~ The Gifted School, by Bruce Holsinger ~
Pointed and clever, The Gifted School has a delightfully snarky opening quote:
There is something so tantalizing about having a gifted child that some parents will go to almost any lengths to prove they have one.
Sheila Moore and Roon Frost, The Little Boy Book
Crystal, Colorado is an upscale community that will seem very familiar to anyone who has experience of similar ‘pressure-cooker academics’ regions of the US. Good schools, upper-middle-class families, professional parents who are deeply invested in the academic success of their children. Yet these same parents are often unaware of the real thoughts, interactions, desires and lives of their children.
This novel focuses largely on four mothers: Rose, Samantha, Azra, and Lauren, who formed a bond when they all had small children, and have stayed close friends ever since. They run together every Friday morning, they meet for birthdays and happy hours, and they talk about their children and the schools almost to the exclusion of all other topics.
Into this idyll comes a new public magnet school for exceptionally gifted children.
The word gifted slashed like a guillotine through other topics. Around the table the talk ceased.
Only one thousand of the 100,000 students in the district will be admitted. “The one percent”, as someone observed snidely.
Rose and Samantha are the most typical of the Crystal community — married, one 11-year-old daughter each (who both happen to be called Emma, and are close friends). Lauren, whose husband died of cancer, is entirely focused on her two brilliant children Tessa (16) and Xander (12). Azra is of Pakistani origin, and perhaps the least fleshed out of the four characters: almost saintly in her calm, soothing manner, an inveterate peace-maker. She has twin boys (12) with her ex, Beck, a self-absorbed man-baby who is remarried to their au-pair and has a new infant child.
The first hint of a problem: Samantha and Lauren already know about the school and its admissions process, but have not shared this information with the others. Still, every parent starts dreaming of their child in this school, where ‘slower learners won’t hold them back‘, where they will be ‘challenged‘, where it will be clear that they are ‘exceptionally gifted‘.
The first hurdle is an aptitude test, the ‘CogPro’, as those in the know refer to it. Those children who get high enough scores in the CogPro have to produce a portfolio of their accomplishments and interests: an open-ended requirement that, in practice, encourages any minor hobby or talent to be described as earth-shattering, world-class and unique. The school wants to see ‘The Whole Child’.
Best of friends they may be, but the competitiveness between the women mounts. Samantha has a ‘test tutor’ for her Emma, and is a master at subtle put-downs of other children. Rose seethes at these comments, and is envious of Samantha’s child, but negotiates a meeting with the new school principal and suggests a research project to study giftedness, in the hope that this will help her own Emma’s admission. (It is startling that the principal would consider such a conflict-of-interest project with the parent of an applicant!). Lauren talks constantly about her truly brilliant son, Xander. Azra is bitterly aware that the others think of her two sons as jocks, incapable of academic achievement.
Holsinger contrasts these four families with a Peruvian immigrant grandmother, mother and son Atik who live on the outskirts of the town, in a poorer neighbourhood. The women clean houses for a living, including those of Rose and Samantha. Atik has an exceptional understanding of three-dimensional space and structures, and is a self-taught, original origamicist. He is also trilingual. He would benefit from the new school, but his grandmother is aware that getting in would be a mixed blessing: possibly the first step towards a life which may leave them behind. While these characters are nicely drawn, they are such perfect hardworking immigrants, never suffering from personality traits such as envy that beset the other characters, that it is a little obvious they were included only to round out the story.
Holsinger is clearly very familiar with the parental discussions in this liberal but largely white mileu. He is also slyly funny. Beck, it turns out, used to subtract a few months from the twins’ ages when discussing them with other parents, to make the boys seem more advanced. “He wanted to see that flicker of worry in the parents’ eyes”.
American college admissions have been much in the news recently, due to the recent scandal where parents were paying big money to help their children cheat on the SAT, fake athletic prowess, and illegally raise their grades to get admission to choice schools. Parents can be just as competitive when their children are younger, and this novel is therefore extremely topical. Who among us hasn’t seen amazingly sophisticated elementary school projects and wondered just how much the parents were involved?
Holzinger hasn’t missed a single flashpoint around the gifted-and-talented (G&T) arguments. Should taxpayer money be spread among all children, or spent on funding special programs for G&T kids? What about inherent biases in the tests and admissions that favour white, wealthy students? Are admissions transparent or do friends of the principal have advantages?
And since Azra’s twins are soccer stars, there are funny sections describing pushy, aggressive soccer parents. Funny, but all too real, as are the discussions on the town mailing lists:
an outrageous use of public resources in an age of budget cuts and defunding
just a bunch of lip service to diversity
the school is in the wealthiest neighborhood in Crystal. Coincidence?
The final plot twist seemed unnecessarily melodramatic, and not all the sidebars are of interest, but the main story is interesting enough to keep the reader hooked.
Thought-provoking, realistic, sometimes uncomfortably familiar, and an easy read, The Gifted School entertainingly captures the nuances of education in upscale communities.
Sounds great, have put on my to-read list!