Shortly after I read this very provocative post by David Kristofferson, I saw a story in Education Week that suicide rates among young Americans have recently soared.
Quoting data from federal sources, it said:
Suicide rates for teens between the ages of 15 and 19 increased by 76 percent between 2007 and 2017. And the suicide rate for 10- to 14-year-olds nearly tripled over that same time period, according to CDC’s data.
Kristofferson writes that something is clearly wrong with the way we raise our children. His own district in California surveyed high school students and reported that nearly a third of them describe themselves as”sad.” A sizable fraction have recently used drugs or alcohol.
He then goes on to contrast two parenting styles: the wholesome Dutch approach, which produces”the happiest children in the world” and the strict Tiger Mom approach, which establishes rigid standards of behavior: all work and no play, a phenomenon that captured media attention a few years ago.
As a grandmother who was once a very loving non-Tiger Mom, I think there is something terribly wrong with the absurd pressure we put on our children today. What they need most of all, after their basic needs are met, is unconditional love, the knowledge that someone is crazy about them. That’s a line I heard many years ago from a celebrated Yale child psychologist, Dr. Alfred Solnit: Every child needs to know that someone is crazy about her or him.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I bet social media is a bigger culprit than Tiger Moms –a tiny fraction of moms outside the wealthy bubbles.
There is plenty of research.
Pediatricians are reporting on their screening for suicidal thinking and desire for more information.
https://www.aappublications.org/news/2019/10/23/research102319
This website, with data up to 2017, shows that suicide is the second leading cause of death for the age group 10-14 and for the age group 15- to 24. Suffication is the major cause of death for ages 10-14 group for the 15-24 group the major cause of death is firearms. The major causes of “unintentional” deaths are drowning (especially ages 1-4) and motor vehicle accidents. https://webappa.cdc.gov/cgi-bin/broker.exe
This 2013 report from the CDC addresses the relationships between bullying and being bullied. The greater risk of suicide is associated with being a bully and being bullied. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/bullying-suicide-translation-final-a.pdf
This 2018 report on “The role of online social networking on deliberate self-harm and suicidality in adolescents: A systematized review of literature,” provides information on the role of so-called social media and cyberbullying in suicide and suicidal ideation with attention to studies in the US. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6278213/
Of course, these stats are not the same as personal histories–living with and witnessing a child or teen who has suicidal ideation, especially when early indications of self-harm are present and become overt acts in the teen years.
There is plenty of research.
Pediatricians are reporting on their screening for suicidal thinking and desire for more information. This is a recent survey.
https://www.aappublications.org/news/2019/10/23/research102319
This website, with data up to 2017, shows that suicide is the second leading cause of death for the age group 10-14 and for the age group 15- to 24. The major cause for the 10-14 group is suffocation and for the 15-24 group firearms. The major causes of death (rank one) are “unintentional.” Drowning is the major cause for ages 1-4 for older age groups the major cause is motor vehicle accidents. https://webappa.cdc.gov/cgi-bin/broker.exe
This 2013 report from the CDC addresses the relationships between bullying and being bullied. The greater risk of suicide is associated with being a bully and being bullied. https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/pdf/bullying-suicide-translation-final-a.pdf
This 2018 report on “The role of online social networking on deliberate self-harm and suicidality in adolescents: A systematized review of literature,” provides information on the role of so-called social media and cyberbullying in suicide and suicidal ideation with attention to studies in the US. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6278213/
Of course these stats are not the same as living with and witnessing a child or teen who has suicidal ideation, especially when early indications of self-harm are present and become overt acts in the teen years. The stats can also distract attention from the toxic envirorments that too many children and teens are living in–physical and mental. as just one example, the marketing of opioids has shattered families.
Here is an OECD report comparing teenage suicide rates across OECD member countries:https://www.oecd.org/els/family/CO_4_4_Teenage-Suicide.pdf
It is interesting to note that the rate in the United States has a slightly higher suicide rate than South Korea, and a slightly lower suicide rate than Finland. All three countries have much lower teenage suicide rates than New Zealand
NJ.com:
The number of suicides among people ages 10 to 24 nationally increased by 56 percent between 2007 and 2017, according to a new federal report showing the tragic consequences of an emerging public health crisis.
The rate of suicides in that age group rose from from 6.8 deaths per 100,000 people to 10.6, according a report by the National Center for Health Statistics.
