I Read The Class and Now I'm Depressed about the State of Public School Education in America

Texted this to my own exceptionally bright, perfectionist kid. Nobody has ever called me subtle!

The Class: A Life-Changing Teacher, His World-Changing Kids, and the Most Inventive Classroom in America by Heather Won Tesoriero
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I love this book, and this book makes me sad.

The Class is written with such compassion and gentleness when it comes to the stories that it tells about the central protagonists, the real children involved in one specific science class in the wealthy, high-class community of Greenwich Connecticut. Tesoriero clearly spent quality time with these kids, and was likable and trustworthy enough to be invited to their promposals and told all the fun little details about their daily lives that, in turn, give her writing life. Her tone when telling their stories is comfortable, a bit gossipy (but in a nice way), but always, always kind and respectful. It would be so easy to typecast a kid as a “character” in her book, so easy to lampoon a kid’s silliness or naivete for laughs, but this never happens. Instead, Tesoriero uses small details that she’s witnessed about the kids’ interactions to illustrate their personalities in a way that feels completely natural and true, and I love how thoughtful and careful she is.

Here's an interview with Tesoriero in which she gives an excellent overview of her book. It's a little long, but you get all the main points and some of the more interesting little details that brought the book to life for me:

The novelty of Tesoriero’s topic is what makes me sad. Tesoriero writes about a unicorn of a science class: an exceptional, privileged teacher of exceptional, privileged children who attend an exceptional, privileged school in an exceptional, privileged town located in an exceptional, privileged part of the country. I haven't looked up how their school district is funded, but if it's property taxes as is usual, they should have plenty of money. Even so, one of the premises of the science class is that the teacher, Bramante, has the skills and the connections to stock the classroom with professional-quality, niche lab equipment that would be otherwise out of the reach of even the most well-funded school, so again, other than in this unicorn situation with this unicorn teacher, wealth is a barrier to recreating this exceptional classroom and these exceptional results.

I'm interested in education philosophies as they connect with education access, and in my amateur research, whether you want the crunchiest, earthiest education or the STEM-iest, most academically rigorous education for your kids, the kicker is ALWAYS money. Here's a short video talking about Montessori and Waldorf and the issue of money to show that these exceptional experiences, wherever they lie on the spectrum, are ALWAYS expensive (and in my short time in the Montessori system, I can tell you that all the other parents but me were R.I.C.H.):

In The Class, the children’s level of achievement is exceptional mostly because of their privilege, and while Tesoriero does acknowledge this privilege, as do most of the children, she completely leaves alone issues of equity, or how on earth this kind of program could ever possibly be reproduced in other schools, or what it says about the overall environment of public education in America. That’s likely because this particular scenario is clearly inequitable, can’t be reproduced in most other schools, and has only dismal things to say about the ways that public school education is, overall, failing the majority of America’s children. All of that is deliberately not the scope of this book, but the book’s very existence begs those questions.

It was interesting, then, to see the small inequities that DO plague the lives of these exceptional, privileged children. Kids who should have won specific science fairs don’t win them. Kids who do win are cyberbullied. One kid, who is clearly THE most exceptional kid, is denied admission to Harvard, but another kid, depicted as entitled and wasteful of some of his many opportunities (but still exceptional! Because privilege!), but also described as wealthy, with parents who are both Harvard alumni and active donors to Harvard, is offered early acceptance. But even though I might want to mock the pettiness of any slight in the shadow of such overall overwhelming opportunity, it’s impossible to, because Tesoriero treats these setbacks with respect; these are children, their setbacks are real to them (if so out-of-scale as to be wildly unreal to me, ahem), and these are the life lessons they’re learning.

But seriously, though--don’t worry about the kid who didn’t get into Harvard; he got into TONS of other schools, and ended up turning down a $267,000 scholarship to Duke, one that would have included room and board and study-abroad, to attend Stanford. As a parent who’s currently got a range of side hustles going on to try to cash-flow as much of my own kid’s college tuition as possible so she can graduate as debt-free as possible, it’s a big challenge for me not to put my petty hat on for that scenario. 

I’ll be a little more petty about the kid who worked out a deal with the high school to basically allow him to test out of all of his classes for his final two years while he lived across the country in an apartment his parents rented for him and worked on his multi-million dollar invention. The super fancy international science fair thing he got invited to disrespected him, I guess(?), so he just didn’t go, and then they asked his mom for $600 to reimburse them for what they’d spent on his no-showness. THEN the bougie high school that had been essentially not making him go there for the last two years threatened to withhold his diploma because he didn’t take the wellness class he said he’d take, and OMG, would Yale withdraw their acceptance if he didn’t have his high school diploma? Nvm, they sent his diploma to him anyway. 

Just… you know, in my house, the most recent money/attendance blow-up with my own teenager involved her getting called into her part-time job on a night that she had ballet class, and I was pissed because I had to ask the ballet program if she could make up the class on another night rather than simply skip it, and they were weird about it but nevertheless, I persisted, because I paid fifteen dollars for that stinking class and fifteen dollars is FIFTEEN DOLLARS!

Okay, I’m taking my petty hat off again.

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