Author: Alexandra Robbins
Excerpt:
The first time I met AP Frank, before he left home for Harvard, he told me about a philosophy of his that worried him. He said, "When you cage up an animal for all of its life and then you let it free, it's going to go crazy." He was afraid that once he got to college, he would experience that fate.
Many students don't wait until college to attempt to break free. As C.J. suggested, high school students might not drink because of peer pressure. They drink because of pressure, period. They drink because of pressure to be superlative. They drink because of pressure to be perfect. Consider all of the other factors that high school students have to deal with in addition to academic stress. Besides the full-time job of overachieving, students deal extensively with social, psychological, romantic, identity, and family issues while at the same time trying to navigate adolescence. None of these pressures lets up after the bell rings at the end of the school day.
Students can get so tightly wound, it's understandable that they search for outlets to let off steam. Drinking alcohol happens to be one of the most popular methods, perhaps not surprisingly, given adults' habits of imbibing to unwind. Like adults, many students say they "need a drink" to escape the stress and pressure of their daily lives. By the time they reach twelfth grade, almost 80 percent of students have consumed alcohol, and nearly a third have engaged in binge drinking, defined as having five or more drinks on one occasion. By eighth grade, almost half of all students have tried alcohol, and more than 20 percent say they have been drunk. At the college level, campuses report record increases in binge drinking. As University of Virginia professor John Portmann told Psychology Today, "There is a ritual every university administrator has come to fear. Every fall, parents drop off their well-groomed freshmen, and within two or three days, many have consumed a dangerous amount of alcohol and placed themselves in harm's way. These kids have been controlled for so long, they just go crazy."
The statistically good news is that nationwide, illicit drug use is on the decline. (Illegal use of prescription drugs is on the upswing, however, as discussed in Chapter Fourteen.) But the sad fact is that students who try these substances often do so less out of rebelliousness than out of escapism. As a Massachusetts junior told me, "I turned to drugs and alcohol because I felt the need to escape everything. I no longer do any of that because I realize it was dangerous and stupid. Sometimes I do think about it, though. Everything seemed much simpler when I could escape the pain and loss of control."
For many students, there's another outlet that falls under the umbrella of "partying" to relieve stress: sex, or just fooling around. "I suppose I went to extremes because of the amount I was working and the reputation I had," a California senior said. "I enjoyed being the valedictorian who could still get drunk or high or have sex on the weekends. My friends knew me as someone who would study until late at night, then go out with a guy, and wake up on Saturday morning to go running and then study all day. It's funny to think that being a good student led to me trying dangerous things, but I think I was just trying to break the mold."
When I asked her what adults might not know about today's high school experience, she expounded on why she partied. "I was definitely very stressed, and I worked very hard. Long nights studying, job shadows, college classes, internships, SATs, sports, all at the same time as balancing a social life. This could be why students do things to such extremes. There is a sense of urgency and pressure. Many of my friends and I would drink to the point of blacking out. Every time. I would have sex with guys the first time I hooked up with them, because I didn't want to waste time. I think I came out fine, and I was happy with how I balanced work and play. But I don't think adults realize what high schoolers are capable of. They think that if we work hard and appear to follow the rules, then we won't make mistakes."
More than 60 percent of twelfth graders have had sex, and health centers say students are experimenting with sex at younger ages. In recent years, middle schoolers have been caught having sex on school buses. In Pennsylvania, a group of middle school girls who called themselves the "Pop-Tarts" offered blow jobs at parties. And in high school, some students are using sex as a tool to attempt to break out of the cage.
A midwestern Latina student felt imprisoned by her parents' pressure to be the perfect college applicant. They refused to allow her to take art or music because the classes weren't APs, and they forced her to take Spanish classes, even though she was fluent, to get the easy A. They also insisted she become a cheerleader, though she disliked it, so she would have an extracurricular activity to bolster her college application. When she wasn't at school, her cage became more literal: Her father locked her in her room, where she was expected to do nothing but study. Because she wasn't allowed to leave the house during the weeks before the SAT, she took to sneaking out late at night. Just before the test, the sixteen-year-old sneaked out to have sex with her boyfriend to relieve her stress -- and had a pregnancy scare. To this day her parents don't know about the home pregnancy tests she frantically took then and twice more in the ensuing months, or that she then turned to alcohol as another escape.
