Class Dismissed: A Year in the Life of an American High School, A Glimpse into the Heart of a Nation [Paperback]

Meredith Maran (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312283091 | ISBN-13: 978-0312283094 | Publication Date: September 10, 2001 | Edition: 1st

Class Dismissed takes us inside California's Berkeley High, one of the most ethnically diverse high schools in the country. For one year, author and journalist Meredith Maran reported on the lives of three different but representative students from the Class of 2000: a troubled yet well-meaning young white man from an affluent family, a highly gifted and academically overachieving young woman from a biracial background, and a functionally illiterate African American young man who excels at football.

In telling their stories, and in fully depicting their turbulent year as seniors—a year that saw arson, corruption, professional ineptitude, and dismal teacher morale—this book offers a fascinating, up-to-the-minute account of the socio-economic and racial realities in our public schools.

Maran's eye-opening inquiry also shows how even a progressively multi-racial educational institution like Berkeley High can operate not as one school with a common objective but as several different schools under one roof, where students' opportunities and options are as limited as they are varied. Revealing as much about our society as it does about our teenagers, Class Dismissed is a must-read for everyone interested in the possibilities and truths behind American public education today.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Few writers can duck inside the world of teens without resorting to clichés, but journalist Meredith Maran manages to give sideline reports from the lives of three high school seniors without relying on stereotypes or typical adult incredulity. Perhaps it's because Maran's own sons recently passed through the same halls at Berkeley High, but most likely it can be chalked up to solid reporting and writing. A reporter who followed up on a story assignment and spent the 1999-2000 school year in this microcosm of society--dubbed "the most integrated school in the nation"--Maran illustrates some of today's most serious societal problems through the three teenagers she shadows. There's Autumn, a biracial achiever whose father is long gone, forcing her to hand over paychecks to help support the family. There is Keith, a black football jock who struggles with laughable remedial courses, run-ins with the police, and his own illusions about sailing into college on an athletic scholarship. And there is Jordan, the rich white kid who battles with senioritis, as well as depression, a year after his drug-addicted father dies. Along the way, Maran examines academic tracking, school safety in the wake of Columbine, teen sex, suicide, school system politics, decaying campuses, and the everyday trials of being a teenager--and a teacher--in today's high school. There's no hype, just incredible detail and description. Maran manages to be everywhere in these kids' lives and, to her credit, the subjects become living, breathing people, not mere case studies. And readers will find themselves rooting for these teens. Even the most cynical observers will feel they've been granted an insider's view of the drama that plays out daily in our public schools. --Jodi Mailander Farrell --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Having spent the 1998-1999 school year closely following three seniors at "the most integrated school in the country," Berkeley (Calif.) High, Maran delivers an altogether engrossing and often humbling account of the stark realities of public education in "a country that has yet to deliver on its founding promise of equal opportunity." While the year was overshadowed by the Columbine shootings, Maran reveals that "Berzerkeley High" faces profound problems of its own. From an inept counselor who ruins students' chances of attending the colleges of their choice to an arsonist whose fires are increasingly dangerous, "the enormity of the issues these teenagers are dealing with" makes their individual achievements sometimes astounding. Skillfully integrating multiple and quite disparate voices, Maran gives clear and chilling examples of how white and black children are treated differently by both school administrators and the police, bringing to light the "dirty little secret" of racial inequality. Her nuanced rendering of the "day-to-day do-si-do of teachers, students, parents, and community" in a school the local paper calls "the petri dish of educational theorists across the country" should awaken readers to the realities behind political posturing about "improving" public education. Maran's concluding recommendations for change are rooted in her well-documented understanding that "Where our children are concerned, we get only as good as we give. As a nation we have been giving our young people far less than our best, with utterly predictable results." (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; 1st edition (September 10, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312283091
• ISBN-13: 978-0312283094
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #267,498 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

"A family's world is irrevocably rocked when an old female lover from Mom's past reappears, in Meredith Maran's sexy, audacious, politically charged, and sure-to-be-talked-about first novel, A THEORY OF SMALL EARTHQUAKES. Ah, l'amour, l'amour."--Vanity Fair, February 2012

"A THEORY OF SMALL EARTHQUAKES by Meredith Maran: a fictional parenting triangle that challenges assumptions."--Reader's Digest, February 2012

"Meredith Maran's wonderful new novel, A THEORY OF SMALL EARTHQUAKES, is what Franzen's Freedom would be, if it were free."--Rebecca Walker

I could not put A THEORY OF SMALL EARTHQUAKES down. Even with my eyes practically crossing at 2am, I had to know what was going to happen! And I found the ending -- the ambiguity of it -- very satisfying, even though I wanted to know more. It was true to life, painful, beautifully done. Very strong, believable characters who I won't soon forget.--Dani Shapiro

Meredith Maran is a book critic whose reviews appear in People, Salon, the Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle, an award-winning journalist, and the author of several bestselling nonfiction books, including Class Dismissed and What It's Like To Live Now. The mother of two sons and grandmother of the cutest baby on earth, she lives in Oakland with her wife. A Theory of Small Earthquakes is her first novel.

To reach Meredith:
[e-mail]
On Twitter: @meredithmaran

For more information:
http://www.meredithmaran.com/TheoryofSmallEarthquakes.htm

Author photo ©Lisa Keating Photography

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Small inaccuracies made for a frustrating read, November 26, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Class Dismissed: A Year in the Life of an American High School, A Glimpse into the Heart of a Nation (Hardcover)

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.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Shallow and indulgent, May 9, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Class Dismissed: A Year in the Life of an American High School, A Glimpse into the Heart of a Nation (Hardcover)

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.

31 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Kidsploitation at its worst, September 3, 2001

By 

John Anderson (Bar Harbor, ME USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Class Dismissed: A Year in the Life of an American High School, A Glimpse into the Heart of a Nation (Paperback)

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..