A Class Apart: Prodigies, Pressure, and Passion Inside One of America's Best High Schools

by Alec Klein

Enter Stuyvesant High, one of the most extraordinary schools in America, a place where the brainiacs prevail and jocks are embarrassed to admit they play on the woeful football team. Academic competition is so intense that students say they can have only two of these three things: good grades, a social life, or sleep. About one in four Stuyvesant students gains admission to the Ivy League. And the school's alumni include several Nobel laureates, Academy Award winners, and luminaries in the arts, business, and public service.

A Class Apart follows the lives of Stuyvesant's remarkable students, such as Romeo, the football team captain who teaches himself calculus and strives to make it into Harvard; Jane, a world-weary poet at seventeen, battling the demon of drug addiction; Milo, a ten-year-old prodigy trying to fit in among high-school students who are literally twice his size; Mariya, a first-generation American beginning to resist parental pressure for ever-higher grades so that she can enjoy her sophomore year. And then there is the faculty, such as math chairman Mr. Jaye, who is determined not to let bureaucratic red tape stop him from helping his teachers. He even finds a job for a depressed math genius who lacks a college degree but possesses the gift of teaching.

This is the story of the American dream, a New York City school that inspires immigrants to come to these shores so that their children can attend Stuyvesant in the first step to a better life. It's also the controversial story of elitism in education. Stuyvesant is a public school, but children must pass a rigorous entrance exam to get in. Only about 3 percent do so, which, Stuyvesant students and faculty point out, makes admission to their high school tougher than to Harvard.

On the eve of the hundredth anniversary of Stuyvesant's first graduating class, reporter Alec Klein, an alumnus, was given unfettered access to the school and the students and faculty who inhabit it. What emerges is a book filled with stunning, raw, and heartrending personalities, whose stories are hilarious, sad, and powerfully moving.

Genres: Education, Nonfiction, College, Journalism

337 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Alec Klein is an award-winning reporter at The Washington Post. His previous book, Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner, was a national bestseller that The New York Times called "a compelling parable of greed and power and hubris." He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and daughter.

Reviews

[Shinynickel · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting exploration of Stuyvesant in New York, one of the best high schools in the U.S. In order to be admitted, students must score incredibly high on a citywide test. The children who go here often attend prep school for years ahead of time to make the cutoff, and are subject to intense demands and expectations throughout their high school career.

It's a fascinating school, and the book was a light, easy read. But the author is a Stuy graduate, and his love for the school, rather than illuminating it, seems to coat it in a warm fuzzy glow. He picks interesting students and school administrators to follow, but unlike And Still We Rise by Miles Corwin, he uses a light hand with them, and with the context of the school itself. There is little sense of the intensity of the school, and the amount or pressure the students feel, though we are told often that they must deal with extreme amounts of it. There are some interesting things here, don't get me wrong, but overall it's a pretty fluffy read.

[Kenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was in my freshman year at Stuy the same year this book was published. It offers a peek into the lives of a wide range of students and staff at Stuyvesant but didn't include any students like me. I was the type of student that left school as soon as classes were over, rejecting extracurricular activities so I could retreat to video games. I didn't realize there was all this drama at my alma mater until I read this book.

[Christina Pan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Kinda just fucking creepy. Alec Klein (the author of this book) has been accused of sexual harassment - not surprised.

I had two of the teachers Klein writes about in this book, Eric Grossman and Matt Polazzo, around fifteen years after this was written. Both are seminal teachers—Klein’s offers tabloid like description of them.

He describes Eric Grossman as the type of man a “schoolgirl would have a crush on” and warps the relationship between him and a heroin-addicted poet, Jane; he makes and mythologizes certain things about Stuyvesant that are certainly not true.

[Joanna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book me back 20+ years. It painted a picture of a place both familiar & foreign. This book really made me ask did I do enough with my time at Stuyvesant? Should I have been more ambitious academically? Joined more extracurricular clubs? Befriended more teachers?

[Oliver Kasenne · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars

[Stuart Nachbar · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Class Apart is about a year in the life of New York’s Stuyvesant High School, one of the most competitive and academically successful secondary schools in the country. The author is an alumnus; sometimes he appears more in awe of the school and students than a non-alumnus might be.

Since its founding in 1904, Stuyvesant High School has along with its sister school, the Bronx High School of Science, stayed true to admission by competitive entrance examination. Stuyvesant is more selective than any U.S. college or university; only three percent of applicants gain admission. Klein does an excellent job of explaining past challenges to the admissions process, including claims of elitism and race-bias in using testing as a selection criteria and he points out an example, a parent-funded Korean student academy, of how one group faced the challenge of the test.

Stuyvesant has a student community where practically everyone is an academic star, and its leadership shares governance of the school with the administration. But I was also reminded that Stuyvesant is a public school, subject to arcane bureaucratic policies, especially in teacher assignments and selection. It also helps that Stuyvesant is located within a city that has a wealth of cultural and intellectual resources; home, school and help are easily accessible by public transportation.

