Reviewed by Suzi Steffen

School of Dreams, one of a number of hot-topic education books sure to appeal to parents and policy-makers alike, offers a year-long slice-of-life look at a public high school in Los Angeles, California. Humes writes smoothly and vividly about the details of various students' lives: the lattes the driven students consume in order to pull all-nighters, the casual brutality of parents who through their daughter’s art portfolio into a busy street. His focus on one physics class experiment provides exactly the right small narrative to illustrate his larger concerns about Whitney High School--where the over-achievers learn how not to think for themselves and seem unable to provide real leadership, regardless of their perfect SATs or Harvard pre-med desires.

But because these students, and the others under Humes' lens, attend California's "best" public high school, Humes has to force the details of their educational lives into a larger narrative arc, "a revealing look at the state of education in America today," as the book jacket announces. No single book could cover this topic; thankfully, Humes doesn't really try. His book is essentially a fine piece of immersion reporting at war with a simple morality tale. When read for the stories of the people at Whitney High School, not for dutiful and unenthusiastic policy recommendations, School of Dreams serves as a nice companion piece to Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities and Meredith Maran's Class Dismissed.