunglings of an incompetent college counselor.

That’s the orderly chaos. It escalated throughout the year with a series of fires, including a major blaze caused, it was thought, by an arsonist not yet caught.

It isn’t clear from the text whether Keith, Autumn or Jordan appreciate Maran’s conscientious effort to tell their and their school’s stories. But she is surely an ally and, just as surely, each student can use one. Keith’s hopes of a football scholarship go nowhere. He is looking at a junior college, there to study “fire science.” Jordan, depressed the whole year, abandoned most of his college plans except for trying to get into a state school. Autumn won acceptance to UC Berkeley but has little money to pay for it.

In an afterword, Maran offers proposals for school reform. Some are familiar, and have possibilities—pay teachers what they’re worth, get parents more involved in their children’s schools, reduce class size.

Other reformist ideas are California hot tub fantasies. Maran would like to “abolish private schools” because “if we are to fulfill the yet-unkept promise of democracy, we must first close the hatches through which those with money and privilege escape the common fate.” No doubt the boards of trustees at St. Albans, Exeter and Choate are summoning emergency meetings to call on divine guidance for ways to close their hallowed halls and disperse students to public school pits, now that enlightenment has come from Berkeley.

Maran is in closer touch with reality when recommending that public schools become more like private schools. How? With adequate funding, of a kind that deals with starting salaries for California teachers being half the pay given to prison guards..

Though not on the level of such education theorists as Herbert Kohl, Theodore Sizer or Linda Lantieri—all with classroom backgrounds—Maran the immersed reporter came away from Berkeley High with a enough experiential knowledge to earn a place in the national debate on education. Unlike politicians and corporate moneymen who have all the answers because they once spent 30 minutes reading to inner city first graders, Maran is not another dabbler. Her headwork is backed by legwork.