The parents in a suburban school district in New Jersey have split into warring factions in response to the superintendent’s effort to reduce academic pressures.
Mostly white parents applauded his decision to reduce academic stress, but many Asian parents were outraged. The latter feared their children would not be prepared for highly competitive colleges.
“This fall, David Aderhold, the superintendent of a high-achieving school district near Princeton, N.J., sent parents an alarming 16-page letter.
“The school district, he said, was facing a crisis. Its students were overburdened and stressed out, juggling too much work and too many demands.
“In the previous school year, 120 middle and high school students were recommended for mental health assessments; 40 were hospitalized. And on a survey administered by the district, students wrote things like, “I hate going to school,” and “Coming out of 12 years in this district, I have learned one thing: that a grade, a percentage or even a point is to be valued over anything else.”
“With his letter, Dr. Aderhold inserted West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District into a national discussion about the intense focus on achievement at elite schools, and whether it has gone too far.
“At follow-up meetings, he urged parents to join him in advocating a holistic, “whole child” approach to schooling that respects “social-emotional development” and “deep and meaningful learning” over academics alone. The alternative, he suggested, was to face the prospect of becoming another Palo Alto, Calif., where outsize stress on teenage students is believed to have contributed to two clusters of suicides in the last six years.
“But instead of bringing families together, Dr. Aderhold’s letter revealed a fissure in the district, which has 9,700 students, and one that broke down roughly along racial lines. On one side are white parents like Catherine Foley, a former president of the Parent Teacher Student Association at her daughter’s middle school, who has come to see the district’s increasingly pressured atmosphere as antithetical to learning.
“My son was in fourth grade and told me, ‘I’m not going to amount to anything because I have nothing to put on my résumé,’ ” Ms. Foley said.
“On the other side are parents like Mike Jia, one of the thousands of Asian-American professionals who have moved to the district in the past decade, who said Dr. Aderhold’s reforms would amount to a “dumbing down” of his children’s education.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The Asian American parents need to have a long talk with Yong Zhao.
And if that doesn’t work, they can just move to China — along with Laurene Powell Jobs, who obviously loves the place.
“Reformers’ Ultimate Goal”
Simply “college-ready”
Is really just all right
But “Mainland China-ready”
Is what they have in sight
AMEN!
The only reason that bar-raising high schools have become pressure cookers is that our K-8 education system does not value academics. Nobody’s ready for what it means to be college-ready.
Baloney. The kind of work high schools are piling up on kids is completely different than the work they are expected to do in college. In college students typically take 3-5 classes per term and go deeply and meaningfully into each class to really understand the concepts and relevance of the material. In high school kids are piling up 7, 8 or even 9 classes per term and covering entire topics like “European History” (or, worse, “World History”) in one year in which they memorize boatloads of facts with not an iota of understanding of why those facts are related to each other or why any of them are meaningful or relevant.
You make my point: if we had good academic programs in elementary school, our high schools wouldn’t feel the pressure to “catch up” kids, which is what your description of high school sounds like.
What you mention is not the k-8 system I have been experiencing. Our school is so “academic” that many “red-shirt” their kindergarteners in an attempt to give them a leg up. There’s extreme pressure to read, write, and solve math problems with pencil and paper from day one. Many parents (and teachers) are starting to finally push back, realizing that we had reached a tipping point where it’s just not possible to get any more “academic”. The kids are suffering. Child development has been ignored. The way kids learn has been ignored. All in the name of academic achievement, yet outcomes aren’t increasing. The kids were being pushed to work, afraid to fail or stray from a set path. We are slowly turning back to incorporate play-based, project-based and student driven exploration.
New research backs up my experience of an increase in elementary academics http://ww2.kqed.org/mindshift/2016/01/08/whats-lost-when-kindergarten-gets-more-academic/
Dear Mamajj, what you describe is not at all what I mean by academics; it is a bastardization of academics. Introducing children to history, geography, science, math, art, and literature — the traditional liberal arts — in a comprehensive and coherent manner has nothing to do with what you are calling academics.
