CLASS STRUGGLE: What’s Wrong (and Right) with America’s Best Public High Schools.

By Jay Mathews. Random House. 304 pp. $24.50

Venturing inside America’s elite public high schools, Mathews finds fabulous teachers, students with heart-stopping talents, and parents willing to bear any burden in exchange for Ivy League admission letters for their children. He also discovers a darker side to these schools: the middling students—those who are bright but not brilliant, as well as those with learning disabilities or language problems—tend to receive mediocre educations.

The fault lies less with teachers and administrators, Mathews contends, than with the overly zealous parents of the superior students. A superb education for their own children is not enough; the parents also insist that the schools set their offspring apart from the masses. So when administrators try to expand advanced-placement classes or to mix the gifted with the average, these parents balk. And they usually prevail. Mathews, an education reporter at the Washington Post, reveals that elite public schools are structured, to an alarming degree, by pressure for even more elitism.

Class Struggle is principally set at suburban New York’s Mamaroneck High School (which Mathews studied for three years), with occasional vignettes from elsewhere. With a journalist’s wiles, the author extracts self-revealing comments from students, parents, principals, and others. We eavesdrop on the teachers who stealthily try to soften the edges of a relentless tracking system, the parents who spar to retain the privileges and prerogatives of their gifted children, the school board member who crafts a Machiavellian plot to save an excellent but ornery physics teacher. In a field plagued by abstraction and jargon, Mathews stresses character and conflict with a novelist’s sure touch. His engaging, economical book shows how overweening parental ambition perverts even the best public schools.

—Harriet Tyson