Two new books offer firsthand evidence that our high schools - even "high-achieving" schools in fancy suburbs - often aren't places where the focus is on learning. For Doing School, Stanford ed school professor Denise Pope shadowed five honors students from a wealthy California suburb for a year. She observed them sacrificing sleep, health and social lives to their schoolwork, but the aim was getting A's rather than learning. Pope concludes that kids are caught in a "grade trap" that leads them to disengage from the learning process and compromise their values by scheming, lying and cheating - anything to get ahead. Halfway across the country in suburban Prior Lake, Minnesota, journalist/author Elinor Burkett spent a year as a pseudo-student inside Prior Lake High School, attending classes and pep rallies and hanging out with students and administrators in a quest to find out what really goes on within the school walls. More diary than book, Another Planet: A Year in the Life of a Suburban High School provides an insider's look at how things like zero-tolerance policies, grade inflation, the self-esteem movement and "teaching to the test" play out in actual schools, where teachers complain about being made "the clothing-and-drug police, the lateness brigade and the parent hand-holders." Doing School by Denise Clark Pope, Yale University Press, October 2001, ISBN #0300090137. Another Planet: A Year in the Life of a Suburban High School by Elinor Burkett, HarperCollins, October 2001, ISBN #0066211484. Both books are available at http://www.amazon.com.
