Back to School

Before I got to Prior Lake, I had bought into all of the arguments against tracking—I thought tracking was evil and awful; Boy, did my mind get turned around! The most intellectually capable kids in this high school were the most disaffected. They had no realistic sense of how smart they were. So their ability to plan their lives was extremely cramped. I saw no upside to schools having gotten rid of tracking. I mean, I realize that tracking used to be done poorly sometimes, and obviously I don't want racist tracking or anything like that. But I think we have gone too far in trying to protect these kids' feelings. The truth is, most kids do not feel bad if other kids are considered smarter than they are. Their parents feel bad—their parents can't stand it, but I have yet to find a regular public high school where being the smartest kid is better than being the prettiest girl.

Furthermore, I did find that the teachers were better than I expected them to be. It wasn't just that they worked harder than I thought they would. They were also smarter. But we have pushed and pulled them from one fad to another—from the new math, to the new new math, to the new new new math—so that they don't know whether they're coming or going. We need to stop that.

The amount of time that kids spend actually studying is ridiculously low. These kids had managed to convince every adult around them that their tests were too hard and that they had too much homework. But it was a crock! They laughed at the adults, because they had managed to convince them to make the tests easier and to give them less homework. But the kids really are not doing much homework, and they're not reading books.

The notion that everything has to be fun is definitely something I would change about today's high schools. There is tremendous pressure on teachers to make all the classes and all the activities fun. When I was in school, nobody cared if it was fun. They cared if I learned something. Many of the kids I've talked to who just graduated a year and a half ago say that the teachers they remember most fondly are not the teachers who were the most fun, but the teachers who kicked their asses. Because these kids need to know how good (or not good) they are, and how far they can go. We are doing them a disservice by treating them as if they're delicate flowers who cannot do some hard work.

Do you think that most of the teachers at Prior Lake would have liked to impose more rigor?

Certainly more than half the teachers would have liked to. But the parents would not let them get away with it. The single thing that startled me the most was the change in parents. When I was growing up the rule of thumb in schools was that it was the adults against the kids. That doesn't mean that my mother would never believe me if the teacher said I did something and I said I didn't. My mother would listen to both sides. But many, many parents today will never listen to the teacher's side of the story, or to the administrator's. So the teachers are in an impossible position when they give the kids homework, and then parents come in and say, "My kid doesn't have time to do all that homework. He's in X, Y, and Z activities, and he has a part-time job." (Not, of course, because he needs the money, but because he wants a nicer car!) Well, I always thought it was the job of kids to go to school.

The teachers simply do not have support from the parents in raising standards. My favorite quote in the book came from the principal when I was asking him about standards. He's quite desperate to raise standards. But he said, "Well, who's my constituency? Every parent says they want to raise standards, but the minute Johnny gets a C, suddenly they're not so hot about the idea."

Why do you think that parents have changed so much since previous generations?

We live in a very, very competitive world. And parents obviously want the best for their kids. So they want to make sure that their kids have the best transcripts, and they're overly protective about it. I also think it's because these parents are part of the anti-authority generation. The first authorities that they ever rebelled against were their teachers and their schools. And they're still doing it.

It's a total nightmare for these teachers. One of the best teachers in the school taught advanced-placement literature, among other things. And there was a kid whose parents were probably more concerned with grades than any other parents in the school. The kid was under such pressure at home that he cheated routinely. It was a joke among his peers. Everybody always knew that he was cheating. He copied his final paper for A.P. literature and composition off the Internet. And the teacher nailed him. The parents came in and the father said, "How dare you call this cheating? He was using the Internet as a resource! And if you try to flunk him on this paper I am going to sue you to the Supreme Court!" So if you're the teacher, maybe the first eight times you fight the parents. But then, little by little, you give up because it's just not worth it to take these people on.

I didn't meet one teacher there demoralized by the low pay. But I met dozens of teachers demoralized by abusive parents who were not willing to let them do their jobs by holding kids to higher standards, or by making them work.

Do you think that the sorts of programs that politicians are talking about these days, like educational testing and national standards, could be helpful in instituting a return to rigor?

The problem is that most of those proposals are dealing with lower grades. And the stuff Minnesota has come up with so far to try to raise the quality of high school education is ridiculous in the extreme. The new programs have nothing to do with the reality of teaching. They just reveal the ignorance of the politicians who've created them. Most of the teachers know how to do their job. But people don't let them. Parents don't let them; school boards don't let them; politicians don't let them; principals don't let them. And the problem with a lot of student testing is that parents help their kids cheat. At the better high schools in America, parents routinely buy the teacher's book for subjects like calculus. And they give their kids the answers to all the tests and the homework. They also buy them very expensive prep courses, which is another form of cheating.

These high schools are to a large extent a mirror of adult society. And if they don't look so pretty, then we need to start taking a look at ourselves. Unless adults are willing to cop to that fact, then I'm not sure that we're going to be able succeed in improving our schools. Because I don't think the high schools can be better than the rest of us. If we live in a world where "getting over" all the time is considered to be a perfectly acceptable thing to do, and if kids see their parents doing it, then why wouldn't they do it themselves?

