Class Dismissed: A Year in the Life of an American High School, a Glimpse Into the Heart of a Nation [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

I was a member of the graduating class of 2000, and I knew all three of the teens that Maran writes about, as well as most of the people she quoted. However, she gets so caught up in melodrama that she misses small things, like the fact that Mr. Skeels' name is Wyn, not Wayne. Also, she seems to invent lives for everyone on campus; the white kids are all rich and drive SUVs to school, everyone else is poor, etc. The park is filled with stoners, and no one is friends with anyone outside their "clique". Having gone to Berkeley public schools since kindergarten (and being one of the few white kids, according to her, who did), I am somewhat offended at the view she has taken of my life. I live in the flats, have never driven an SUV, and didn't slack off my senior year of high school, as apparently all my peers did. I give her props for good writing, but maybe she should have had students edit it first. Had she done that, it might have presented a more realistic picture, but as it is, this book comes off as the literary form of School Colors.

As a current Berkeley resident and not-too-long-ago graduate of a similarly "diverse" high school, I was disappointed with "Class Dismissed". The three students that Maran follows around for the better part of a year serve as cardboard cutouts enacting the roles that she expects of them. She fails to discover a narrative arc in her string of anecdotes, or even to relate them in any compelling and nontrivial way to national trends. Her "research" into nation-wide problems in secondary education seems to consist mainly of reading the San Francisco "Chronicle", and the "recommendations" that close the book are trite. While the local color is amusing, Maran indulges in the same sort of apologism as the "entitled" Berkeley Hills parents she criticizes, and some of her scenes depicting students of color are painfully smug. About the only parts of the story that brought sympathetic indignation from this reader were the accounts of Keith Stephens' arrests and batteries.

It may be a good book to get angry at, or to spend an afternoon with if you can borrow it from a friend, but don't expect "Class Dismissed" to materially change the education debate.

Anyone looking for a serious evaluation of the state of modern education will have to look elsewhere. This book is a nasty little example of a currently popular form of writing in which adults who should know better try and get teens to tell all and then sensationalize what they hear. I suspect that all three of the student participants in this experiment in journalism will look back in anger at later points in their lives when they see how they have been used. Their friends (whose lives are also exposed) are probably already furious. Now, to the content itself. For reasons that escape me the author selects as her representative sample of Berkeley High Students NO Berkeley teens! Instead we get the hard-worker from Alameda, the jock from Richmond, and the trust-fund kid from the Oakland hills. This probably wont mean much to folks unfamiliar with Bay Area geography, but it means worlds in terms of socio-cultural differences. Although the author makes repeated snide remarks about the children of professors we never get to meet any, nor do we see any signs of the middle or working classes. In addition, the authors focus on a very small school-within-a-school fails to give any real insight into the experience of the overwhelming majority of Berkeley students. Even within the modest bounds that she has set up actual curricula content constantly takes second place to the authors interest in clothing we hear in great detail what everyone WEARS in High School but very little about what they HEAR and still less about what it might mean. Teachers are classified on the basis of dress, and we have to find out in great detail what each of our protagonists is wearing at every stage of their final year. This might (perhaps) be acceptable as social commentary if some analysis was included, but the author seems incapable of ANY analysis at all, she simply has an agenda, but as we plow through dismal page after page one starts to wonder just WHAT that agenda might be. The author obviously likes integration and hates private schools, yet much of what she says demonstrates the failure of the former and the reasons for the latter. She likes experiments in multi-cultural education yet after four years of it NONE of her three teens can get into college on academic merit alone (the jock is parodied as an illiterate, the hard-worker gets in under affirmative-action-by-another-name, and the trust-fund kid is every admission officers nightmare). Perhaps the most egregious fault in this book is the complete lack of any footnotes or real references. Instead the author relies on tittle-tattle & vague allusions to un-cited newspaper editions etc. We dont know her methodology, we dont get any sense of cross-validation, and any hint of scholarship is woefully lacking. The saddest part of the books subject matter is that there really IS a problem with public schools, but having read CLASS DISMISSED one has to wonder whether it is precisely people like the author who have with the best intentions- squandered a unique opportunity in American education. By emphasizing form over content and feel good and appearance over academics a generation of students has been cheated out of much that they should have learned. In the end I fear that we will be left with schools as engines that create the very racism that some of us hoped to do away with as the black kids realize that they have been taught nothing that will help them integrate into society, the white kids resent what they see correctly as racist preferentialism, and both resent being made pawns of their elders guilt complexes..