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Prodigies, Pressure, and Passion Inside One of America's Best High Schools
Simon & Schuster
September 2007
On Sale: August 21, 2007
336 pages
ISBN: 0743299442
EAN: 9780743299442
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
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.
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