No, I didn’t make your point – you completely missed mine. Colleges expect students to be able to wrestle with problems, issues, controversies, etc. and to contribute something new/original to the debate. It’s challenging, but it’s not a “pressure cooker”. Colleges don’t pile on the work so deep that students are staying up all hours just to get the work done. They know that real work takes time, as well as time away.
At the elementary and high school level, in the name of “rigor” and “college and career readiness” (cough, choke), we are burying kids eyelash deep in busy work. We’re conflating busy-ness with difficulty. Kids complain that they have so much homework they don’t have time to sleep let alone do anything enjoyable and we say, “suck it up, kid, that’s life”. But that’s not life, except for those who choose the rat-race life. Real life is about finding something you love doing and immersing yourself in it, but also allowing yourself to have a life. Life isn’t about work. The pressure cooker, whether we’re talking about corporate worker drones or high school kids preparing to be corporate worker drones, comes from hours and hours of meaningless busy work that has to be done or else, consequence, which squeezes out time for anything any human being would actually find meaningful that would make life worth living.
To Dienne: Too many factual disagreements here (e.g. what schools do and don’t do) and value judgement calls (e.g. what makes life worth living) to have much of a productive conversation here.
Nothing in the K to 12 landscape really prepares students with the self-discipline needed to succed in typical college “classrooms” like this:
pbm,
Please educate us as to the fundamental purpose of public education. Where can that information be found and what is the purpose according to the source?
TIA,
Duane
Duane, not sure if you were serious, but “Cultural Literacy” and “The Making of Americans” by E.D. Hirsch would be good places to start the research on public schools and their purpose.
Yes, pb, I am being serious. And no, Hirsch is not the source. I’m sure you know, think about it some more. (sometimes the most obvious is hidden, eh)
“College-ready in kindergarten”
College-ready in Kindergarten
Bachelor’s in first
Ph D in second grade
A life that’s well-rehearsed
Dear SomeDAM, my guess is that you had a pretty good education. The goal of public education is to offer that opportunity to kids who can’t afford one.
NYS parent:
Good idea.
Lecture-style kindergarten classes with 500 students would help get them college-ready.
Pbm,
What are “good academic programs” to you? Our k-5 school does all the things you mentioned in a traditional liberal arts education such as Spanish classes for all starting in K. Here’s a list of what they will do in just the next week or two in my son’s K class
-upper and lowercase letter -identification and printing letters
-letter sounds
-beginning sight words: and, are, is, the, you
-rhymes, syllables, beginning and ending sounds in words
-beginning reading strategies, sounding out words
-talking about books – parts of a story, making connections & predictions
number identification 0-20 and printing numbers
-counting objects, counting practice by 1s, 2s, 5s, 10s
-solving simple equations with sums to and from 5
greater than or less than? more or less?
-changes in our environment now that winter is approaching, the temperature outdoors
-problem solving using words
-creating signs to get mesages out to make a positive change in our school (e.g. “recycle, please!”)
-Sending messages and letters (and remembering our address & zip code)
-mapping – maps of the world, the U.S., State, hometown
-Learning about our community, important community helpers and jobs we would like ourselves
It is the way we are teaching it and the pace that are becoming a problem and creating the pressure (even before k) that continues in middle and high-school. It’s an over focus on traditional academics rather than innovation, collaboration, creativity in my opinion.
Agreed SDP. To truly prepare those 5 year olds for college, we must start recruiting kindergarten teachers with very thick foreign accents and illegible chalkboard writing.
I realize it’s easy to make fun of Tiger Moms and pre-K academies that dare to talk about college-readiness, but the fact is that if you work backwards from PhD and ask yourself what a student should know at each stage (grade-level), working backwards, in order to be proficient in a given discipline, you end up at pre-K and the necessity to teach 5-year-olds something. What do you teach them? We know of the huge differences in vocabularies between poor/working class/rich kids just entering school and how those differences get magnified (in bad schools) and closed (in good schools). So, the need to think about what kids in kindergarten (or first grade or 2nd grade, etc.) need to know is no joke. The pressure-cooker question is a separate issue, but I have been in enough good schools and bad schools (p-K through 12) to know that the quality of the curriculum, P-K–12, makes a huge difference in whether a student graduates, goes to college, needs remedial education in college, or graduates college. And given the economic data about the value of a college degree, I suggest it’s not a laughing matter.