Locked in her room as the SAT neared, she was forbidden to take breaks, relax, or chat with friends. Burned out and stressed beyond belief, the non-drinker skipped school soon after the test to try to relax at a friend's house, where she had two beers. A police officer happened to catch the students, arrested them, and jailed them for the day. Her parents didn't speak to her for a week, but not because of the arrest. They were furious because of her 1300 (out of 1600) SAT score.
Review:Atlantic Monthly
The frenzy of academic competition, particularly among affluent American families, has triggered a spate of cautionary new books. The titles reviewed here are all excellent: I give them all A+'s -- or, in the parlance of today's elite high schoolers, weighted GPAs of 4.687, including 5's in fifteen AP courses and a combined math/verbal SAT score of 1540.
Of course, I'm a biased reader; in my estimation, there can't be enough books written on the topic. I say, let's hurl them, one by one, at today's frenzied "helicopter parents," who deserve to be, if not bombarded, at least given a simple clonk over the head with a frying pan while a trained therapist yells, "Stop the insanity!"
Winning admission to a coveted college is so do-or-die that today's �ber-protective parents leave nothing to chance -- which is to say, nothing to the bumbling students themselves. For our most obsessively college-minded parents, it seems foolhardy to allow high-school seniors to track the progress of their own applications, to solicit their own letters of recommendation, even to write their own autobiographical essays about why they want to go to college. At a certain point, one might ask who is actually hoping to pull on that crimson sweatshirt.
In a telling USA Today essay on such parents, the MIT admissions head, Marilee Jones, wrote that they even "make excuses for their child's bad grades and threaten to sue high school personnel who reveal any information perceived to be potentially harmful to their child's chances of admission." (Indeed, in The Overachievers, Alexandra Robbins points out that the number of teachers purchasing liability insurance rose by 25 percent between 2000 and 2005.)
And when these litigious parents' work is well done, they need only stand back as their mini-me's shamble forward, robotlike, hurling lawsuits for them. In 2003, with acceptances from Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Princeton, and Cornell already in hand, the New Jersey senior Blair Hornstine sued her school district for $2.7 million for the pain and humiliation of having to share her valedictorian title with another student. Diagnosed with chronic fatigue, Hornstine had completed much of her coursework at home with private tutors, while being allowed to skip gym class (where even an A+, valued at 4.3, would have lowered her AP-fueled GPA of 4.6894). Her father, Superior Court Judge Louis Hornstine, didn't just support his daughter's campaign; he helped complete her volunteer work, driving groceries to the local food bank on her behalf. (In June 2001, Blair Hornstine also received a Congressional Award Gold Medal, an honor that requires a student to have performed 200 hours of personal development, 200 hours of physical fitness, and 400 hours of community service. Talk about chronic fatigue!) After winning sole-valedictorian status and settling with the district for $60,000, Blair, in a bizarre twist, was de-admitted from Harvard upon discovery that she had plagiarized some material in her local newspaper columns. Also in 2003, the Michigan valedictorian hopeful Brian Delekta challenged district regulations that allowed him at most an A for summer legal work, as opposed to the A+ that -- yes -- his own attorney mother had awarded him. (In the suit, Ms. Delekta served as her son's lawyer. They lost.)
On the one hand, I worry that unless they join some sort of MTV-sponsored witness-protection program, such children have no hope of ever getting laid. (One imagines Brian and his lawyer mom, or Blair and her judge dad, years down the road, sharing a lone Zima at a vast granite kitchen island as the pair of them nostalgically go through old torts.) On the other hand, I have to admit to a grudging admiration for the sheer professionalism, the smoothly oiled Bonnie-and-Clyde teamwork of these academic parent-child hit squads. I too had insanely pushy parents, but in retrospect they seem like pikers. Yes, my Danzig-born mom wrote all my sister's school papers (which my sister then dutifully copied and presented as her own). However, the result was not Ivy League entry but instead, as my sister will joke, "my strange German syntax, to shake, I have never quite been able." When I was a senior at Caltech, my Shanghai-born scientist dad kept calling my dorm to shout, over the thumping ZZ Top, "Sandra! Apply to any grad school in any engineering major!" Sadly, thanks to the freedom of the EZ student loan the great cheapskate himself had helped me secure, I was already off dating a rock-bagpipe player and spectacularly bombing my physics GRE. (Out of a possible 99, my percentile was 7 -- that's right, one digit -- a number so low it inspires almost Talmudic awe in those who hear it uttered.)