A Class Apart made me consider the worthiness of ultra-selective public high schools outside of New York, a city with over a century’s experience with them. Within my home state of New Jersey, Newark has two such schools: University High and Science High, where students consistently demonstrate exemplary academic performance, despite lacking the resources, including a $150 million campus, at Stuyvesant High.

I had to ask myself: should suburban school districts follow this lead, and create similarly selective high schools? My answer was yes, assuming that transportation issues could be resolved. The existence of such schools gives parents hope and the best students have incentive to perform well on an examination. They get no such thing from No Child Left Behind.

Three \ stars; the teacher/administrator stories are interesting, but the student stories seemed too similar to numerous other “year in the life of a high school” books.

[Mike Mcfarland · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was deathly afraid that this book would be smug and self-congratulatory. Look how many graduates go to Ivy League schools! Look how many win national awards! The building has escalators and a pool! All of these things may be true, but the school was more than just a list of accomplishments.

Klein captured the spirit really well: the ridiculous yearly SING! competition (each class writes and produces its own musical every year) that did more to unite students than anything, the excitement of a really well-run classroom, the way different cliques congregated on different floors (your influence was directly related to your proximity to the second-floor entrance), "traditions" that seemed eternal at the time and then died after a couple classes graduated, and the way the entrance exam fostered a weird kind of diversity.

Klein also didn't shy away from the more problematic aspects of Stuyvesant. The same entrance exam that made it possible for dedicated immigrants and first-generation Americans to attend in high numbers was also responsible for the shamefully low number of minority students. Many of the teachers, as in other schools across the City, were more interested in marking time until retirement than in challenging the students. And, perhaps most importantly, the extremely high-pressure environment really warped many students (cheating is rampant).

In the end, Klein's message is less about trumpeting achievements, and more about conveying that Stuyvesant is a pretty remarkable place. It's not necessarily the greatest place, or the only place worth going to high school, but it's pretty remarkable.

[Ellyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author spends a year at his alma mater, Stuyvesant High School in New York City, an ultracompetitive school for gifted kids that accepts only 3% of applicants based on an exam. The book is an accounting of the author's experience and of the students and teachers that he comes to know along the way. The book does a good job painting the good and bad parts of a high school such as Stuyvesant: it provides an incredible learning environment and foster remarkable achievement, but it's also an intense and high pressure place with a cheating problem and limited diversity. (More than half of the students are Asian and about 40% are white. Many are children of immigrants and come from lower income families.) I agree with other reviewers in that I wish the author had explored some of these issues in more depth. He did choose a unique array of students to profile, and I enjoyed the snapshot of what life is like for each of them. The book dragged a little bit in the middle but picked up towards the end as I become anxious to see how things worked out for each of the profiled students and teachers. Ultimately, I'm not sure that I can support public schools such as this one that separate out all of the gifted kids, but it was an interesting read just the same.

[Maisha Miles · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book provides interesting insight into one of the best public high schools in the country. For one school year, the author follows students and administrators through the halls of the school and into their neighborhoods and homes. I was left wanting more, perhaps a more in-depth perspective of some of the challenges the students face other than whether or not they get a 95.6 or a 95.8 or if they get into Harvard. The students would mobilize when the administration would seek to implement policies that were perceived as invasive (metal detectors). However, I did not get the impression that their activism went beyond the school. The students self-segregate based on race/culture and of course grade (this is still a high school after all). I would have like to see how the student body approached the past election cycle. (Of course the book was written before that, but there were other political issues going on during that time period that could have been addressed.) Overall, this book was easy to read and the stories were interesting. My eyes did glaze over when they approached some of the history of the school. I skimmed those pages.

[Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this interesting book about a year at Stuyvesant High, a public school for gifted kids in New York. Though I was envious of the brains and talent of these students (including the author who graduated from Stuyvesant 20 years before writing the book), I was certainly not envious of the pressure put on them by parents to produce consistently high grades. The author follows several students and how their lives are played out at this unique public school. It was fun to read about Romeo, the football player brainiac whose team loses one game, 60-1 (athletics are not particularly valued at this institution of learning) and also about Milo, the 10-year old prodigy, who attends Stuyvesant as a sort of non-student.

For anyone interested in education and who wants to revisit teenage life (God, it was miserable remembering some of the anguish of being 15!), this book is just wonderful.

[Benjy · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's weird going to a high school that has a significant amount of literature on it and Alec Klein's book was no exception. Seeing your bitchy assistant principal, your awesome government teacher, and your school musical contests turned into narratives is very weird after you've experienced them as life events. Almost everyone at the school when the book was written graduated before my time (I think I knew Jane, the heroin addicted poet), so at least I can look at the students with fresh eyes. That said, Alec Klein takes a great approach, focusing on a few extraordinary students and interesting teachers to lend both a micro and macro look at the school. It's really hard not to like these people and Stuyvesant is as unusual a school as they come, except for maybe LaGuardia High School, which surely deserves its own series of books to go with its movie (Fame).

