Books discussed in this essay:

American Band: Music, Dreams, and Coming of Age in the Heartland
by Kristen Laine
Gotham, 336 pages, $26.00 hardcover

School of Dreams: Making the Grade at a Top American High School
By Edward Humes
Harvest Books, 400 pages, $14.00 paperback

The Kings of New York: A Year Among the Geeks, Oddballs, and Geniuses Who Make Up America's Top High School Chess Team
By Michael Weinreb
Gotham, 304 pages, $26.00 hardcover

South of Heaven: Welcome to High School at the End of the 20th Century
By Thomas French
Pocket, 384 pages

When you're in high school, it frequently feels like the worst four years of your life. But give it a decade or two, and you're looking back with fond memories, thinking maybe it was the best four years of your life, after all. From vintage TV shows such as Happy Days to more recent hit movies such as Napoleon Dynamite and High School Musical, the locker rooms and cafeterias of America's high schools have provided ample fodder. And why shouldn't we enjoy reliving our formative years through the (distorted) lens of attractive actors as they encounter the elements of high school that make for a good story: Drama, romance, action, suspense, bad hair.

High school has the distinction of being our last commonly shared experience. It is where lives take a more definite shape before venturing off in different directions: college, vocational school, the world of work, or of unemployment. Even most students who drop out at least stick around long enough to see what high school is like. It's not just our personal experience of high school and our ability to relate to stories about it that make books about the experience compelling, however. Education is a significant and enduring issue, with social, economic and political implications that affect everyone. While these books focus on successful, good high schools, they still allow glimpses of what's really going on in high schools, what's working and what isn't.

Almost every high school story, fiction or nonfiction, is a story of change, of becoming. In high school, competition speeds up the journey to adulthood, allowing children to distinguish themselves. Sports are the obvious high school competition. H.G. Bissinger's 1990 book about high school football in Texas, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream, was popular enough to spawn a movie in 2004 and a TV series in 2006. But even for students who don't play football or basketball, high school is rife with competition. Some would argue that learning competition early is necessary in our society. It teaches students to do their best, to strive for success. Whether it's chess, marching band, or getting into the best college in the country, the amount of work necessary to become the best in a category can be exhausting, overshadowing everything else. The day of the well-rounded student is over.

In all four books, the authors essentially relived a year of high school--navigating the cliques, spending late nights studying and eating pizza, traveling on interminable road trips for competitions. Two of the books, American Band and Kings of New York, study a specific program within the school, while School of Dreams and South of Heaven focus on students in the whole school. Unlike the TV shows and movies portraying high school, these books are real and raw, as uncomfortable and triumphant and full of loose ends as high school itself.

American Band takes place at Concord High School in Elkhart, Indiana, a quintessential Midwestern town. The Concord High marching band won the state championship the year before and is hoping for a second victory, something they've never done before. For the band and for author Kristen Laine, school revolves around practice, practice and more practice. Laine rises early to attend before-dawn instrument practices and slogs through stormy afternoons of marching, when rain runs in rivulets down the insides of trumpets.

The author, who marched in high school herself, must have had a great rapport with the students to get inside their minds the way she does. Perhaps the high-schoolers welcomed the chance to confide in someone who wasn't a teacher or parent, an adult who wanted to listen to them and took their secrets and inner struggles seriously. The book is a compelling portrait of young adults struggling to become leaders, to help others amid their own troubles and tragedies.

Michael Weinreb is a sports writer, and he approaches writing about the chess team in The Kings of New York just as he would any other sports team. The players have their strengths and flaws, good game days and bad game days. The team is an odd mix of Eastern European, Russian and Hispanic students, recruited from all over New York City for the chess program at Edward R. Murrow High School in Brooklyn. Competition is a way of life for them, but they choose their battles: Most do not care to attend classes, and prefer to play poker online or in the school cafeteria when they're not playing chess. Basketball players prepare by shooting baskets and running laps; these students use poker as their practice game.

In some ways, the world of high-level chess is esoteric and dysfunctional, but Weinreb's focus on the lives of the young players makes it fascinating. In writing about a game that is so complex, the danger would be to either dumb it down or go into such great detail that it's boring to non-chess players, but Weinreb manages a compelling balance.

In School of Dreams, there is no marching band, no chess team, no sports. The competition is solely academic. At Whitney High School, California's top-ranked public school, there is just one goal: get every student into college, preferably Harvard, Princeton, Yale or Berkeley. Families move from India, China, South Korea and other countries in hopes of getting their child into Whitney, which is seen as a ticket to a better life. In a school where a B-minus is viewed with horror, the danger is that grades become more important than what's actually learned.  Once again, the drive for success takes its toll. Pressure from parents forces students applying for pre-med programs when they dream of being an art teacher or a musician. Students are so afraid of messing up that they don't want to take chances. And then there's the cheating.

The school does have its bright spots. There's the history teacher who encourages critical thinking, the art studio that's a haven from the pressure. Edward Humes, more so than the other authors discussed, is a character in his story. In appreciation for being allowed to write this story, he works with students on the dreaded college admissions essays, helping them see that their grades aren't the only thing that makes them stand out. In developing the essays, Humes is allowed to see parts of the students' lives that their teachers, and even their parents, don't get to see. Incidentally, the essay process allows Humes to extract great material for his book from otherwise mysterious teenagers.

In some ways, South of Heaven was the odd book out in this bunch. Thomas French spent the 1989-90 school year at Largo High School in Florida and then wrote a newspaper series that he expanded into a book. Largo was a decent school with dedicated teachers, but people don't move America or switch school districts to attend Largo High. There were good students, average students, and those who seldom went to class. For some, just showing up at school was an achievement. French didn't just focus on the shining stars – he picked a hodgepodge of students to write about, from those who ended up dropping out before the year was over, to the popular girls who practically ran the school, to the ones who had to carry a gun to school just to protect themselves on the way home.

French does a good job of showing what high school was really like at a specific point in time. In this book, you can smell the hot dogs cooking in the cafeteria, hear the boom boxes blasting 2 Live Crew, remember the stonewashed jeans and bad perms that prevailed in the early '90s. While French's book is a bit outdated (who uses a pager anymore?), the experience still rings true.

Competition is not an outstanding theme in this book, as opposed to the others. Things have changed in the 20 years since French wrote South of Heaven, and it would be interesting to see what the school would be like now if French revisited it. Would the challenges facing the students be the same? Would competition be more prevalent?

The other books reflect the changes in education in the last 20 years, culminating with the No Child Left Behind Act. Schools and teachers are pressured to increase test scores, but the most pressure is on the students. In addition, admission to top colleges is increasingly competitive. But is competition the best way of ensuring success? Does it make students more capable of learning and dealing with life's challenges? What sort of life are they preparing for?

Laine offers some insight through the perspective of an exchange student from Germany: "She had been surprised, however, by how much her experience in America seemed framed by competition. In her school in Germany, direct competition among students was frowned upon...In America, it seemed, learning how to compete was one of the skills you were groomed for..."

Abbie Stillie is a graduate student in the literary nonfiction program at the University of Oregon.