By contrast, today's top students don't seem to have the sheer Falstaffian airspace in which to belly flop -- and even when they do, they enjoy odd new protections. (Robbins cites a teacher's surprise when a star student suddenly came in with a diagnosis of "difficulty with Gestalt thinking" -- which, conveniently, allowed her to take all subsequent tests untimed.) However, these soaring levels of academic achievement and care seem to be generating not satisfaction but epic levels of misery � particularly for the sons and daughters of America's most affluent, education-obsessed families. Such kids are fueling their own exploding at-risk statistics: among all socioeconomic groups, they're now the leaders in adolescent rates of depression, substance abuse, and anxiety disorders. The gnawing discontent shows up less in colorful Jerry Springer-style drama than in a kind of beige blankness, personality absence, or paucity of self. In The Price of Privilege, Madeline Levine notes a widespread lack of what she calls an "internal home,'" described thus:
It clearly is not built of bricks and mortar, but of the psychological building blocks of self-liking, self-acceptance, and self-management. It is the welcoming and restorative psychological structure that children need to construct in order to be at ease internally as well as out in the world � For me, this internal place looks and feels very much like the big oak tree I used to climb up in my backyard when I was a child.
Which sounds quaint until one considers that in today's overscheduled families, climbing a tree and sitting in it is practically unheard of.
One fascinating thread Robbins tracks is a growing similarity between the overachieving culture of the United States and the legendarily rabid edu-culture of East Asia. By the age of six, some Asian students are doing homework until after midnight. By adolescence, they're suffering such high rates of suicide and anxiety that they make the likes of Winona Ryder seem rather cheerful.
But -- one might coldly ask, with a certain gestalt bent -- don't the miserable survivors at least make better widgets? Even in this, though, the results are mixed. Studies indicate that Asian students achieve some of the highest scores in the world in math and science comparisons. However, owing to excessive focus on memorization, done solely for the purpose of passing tests, these gloomy idiot savants demonstrate surprisingly little practical know-how and often are unable to apply what they've learned. And this is the educational system we mistakenly aspire to, argues Robbins, who traces the U.S. overachiever culture back to President Reagan's 1983 Department of Education report "A Nation at Risk." Its authors identified a "rising tide of mediocrity" in U.S. students' poor scores on standardized tests. In so doing, according to an education expert Robbins quotes, "the members of the National Commission tightly yoked the nation's global competitiveness to how well our 13-year-olds bubbled in test answer sheets."
Of course, until recently in many Asian countries there were frighteningly rigid educational systems, which in turn tracked into few good jobs. Failing a single test as a child in those not-so-bygone days could put you on a path to permanent economic hardship, social failure, and a windowless apartment the size of a telephone booth -- making all that anxiety tragically somewhat understandable. By contrast, professional futures in America aren't so instantly or firmly etched -- see, for example, the famous college dropouts Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Getting into college isn't so much of a worry, either: Robbins points out that only about 10 percent of the more than 2,000 four-year undergraduate programs nationwide have selective admissions. And how important, really, are those one in ten? Granted, for graduating directly into high-paying jobs in consulting and finance, very important. But the most definitive longitudinal study so far indicates that a degree from a prestigious school isn't ultimately worth more, earnings-wise, than a degree from any other school -- though the former will certainly set you back more.
Still, a deep river of must-have school mania runs through the chattering classes. There is, of course, the parental adrenalin rush at suburban cocktail parties that comes from announcing one's son or daughter as an Ivy Leaguer. But even at the preschool level, parents now fight to be the last family in, frenetic as the eels in that horse's head in Volker Schl�ndorff'sTin Drum. Why? Because getting into that $25,000-a-year preschool is now seen as a toddler's de rigueur first step down the yellow brick road that winds from preschool to private school to Harvard to Goldman Sachs. That said, however perilously narrow such families may seem in their worldview, certainly their academic clarity is enviable. For those of us still feeling our way through the meritocracy, successful career paths are much more complicated. Many of us, unsure of how we got where we are in the first place, are just as unsure of what education will best prepare our children for an unknowable future. (Perhaps your child can indeed get more personal attention at a good state school than at an Ivy League one, where TAs teach all the classes while the professors are away doing research. But when your child interviews for a job, can you trust that her interviewers will be smart enough to see how Personally Attentive that state school really was?)