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was fun to read this book, just for the nostalgia. Lots of teachers I knew at Stuy were in the book, and I recognized what the students went through. This book highlights several exceptional Stuy students, and in other chapters discusses more general Stuy themes & issues, such as school politics, race, and Sing!. I found the writing a bit overdone, much like an ambitious high school student's college admission essay. It overreached, overdescribed. It came across as fake and hokey.

I liked the treatment of general issues & events much better than the descriptions of individual students. I guess I found some of the highlighted students unlikeable and disturbing, and not always that interesting. They were almost like charicatures.. though I liked the way Klein handled the 10-year old math prodigy and the Ukranian girl.

[Erik · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm an alum from roughly the time of the author, so we went to Old Stuy on 15th Street instead of the new super mod building, which I recently visited and which is featured here. What never changes is the teachers and their dedication. It's a special place, even if the stress and push to succeed is a little like OCD. I place the blame squarely on the parents for this, a theme which Klein could have addressed a little better. He is very non-judgmental, almost like a camera, and the format is a little too MTV real world or faux documentary style. He did choose interesting kids to follow however, especially Jane the heroin addict, who represents the dark side of Stuy, making her by far the most interesting person.

[Jared · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really cool book about thhe people and oplaces that go ton stuyvesant frrom 12 year old child prodigies to drug addicted geniuses this book explores the craziness that is the hardest high school to get in to in new york. the loree that manyy outsiders don't get to know the author gets in to the stuyvesant tradition. So many different people and personalities in this humonggus school all sharing one thing in common smartness. great book would should suggest to the world.

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good overview of Stuyvesant...was good for me to read to catch up with the latest at Stuy. I'd recommend it to alum. It gave me a flavor of what environment my son is going through. I'm not sure how non-alum would find the book, since it spends a good amount of time expounding on how great Stuyvesant was and is, and I wonder if that would be a turn-off. (it is a great school, I still have many fond memories...but devoting many pages to that theme felt excessive.)

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Narrative nonfiction about one year in the life of Stuyvesant High in New York City, considered to be one of the best in the U.S. Stuyvesant is a public school, but children must pass a rigorous entrance exam to get in. Only about 3 percent do so, which makes admission to the high school tougher than to Harvard. It follows the lives of several students and teachers over the year, providing insight the pressures faced by students at an "elite" institution. I thought it was very well done.

[Ms. G · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took a break mid-stream--was getting repetitive. Glad I returned to finish. In theory, I am not a fan "screened schools" or elitist schools, such as Stuyvesant --think a mix is always better -- but after reading I must admit I see the value of having high performers in one school--some of these kids were really impressing. Of course, the author, an alum, presented the schools mostly in a positive light, didn't reflect on the downside.

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book takes you inside one of the best high schools in America to see what kids, faculty and administration think, and how they deal with the trials and tribulations of school life. Written over the course of the Spring, 2006 term, by a Washington Post journalist, who graduated from Stuyvesant twenty years ago, this is a good read...very insightful!

[Dale · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty fascinating book about one of the top high schools in New York (or anywhere else for that matter). Personally I disagree with the concept of putting all of the top students (based on a test that only measures one or two types of genius) but I have to admit that I envied a school where the students didn't want to go home and demanded excellence.

[Carrie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A friend lent me this book to give me a glance into her High school life (she graduated from Stuy). I think that made it all the more interesting to read. It was an appealing read that followed a few key students and selected activities in the school. The book didn't blow me away, but it did engage me enough to keep reading.

[Joie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Major complaint was that it seemed disorganized. The story follows the high school through the spring semester, but the way it was written almost seemed out of order. A lot of jumping around and not a lot of constant narration on a character or topic. Just seemed too disjointed.

[Shana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good. I kept wanting to stop reading because apparently Stuyvesant is eerily similar to my own high school, and it wasn't exactly causing waves of nostalgia. The prose gets over the top at times but it's interesting to see how everything ends up.

[Amanda · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I would have loved my high school to have some focus on academics, this other extreme of the spectrum where they are the only focus carries its own set of issues and pressures. Good to know that there is a place where school is a positive escape though.

[Erica · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't know how interesting this would be to someone who didn't go to Stuyvesant or isn't interested in education, but I would recommend it to all former stuy kids. I tore through it in a day and a half, and I thought it was a fair portrayal of what my (somewhat unusual) high school was like.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fast-paced look into one of America's top high schools. I love getting to know different teachers, students, and administrators, but at the same time I would also have liked for the author to spend more time with each of his subjects.

[Margaret · Rating 3 out of 5]

Still reading

[Laurie · Rating 5 out of 5]

An indepth look at Stuyvesant, an intense, pressure driven public high school where students can have only two of the three: high grades, sleep or a social life. Interesting food for thought.

[Miriam · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting read, though the author fails to make any analysis of what he's seen.

[Hectaizani · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brought back a lot of memories, not all of them good. I've never actually been to the new Stuy building, I was there in the mid '80's.

[Amy Edgington]

Excellent