Beyond Measure: Rescuing an Overscheduled, Overtested, Underestimated Generation - Softcover

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Vicki Abeles is a filmmaker, an ex-Wall Street lawyer, and a mother of three. Her documentary Race to Nowhere hit a nerve with its vivid portrayal of today’s broken education system. Her second film, Beyond Measure, about the groundbreaking leaders transforming schools for the better, premieres in 2015. She lives in the San Francisco area with her family.

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Beyond Measure

CHAPTER 1

Sicker, Not Smarter

IN LATE 2010 I received an email from Saint Louis University School of Medicine professor and pediatrician Stuart Slavin, who was concerned about the health effects of excessive performance pressure on children. One passage in it sticks with me to this day:

My personal feeling is that we are conducting an enormous and unprecedented social experiment on an entire generation of American children, and the evidence of a negative impact on adolescent mental health is overwhelming. This is particularly disturbing given the fact that having mental health problems in the teen years predisposes to mental health problems in adulthood. It is even more profoundly disturbing when one considers that there is absolutely no evidence that this educational approach actually leads to better educational outcomes.

The science shows that Slavin is right: Our children are paying a high price for our cultural misdirection. Thousands of students are suffering from withering anxiety, depression, eating disorders, insecurity, dangerous sleep deprivation, and even thoughts of suicide. And it’s not just our children’s mental health that’s in jeopardy (which would be worrisome enough by itself); it’s their physical health, too. The result of the Race to Nowhere is a public health crisis on a scale that we have yet to fully recognize.

Before we turn to solutions, which are the heart of this book, it’s important to take a chapter to demonstrate that students’ stories are backed up by hard data—to take stock of the science of just what we’re fighting for. In fact, the price of the achieve-at-all-costs approach includes more than sickness. It produces a drill-like mode of education that deadens lessons and narrows students’ chances to explore broadly or think creatively. We see even young students disengaging from school experiences that feel impersonal and irrelevant, high school grads arriving at college in need of remediation, and rampant cheating among students of all ages. Ironically, the constant pressure also physiologically impairs children’s capacity for learning. In other words, it backfires, undermining the very achievement that it’s meant to promote.

All told, the outcome is a school environment that deprives children of both sound health and vibrant learning. These grave consequences are at the heart of what makes our work to transform childhood so urgent. What’s at stake is no less than raising healthy, thriving kids and—as they become adults—a healthy, thriving society.

Fremont, California: A Crisis Visible

Irvington High School is a sprawling, single-story beige building wrapped around a central courtyard with picnic tables and a few redwood trees. The city of Fremont spreads out around it, pancake flat and pasted with strip malls and small ranch houses, the bare brown hills of California rising in the background.

Over the past five years, Assistant Principal Jay Jackson has watched this school community transform. He taught world history and sports psychology here for eight years before becoming an administrator. With close-cropped hair and the compact build of a lightweight wrestler, Jackson is the kind of compassionate teacher whom students instinctively trust. He has an Elvis Presley shrine in his office—replete with Elvis figurines, Elvis clocks, Elvis PEZ dispensers, and even a life-size Elvis cardboard cutout—made up of gifts from past students, who kept giving him the knickknacks as a kind of joke, even though he insists he’s not that big of a fan. During his teaching years in the 2000s, Jackson recalls, the student population here was mixed: about half of them were academically oriented and intent on college, the other half not. When, in 2010, the auto plant that had employed many of the students’ parents shut down, taking nearly five thousand mostly blue-collar jobs away with it, the demographics of the school district began to shift. Around the same time, the district redrew neighborhood boundaries, delivering to Irvington a flood of students from a more affluent part of town. Many of these new students’ parents were immigrants, drawn to the technology industry in nearby San Jose with high hopes for their children’s futures in this land of opportunity.

The school’s standardized test scores shot up—as did its rates of student anxiety, sleep deprivation, and stress-induced illnesses. When Jackson became assistant principal in 2012, the change was already under way.

“Two or three weeks into the school year, you start seeing students coming into the office with these issues, with stress, breaking down crying,” even cutting themselves, he remembers. The problem hadn’t been as obvious from the vantage point of his classroom, where students put their best face on and their late nights spent laboring over piles of do-or-die assignments weren’t so visible. But you go to work in the school office, the crossroads of students’ difficulties, and, he says, “You see enough.”

Enough, that is, to deeply alarm Jackson, who’s also a father of two boys in elementary school. It convinced him that Irvington has a serious health crisis on its hands. Jackson organized an online survey of students in fall 2013, to see if his instincts matched the teens’ own experiences. The measure wasn’t perfect—only about one in six students completed the survey. But this much was clear: if even a small percentage of Irvington students overall felt the same way as those who answered the questionnaire did, the situation was dire.

More than four in five of the teens who responded said they felt moderate or high stress about school. They reported doing hours of homework a night and sleeping too little. A majority were taking multiple AP and honors classes, and the most common reason they gave for enrolling in those classes (cited by 61 percent of students) was that it would help them get into a better college; trailing far behind, the next reason (cited by just 42 percent) was that they were actually interested in the subject matter. Nearly half of the teens admitted to cheating on tests or homework in the past year, primarily because they didn’t have enough time to study or finish the assignment. Perhaps saddest of all, when asked, “What is your main purpose for being in high school?” more students checked “To get into a good college” than “To learn.”

Stress levels were high when I visited Irvington in the fall of 2014. Sitting with a classroom full of juniors, I casually asked, “How stressed are you, on a scale of one to ten?” The teens replied with a chorus of groans: “Ten!” One said eleven.

I went on: “Who gets seven hours of sleep a night? Raise your hand.” A couple of hands went up. “Six hours?” A few more. “Five?” And there the bulk of the class raised their hands. Growing ever more incredulous, I asked: “Four?” Up went the last couple of hands. Even as the discussion continued, many students were scribbling in their notebooks, not sparing a moment that could be spent on schoolwork. Finally, I put the critical question to them: “Is it worth it?” They mumbled yes. “Why?” One boy with a blondish mop of hair answered for his peers: “To better your future.”

Afterward, Jackson strode down the hall away from the classroom, his frustration showing in his gait. “It pains me to go into those classes because...