| Main Feature Story - Friday, March 19, 2010
Feature: Schools of lost children
New film asks if grade-driven education has any redeeming lessons...
by Ronnie Cohen
Marin County parents and educators have been flocking to see a movie that was not on the Oscar list. An East Bay lawyer and mother of three school-age children directed and producedRace to Nowhere. Prompted by her own kids' struggles and looking to incite an educational revolution, Vicki Abeles has been showing the personal documentary in communities like ours, communities where young people say they feel like they step on a treadmill in elementary school and remain on it through college.
In the film, Abeles laments academic demands on her son and daughters' time that prevent them from being able to run around outside or spend more than 20 minutes a night with their family. A father bemoans having to play homework cop. A teacher cries about her inability to fix what she perceives as a data-driven, grade-obsessed and broken school system.
Stressed-out students complain that they sometimes have six hours of homework a night. They feel forced to cheat on tests and skimp on sleep. They suffer from stomachaches, headaches and anorexia. They pop pills to concentrate and to stay awake. Unable to handle the stress, one boy drops out. A 13-year-old Danville girl, facing her first less-than-perfect grade, kills herself.
Drake High School parent and tutor Torri Chappell of San Anselmo has been warning educators to turn down the pressure on kids for years and was thrilled to see a movie that gives voice to her concerns. "Family and health are taking a back seat to academic and athletic rigor," she said. "Our community protests loudly and effectively when there is a threat to spray pesticides on our food. Yet it is acceptable for our children to give up sleep and time with family in the name of being successful?
"It is absolutely crazy what is going on. If I didn't know it to be true, I would think I was making it up. I have been advocating change for a good decade. I wasn't getting any traction, even any professional dialogue. What brought me back into it with fervor is the Race to Nowhere. I feel it's a tipping point."
Lindsay Brauner, a strawberry blonde Tamalpais High School senior in the movie, discusses the stress she has experienced since middle school, when she would sometimes stay up until 1am doing homework.
"I definitely felt a lot of pressure to have perfect grades. I was really stressed, and all my joints would swell," she says in the film, her blue eyes widening to accentuate the point. "I've often wondered—why am I doing this?
"I'm doing this so I can go to college and get a job I like, ultimately so I can be happy. But, if I'm not healthy, none of it really matters."
Some might argue that Brauner won her race. Today, she attends UC Berkeley—a prize that scores of hard-working local high school seniors covet. California students need higher grades and higher college-entrance exam scores than ever to get into schools like UC Berkeley, where more than 50,000 high school seniors are vying for one of about 4,000 freshman spots in the fall.
"It's like going through the eye of a needle to get into some of these schools now," Deborah Stipek, dean of Stanford University's School of Education, says in the film.
• • • •
EDUCATIONAL EXPERTS IN the film say getting into college should be a match made rather than a prize won. Local educators concur, but with admissions decisions hitting high school seniors' inboxes right around now and the accompanying joy and grief, it is hard for some students and their parents to turn away from pursuing what for many in Marin looks like a trophy.
Before month's end, Teo Pier, an 18-year-old Marin Academy student, expects to hear whether he made the grade for a spot at UC Berkeley. The tall, thin, curly-haired senior was one of just a handful of students to steal time away from homework, athletics and other extracurricular activities to attend a recent Race to Nowhere screening at his private school in San Rafael.
Pier wishes he had seen the film when he was a high school freshman because its message might have helped him move off the track sooner. "I did fall into the race to nowhere," he said. "It's kind of a trap.
"Definitely in the past year I've realized you should work hard and do your best, but I want to learn something that doesn't feel like I'm just memorizing it for some crazy standardized test. Learning for the sake of that test stresses you out and leaves you with nothing in the end."
Abeles and the education experts who speak in the documentary would wholeheartedly agree. They say our schools reward a limited and sometimes unhealthy version of fill-in-the-bubble test-taking success. They want to broaden the culture's definitions of success. And they urge a re-examination of a system they believe compels children to forgo sleep as well as time with family and friends, time to explore, time to develop passions and time to be kids.