It would certainly good to get more recent data comparing teenage suicide rates across countries and I hope a reader might provide them. The data in the table I linked to was from 2014 for the United States and Finland, 2013 for South Korea.
The Teen suicide rate in the US has risen sharply in the past decade.
Comparative rates over time dispense with the problems of causal variability like Seasonal Affective Disorder (long, dark winters in northern nations).
te’s elevator doesn’t go to the top floor.
Linda,
Are you calling me dumb in an effort to drive me off the blog?
No one can drive you off the blog.
te-
No, driving a person away is not my intent. We all have the choice to read what commenters write or not.
My insult reflects anger at people who I speculate vote Republican out of ignorance. It damages America.
Without speculation about your voting, my style would be to suggest to you that you phrase what you write differently with this introduction, “I planned to post the following information and/or my viewpoint, if there are known fallacies, wrong applications in it, I’d like to learn about them.”
TE, how dare you suggest the Finns are not the model for happy life and perfect public education.
Linda,
No need to speculate. As I have posted before, I have always voted for the Democrat candidate with the single exception of a race between a pro-life Democrat and a pro-choice Republican. I voted for the Republican. Do you think that vote was ignorant of me?
I had not noticed your using your recommended preamble for posts, but I look forward to seeing it in the future. Given your interest in fallacies that might arise from your posts, let me point out that Seasonal Affective Disorder does not do a good job of explaining why the teenage suicide rate in Norway is so much lower than that in Mexico or the teenage suicide rate in Denmark is so very much lower than that in New Zealand.
These things are complicated. I think that more information is better than less information, which is why I posted the cross country teenage suicide data.
If you really want to test if there is a link between teenage suicide and standardized testing, you should do a difference in difference analysis. States have rolled out standardized testing at different times, in different amounts, and with different stakes attached. If a comparison across those states shows that relative teen suicide rates increased with administration of standardized tests, increases in the frequency of standardized tests, and increases in the stakes attached to the test, that would be good evidence that standardized tests caused increases in teen suicide.
TE,
You have a problem in presenting your ideas because of your tone. You come across to the reader as a supercilious know-it-all. For all I know, you may be a kind and humble person. But your written words do not portray you as such. You come here (and to other blogs) to tell everyone else how stupid they are. They don’t react well.
te-
The reasoning in your reply begs the question-why the prior comment with link?
Instead of my prior advice for comment preamble- change your commenter name to Straw Man- problem solved.
The analysis you suggest would make sense, TE. Unfortunately, there has been remarkable uniformity in the state testing. NCLB, passed in 2001, required high-stakes testing in grades 3-8 and once in high-school in both reading and math. So, you would have to compare private schools that can avoid the testing with public schools that can’t, and doing so would introduce significant confounding variables. You might compare states with extreme amounts of high-stakes testing with ones with slightly less extreme amounts of high-stakes testing.
Or, you might ask high-school teachers, who work with students are are almost universally angry and stressed out about these tests. My POV: This is like conducting to a study to determine whether shooting yourself in the belly is conducive to long-term health.
Dr. Ravitch,
Have I ever personally insulted anyone in your living room? Have I not also been the frequent victim of personal insults, ranging from “elevator not going to the top floor” to “Koch sucker” and “rug sniffer”?
TE, you are very polite. But you have a tone of snobbery and intellectual superiority that is exxtremely offensive. You try to one-up whoever you engage with. Your tone is obnoxious even as it is masked in civility.
Linda,
I added a comment to my link because I thought it likely that many would not bother to click on the link. Given the high regard for Finnish education on the blog, I thought that noting the higher levels of teen suicide in Finland than the United States and Korea might cause people to think more about the relationship between K-12 education and teen suicide.
The teen suicide rate is the US and Finland is nearly identical. The teen suicide rate in the US is rising, but in Finland it is falling.
Robert,
I think people could take advantage of the differences across states in requiring students to pass standardized exams in order to graduate. After all, a senior taking an exam that will determine if they receive a high school diploma or not is taking a high stakes exam while a senior that is taking an exam that will have no impact on their lives might well be thought of as not taking a high stakes exam.
