January Reading: Three Book Reports

So, when the new year started, I was in a reading lull. I didn't have many books home from the library, and hardly any in my hold queue. I felt sort of tired of all the kinds of things I usually read, and like I'd just been thinking too much about too many things and needed to give my brain a break. So, I decided, I would devote my reading in the new year to genre fiction, and avoid reading anything else on certain worn-out topics, like politics, education, and parenting.

I have been half-successful. I've read some science fiction, including Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World, which I just finished this morning and was very impressed by. It's one of those books that seems only OK--good in the gonzo, perfect-action-man tradition of Spider Robinson's Callahan books, John Scalzi's Old Man's War series, and certain Heinlein. But then, about halfway in, the pieces start coming together in a very satisfying way, and it becomes a really good book, and you admire the author for having the patience to create a set-up 250 pages long. I was completely surprised by the twist around page 400, even though the twist suddenly made all these things that had nagged at me ("Why does he never talk about his parents?") make perfect sense. I picked up that something was off; I didn't figure out what it was. That's a good twist.

I have set aside The Gone-Away World for David, instead of putting it right into the library bag to be returned. Though, as I told him this morning, I'm not sure I want him to read it even though I am sure he'll like it. Because he is smarter than me in certain ways and he will figure out the twist in about 100 pages, and then I'll feel stupid.

Of course, I've forewarned him: he knows there's a twist. So he has an unfair advantage. In addition to the one where he's just smarter than me in certain ways, I mean.

But I have not been fully successful at focusing on genre fiction, because I have this reflex: if someone mentions a book in my hearing, or on a website or something, I order it from the library and read it. I think I have said before that it's a wonder my friends don't exploit this habit for their own amusement, sending me on wild goose chases after terrible novels and unreadable literary criticism and Tea Party memoirs and distasteful porn.

Anyway, I was on a website where some people were recommending books, and as a result I ended up reading two books about education and one about parenting this month. And now I will say a few things about these books.

School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School by Edward Humes.

Whitney High School in Cerritos, California, is one of the highest-ranked public high schools in America. 100% of its graduates go on to college, many of them in the Ivy League or at flagship schools in the California state university system. Edward Humes spent a year at the school interviewing teachers, parents, and students, in the interest of painting a picture of what high school is like at the kind of school that has a reputation so wide-spread that families move into the district from India and Japan in the hopes of enrolling their kids there.

I liked this book better than I expected to. Humes was less interested in an expose than in a description, so the book gives you a picture of what works in the school as well as what might make most of us cringe, like seventh graders pulling highly-caffeinated all-nighters before major tests, and parents who push kids into a very narrow range of options (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, conveniently abbreviated "HYP"; medicine, business, hard sciences) no matter what the kids' interests and aptitudes. Humes doesn't seem too interested in the big questions, but his book shows us what it takes to produce that student body, and invites us to wonder whether it's worth it. A pretty quick read; worth it if you're interested in that kind of thing. Not something I'd put on a list of "10 Books About Education You Must Read," were someone to ask me for such a list.

How to Walk to School: Blueprint for a Neighborhood Renaissance by Jacqueline Edelberg and Susan Kurland.

This book is about the transformation of a failing Chicago public elementary school into a model school, and it is written by one of the mothers who drove the transformation, and the principal of the school. One of the book's flaws is that is is annoyingly self-congratulatory; the group of mothers who joined together to try to improve their neighborhood school is referred to throughout as the "supermoms," for instance. It's a bit grating.

There is no doubt that these moms worked hard. They conceived of their plan while hanging out at the playground with their preschoolers; overwhelmed by the process of trying to find places for their kids in one of the decent public elementary schools (which might get 600 applications for 57 places), or in one of the private elementary schools in Chicago (which might also get an overwhelming number of applications, and then cost $20,000 per year to boot), they decided to see if they could do something about their neighborhood school. It was failing academically; the physical plant was dingy and in need of repair; the building itself was so posted over with KEEP OUT signs that it was intimidating just to approach it.

But they did. The met with the principal and got her permission to transform the place. They set a timeline of one year, just long enough to figure out if they could make it decent enough for their kids to start kindergarten in, and to show enough progress to get other parents to choose it over the magnet-school/private-school lottery. In the second half of one summer, they collected nearly a half-million dollars worth of donated materials and labor, with which they improved the building's exterior, painted the interior, made much-needed repairs, and transformed an unused room into the school's first-ever library.