Marin County psychologist and The Price of Privilege author Madeline Levine speaks as one of the experts in the movie. Having counseled Marin adolescents for the past 30 years, she has had a front-row seat to the psychological effects and pain of ever-increasing stress on teenagers. Along with Denise Pope, who founded the Stressed-Out-Students project at Stanford University, Levine created Challenge Success—a research-based organization that has been working with schools around the nation and in Marin to help develop curriculum that rewards not only achievement but character, creativity, independence and health.
"We have an opportunity to change the way we conceive of being successful for kids," Levine says in the documentary. "It takes bravery. You're swimming against the popular culture.
"When I went to school a very small number of kids were expected to be really super-smart, and they went on to great colleges. Now every kid is expected to be that way. It's just not the way it works. We're ignoring this great group of kids because we're so focused on this narrow group of high-achieving kids, and we're trying to turn them all into that."
Local educators say that if Garrison Keillor broadcast A Prairie Home Companion from Marin County—instead of Lake Wobegon, where all the kids are above average—all the kids would be extraordinary.
Of course, they are not. But parents, teachers and the kids themselves try to shoehorn a majority into spots reserved for a select minority.
"If you're not a really high-powered student, it's tough in this community because there are so many children who are so bright and capable," said Linda Brauner, Lindsay's mother and a Mill Valley psychologist. After a spate of Mill Valley teen suicides, including two of Lindsay's friends, Brauner teamed up with local educators to host a series of discussions about adolescent stress. During the discussions, parents, students and teachers began to articulate the problem to which there is no single or simple solution.
"In order to have change, the community has to say out loud: This is a problem. That's exactly what we're doing right now," Brauner said. "We're not saying who's to blame. Parents, educators, administrators are standing up and saying we are responsible for making this change."
• • • •
ABELES SEES THE problem as a national one and interviews students from New York as well as the Bay Area in the movie. The problem can be exacerbated, though, in affluent communities like Marin, where teens' parents tend to be highly successful.
"When you live in a community like we live in, and these kids see where their parents have been and what they have achieved," Brauner said, "that's a hard act to follow."
"You want to give your child a better life than you had or at least as good a life as you had, and that's hard now," said Jennifer Blake, Marin Academy's college counseling coordinator.
Margie Reis, whose sons attend Redwood High and Hall Middle schools, braved a rainstorm to see Race to Nowhere at the Lark Theater. "Redwood is an overachiever environment," she said after the screening. "I think this community, Marin County, is a very competitive community—driven—and there's a lot of pressure to be better than the next."
Reis' friend, Shannon Di Donato, whose sons also go to Redwood and Hall, nodded agreement. "I think here 'average' is a bad word," she said.
"When did a B become a failing grade?" a father asked.
Psychologist Levine watched Race to Nowhere for the first time teary-eyed during the sold-out showing at the Larkspur theater. After the screening, she joined Abeles in the front of the auditorium to answer questions. Right off the bat, she urged parents to send their tired kids to bed without doing their homework.
"Just stop doing homework," Levine advised the standing-room-only audience of mostly mothers. "Tell your kids to go to sleep. You are the parents, after all."
Then she tried to talk the parents out of their desire to send their children to the nation's most elite universities. She asked audience members to raise their hands if they had attended an Ivy League college. Nine out of the 250 counted themselves in the select group. Levine said she attended the University of Buffalo.
"I think we've been absolutely sold a bill of goods," she said. "People who attend Ivy League schools are not any happier. They don't make any more money. We've developed a mythology about what kids need to be successful.
"They're missing the time and experience to develop real self-esteem, integrity and the ability to be interested in someone else. If you're stressed and anxious and working all the time, you can't attend to these things."
Levine recalled standing outside a Marin Safeway in the 1980s protesting the spraying of the pesticide Alar on apples and compared stress to poisons. "We know this is harming children and just as toxic as spray," she said. "We need to act just as directly and vehemently when it comes to our children's mental health."
Abeles said her children have worked harder in middle and high school than she worked in law school. After the Lark Theater screening, she urged parents and teachers to push for change.
"It starts in our homes and our classrooms," she said. "It takes everybody starting to feel more empowered and not just accepting what's been going on for the past 20 to 30 years and has reached somewhat of an extreme."
In Race to Nowhere, Sara Bennett, who wrote The Case Against Homework, details the modern history of what has become such a burden to high school students that parents say they feel guilty making their kids perform household chores. Stanford's Pope recently surveyed students at high-achieving Bay Area high schools who reported doing 2.94 hours of homework a night. In 1948, Bennett says, students spent three to four hours on homework—in a week.