Education Week provides an up to date list of states requiring requiring high stakes exams for graduating seniors (https://www.edweek.org/ew/section/multimedia/states-require-exam-to-graduate.html). Pennsylvania, for example, does not require students to pass a standardized exam in order to graduate but it is surrounded by states that all do require students pass a standardized exam in order to graduate. If high stakes exams cause more teen suicide, we might well expect to see lower levels in Pennsylvania than in the surrounding states.
Additionally, the article notes that half of the states required students to pass standardized exams in order to graduate in 2002, but only 17 now have that requirement. We could see if dropping the requirement had any impact on teen suicide in the states that dropped relative to the states that retained that high stakes test.
Standardized tests may even improve suicide rates. I think we should keep them!
TE,
You have this annoying habit of showing everyone on the blog that you are smarter than anyone else. The OECD link you provided on teen Suicide rates is from 2013. The US and Finland have nearly identical rates, but the US rate is rising while the FINNISH rate is falling.
This is from the report to which you linked.
“Some countries have seen large changes in teenage suicide rates since the early 1990s. Chart CO4.1.C shows the four countries with the steepest increase in suicide rates since 1990, as well as the three countries with the largest decreases in suicide rates. Japan, Mexico, Lithuania and New Zealand have seen particularly large increases in teenage suicide rates since 1990s, although in the case of Lithuania rates have declined again slightly since the early 2000s. Notably, both Japan and Mexico began the period with relatively low rates well below the OECD average, but ended the period with rates at or around the OECD average. By contrast, in Finland, Norway and Iceland teenage suicide rates have fallen considerably over the past couple of decades. In Finland, for example, current rates are about half what they were around 1990, while in Norway rates have fallen by almost three-quarters.“
The sole purpose for Ohio’s change in its requirements for graduation, which established higher standards, was to fail students as proof that the state’s current education system was a failure. The talking points were intended to give grifters greater cover for entering the “market”. The losers were the state, which appeared to have a lesser educated workforce than other states and students denied jobs because a capricious system screwed them.
te,
You are maddening because you take the side of the corrupt which has no legitimate defense. The corrupt have well crafted PR, which they deliver to bought and paid for legislators.The legislators are unwilling to take the tests and post their scores which tells us everything we need to know.
And, before you post data to refute, at the last minute Ohio monkeyed with the standards to minimize adverse effect.
As you point out, Ohio’s more demanding standards and tests are supposed to make the public schools look bad. Ironically, the charters and vouchers schools do worse than the public schools, even in the urban districts with concentrated poverty.
Dr Ravitch,
The figures in my link were the most recent that I could easily find. If you or a poster can find a more recent international comparison of youth suicide, I certainly think that would be a good thing. Do you have more recent data across countries?
I quoted the same OECD link that you used, which said FINNISH and US teen suicide rates are nearly the same but the FINNISH rate is dropping while the US rate is increasing. Data from the federal Centers for Disease Control shows a dramatic increase in US teen suicide rate between 2007-17.
Your goal is to belittle Finland, Because I have praised its education system. Your snark is obvious. You don’t give a hoot about suicide rates. You are doing your usual game of “I’m the smartest guy in the room.”
Linda,
Are you saying that I am maddening because I sometimes disagree with you and provide an argument or give evidence that I am correct and you are incorrect? Rather than personally insulting me, let me suggest that you attack my argument, showing it to be deficient.
I am not sure about the relevance of your discussion about Ohio graduation standards. If it is an attempt to be critical of the difference in difference analysis that I recommend be used, let me suggest that you read https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28241285 . I have some hope that you might think the method of analysis is valid because I suspect you agree with the conclusions.
TE,
Will there ever be a comment by you that is not a demonstration of your vast intellectual superiority to everyone else who comments here? Do you know how arrogant your tone is? Do you have any humility? Ever?
TE,
Will there ever be a comment by you that is not a demonstration of your vast intellectual superiority to everyone else who comments here? Do you know how arrogant your tone is? Do you have any humility? Ever?
“I have some hope that you might think the method of analysis is valid because I suspect you agree with the conclusions.”
What the heck is this, TE? End justifies the means in science? Seriously, who do you think we are?
Dr. Ravitch,
You might want to let people see my post that you appear to be responding to in your post. The fact that the number of teen suicides in Finland have, unfortunately, increased by over 50% between 2015 and 2017 would appear to be relevant to the discussion here.