Yay for them! They certainly deserve some kudos for their vision and hard work, these "supermoms," and I would offer them some except that they are so busy kudos-ing themselves that it would be redundant.

Well, and I won't offer them too many kudos because their story has a much deeper problem than a little too much self-satisfaction: a shocking level of cluelessness about social class issues.

These women achieve something that goes so far beyond ordinary class-cluelessness that I was staggered. I have a friend who is very passionately concerned about social class issues; I kept thinking to myself, "Jeanne must never read this book. You could practically murder Jeanne with this book, just slip it into her bedside to-be-read pile and wait for the inevitable aneurysm..." I honestly did not want to believe that people this unaware existed, but here they are, damned by their own words. No wonder people like Jeanne are so passionate about social class issues.

It starts when they conceive the project, and deliberately decide to proceed without seeking input from anyone outside their group. Their reasons are pragmatic, and make sense to a point: they want to hit the ground running and accomplish a lot very fast, and they're concerned that if they start convening neighborhood meetings and listening to other people's concerns, they'll get bogged down in discussion and controversy and accomplish nothing. I don't think they're necessarily wrong about that; I've been in community meetings myself where action was stalled by nay-sayers, or by competing and incompatible aspirations.

But that decision speaks to a kind of persistent assumption that the Supermoms know best. Unfortunately, they have a very narrow vision: they want to create a school that their kids, and the kids of other people like them, can attend. They are not asking questions about how to best serve a diverse neighborhood, for instance. They are self-congratulatory about things that would have troubled me, such as the high number of professional degrees among their group. It's not that professional degrees are bad; I'd just have been concerned about the insularity of the group. They don't seem to be. The authors crow about a moment when, needing a special permit for something, they are able to get it quickly because one of the group members, an urban planner, has contacts at the city. I'm having trouble making my point. I mean to say that they don't seem to notice that they're not a very representative group. If anything, they revel in the very things that privilege them. They describe what they did as a "blueprint," but don't seem to notice that they have a formidable array of resources that may not be easy for another group to come by. Their driving force is not, "This school is failing the neighborhood children; what can we do to make it better serve its community?"; rather, it's "I want to opt out of this insane magnet school/private school race; how can I make this school good enough for my child?"

Two more examples: At one point, the group is accused of "elitism" for wanting to hold an expensive fundraiser at what they describe as a "posh wine bar." It is very telling that the authors' response is a combination of befuddlement and missing the point: "How can we be elitist?" they ask. "We're working so hard on this fundraiser, working into the night!" And then they smugly claim that the complaints disappeared once the money started rolling in, $17,000 in one night. Yet again, the Supermoms know best! Astonishing.

The most telling moment, though, comes when the authors discuss the decline in enrollment among poor children and African-American children, once the school's turnaround begins to succeed. They are very troubled by this, and the long, introspective passage where they consider the moral and ethical issues involved in "fixing" a school and in the process turning it into a magnet for the upper-middle-class, and where they consider soberly whether there are things they could have done to improve the school while retaining and serving the kids who used to be its core population, is one of the highlights of the book.

Just kidding! Ha ha ha ha ha. They are, in fact, troubled by the decline in enrollment of Black and poor kids...because it becomes a fund-raising challenge. It turns out that both government entities and private foundations prefer to give money where it can help the underprivileged. The authors note without irony that nobody seems to want to give money to help kids who already have everything they need, so once the population of the school reaches a certain percentage of white and middle-class kids, it becomes much harder to get outside money. The lesson they learn: how to find corporate partners.

These moms really are dedicated, hard-working, and high-energy, and they forged a very productive partnership with their local failing school. I just wish they'd done it without making privileged white people look so completely clueless and self-involved.

[Full disclosure: By about halfway through the book, I found the authors so insufferably smug that I started skimming. So it is possible that somewhere in the second half is a section I missed in which they make all this right. If you read it, and find that part, send me an e-mail with the page numbers and I'll post a sheepish and apologetic update.]

Finally, I read The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris (though not the updated version linked there, the original one). The original was published in 1998, though I thought it was more recent than that--I remember some book whose premise was "parents actually have very little influence over their kids" making a big splash a few years ago. Whatever book that was, I ignored it, as I had ignored this one, until someone called it a must-read and I decided to give it a look.