You explain, toward the end of the book, that you settled on Prior Lake as the kind of high school you wanted to write about "with the demographics of Littleton in mind." Was it the Columbine tragedy that inspired you to undertake the project? And if so, did your year at Prior Lake affect your understanding of what happened at Columbine?

My interest in education goes back a long way. I was a college professor for a long time and watched the students become less informed every year. But Littleton pushed me over the edge into doing a project like this.

After my year at Prior Lake, the one insight into Columbine I think I can provide is that when I was in school (and I'm fifty-five years old), all of the things that everybody says about Columbine—that the bigger kids beat up the little kids, and the popular kids get all the favors, and all that stuff—well, all that was true in my school, too. Those things have always existed in American schools. So the notion that they explain what happened at Columbine just seems ridiculous to me.

But back then, nobody cared how I and the other students felt. Of course our parents cared how we felt. But the school was not overly concerned with our emotional well-being, nor would our parents have wanted it to be. The school was more concerned with the quality of our education and what we learned.

There is an incessant pressure on kids today to be happy. There's an emotional tyranny to it. If the kids don't fit in, they get called in by teachers and administrators very regularly, and it's like, "What's the matter? Get with the program! Have school spirit. Join some clubs." The most angry and alienated and disaffected kids that I met in my year at Prior Lake were kids who felt emotionally hectored to fit in, both by their parents and by the school. There were days when the level of emotional hectoring of the kids bothered me to the point where I felt like if I were one of them I would have wanted to strangle somebody.

In the end, those kids at Columbine committed suicide. And maybe the question should not just be, Why did those kids want to kill everybody else? The question should be, Why did they want to die? Those were some pretty unhappy kids. But you're not allowed to be unhappy in high school. If you're not with the program, they send you to therapy, they medicate you out of it. They don't leave you any room to just be a surly teenager.

What do you think accounts for the failure to recognize that some kids just aren't going to like high school?

Probably half the teachers at the school were there because they loved high school themselves. And I think that's a problem. Because as long as high schools are run only by people who liked high school, you don't have anybody for the students who hate high school to talk to and to identify with. Of course, that may be unfixable, because why would you want to go teach high school if you hated it yourself? But I do think that if there were more people around high schools who had not loved their high school, a wider diversity of the kids would feel understood, and high school would end up serving them better. I think the fact that Craig Olsen, Prior Lake's principal, had been kind of a geek himself in high school really, really helped. Because the kids who didn't fit into the mainstream of the school felt like the principal understood them, and they felt less alienated than they might have otherwise.

Have you gotten feedback on the book from any of the teachers, students, or administrators that you wrote about? How did they feel about your portrayal of them and their school?

First there were the personal reactions. There were people who loved how they were portrayed, and people who hated how they were portrayed. And, of course, the people who hated how they were portrayed complained loudly. Now there's a much more serious discussion going on. I just got an e-mail the other day from one of the teachers who said that there are a group of pastors in the community who are demanding that the school board have a public discussion about the issues the book raises. Nothing could thrill me more. People in the community are saying, "Oh my God, our kids don't know enough, we need to do something about this."

There was a wonderful moment when I went back to Prior Lake on my book tour. Some parents had a reception for me with teachers, students, alumni, and other parents. The principal came, too. And the alumni got him into a corner and started just giving it to him about how little they learned in school, and how they "got over" all the time, and how easy it was, and how they always pretended it wasn't easy, and why did the adults believe them? He sat them down and said, "Okay, so what are you going to do about it? You're members of this community. You're alumni. Help me." So they've started a discussion group about how the alumni can help the school raise standards.

There are people out there who really want to do this, but they just don't feel like they have enough political leverage. And, actually, I do have another really concrete suggestion. The way we fund schools is a travesty. By making it a local community issue, school funding is always going to be a popularity contest. The parents who are the angriest at a school at any given moment are the most likely to show up and vote down a bond issue. That is just a hell of a way to run an education system. Schools constantly feel that they have to pander to parents who will get mad at them because they gave a kid a bad grade. That doesn't do our kids any service. I think that if we removed some of that financial control from the local electorate, then the administrators would have a lot more backbone in fighting against the parents.

Do you intend to keep tabs over the years on the students you wrote about and see how their lives develop?

There are kids that I can't imagine I won't always know, because they became my friends. Like the bad boy who I never thought I would be friends with who's in the Marine Corps now and who I hear from regularly. And Nick, the incredibly talented writer who wants to write professionally. There's a core group of about fifteen who I'm in touch with regularly.

The summer right after my husband and I came back to New York there was a constant parade of kids from Prior Lake coming up to visit us. I gave more tours of New York City than I ever thought I would. It's a little harder now because this year I'm so far away. But these kids gave me an immense gift. It wasn't just the gift of a book, or the gift of a better understanding of their generation. When you go back to high school at my age, your own old demons are all relived. And I got to go back to high school and do it differently the second time around. And that was really really really fun.

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