The Race to Nowhere

This week I attended a screening of Race To Nowhere, a documentary film that analyzes the alarmingly ineffective and dangerous pressures our children face in school. The film, by Vicki Abeles, was born of a mother's concern over the stress induced insomnia and health problems her middle schoolers were experiencing from pressure to perform in school, the lack of family time caused by heavy homework loads, and sadly, the unfortunate suicide of a local 13 year old honor student after failing a math test. Abeles travelled the country interviewing students, educators and experts, exposing highly stressed students who are increasingly disengaged, depressed, ill, who self injure, become suicidal or hopeless; teachers disillusioned that they are not able to teach their material due to the pressures to teach standardized tests, and experts who are alarmed at the products this process is creating and its toll on our children. The film concludes that this treadmill of performance based standards is robbing children of both their childhood and a proper education, and encourages community involvement to help change the system.

The film was eye opening, and confirmed many of the gut feelings and biases I have about the education my children are receiving. A few highlights from the film, which I highly recommend:

Hours of homework increasingly cut into family time and cause stress for the whole family. There is no correlation between homework and performance, in fact the less homework a school assigns, the better the overall achievement of the students and school and the lower the stress levels for children and families. Most kids are skilled at hiding their stress, saying their day was OK, but the stress manifests itself in many unhealthy ways.

Roughly 97% of all high school students have used some form of cheating to maintain their grades. Most admit to cramming and forgetting to pass tests. Many are sleep deprived due to overscheduling and heavy course loads. But to what end? Elite colleges who accept the top AP students have to remediate almost half of the incoming freshmen because they are deficient in basic math and english skills. Go ahead, read that line again. Half of our top students are unprepared for freshman math and english classes. They also lack critical thinking, problem solving and social skills. They want to be told what to study for a test. The have been reared on busy work and standardized test prep and are not ready to really think and reason. Their education is a mile wide and an inch deep. Their education is biased toward college applications, not College.

Industrialized nations like Singapore or Finland who consistently outperform us on tests do not teach the tests or mandate testing, and they recruit their best students to become teachers, offering them scholarships and stipends, and reward them with high salaries and in many cases, strong unions. In the United States, teachers are penalized by the system, required to take an additional year of studies to become certified, losing a year of income while incurring further college debt, and then rewarded with low salaries and pressure to achieve test scores, not educated children.

I came home from the movie and had a long, meaningful discussion with my son, who is disillusioned and disengaged from school, and for whom I have become the prison warden and chief nag about all things related to school and grades and performance and schedules and his college options and his career path and his future and his entire life, and I apologized to him. We talked a lot about what his education has become and how we might try to make learning more fun and less oppressive for him. We decided that since the world is run by C students, he can relax, and know that if he finds his passion, everything will work out. I told him that Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and the CEO of McDonalds did not graduate college, some never even went. I decided to stop nagging him about his future and let him try and enjoy a piece of the childhood he has remaining. I'm going to be more perceptive about the pressures I put on my kids, and help them recognize and deal with their own stress before it becomes a bigger problem.


I caught Jon Stewart's interview last night with the author of The Death and Life Of the American Schools, who raises many of the same concerns as the film. After checking out her book, I'm convinced that No Child Left Behind (which began as an effort by the Children's Defense Fund to reduce poverty in American children before the Bush Administration turned it into an 1100 page unfunded mandate to the states) is the worst mistake ever made in the history of Education. The greatest irony of the program is that it takes the schools most in need of resources, our poorest, and punishes them by making them poorer. Poverty is the enemy of education and the cost to society is far greater at the outcome than the cost of investing in nutrition and education.