Peter,
Sorry to disagree but no child in preK is ever “college ready,” unless both parents are college graduates.
I agree with Dienne that the K-12 system frequently piles on busywork to make schools seem more rigorous. This is just another example of faux rigor. We also see it with material meant for higher grades shoved down into lower grades. It makes it seem like the school is very rigorous, but it is phony. The kids don’t learn much and everyone is frustrated. I feel the same way about all the busy work that my kids had to do in middle school. Much of it was a waste of time.
Dear Eric, I Couldn’t agree more! We have a huge faux rigor / faux academics problem. I attribute that to our national fear of curriculum and the failure to appreciate the role of background knowledge (in many subjects) to learning. Such fears and failures have driven us into the standards game, which is based on the false notion that reading skills are “transferrable” and the equally destructive notion that we have to focus on reading and math…. etc. The fact that so many people criticized me for wanting more academics in K-8 is testament to the deep misunderstanding of what true academics are.
PBM – what you’re describing is called backward mapping and it doesn’t work – it’s been tried. It doesn’t work because there is no linear progression from kindergarten to college. Kindergarteners are fundamentally wired differently from college kids. They don’t – can’t – learn the same way. What you end up with doing it your way is “bunch o’ facts education [sic]”. Kids forget those facts that have been poured into them as soon as the test is over and they spend their whole lives trying to figure out what the “right answer” is.
True education doesn’t involve figuring out for kids what they need to know, but rather letting them play and discover for themselves what’s important and then building on that to learn content knowledge as they’re ready for it. “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” –Ben Franklin
Peter M.
You don’t seem to understand the true nature of what you refer to as “bad schools”. An academic program is only as strong as its weakest link. The possible links include: teachers, administrators, families, curricula, and funding/resources.
The best curricula available is just a down-load away. Not a relevant issue. Not a weak link.
Funding and resources are especially important regarding class size and a wide variety infrastructure. Usually beyond the control of the school; another moot point. Not the weakest link.
Administrators spend 99% of their time putting out fires and just keeping the lid on. Definitely not the weakest link.
In your so-called, “bad schools” the parent/child link is inevitably the weakest. “Bad schools” are usually located in communities made up of mostly dysfunctional families mired in generational poverty. Parents who raised children ill-equipped for success in a rigorous or challenging learning environment. Children with poor attendance, little motivation, near zero expectations, no self-discipline, limited language skills, and very shallow real world experiences.
Teachers are never the weakest link in your bad school scenario and are rarely the reason for poor student achievement. Every school in America has approximately the same mix of excellent, good, poor, and incompetent teachers. Great students from supportive, highly motivated, well educated, two-parent families make us all look like geniuses. Take all that away and even excellent teachers struggle.
The quality of the student establishes the size of our teaching toolbox and sets the limits of our program rigor – not the other way around. If a school offers a full IB program with the best teachers on Earth, the number of IB diplomas will still not be determined by the teachers. There is a reason that IB programs are found in mainly affluent districts located in well educated communities.
Please stop referencing “bad schools” as student achievement correlates best to parent income for some very real reasons.
pbmeyer– starting at PhD and working backwards to figure out what kids should know at each grade level is not a recipe for curriculum. This approach might work for carpentry, or cooking, or perhaps to arrive at a list of quantities of various materials required to produce a certain volume of widgets perday.
That’s because PhD’s are not people who simply know a certain quantity of material more than kindergarteners (divide by 18). PhD’s could perhaps be described as folks capable of the sophisticated reasoning ability to advance their respective fields through research.
