BiblioVault - Books about American High School

The American High School and the Talented Student

Frank O. Copley

University of Michigan Press, 1961

The American High School and the Talented Student is a book for parents and educators that deals with the major problem of our time: how any ordinary high school, large or small, can better educate its superior students. For it is this group, and this group alone, properly identified and trained, that can produce the original and unconventional thinkers needed today. Advanced Placement is a program based on individual differences, manageable even by a single teacher, and particularly suited to that peculiarly American institution—the comprehensive high school. How can you set up an advanced placement program in your high school? How can it be fitted into the regular high-school program? At what grade level should it be offered? What subjects should you begin with? What tests should be used in selecting students? How should the teachers be chosen? What should be done about grades? What chance does the student have of getting college credit for the work he has successfully completed? What is the cost? Author Frank O. Copley, who served as high-school consultant for the Honors Council at the University of Michigan, draws upon extensive firsthand experience in the teaching field, including his own observation of schools that have had advanced placement in operation over the past five years. The result is a practical guide that enables parents, teachers, and principals to help guide today's academically talented youth to become the intellectual leaders of tomorrow.

[more]

In Search of Deeper Learning

The Quest to Remake the American High School

Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine

Harvard University Press, 2019

Winner of the Grawemeyer Award

“In their brave search for depth in American high schools, scholars Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine suffered many disappointments…Undeterred, they spent 750 hours observing classes, interviewed more than 300 people, and produced the best book on high school dynamics I have ever read.”
—Jay Mathews, Washington Post

“A hopeful, easy-to-read narrative on what the best teachers do and what deep, engaging learning looks like for students. Grab this text if you’re looking for a celebration of what’s possible in American schools.”
—Edutopia

“This is the first and only book to depict not just the constraints on good teaching, but also how good teachers transcend them. A superb book in every way: timely, lively, and entertaining.”
—Jonathan Zimmerman, University of Pennsylvania

What would it take to transform our high schools into places capable of supporting deep learning for students across a wide range of aptitudes and interests? To find out, Jal Mehta and Sarah Fine spent hundreds of hours observing and talking to teachers and students in and out of the classroom at thirty of the country’s most innovative schools. To their dismay, they discovered that deeper learning is more often the exception than the rule. And yet they found pockets of powerful learning at almost every school, often in extracurriculars but also in a few mold-breaking academic courses. So what must schools do to achieve the integrations that support deep learning: rigor with joy, precision with play, mastery with identity and creativity?

In Search of Deeper Learning takes a deep dive into the state of our schools and lays out an inspiring new vision for American education.

[more]

Making a Mass Institution

Indianapolis and the American High School

Kyle P. Steele

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Making a Mass Institution describes how Indianapolis, Indiana created a divided and unjust system of high schools over the course of the twentieth century, one that effectively sorted students geographically, economically, and racially. Like most U.S. cities, Indianapolis began its secondary system with a singular, decidedly academic high school, but ended the 1960s with multiple high schools with numerous paths to graduation. Some of the schools were academic, others vocational, and others still for what was eventually called “life adjustment.” This system mirrored the multiple forces of mass society that surrounded it, as it became more bureaucratic, more focused on identifying and organizing students based on perceived abilities, and more anxious about teaching conformity to middle-class values. By highlighting the experiences of the students themselves and the formation of a distinct, school-centered youth culture, Kyle P. Steele argues that high school, as it evolved into a mass institution, was never fully the domain of policy elites, school boards and administrators, or students, but a complicated and ever-changing contested meeting place of all three.

[more]

Producing Success

The Culture of Personal Advancement in an American High School

Peter Demerath

University of Chicago Press, 2009

Middle- and upper-middle-class students continue to outpace those from less privileged backgrounds. Most attempts to redress this inequality focus on the issue of access to financial resources, but as Producing Success makes clear, the problem goes beyond mere economics. In this eye-opening study, Peter Demerath examines a typical suburban American high school to explain how some students get ahead.

Demerath undertook four years of research at a Midwestern high school to examine the mercilessly competitive culture that drives students to advance. Producing Success reveals the many ways the community’s ideology of achievement plays out: students hone their work ethics and employ various strategies to succeed, from negotiating with teachers to cheating; parents relentlessly push their children while manipulating school policies to help them get ahead; and administrators aid high performers in myriad ways, even naming over forty students “valedictorians.” Yet, as Demerath shows, this unswerving commitment to individual advancement takes its toll, leading to student stress and fatigue, incivility and vandalism, and the alienation of the less successful. Insightful and candid, Producing Success is an often troubling account of the educationally and morally questionable results of the American culture of success.

[more]