High School Confidential

THE WORLD WE CREATED AT HAMILTON HIGH 1953-1987 by Gerald Grant.Harvard University Press, $24.95.

THE BRAND OF conservatism that became politically dominant in this country when Ronald Reagan was elected President revolves around the idea that in the sixties liberals took over a perfectly good and happy America and, in the name of correcting a lot of trumped-up problems, nearly ruined everything. As a fable, sixties revisionism has a powerful appeal, but many of the specific examples given in support of it have to be taken on faith—for example, the idea that detente and insufficient defense spending made us an international weakling.

The story that Gerald Grant tells here, though, makes an almost perfect true-life case study of the destruction by liberals of the peaceable kingdom of the fifties. Following social-science etiquette, Grant—a professor of education and sociology at Syracuse University— calls the school that is his subject Hamilton High School, in Median, U.S.A., but it’s really Nottingham High, in Syracuse, New York. It opened in 1953 in a middle-class residential neighborhood, and its early years were ones of high achievement and social conformity. By the beginning of the seventies there were policemen in the hallways and pimps operating on the school grounds. The principal had a full-time bodyguard; his predecessor had had his skull fractured during a race riot in the cafeteria. School closings due to violence and threats of violence were a regular occurrence. Student test scores were dropping dramatically, and nearly three quarters of the corps of teachers had left the school over a five-year period.