One might, at some point in the future, be able to devise curriculum based on neurological mapping, so as to take full advantage of the learning capabilities at each stage of maturity. But we don’t even take what we already know about brain development into account when devising curriculum– else we wouldn’t ignore the natural variation in early development; we test every year for uniform annual devpt in primary school!
The only reason that bar-raising high schools have become pressure cookers is the national obsession with phony international competition to race to the top(e.g., PISA). No doubt American kids will be screwed even worse than now if they are forced to plug into high-stakes testing machine to get into good high school and college–like kids in China, Japan, and South Korea.
Skip the Hirsch, and go to Dewey.
Dienne is right as usual, and college should hardly be a spoken word before 11th grade…
Guys, here’s half of my 10th grader daughter’s math HW from today.
She had only two assignments today: this and AP European history. She finished a bit after 9pm. True, I made her dare to have a 30 min break for dinner.
Since Finnish kids spend 25% less time in the classroom than US kids (40% less than in Texas), and barely any time on HW in K-8, we may suspect, time is not well spent in US schools.
Based on my daughter’s math HW, I can firmly state: my daughter spends at least 90 min every day on completely useless “math” hw that has nothing to with math or college or brain.
Too little stress is certainly bad. No doubt about it.
“Finland is finished”
Finland is finished
Encouraging “play”
Their future’s diminished
On PISA they’ll pay
There’s lots of these splits in public schools, though. We have one over discipline. There’s a vocal minority in our schools who want children removed from school for all kinds of reasons- suspension for what I consider minor offenses. It’s a balancing act – that’s baked into public education or any public entity, really. I think the real question is whether we value that as a strength or see it as a weakness.
Arguably, it’s a strength because it’s a leveling factor- if the school goes too far in one direction there is a push to move it back into some reasonable range that everyone can live with. I consider the disagreements and splits to be a strength, although they’re certainly divisive and hotly debated. Everyone doesn’t get everything they want because everyone has to be considered.
IMO, the “problem” won’t be “solved” but instead will just be mitigated, because you’re really talking about what people value and there will never be broad agreement on that.
Excellent thoughts, Chiara!!
Private school parents have these disagreements, too. I belong to a local organization that happens to have a lot of private school parents as members and I smile when I hear them complaining their school is going to hell in a handbasket because they sound exactly like (some) public school parents 🙂
I attended a pressure cooker school for high school years ago. I am a survivor because I had enough gray matter and was determined to succeed. I was totally prepared for college. Not everyone has that type of drive or resilience. I think the advent of technology has intensified the level of stress in many schools. Now students are tracked to the .00001 on their level of “performance.” Likewise, failure becomes community property as kids spread hurtful or humiliating incidents via youtube, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Access to information, both objective and subjective, has intensified competition among our young people. Today’s stress for young people is both academic and social, and it is not a formula for producing well adjusted adults.
Excellent thoughts also, retired teacher!
I completely agree. There are a few main factors that produce stress and anxiety at the secondary level (workload, self and parent expectations, personalization or the lack thereof, how learning environments are organized), but social media is a significant amplifying factor as you describe.
The deeper problems are capitalism and competition, which are intertwined. We are now simply taking these things to their logical conclusion.
We are looking at opposing cultural values in these discussions. Asian society depended on exams for thousands of years. I am not so sure it created better or smarter societies. Americans have seen schools as a road to literacy and social cohesiveness. Asians send us their kids when they get to graduate school. Why is that?
There is more than one way to skin a cat. Maybe a test doesn’t prove a thing. Maybe cramming all learning into a few years does nothing.
My NJ high schooler has so much course work he rarely gets to bed before midnight. Pressure cooker puts it lightly. Just came from a guidance meeting about college–if you aren’t tuned into the 7 levels of hell–er–perfection –these kids are supposed to attain before filling out applications, you don’t have a kid in high school. GPA, AP, SAT, ACT subject matter tests-2 at least- PSAT, PARCC, course work, rigor grit rigor, and cure cancer while solving world hunger and playing your cello after completing your NCAA worthy sports performance.