And then there are matters of character. Typically, middle-class educated parents' search for their children's schools takes on the feel, if not of teen girls trying on different outfits, of adolescents trying on various selves. In our own experience negotiating the educational Byzantium of Los Angeles, my husband and I asked ourselves: Are we leafy-tree/Waldorf School people? Are we hip/Johnny Depp-friendly/progressive people? Are we hybrid-SUV enviro-Democrats? Are we white? It turns out that all of these questions were moot, as the answer was simply that we are, if not poor, too poor for our two children to be developmentally nurtured at $15,000-plus a year. (Which raised an alternate question: In our reaction to all of Los Angeles's excesses, are we half-price closet conservatives of a Lutheran or even Catholic shade?)
Actually, to my surprise, I've turned out to be a big-barreled Mother Jones-like figure -- in this case, a defiant urban public-school mother, which in today's middle-class zeitgeist practically feels like being a communist; I'm given to wild-eyed rants against the perils of affluence, particularly when I'm in my cups. Then again, while waiting for the school bus among Mexican day laborers and Armenian grandmothers with strangely dyed magenta hair, I do sometimes gaze longingly at the Los Angeles private-school parents whizzing by in their Priuses -- the writers, the composers, the actors, the thinkers � so intelligent, so creative, so sensitive, so incensed about global warming, so angry about Bush. Then I think of the administrators I met in those private schools, when we were interviewing (as I said, to my surprise I'm a Mother Jones-like figure �). Given that independent-school business (and middle- class urban fear) is booming now, "the front office," as I call it, is always manned by mercenary professional gatekeepers -- the lion-maned admissions directors, the women with important scarves -- who let you know, in no uncertain terms, exactly what on your Visa is nonrefundable. But in "the back office," there is always the gentle little gnome who lives in a woodland cave of the mind. In Los Angeles, this woodland gnome is typically a sweet and fragile eighty-something educator (think wonderfully old-fashioned cardigan, white hair perhaps growing out of the ears) who in Austria in the 1950s invented some sort of benevolent alternative- learning theory whence gently flowers the school's educational philosophy. If he or she is the emotional figurehead of an independent school (one possibly even bearing his or her name) that now allows in, by breakneck competition, only the most affluent and privileged (with the occasional Savion Glover-brilliant inner-city child, for color; or perhaps an heir of Denzel Washington), thus exacerbating the twenty-first century's Grand Canyon-like divide between rich and poor, it's not the helpless and unworldly little gnome's fault -- it's just something that happened along the way. Hey -- you wouldn't blame John Dewey!
The irony for me is that although I see and decry these social divisions, there's some lingering part of me that wants to sit obediently before the gnome, manipulate blocks, and be patted on the head and called exceptionally creative, and gifted.
And clearly I'm not alone.
Alissa Quart, in Hothouse Kids, writes about a visit she paid to Philadelphia's prestigious Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, and offers this observation:
For many [parents], the school was the center and pinnacle of their own lives. One mother told me that upon arriving at the school, when her son was one year old, her husband cried because he felt they had "wasted a year of our baby's life."
But who exactly is the husband crying for? For his son, or for himself? Is it, as the saying goes, that the child is the father of the man, and that this man maintains an unsophisticated view of human development and human potential -- one that is striverishly superficial, and external (to borrow Madeline Levine's concept)? Regardless, woe to the one-year-old who's being pitied for blown deadlines, for having spent the first twelve months of his life drooling and cooing without educational purpose. Imagine how this father's boundless quest to fulfill one's Potential -- whatever that vague word means -- will unfold as this infant comes of age. Quart offers this extraordinarily telling tableau:
A boy undone by the failure to accept human limits, Icarus is a useful metaphor for the hothouse kid. Building these champions does create a generation of high achievers. But they do not necessarily stay aloft. They may grow up resentful of their parents' inculcations. They may forever romanticize the childhood they never experienced. They may spend their adulthood aspiring to be children. They also share a feeling that normality is banal, even terrifyingly so. They may feel as though they fell from glory. And in fact they have. The attention they once received has never returned.