In my posts I state my position and attempt to give arguments and present data that support my position. That this is unusual on your blog is not, I think, an indictment of my posts.
TE, your only interest in teen suicides in Finland is to one-up those of us on this blog who admire the very successful Finnish education system
As I have said several times, your arrogance and one-upmanship are obnoxious.
Why else are you so obsessed with the Finnish teen suicide rate?
Why are you NOT at all concerned about the dramatic increase in the American teen suicide rate?
I really prefer that you cease to comment on this blog. You have no interest in anything other than strutting your stuff at the expense of other commenters.
You have no point of view other than your vast intellectual superiority.
Just go away.
Hungary used to be unbeatable at Math olimpiads. A country of 10 million. Everybody wanted to know the secret of the Hungarian (math) education. Yet, Hungary led the suicide statistics at the time. Way ahead of any other country. Finland used to be 2nd after us—or third, I cannot remember. And Hungarians and Finnish happened to be relatives. Their tribes came together from the Ural mountains in Russia and separated about 1500 years ago.
So between 1960-80, one could have thought, great math education might have caused the suicides. It could be genetics, though…—or something else.
Give me a reason for suicides and I find correlating supporting data. (But no, I won’t bother since I wasted years doing that in high school after 2 of my classmates committed suicide together)
Máté Wierdl: I had one classmate who committed suicide when I was in the 9th grade. I felt bad because I hadn’t reached out to him. I have no idea what the circumstances were that caused this horror.
Regarding Finland, I am guessing that the climate has something todo with depression and sometimes suicide.
That was a suggestion too. What I know is that in the northern part of Norway, where the sun doesn’t come up for 3 months, people wake up with big screens lit up in their bedrooms to guard against lethargy and depression.
Case in point: suicide rates are highest in Alaska among the US states.
Here you go: https://www.thejakartapost.com/life/2019/04/13/finland-from-suicide-hotspot-to-worlds-happiest-country.html
Suicides in Finland have now fallen to less than half of 1990 levels. That is thanks largely to a decade-long public health drive to improve treatment and support for those at risk, as well as to make media reporting of the issue more responsible.
These days it is also much more socially acceptable for Finns, especially men, to open up about their feelings, says Partonen.
“Now it’s easier to talk about it if you are depressed for example, and it’s easier to get treated and have adequate treatment as well.”
According to the World Health Organization, Finland’s suicide rate is now 22nd highest in the world, lower than the US and one spot higher than Australia.
Jonathan Turley’s blog is a good fit for te.
Mate,
Linda also suggested seasonal affective disorder as an explanation for the relatively high teenage suicide rate in Finland, but the relatively low teenage suicide rates in Denmark and especially in Norway suggests that it is more complicated than simply the lack of sunlight in the winter.
I certainly agree that it is easy to think A causes B when A and B happen at the same time. It is even easier to think A causes B when you do not like that A has occurred and B is something that no one likes. That is exactly my point in this discussion. It is very important to understand the actual causes of teenage suicide. That is why I have suggested several ways to test if standardized testing is a cause.
I am disheartened that posters here are not particularly interested in the truth of the matter.
TE, why do you show no interest whatever in the reasons for the rapid escalation of teen suicides among Americans?
Your snark is sickening.
Dr. Ravitch,
Did you not see the posts where I suggested ways we could try to find out what is causing the increase in teenage suicide? It seems to me that finding out the actual cause is key to reducing teenage suicide. Do you disagree?
TE,
You are obsessed with Finland for one reason only: to attack its excellent school system.
I have seen zero evidence of concern from you about US Suicide rates.
Hm. Is this now a research forum? Are you qualified to conduct research on suicides? Is there anybody here you presume to be an expert on suicides with whom you can conduct competent research?
One of the big issues we discuss here is exactly when nonexperts claim, they can budge into the business of professionals.
Besides billionaires, I personally know economists and AI workers who think, they can competently discuss matters ranging from science, education, psychology, even math.
They all sound bad. No exception. We all know, there are geniuses who are experts in several fields of knowledge (like Leonardo was), but not these people.
Mate Great observation:
“Besides billionaires, I personally know economists and AI workers who think, they can competently discuss matters ranging from science, education, psychology, even math.” CBK
Agreed. Very few are “Tiger Moms” compared to the “Helicopter Parents.”