Agreed. When my kid is freaking out about getting an 87 on an AP history test, it’s just not right. What gets me is I thought block scheduling would eliminate the need for excessive homework. I have no problem with homework, but I do have a problem with busy work.
I agree, Allison. I teach HS and have two teens…the pressure and busy work is awful. I think block scheduling makes it worse because they have more classes, and teachers who now see kids less per week, every other day here, feel compelled to increase homework to make up for lost class time.
Well, I guess there are some benefits to sending your kid to a failing school! We don’t have any of these college pressures. Administration is too worried about making sure the kids graduate high school. I did worry about whether I should have moved my kids to a more competitive school, but now that my oldest’s college acceptances and scholarships are rolling in despite the lack of these crazy pressures, I’m telling parents in more well-regarded districts to think about fighting against it.
It’s all about balance and those parents don’t seem to get that or care about that. Why is more kids getting into the music program a problem? Do these parents not realize that not everyone is on the same academic, artistic or athletic level? The point of public schools is to offer well rounded educations and extracurriculars that all kids can take part in. It’s very disturbing that some of these parents could care less about those kids that aren’t on the overly intense academic track or don’t survive the one they’re children are on.
I, myself, want balance for my kids. Sure I want rigor in their classes, but I want them to have time for sports and other activities, and time to relax and recover.
Just where should our curriculum and teaching aim at: the upper 10%, the mode, the lower quartile? Should our general curriculum (not AP classes) be geared to the “cognitive mean”, so that we ensure most students will gain enough knowledge and skills to be “college ready”? Yet, for those that want more, ex. Asian parents, then they have the choice to give their student all AP classes their junior and senior years?
Here in Miami-Dade Co. Public Schools, students have lots of choices: Honors, AP, dual-enrollment (a college class given here at the school), and students can even go to the “high school” called SAS (school for advanced studies), which is taking college classes at the local community college for their 11th and 12th grade, and graduating with the equivalent of an AA.
So, I think our high schools should cater to the cognitive mode, and those that want more specialized and rigorous classes can get them thru the AP program or other options.
Rick, I am confused by your term ‘mode’ & assume you mean ‘mean’ or ‘median’.
I do not agree that our goal should be for ‘most’ students to gain enough knowledge and skills to be college-ready. Historically (late ’50’s-’80’s) we’ve had 25-33% students go on to complete college. This squares with today’s PARCC-SBAC assessments of Common-Core-based ‘college-ready’, 25-33% ‘in the zone’. Regardless of corporate/DOEd exhortations that ‘all’ must go to college in order to compete in the global job market– regardless of the fact that today 50% or more attempt college– it is reasonable to assume that 1/3 or less can attain that level. There is probably another 1/3 (or more) capable of doing average-to-advanced technical and trade work, and a bottom quarter or third capable of low-to-medium-skilled work.
Personally, I like the ed system Poland has adopted in recent years. They are worth paying attention to: Poland has a very long history of prizing education & developing ed systems which work for their populace. And if PISA scores are any indication, they’ve zoomed up since the fall of the USSR, particularly in the last 15 yrs since they fine-tuned the system. Their PreK is optional. Compulsive ed is from age 5-6 to 18-19 [they take a 2-mo summer off as we do]. At age 15-16, a uniform exam tracks them into college-prep, tech, vocational. And from that point forward, there are a number of options: one may start early in a vocation, continue to medium or advanced tech, or switch back into college> advanced degrees. I have not completely figured out how much of this is carried by the state, but it appears that free ed continues to about age 23.
My experience tutoring a high school boy who moved from Shanghai to Colorado….
Tutored a high school male from Shanghai. He hated school in Shanghai. He told me that when there was awful weather outside, he would play in that terrible weather hoping to get sick so he wouldn’t have to go to school. He also told me that pollution is awful where he lived and he would choke and cough a lot. Another piece of information he shared is that the students were under a lot of stress from school via their teachers and parents. Many thought of running away and/or committing suicide.
This high school male (at the time) also told me that American public school teachers were awesome and that he couldn’t believe that they taught him to communicate in English even though his PUBLIC school teachers could not speak his mother tongue, Mandarin. He is now graduated from college and doing exceptionally well.
