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

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.

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 they’re really stressed, and my assumption is we’re doing this to them,” he said. “They’re all messed up.”

A student had died by suicide the previous spring. And just the day before my visit, Jackson said, he’d checked a student into the home-and-hospital program. That’s an alternative education program for students who are too sick to come to school. What was this girl’s ailment? The doctor couldn’t diagnose the precise cause of her bodily pains and ulcers, but mysteriously, they went away during the summer and returned two weeks before the start of school. “It’s driving me crazy,” said Jackson, “because what’s going on is flawed, but we’re not brave enough to change it.”

The fact is that he and his colleagues at Irvington actually are taking courageous steps to change the school’s high-stakes culture and rebuild student health—most notably by restraining students from overloading on AP classes and working with Dr. Slavin to research what kind of support they most need, as we’ll learn more about later. The progress is just slower than Jackson would like.

The questions I didn’t ask in that classroom at Irvington were these: What makes you so sure it’s worth it? Is this sprint to achieve a certain version of “success” (reaching the top of the class, the top college, the top job, and the top life) really helping? Or is it actually making you sicker, not smarter—the kind of sick that will likely last through your adulthood—and causing you to miss opportunities to build the real-life skills that really matter?

Let’s examine the facts about what is happening to children’s health. The implications are long-lasting, as there is an avalanche of evidence that an unhealthy youth sets the stage for an unhealthy life. I’ll begin with the effects that we can see right now: the current frayed state of our children’s and teens’ health.
Unhealthy Hearts and Minds

Students these days are incredibly stressed. On the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America survey, teens rate their stress levels during the school year higher than adults rate their own. Nearly one in three teens says the stress drives them to sadness or depression. And what are the top sources of their stress? Eighty-three percent of the thousand teens surveyed named school, and 69 percent named getting into a good college or deciding what to do after high school. Meanwhile, 30 percent of high schoolers said on a government survey that they had felt sad or hopeless almost every day for two weeks or more within the past year.

Young Americans’ mental health has deteriorated dramatically since the postwar days of the 1950s. Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and author of the book Generation Me, has scoured and crunched decades’ worth of data to illuminate these trends. By her calculations, five to eight times more college students today report serious mental health problems than did students at midcentury. This doesn’t bode well for their future health, as depression raises a person’s risk of heart disease, diabetes, and other illnesses, and having depression early in life significantly increases the risk of having it again as an adult.

Federal data also show that suicide rates more than doubled among youth age fifteen to twenty-four between 1950 and 2010 and more than tripled (though the rate is still much lower) among younger children. What’s less well known but equally worrisome is how many kids consider taking their own lives. In a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) survey of high school students—children as young as fourteen—nearly one in six said they had seriously thought about suicide. Half that many had made an attempt within the past year.

It makes me wonder: How much torment happens below the surface, beneath the game faces that adults can see? And how much is hidden behind the airbrushed lives today’s teens present on Twitter and Instagram, where one kid’s seemingly effortless achievements only make the next kid feel she must do more?

Behind these numbers are stories like that of an alarmed mother in Orange County, California, whose seventeen-year-old son had once ranked first in his high school out of a class of 764, taking six AP classes (out of seven total) in his junior year and sleeping only five hours a night. His worried mother wrote:

I discouraged him from taking on this load, but he insisted and continued this into his senior year by taking the International Baccalaureate, and now the chronic stress and lack of sleep has taken its toll. . . .

Prior to high school my son was a secure, outgoing well-liked person with many friends. He likes to surf and would design and paint patterns on his boards. He organized camping trips, booking at state parks and organizing his friends without any help from me. He would not be able to do this today. . . . He is now in his senior year and was diagnosed last month with major depression. He has a terror of going to school and has only attended school for about six days in the past two months. . . . We are working with a doctor, a counselor (who brought your film to our community) and the school to try and salvage what we can for him to graduate in June.

What happened to this young man is sadly not uncommon. And unfortunately, our kids’ poor health outcomes are anything but temporary. The unhealthy, unhappy patterns laid down in the grade school years stay with teens as they enter the nation’s universities, where officials are battling binge-drinking episodes and reporting a rising mental health crisis, as well.

“They work their tails off to get here, and then reach the finish line and are accepted and get here, and then realize that there is no finish line,” says Kevin Wehmhoefer, a Harvard University clinician and coordinator of outreach, counseling, and mental health services. “I got here and I was blown away by the level of acuity that kids were presenting with.” Wehmhoefer observed extreme anxiety or depression in many students who came to his clinic—and counselors from the University of California to Appalachian State University in North Carolina report the same trend. Surprisingly, though, after final exams ended, Wehmhoefer saw the symptoms for some students resolve within days. That’s not typical of clinical depression. The problem, he says, reflects “kids who have been measuring themselves by a lone metric for a long time,” who have no tolerance for failure. And who, crucially, have never learned the emotional skills to manage the acute stress that results.

The scale of the problem is huge. In the latest National Survey of College Counseling Centers, 94 percent of counseling directors said they were seeing rising numbers of students with severe psychological problems. Indeed, more than half of college students in a recent survey reported that they’d felt overwhelmed by anxiety within the past year. One in three said they’d felt so depressed it was hard to function. Tulane University, particularly hard hit in fall 2014, lost three students to suicide by Thanksgiving.

“The increased need for mental health services on our campuses is outstripping our ability to provide those services,” John Stobo, an executive vice president for the University of California system, told the California Report radio program that same fall. The number of students seeking help at UC counseling centers had jumped by more than a third in the previous six years. Reduced stigma around seeking mental health counseling could account for some of that rise. But the increased incidence of emotional distress among college students is dramatic nonetheless: UCLA has surveyed entering freshmen at four-year colleges and universities around the country about their own mental health since 1985. In 2014, these students’ ratings hit a record low.
Unhealthy Bodies

Beyond the kinds of mental and emotional pains the college psychologists describe, the health consequences of the childhood rat race are also frequently physical. Many of the pediatricians I’ve met around the country have told me, with grave concern, that they’re seeing physiological impacts of this stress among their patients. And not just among high schoolers: many report symptoms in children as early as elementary school, just like I saw...