Harris's premise is indeed that parents have very little influence over their children. She is a big fan of genetics, and she also believes that peers have more influence than parents. Some pieces of her argument are quite persuasive, and I'll talk about some of the points I found worthwhile in a minute. But I didn't trust her. Aristotle identified something called the "ethical appeal" in argument, which is the ways that a person signals that they can be trusted: carrying oneself with authority, for instance, or speaking calmly. I didn't buy Harris's ethical appeal. For one thing, she is too self-consciously radical. She likes to say, "Nobody else is brave enough to say this, but I am," as if early childhood researchers are going to form a mob, storm her house, and burn her at the stake as a heretic.

She also recycles the same examples over and over. Certain pairs of identical twins reared apart show up in chapter after chapter. It's tiresome to read; somebody should really have helped her edit this thing more effectively. But it also made me wonder to what extent she was relying on a handful of studies that supported her claims, and what she was ignoring. I found myself suspecting that if I were to check her sources, I might find that they didn't say what she said they did. I'm not invested enough to do that, but I just didn't trust her. Too axe-grindy.

An aside on the identical twins: she is especially enamored of these twins, reared apart, who, when they met as adults for the first time, had similar haircuts, glasses with rectangular frames, and sons named James. They were also both wearing blue shirts. This is all supposed to point to the mysterious genetic component of behavior, but I was skeptical. I found myself thinking about how similar men's haircuts are in general; how little variation there is in eyeglass fashion (practically everybody I know is wearing rectangular frames right now--because they're the only thing you can get). How common a name was "James" when their sons were born? I remember getting all excited one time because David and I met another couple named Dave and Sue; David laughed at me. He reminded me that "David" and "Susan" were the #1 baby names when we were born; there must be thousands and thousands of couples our age with our names. And, finally, blue has got to be one of the two most popular colors for men's shirts.

I'd have been more impressed if the raised-apart identical twins had shown up for their first meeting wearing Hawaiian shirts, with fresh Mohawks, John Lennon glasses, and sons named Hubert. You see what I mean? I don't think "blue shirt, son named James" rises much beyond coincidence.

Anyway.

What did I find convincing about Harris's argument? Well, she points out that cause and effect can be hard to untangle. A study finds that children who are spanked are more aggressive; does the spanking cause the aggression, or is it true that aggressive children are more likely to be spanked? She says that our pre-existing assumption that parents create their children's behavior leads us to assume the cause-effect arrow goes spanking----> aggression. But she doesn't think the research that has been done establishes that very well.

She also disputes the idea that parents have a character that can be summed up once for all their children: "She's a permissive parent," or, "He's very strict." Most parenting studies look at a cohort of children--a first-grade class, say--and correlate the kids' characteristics with how their parents treat them. But, Harris points out, most people have more than one child, and they are often different with different children. This is certainly true in my experience; I recently blogged about how different I am with Yehva than with the boys. But I was already learning from Eric, when he was my only child, how children create their parents. Harris suggests that if researchers looked at complete families they would find parents' behaviors and attitudes varying depending on their kids' temperaments and challenges.

Here, while I agree with her, I also feel a caution she doesn't seem to. If other researchers are guilty of making "the nurture assumption" and interpreting all their findings in that light, it seems to me that Harris sees children's inborn tendencies as extremely robust; she gives tremendous weight to "child-parent effects." She forgets to be as careful about cause and effect as she wants researchers to be.

I do think she is right that it is very difficult to separate parenting effects from the effects of peers (which she sees as extremely influential, though she says children self-select peers who reinforce their inborn tendencies: a child who tends toward delinquent behavior might be more likely to choose a peer group with similar tendencies) and the wider community. She says that parents do their parenting while embedded in the effects of the genes they have passed down, and in the community of people mostly like them they have chosen. Given all that, she thinks that there is little evidence that the very modest differences between what happens in two houses--an hour of TV vs. two hours per day; a slightly-higher tendency toward harsh discipline in one house, and so on--has much influence on what kids do or how they turn out. And thus, she says, out cultural tendency to praise or blame parents is unfair and misplaced.

Harris has some thought-provoking arguments; the book could have been better.