Growing up, it seemed like the biggest argument with parents related to independence. All my friends and siblings seemed to want that most of all – and fought tooth and nail for it.
Today, kids have no idea what that independence even means – everything is structured play.
We all learn that life is difficult. No matter how much we want to protect the kids, I think we make it difficult for them to process the challenges they eventually have to face. Independence at early ages helps to deal with that.
When this research is disaggregated by demographics the depression & suicide rates in young black boys is staggering.
The rates of attempted suicide, including attempts that resulted in an injury, poisoning, or overdose, are 1.2x higher among Black males compared to White males.
https://psychologybenefits.org/2018/06/29/depression-in-black-boys-begins-earlier-than-you-think/
Sadly, that makes sense. The lesson that life is difficult is greater and biased against them.
And white adult males make up 69.67% of all suicide deaths (2017).
https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/
Oh, the mighty do fall…
How will helicopter parenting help or hurt this statistic?
As I said before, learning that life is difficult is a tough lesson. I am not that sure there is a way to get around that lesson. Is it better to learn it earlier or later? When are we stronger to adapt?
Children who take the standardized tests and fail year after year after year are being told every time that they are worthless. This has to have an effect on children.
Schools that are labeled failures year after year and finally are taken over by the state have to make students and teachers miserable. There is nothing good that has come out of the standardized test mania.
I remember when teachers were supposed to always tell children how great they were doing. Then we got criticized for making children believe they were fantastic even though they were average or below average.
I think media with images of perfect people and perfect lives contribute to the disaffection. Our hyper capitalism with its emphasis on “winners and losers” and our current economy with limited opportunity and mobility for many people result in a sense of hopelessness among many young people.
With our problems of gun violence and drug addition, we should fight to keep our educational system human at its core. Computers are useful tools that should not replace human interaction. It is often teachers that can spot potential dangerous emotional problems with students. Many students can remember a teacher that intervened on their behalf that kept the student out of harm’s way. We need to keep education human for the social-emotional well being of our youth.
We need to keep education human.
So, so important. Tell this to the Gates Foundation for the Standardization, Depersonalizing, and Computerizing of US Education, and to Jobs Powell and to Zuch and Chan.
And again, a lot of this comes down to time. The high-school teacher with 190 kids in his or her 7 classes doesn’t have enough time for the socio-emotional part of the job. Teachers save lives, all the time, and often, this is done in small ways. A conversation with a kid about his or her great anime drawings, a single comment that gives a kid courage at the right time (“Ignore that comment; he was being clueless and idiotic”) can, literally, save a kid’s life. I’ve had parents come back to me a year later and say, “Mr. Shepherd, I really believe that my son wouldn’t be alive today if not for you,” and I suspect that there’s not a good middle-school or high-school teacher who hasn’t had this experience again and again. There’s a lot more to the job than teaching kids how to answer multiple-choice question, and typically, it’s the kids in the most trouble who most need this, though it’s also often the case that the kid who is otherwise doing OK–good grades, no discipline issues–who is nonetheless a powder keg inside.
There was a takeover of schools in Gary, IN, a poverty area. A consulting group from Florida has an emergency manager to find ways to save money and to get the children learning the state standards. I’d like to know who thinks the state standards are any good and why there is $6.2 million to award to an out of state group that can ‘fix’ the problems of poverty. “At Gary she’s introduced curriculum maps, similar to pacing guides, to ensure students are learning the state standards. It combines student data, regular assessments, and remediation.” That really sounds inspiring. [sarcasm]
Why are academic gains measured by good test scores? Oh but there is an incentive of around $1.5 million if “she meets fiscal and academic benchmarks.” This will probably work as well as the bonuses given to teachers who do a “really good job”.
………………
EBRUARY 15, 2018
Can Gary Schools Be Saved By A State Takeover?
The Gary Community Schools Corporation faces massive debt and academic failures. In a last-ditch attempt to save the schools, state lawmakers took the extreme option last year to take it over by using laws that transferred financial and academic control to a state-hired emergency manager.
It was a controversial move that lawmakers hoped would give Gary Schools a second chance even as decades of decline in population and industry continue to drag down the district’s enrollment and state funding…
More than 10,000 students have fled the district in the past decade for charter schools or nearby city schools. Today enrollment has fallen to around 4,700 K-12 students….For the past six months, the 65-year-old education veteran has been the sole decision maker for the district….