The terror of the ordinary is what keeps many affluent, educated parents and their kids out of the merely "decent" schools, the ones that are simply "fine." For Katie, a private-school mother typical of the parents in Alan Eisenstock's Kindergarten Wars, the only acceptable school is the one with which she literally falls in love. The campus -- with its picture-perfect bucolic landscape, its lush greenery, its air heavy with magical scents of eucalyptus and mint -- suggests a modern-day Eden.
There is, ironically, no sense of school. Instead Katie feels something else, something � larger. She feels an immense calm. Contentment. And then it hits her. It's as if she has wandered through some kind of enchanted garden and has come home. That's what Hunsford feels like.
Home.
For the next thirteen years.
"I'm in love," Katie says.
After the quickening drama of the admissions process, the expulsion from paradise is hard. Upon being tossed by Hunsford into the death of the soul that is the waiting pool, in a scene that alone merits the price of the book, Katie polishes off an entire bottle of Grey Goose and curses, for pages and pages and pages:
The irony. I wasn't even going to go through this process. And then I saw Hunsford and I wanted it. I gave up everything for one year, devoted my entire life to getting us into Hunsford. That became my job. Miles had his job. His job is to bring in the money. My job was to get us into Hunsford. And you know what? I failed. I fucking failed. I'm a failure. Today I got fired from my job.
Although one must at the very least credit Katie with greater self-awareness than the weeping Philadelphia father, her admission of monomania and misplaced ego doesn't make the moment any more seemly. And what of Katie's child in all this? Even allowing that a failure to land a kindergarten slot at Hunsford might have existential implications (as pretty much everything, interestingly enough, does), those implications are much less worrisome than the prospect of Mom reaching for the vodka whenever her parental pride -- or inner copresident -- is wounded.
So this is what wealth and good fortune have gotten our affluent, education-obsessed families in the aughts. A mother may glimpse a home of calm and contentment (her own missing Oak Tree of the Soul, perhaps?) in the enchanted parklike grounds of a school whose cost is $25,000 a year for kindergarten, and where -- after legacy, siblings, and staff -- there are only four available spots for an application pool of 600. A judge father may try to make Icarus fly again, even if that means arduously winching his own daughter up into the air with a mind-bogglingly complicated system of cranes and pulleys that accidentally sends her flying backward. And meanwhile, for adolescents, the result of all this parental academic yearning is grinding pressure, emptiness, and conformity � such that Ivy League hopefuls -- or their parents -- polish their autobiographical essays (yet more empty Selves) via www.essayedge.com, where for $299.95 a "Harvard-educated editor" will punch up, in an edited example, one's inspiring tale of a father's battle with colon cancer. (With apparently no one being given pause that part-time work for EssayEdge is what the Harvard-educated are doing.)
In the future, when sociologists look back, they may find it fitting that the signature novel of this academically frenzied era is the Harvard undergraduate Kaavya Viswanathan's famously lucrative and famously plagiarized How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life -- a book so deeply conventional that the heroine's Harvard-obsessed parents and a dean of Harvard are actually the feel-good heroes. (You wouldn't want anyone to be mad!) On the plus side, just as the '50s gave way -- culturally speaking -- to the '60s, this moment in time may be another Oedipal breaking point, from which might spring the beginnings of a real youth revolution. The lack of a draft may have forestalled a college-wide antiwar movement, but young elites surely are being crushed by Ivy-bound pressure, and this era's needed cultural statement may well be kids joyously burning U.S. News & World Report college rankings on the front steps of Reed College. It could just be me -- once highly gifted, now fallen from grace, bombed GRE scores in hand, barely able to complete a Sudoku puzzle -- but when I read the following passage of Marilee Jones's USA Today essay, I think of Dustin Hoffman in a bus bumping down a dusty road at the end of The Graduate:
Last April, a few weeks after sending the acceptance/rejection letters for the Class of 2006, I received a reply from a father of one of our applicants. It was curt and written on his corporate letterhead: "You rejected my son. He's devastated. See you in court." � The very next day, I received another letter, but this time from the man's son. It read: "Thank you for not admitting me to MIT. This is the best day of my life."
Maybe, with the son's understanding and encouragement, the father can reapply next year.
Review 2: Knowledge@Wharton
Julie is perceived by her peers as a superstar -- a brain, a jock and a beauty all in one. CJ is seen as a flirt. Taylor is the popular girl, and Sam is the teacher's pet. All are academic "overachievers." And all attended Whitman High School, one of the nation's top public schools and the setting for best-selling author Alexandra Robbins' study of contemporary American high school culture entitled, The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids.