BTW, he hated all the testing in Colorado and his wise Chinese mother opted him out of those high-states tests. Hooray for this Chinese mother from Shanghai. Btw, the grandparents of this male from Shanghai were teachers. Nothing they did made him like school and learning while he lived in Shanghai. Even bribes from parents and grandparents didn’t help or change his mind/attitude about schooling in Shanghai.
So, at great expense and sacrifice, his mother and her son moved to Colorado. I think they had a sponsor. I did not ask personal questions. Didn’t think it was my place to pry.
Bravo to the mother that did what was best for her son!
Yvonne, I can relate. I know it’s only anecdotal, but it’s another story that shows foreign-born Asian Moms are not all ‘Tigers’. I tutor Spanish to an Indian Mom & 2 sons. Mom says they came here to find alternate ed path (for their kids) to the rigid Indian middle-class system which says everybody must be ‘STEM’– preferably engineering; fall-back, finance. They were looking for flexibility, & a path for creativity.
To their credit (as opposed to the Princeton-area Asians in the article), they ‘go with the flow’. Their ed stds are much higher than those of the p.s. in their region. She is an accounting consultant whose work ebbed w/the fin’l collapse; she threw herself into supplementing ps for her kids; she would design extra assnts & quizzes etc.
The family prize multilingualism; by the time they found me they’d already gotten past square 1 via Sp IV babysitter & self-study, but recognized that curriculum would not lead to conversational ability; I give them (incl Mom) cheap wkly role-play conversational Sp.– she learns from me & now leads conversational Marathi at their temple.
Elder son was advanced-STEM & self-motivated, getting max out of ps, but younger creative/ role-play type, suffering under CCSS. Instead of quibbling à la Princeton Asians they ponied up dough for 2 yrs priv sch to get him over hump.
Definitely a cultural thing. One of my run ins with an Asian family was because their child caught a bad case of senioritis and earned a well deserved A- in an AP class. The family went ballistic even though I had objective data. They threatened to sue, went to school board, etch (yawn). I had a badly shaken administrator in my office threatening me with my job and criminal charges – no kidding. I refused to change the grade, the admin said she’d have my job, I gave it to her – I quit. One of the worst incidents of grade obsessed parents I experienced. Of course, not just Asian parents are obsessed with external measures.
But in industry, we would often find new employees taught in Asian had a very difficult time adjusting to the fluid, dynamic, internally motivated system here in the states. I do not know if these countries have changed in that regard. Americans seem to despise their teachers and education system to the point of self destruction. Yet America’s schools have helped produce the greatest nation of the past century. I don’t know why Trump insists “make America great, again”. I think we are already a pretty outstanding nation.
I wonder if the white parents are aware of how much harder it is for an equally qualified Asian student to be accepted at a selective college.
Then again, what’s that old saw about not wanting to understand something that’s benefiting you personally?
Not sure if your assumption is accurate.
Got data that could help us?
Google “Asian admission rates selective colleges”. I particularly recommend the first, third, sixth, and seventh links.
Many of these links use SAT/MCAT and GPA as sole criteria for their conclusions. Are you suggesting only standardized entrance exam test scores and GPA are to be used in college admission decisions?
The most selective universities have acceptance rates of about 7%. How much harder could it be to get into Princeton, Stanford, Yale, or MIT?
Telling us to Google it proves you have no data or else you would have backed up this specious claim with a convincing set of numbers.
This article seem to say that while discrimination against Asians in Ivy league schools was true 20 years ago, it’s not clear if it’s still going on, since Ivy league schools refuse to release admissions data.
http://blog.priceonomics.com/post/48794283011/do-elite-colleges-discriminate-against-asians
Interestingly, it points out that the holistic admission procedure was adopted in these schools in the 1920’s to curb the Jewish domination at those schools.
All I really know is that the amount of work expected and the course rigor required are much more than when I went to high school. I would like to see a little more emphasis on visual and performing arts plus the joy of learning. There is plenty of time for pressure and accountability once these children have a chance to grow up.