And now for some really biased opinions. First, I am a mom, and I pay attention to my kids' educations. I am very hands on, because I care A Lot, and I have the luxury of time to volunteer in their classrooms, or be available after school to help with assignments. Second, I see the world through the lens of my education and experience: a degree in Geography, because I like seeing the big picture and the whole organism, my career in analytical laboratories where I learned a thing or two about accuracy and precision and deductive reasoning, my MBA and Quality Management training, where I learned how important process is to outcome, and how measurement truly affects results. And third, after I left my glamorous career to be a stay at home mom and channeled all that energy and brain power into over-volunteering as a reading tutor, I was offered a part time position as an aid in the classrooms. I became a district employee, and one year on the inside of a stellar school district was enough to disillusion me for good. I worked with some wonderful teachers, but very few were able to maintain a sense of order or quiet in their classrooms, which I considered to be problem number one. Problem number two was the inane curriculum, which was modeled on a spiralling program of constantly repeating the material year after year, allowing for breadth of learning, but not depth, and text books that resembled Reader's Digest rather than reference books. Problem number three and worst of all, was the pressure to perform on standardized tests. Thanks to Bush's NCLB mandate, the test was life. The test determined not only our school's ranking and bragging rights, but ensured our share of federal funds. No performance, no money. Oh, and I suppose it determined Is our children learning? as the President so eloquently asked. Yes, our children was learning, alright - they were learning how to pass the state tests. The bulk of my paid time working as an aid to 3rd grade students was spent pulling the low performers (who were tracked in one class with stars on a wall chart) out of instructional class time to sit alone with me and review trouble areas on sample test questions, and try to help them figure out how to guess the correct answer. I spent hours copying sample tests for the classes to take repeatedly as the state test date loomed. On test week, every household still receives a robocall reminding the parents of the importance of sleep, nutrition and hydration to test performance. Posters and signs get hung reminding everyone of the test dates and reminding those in the hallways to keep quiet to avoid distracting test takers. Shhhhh. Tests in Progress. It is a Really Big Deal.

(Inane pet peeve about my job: I freaked out a teacher who had me grade quizzes, because I used a red pen and marked incorrect answers with an X. Oh No. Red has negative connotations, as does the X. Oh no, we mark incorrect answers with a non threatening color and a friendly check mark. Yep. Check = wrong. My counterintuitive BS meter was pegged all year!)

So. My middle schooler spends 4 half days a year just taking the ISAT tests, and who knows how much time prepping for them now. At the high school level test prep is now part of the curriculum and counts toward a percentage of the course grade in math and english classes.

To what end? My kids are pretty good test takers, scoring in the upper percentiles. They should, since mom and dad are both pretty smart geeks, but mostly because it is what they have been trained and drilled to do since elementary school. But here's the thing. They are poor thinkers. They miss key concepts. They want a quick and easy answer. The school system has dumbed down so much of the information and process that I am constantly appalled. For example, my 11th grader's history paper assignment came with a 4 page overview of the essay topic and grading rubric. This was accompanied by a 8 page fill in the blanks outline driving both the content and the format of the paper. I recall being assigned a topic and simply writing a paper in high school. I wasn't forced to dissect my thesis and argument into pieces and fit them into a confusing puzzle.

And while I'm bitching, my high school Chemistry text was not full of pictures and insets and outlines, or inane examples like this one. Seriously? Do 17 year old students need a quarter of a page devoted to a picture of a boy swimming to illustrate the concept of a parallel line????? Are you kidding me? I know, lets take some more tests.


It's not just this book. I look through all my children's text books, and they are full of pictures and they are so compartmentalized that research is tedious and ineffective. We use my books and the internet to fill in the gaps. My son's US History text, which is heavy and huge with pictures and ADD inducing content, includes a lengthy addendum of historical documents such as the Magna Carta and Articles of Confederation, but does not have a copy of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. Again, are you kidding me?

There is no doubt in my mind that this system is badly broken. Into pieces. Bush's dream of becoming the Education President is our children's nightmare. Obama has some unkept promises to fulfill where this complex issue is concerned. I believe the stakes are very, very high in this Race that needs to be to Somewhere.