Robbins is herself an "overachieving" graduate of the Bethesda, Maryland school (barely 30, she has already published five books). Returning to Whitman a decade after she left for Yale, Robbins draws a sharp contrast between what the school was like then and what it is like now, using it as the basis for her analysis of the "competitive frenzy" that, she argues, has taken root in high schools across the country. "This is not just a book about high school," Robbins writes. "This is a book about how a culture of overachieverism has changed the school experience so drastically in even the last ten years that it has startlingly altered what it means to be a student today."
Tracking a group of juniors and seniors as they struggle to maintain their grades, excel at sports, rack up extracurriculars, ace the SAT and get into elite colleges, Robbins alternates between biography and commentary, using the daily lives of Whitman students to ground her claims about what high school does to teenagers today. Over the course of the book, Julie suffers from stress-related hair loss, CJ resorts to binge-eating and drinking to relieve anxiety, Taylor breaks down when she can't decide between Duke and Penn, and Sam cheats on a homework assignment. Their stories allow Robbins to reflect on the stressful, hyper-scheduled lives of teens growing up in a culture that is excessively focused on achievement.
Adolescence today, Robbins argues, is a highly professionalized experience in which one's resume, transcript, and scores are everything, and where both the innocence and leisure traditionally associated with childhood are nowhere to be found. Noting that the competition to get into top-ranked colleges has increased enormously in recent years, Robbins shows how teens' attempts to look good on paper have resulted in a host of disturbing trends.
Teens are more focused on productivity than on learning, for example; they also measure their self worth by comparing themselves to the achievement indices set by elite college entrance requirements. They are wracked with anxiety and they are sleep-deprived; they suffer from eating disorders, panic attacks, and depression; they cheat routinely and they take achievement-enhancing drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall illegally; they attempt suicide in growing numbers.
The picture Robbins draws is of a crushing cultural machinery that drives adolescents to the brink, flattening out their personalities and warping their characters while pressing them to become perfect, if somewhat generic, pre-collegiate products.
But Robbins is only telling part of the story. The Overachievers focuses on a small subsection of American teens -- the privileged elect whose parents care about education and who can afford to make sure that their kids go to good schools.
Whitman's website proudly notes that 80% of Bethesda's adult citizens are college graduates (as opposed to a national average of about 25%) and that they are "mainly professional and managerial." Whitman sends 94% of its graduating seniors to college -- 88% go to four year colleges, and 75% of those attend college out of state. Whitman's student body is 77% white, 13% Asian-American, 7% Hispanic and 3% African-American.
Compare those figures to national averages. A study released by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation earlier this year noted that while about 70% of U.S. high school students earn a diploma, there is huge regional variation in graduation rates. Fourteen of the country's largest urban school districts -- among them Milwaukee, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, Denver and Houston -- graduate less than 50% of their students on time. The worst numbers are to be found in three of the country's largest public school districts: New York graduates 38.9% of its students, Detroit graduates 21.7%, and Baltimore -- just a few definitive miles from overachieving Bethesda -- graduates a meager 38.5%.
The numbers become even more dramatic when broken down demographically: Nationally, according to the study, only 52% of black high school students graduate, and only 57% of Hispanics do.
These figures are a far cry from Whitman's, and as such they tell us something about Robbins' decision to treat Whitman as a representative case. If Whitman students take five or six AP courses and spend more than four hours each night on homework, they are the exception to the rule. The vast majority of high school students are taking it easy indeed. According to UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, about two-thirds of college freshmen report that they did an hour of homework a night or less during high school. One can only assume that the 30% of high school graduates who don't go on to college do even less.
As Washington Post education columnist Jay Matthews notes in his review of The Overachievers, the national picture of high school education is starkly different from the picture Robbins draws of Whitman. The National Assessment of Education Progress -- otherwise known as "The Nation's Report Card" -- shows that 17-year-olds' reading and math ability has been stagnant for the past 30 years; one likely reason is that teenagers spend far more time watching television and surfing the Internet (about 3.5 hours per day) than they do on homework (42 minutes per day) or recreational reading (seven minutes per day).