“respects “social-emotional development” and “deep and meaningful learning” over academics alone….”
I think these jargon-filled phrases and fuzzy concepts are part of the problem. They perpetuate the idea that “academic” learning cannot be deeply engaging and meaningful to students, scholars, and teachers, and a whole lot of people. If academic learning has been stripped of these attributes, then it is (as others have noted) merely school-work, and home work, the faux academic thing, with grit, and a practice-makes perfect ethic free of any passion for learning.
“Social-emotional learning” is certain to be a scary phrase for parents who think teachers and schools should not presume to be messing around with group discussions and activities with this focus. In theory, teachers are supposed to “integrate” SEL into everything they do, but if the SEL standards for Illinois are viewed as exemplary, and if these were actually reviewed by parents, I think there would be less casual use of this phrase.
I agree. We need to educate the whole student, not just academic side. We need for students to have balance and opportunity to explore and develop interests and talents.
Every high school should be as rigorous as Sidwell Friends and the Chicago Lab School and Dalton.
Define “rigorous” so I know what you mean.
Whatever is is they do at those schools. Every high school should do that.
FLERP,
At the schools you mention, they have small classes, experienced teachers, large numbers of arts and music classes, at least two foreign languages, the latest technology, excellent facilities. I’m for that.
Let’s do it!
I’m w/Diane on this. “SEL”, faux division between ‘rigorous’ academics & soft-skills: all that is just top-down econometricians & ed-ideologists imposing silver bullets. Recipe for allowing each to find their strengths, stretch wings & fly: the ingredients listed by Diane.
Maybe those high schools are rigorous because the students aren’t burned out from all the homework that has been given them from the time they are five. Instead, those schools don’t have any homework until much later.
Also, we don’t actually know if those students are learning anything because they opt out of most of the standardized tests. Unless you think that an SAT score reflects the amount of homework you have been given in high school! Many of the top private schools won’t even have AP courses anymore because that would require their students to be measured against a national norm. A few of the top performing students might opt to take an AP exam following their supposedly “more rigorous” non-AP class in a private school. But of course, the vast majority of students and parents at those private schools already KNOW that their students’ courses are “more rigorous” and see no reason to actually have to prove it with an exam! Exams are for the little people (i.e., middle class kids whose families can’t afford $40,000/year tuition). The rich folks are already certain their kids are better so why would they need an exam to prove it?
Howbout banning “rigorous” and “childhood” from the same sentence?
Now if we rather use the words engaging, joyful, interesting, appropriately challenging, etc…
That is a great circular argument.
Rigor to a student means learning all he or she can given the circumstances of life. Rigor to a teacher means that all students are competent where expectations are met. Rigor to a parent means that their child comes away equipped with the intellectual tools to succeed at whatever they desire. Schools are faced with harmonizing these points of view. All of this seems to me to be more complex than any of us are willing to admit.
Several writers on this site have pointed out that he job of reforming schools in Memphis or Newark turned out to be more complex than the reformers thought. No wonder. Think about the difficulty of getting together even the three points of view above. Now throw in businesses who want certain attributes of education, the necessary understanding that produces good political leaders, and the necessity of maki the next generation value education in general. The waters are murky. The way unclear. Success is a vanishing phantom. But teaching, you sometimes see a glimmer of light. So I teach.
Rigor to the dictionary means:
a
(1) : harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, or judgment : severity
(2) : the quality of being unyielding or inflexible : strictness
(3) : severity of life : austerity b : an act or instance of strictness, severity, or cruelty
2
: a tremor caused by a chill
3
: a condition that makes life difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable; especially : extremity of cold
4
: strict precision : exactness
5
obsolete :
—–
I want none of those things for our children, or their education.
Roy: “Rigor to a student means …”
I never realized the “r”-word had more universal meaning in English than “get”. 🙂
I dream and wish for an education system in which children from Pre-K to grade 12 to learn about sharing, caring and mutual respect (=not jealousy or hateful) for the difference in people’s natural skills and talents so that these learners can cultivate their parents in return.