Improving academics is a key priority, Hinckley says. More than 80 percent of Gary students failed both parts of the 2017 ISTEP exam. This week state education officials alleged cheating by staff took place on those tests at one school….
The state gave MGT Consulting Group, based in Tallahassee, Fla., a $6.2 million contract to serve as Gary’s emergency manager. Hinckley has a team of 12-15 people working on the emergency management. The contract calls for Hinckley to make compelling improvements in the classroom and the accounting books. Financial incentives worth nearly $1.5 million are available if she meets fiscal and academic benchmarks.
In 2019, lawmakers will decide if Hinckley gets a third year.
“So we have to produce,” she says, “And we have to produce in a year.”…Today, teachers follow the 8-Step Continuous Improvement Process. It combines student data, regular assessments, and remediation. It’s not uncommon to use these methods — but it’s never been done in Gary.
Hinckley used the process when she was superintendent at Warren Township in Indianapolis. The program led to academic gains and national recognition….At Gary she’s introduced curriculum maps, similar to pacing guides, to ensure students are learning the state standards. Students are assessed every week three weeks to gauge if they are learning on pace or need extra help. The students who are falling behind get extra attention…
The state took over Gary Schools in August. The two laws gave Hinckley as the emergency manager, absolute power over the district. That means, the Gary superintendent and elected school trustees are reduced to advisors…
A recent state audit report found the district owes vendors $16,971,524 as of July 2017.
I’ve had parents and students themselves come back to see me and thank me for helping them through a rough time. Sometimes students came back to let me know they had overcome a problem and were doing fine. The human connection matters, and to some students it matters a great deal.
Lots to think about here, including much from the field of philosophy. However, let me offer that the best educational site I’ve seen is edutopia from the George Lucas Educational Foundation.
https://www.edutopia.org/about?utm_source=Edutopia+Newsletter&utm_campaign=0987185494-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_101619_enews_creatinga&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_f72e8cc8c4-0987185494-79205895
Using the arts to promote the Common Core and SEL? You have to be kidding.
SEL from a machine, what could possibly go wrong?
If you teach in a high school, you see this. Teens are already, naturally, volatile. By the type they reach the end of the school year, facing final exams and an excessive battery of standardized tests that can decide their futures, they are time bombs. Add a significant life event to the mix–parents going through a divorce, a breakup with a boyfriend or girlfriend, dissing on social media, and the consequences can be catastrophic. This is reflected in the suicide statistics and also in stats on number of teens and young adults experiencing depression or loneliness. We need to show them a LOT of care.
Part of this is just time. Our high-school kids are extremely stressed out.
One Way to Make High School Suck Less
A high-school is a kind of medium-security prison in which young people are incarcerated for seven hours a day and given lots of supervision and highly structured schedules in order to get them out of the way and control them while adults go about their business. If adults had to put up with the schedules of high-school students–sit for fifty minutes in class, get up for three minutes and race to another class, sit for another fifty minutes, and so on for seven classes–with twenty minutes for lunch (half of which is spent queued up), and routine refusal of even the right to go to the bathroom–there would be open revolt–revolution.
Adults in business training sessions rebel against even a day or two of similar treatment. After a single day like that, they beeline to the hotel bar for a drink and then to their room to collapse from exhaustion. Of course, no one can think carefully about seven different classes in a day, and no one can process what’s dumped on a high-school kid in a given day without any time, during that day, for downtime, regrouping, socializing, and reflection. This ought to be obvious, but people often don’t think at all about the craziness they’ve become used to. They become so inured to quotidian absurdity that they don’t even recognize how loony it is.
It doesn’t have to be this way. I had a student from Finland. She thought our system cruel and insane. In her school back home, students went to a class and then had a leisurely 15 minutes to half an hour to sit with one another in a lounge area to talk, decompress, study, have a snack or a drink, socialize, and prepare. In other words, her school back home treated students like people with human wants and needs and natural ways of functioning, not like prisoners in a detention center. As a result, kids there actually had reason to look forward to their day. They spent less time in class and learned more.