If the story of Whitman is one of high-stress overachievement, the national story is one of low expectations and diminishing returns. Only about 70% of today's high school graduates actually do go to college, and of those, nearly half will not graduate. And, again, the numbers are even worse when broken down demographically. Whereas more than 50% of children from wealthy families can expect to graduate from college, only 6% of low income students will earn a bachelor's degree by the time they are 24. Nationwide, says a new report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, only 18 out of every 100 ninth graders will graduate from college.
Though Robbins qualifies her claims about Whitman's typicality -- "Whitman could be any competitive school, public or private, almost anywhere in the country" -- the truth is that such schools are outnumbered by schools that are not competitive at all. And while Robbins spoke with students at schools in Kentucky, Vermont, New Mexico, Washington State, North Carolina, Illinois, and Texas in order "to make sure the views in this book represented as broad a range of students as possible," what she was really doing was tracking a small and exceptionally privileged cross-section of teens from state to state.
For all Robbins' claims to be describing a national trend, it's crucial to keep in mind that this "trend" exists for a small minority of high school students, and that these students are in turn those who have the highest expectations for college and career. While it's important to understand this trend, and important, too, to consider how the teens caught up in it might be affected -- even damaged -- by it, it's also important to understand that we can't get a clear picture of what's going on in American high schools if we don't take other, broader educational trends into account. Even more to the point: We can't begin to think about what kinds of changes in education policy we might need until we have an accurate understanding of American high school culture as a whole.
This is where Robbins' argument breaks down. Instead of presenting The Overachievers as what it is -- an anthropological study of an exceptional adolescent niche -- she casts her work in terms of policy analysis and ends the book with a series of sweeping recommendations for reform. These range from the mundane to the intriguing to the radical, and vary considerably in their wisdom and practicality.
Mundane: Students and parents should focus on mental health and well-roundedness. Intriguing: High school start time should be later in the morning, to accommodate teens' biologically unique sleep patterns; colleges should eliminate early decision, which creates outrageous pressure and favors those who do not need financial aid. Radical: Colleges and universities should boycott the rankings and scrap the SAT; high schools should drop class rank, de-emphasize testing, and limit AP courses.
Robbins may be right about things like early decision (which a number of elite schools have recently abandoned) and the need for students, parents, and teachers to remember that there is more to life than grades, scores, and acceptance letters. She's also right that the major college rankings are often rigged, and rarely measure the actual quality of undergraduate education and experience; she gives good advice when she tells parents and students to look beyond the top 20 schools to find the one that is right for them. And she just might be right about changing high school start time. But she flounders when she recommends policy shifts that would, to her mind, take the pressure off America's stressed-out teens.
If it makes sense to steer highly competitive students at highly competitive schools away from taking excessive numbers of AP courses, for example, it makes no sense to advocate a national move away from AP courses; there are more schools that could benefit from the curricular sharpening such courses can offer than there are schools that really need to cut back. And while it makes sense to tell parents and teachers who push teenagers too hard to back off, it makes no sense at all to recommend relaxation for those vast numbers of teens who are already slacking along at less than an hour of homework a night. Those kids need to learn to push themselves -- and in order to learn to do that, they need to be pushed by their parents and teachers.
Similarly, the SAT may not be an ideal guide to prospective college students' success -- but at least it allows admissions officers to begin to differentiate students whose padded resumes, boilerplate essays, and inflated grade point averages all look depressingly alike.
Such unevenness is to be expected when an author overreaches in the way Robbins does. Had she confined her recommendations to the demographic she is studying, she would have made some important points. But Robbins' attempt to generalize from her study of a select and unrepresentative fraction of American teens shows both a lack of restraint and a lack of understanding. Like the overachievers she writes about, Robbins confuses the minor daily struggles of the enormously advantaged with a pressing national problem; like the overachiever she acknowledges herself to be, she loses sight of what is reasonable in her effort to push her work to ever greater heights.
Robbins' error is ultimately symptomatic of the culture she writes about, and of which she admits she is a part; it is an error that flatters the people she writes about -- who are, significantly, also the people who read her work and who are responsible for her spot on the bestseller list. But as profitable as that error may be for Robbins, it is a costly error all the same. We should not be fooling ourselves into thinking that the problems facing American secondary education are the problems Robbins describes -- and to the extent that her book eases our ability to ignore the bigger, more troubling picture, it is part of the problem, not the solution.