The biggest problem in education is that political incorrectness about religion, cultural background, parental background and rich power class have dominated the curriculum and teaching environment.
Let us to recognize that male and female learners obviously show their distinctive learning style from their young age. However, in the primary level of learning, only songs, painting, and storytelling will bring young learners together in learning with joy and curiosity. In middle school and high school, creative/social project and justice debate will teach them how to exercise their democratic responsibility and rights in a fairness way in society with critical analysis where they will unite and participate to live, work and protect with all their might and just mentality.
Besides all of this academic learning, simple extracurricular like track and field, soccer, basket ball, swimming, and Judo should promoted for survival skills and confidence in physical strength to all learners.
There is NO RUSH to squeeze and jammed into young learners all so called “rigor” academic studies/ stem. There will be certain period of time to sharpen body, mind and spirit. Rushing, overlapping or young PhD will harm humanistic value, and cause chaos in society like the one we are living in. What is the meaningful life to live and die for? Back2basic
I think the problem with pressure is that it makes kids study for the wrong reasons, which then may lead not only to unhappiness and distorted worldview (compete or die), but outright mental health problems.
Related good readings are plenty on the pressures on students in colleges and their effects on their mental health.
This one is a great interview, giving unusually readable references
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/08/qa-the-miseducation-of-our-college-elite/377524/
The interviewee, the author of Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life says this about the students the term “excellent sheep” refers to,
“They’re “excellent” because they have fulfilled all the requirements for getting into an elite college, but it’s very narrow excellence. These are kids who will perform to the specifications you define, and they will do that without particularly thinking about why they’re doing it. ”
It may not be a bad idea for Asian parents to read the Excellent Sheep and The price of privilege , also referenced in the interview
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000S1LV40?redirect=true&ref_=docs-os-doi_0
A girl from India, a classmate of my daughter, told me years ago, while she was only in 6th grade: “I must have all A’s. My dad makes me feel, if I don’t compete, if I don’t get into Harvard, I might as well die.”
Just to stir things up a bit: Jewish parents often put a lot of pressure on their kids—similarly to Asian parents.
The fallacy is that while pushy parents often “produce” perhaps strange, unhappy adults, the kids may end up truly excellent: Beethoven, Mozart, Norbert Wiener, or more recently, Michael Jackson, Serena Williams.
No doubt, we can be quite certain that there’s a pushy parent behind a prodigy or young star.
Among the greatest in history, I think we can find at least as many unhappy people as happy. Great art, music, poetry rarely seem to come from happy, balanced individuals.
And yet the one or two “greats” who “make it” do not justify the practice of overstressing the children of an entire culture, or even of that one child.
I believe we will achieve even more greatness as a society when it becomes normal to treat kids well, and let them grow up to be healthy.
I certainly agree. Besides, stress is definitely not good for science. 🙂 Einstein says
“One had to cram all this stuff into one’s mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.”
He also says, btw,
“One should guard against preaching to young people success in the customary form as the main aim in life. The most important motive for work in school and in life is pleasure in work, pleasure in its result, and the knowledge of the value of the result to the community.”
But he probably would be dismissed as overqualified to give an opinion on the purpose of education.
Being “stressed and overburdened” is the norm for those with less privilege. It’s amazing to see that white families can move the bar when their kids start to lose. I’m not advocating that “drill and kill” is the way, but based on our knowledge of so-called achievement gaps, grad rates, and drop out rates, we can likely say that others have had this stress for a long time.
Our mid-west, Catholic, college-prep high school was cold, heartless and very ill equipped when it came to dealing with stressed out students. The principal said one thing (spoke of balance, etc.) but the academic counselor said something completely different putting tons of pressure on the kids. From the moment our child came in to her seeking help, the first thing she mentioned was the school district’s Homebound program. There were no resources in place to help the students relieve stress: no yoga, meditation, nothing. Oh wait, I forgot, there was a coloring session and they offered watching Disney movies. Really?!