"Then there was sputnik," she says, "and all of a sudden, we were falling behind in the space race." The homework load took off, but it fell again in the laid-back 1960s. Then, in 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education released its report, A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform. It concluded that high school students "should be assigned far more homework than is now the case," and the number of hours American students had to devote to homework rose.
In 2002, after President George W. Bush signed his No Child Left Behind program into law, teachers further ratcheted up homework loads.
Following the Marin Academy Race to Nowhere screening, one mother asked: "How did this happen that my husband and I do the dishes? The kids feel they get a free pass from chores because they're doing homework."
• • • •
IN HER ROLE as Drake High School's director of student activities, Kendall Galli defends her school's homework load. On the other hand, as a mother of a Drake freshman and two White Hill Middle School students, she sometimes feels so guilty when she has finished her work for the day and her children are still doing homework that she pretends to be busy.
"We want our kids to not be stressed but still have the pipeline to Harvard," she said.
In November, Galli brought Race to Nowhere to the Drake High gymnasium, where more than 500 parents, students and educators watched it. "I felt like I opened this powder keg," she said. "The film is so appropriately titled because it's like you're a hamster in one of those balls. You see where you want to go, but you're stuck behind that Plexiglas ball."
Some parents and educators say the pressure stems mostly from teachers. Others blame parents. Others point to athletic programs and coaches who expect kids to devote every afternoon, in addition to their school vacations, to their sports. Ditto for theater and music programs. Kids say they feel the most pressure from other kids, some of whom talk incessantly about how this or that activity or class looks on college applications.
"There's enough blame to go around," Galli said. "The film spotlighted schools and the pressure that homework and test prep puts on students. But parents should not be let off the hook, nor should athletics."
Tutor and parent Chappell believes we have become a nation addicted to testing, with some teachers convinced they need meaningless data to measure learning. Starting in kindergarten, she said, teachers begin to time-test children, who are tagged as needing "academic intervention" if they cannot read by the end of their kindergarten year.
"They're identifying kids at risk at 5," she said. "It's just ridiculous. When did it all become about measuring learning instead of inspiring learning? It really started happening after No Child Left Behind."
Jeff Alonzo of San Anselmo, whose daughter attends third grade at Brookside Elementary School, looked haggard while listening to a recent talk about a program to test elementary school children's reading ability. He said his daughter struggles to get through weekly timed reading and math tests. "I want my kid to be excited about learning," he said. "Every night, it's just drilling."
After the Marin Academy screening, father Steven Birer said he sees pressure from the universities trickling down to the high schools. "The movie is an interesting description of a problem," he said. "It's a top-down problem. Unless universities change what they're demanding, the high schools have more demands on them.
"We love it here at Marin Academy because it's not just about the grade; it's about the holistic growth of the child. But, that said, my daughter stays up till midnight doing homework."
Students in today's bulging echo-boomer generation will have to compete not only for a limited number of spots in colleges but for spaces in graduate and professional schools as well as jobs. How can parents and teachers prepare them without jeopardizing their well-being?
"It's not a problem you can solve in one miracle, like less homework," Branson senior Evan Curhan said. "It's not something you can slap a Band-Aid on and say it will be all better."
Even top students like Curhan, who is going to Dartmouth College in the fall, say they struggle with workload, sleep deprivation and stress. Since he learned in December that he was admitted to Dartmouth, Curhan said he has worried less about his grades and focused more on learning. He has noticed a slight dip in his marks and a significant increase in his grasp of the material.
"Now I'm learning because I want to," he said.
The trick is figuring out how to motivate kids to learn while continuing to assess them.
"This is just a start," Abeles said. "For the first time ever these issues are out in the open. People have been afraid to talk about it. We need to create political will. The film is a vehicle, hopefully, for that."
She said she has been invited to screen her documentary at President Barack Obama's daughters' school. But she wants to wait for her grassroots movement to gather steam first.
"I really feel that a shift's occurring in the last few years," Linda Brauner said. "When you put out this kind of film in your community, when you have Denise Pope come, there's no way you can go back."
For more information on 'Race to Nowhere,' go to www.racetonowhere.com .
Contact Ronnie Cohen at ronniecohen@comcast.net. | 
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