Having recently taught, I can attest that most high-school students are extremely stressed out. As the end of the year comes, after 160 days like that, as they face exams and high-stakes standardized tests, most of them have become time bombs. And, ofc, we have epidemics of suicide and cutting and depression and loneliness among teens. It’s no wonder. No one learns well under extremely stressful conditions, and learning should be a joyful experience. It is long past time for the high-school day to be rethought. Our goal should be for kids to look back on this as the most glorious, empowering, delight-full time in their lives.
A happy child will be a learning, growing child. And make no mistake about it: a high-school student is still a child–a toddler in an almost adult body. I wouldn’t say this to them, of course, but it’s true.
Time to end the high-stakes standardized testing. It’s child abuse, and those who support it are child abusers.
An extremely important piece, David. Thank you!
Thanks, Bob! I have been overwhelmed with work the last week (non-stop since starting a big project last Saturday) and just saw yesterday that Diane had mentioned the articles here. (Thank you, Diane!) Just now having a chance to read the comments at 4:00 AM!!!
I have had several interesting discussions with friends about the article since publication and intend to post a lengthy addendum reflecting their feedback in the Comments section hopefully early next week.
When I was in high school, my father got sick. He had a brain tumor. He lived, the first person I knew to do that, but he was permanently disabled. M brother came home from college to milk the cows. Life was pretty crazy for a time.
What was not there was a mountain of pressure from this test or that requirement. I do not recall feeling anxious, except when the weather said we were facing a rain at 3 AM and we had 1000 bales of hay on the ground. Nobody was spending a lot of their time thinking about how they would make me feel bad by posting my picture on asocial media. People who did not like me ignored me. Nobody posted directions online that explained how to kill myself or posted glorification of such an act.
I have, nonetheless, been exposed to an extraordinary number of people who took their own life. I used to keep a list of folks I knew well that fell into that category, but I got behind. Students, army vets (I grew up after WWII), and just folks have lengthened that list over the years. A favorite student of mine took her life. I heard about it some ten years later.
It saddens me to think that people consider this an option. I read an article about enslaved populations in the Caribbean practicing infanticide and the attempt on the part of historians to interpret the motivation for this practice. This too is very sad. Somehow I think the two phenomena are related.
We should all try to let each other know we care for them.
Someone remind me when the first iPhone was released . . . .
The full quote from the article on suicides paints a hard to believe “progress” in suicides. I wonder how much of these rate increases can be attributed to the boredom and pressure of CC?
Teen suicide rates have increased dramatically in the past decade, according to a report released on Thursday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Suicide rates for teens between the ages of 15 and 19 increased by 76 percent between 2007 and 2017. And the suicide rate for 10- to 14-year-olds nearly tripled over that same time period, according to CDC’s data.
It’s a sharp reversal from the previous period—2000 to 2007—when the suicide rate had been stable for the 15-to-19 age group and had even declined for 10- to 14-year-olds.
There was another important thread in my article besides the parenting issues that Diane discussed above.
I teach because I want to inspire kids about the beauties of math and science, but everything in our current system seems to mitigate against that.
We continue to exist in a complex cultural milieu with numerous international influences which I encounter daily in my tutoring work. Because of this challenge, I also reviewed the recent Netflix film “American Factory” (which I highly recommend to everyone) and the CNN film “Apollo 11” which came out this summer just before the 50th anniversary of that mission. The space program played a large part in developing my scientific interests as a child.
Regarding the latter I wrote
“Watching this movie, one holds one’s breath throughout with the realization that many things could have gone tragically wrong at many points of the mission. For example, Armstrong lands the Eagle on the Moon’s surface with just seconds left of fuel remaining in the lander, and then he and Aldrin are reliant on a second engine/ fuel supply in the upper pod to leave the surface of the Moon!!!
There are constant scenes of worried NASA engineering staff. But these people are not ones who “move fast and break things!”
They take pride in their work and as a result, everything works!!
Looking back at this, we have to remind ourselves that this was US not that long ago! Despite all of society’s problems in the 60s (and they were immense, not the least of which was the threat of nuclear annihilation!), America accomplished amazing things.
These were the accomplishments of a free people who asked questions and debated the multiple possible answers, not ones who meekly accepted what they were ordered to do by a dictatorship.
Our success was not achieved by turning our students into standardized test-taking drones and damaging their interest in academics in a frantic race for college admissions!
Nobel Prizes are not won by taking tests, but by those who develop a life-long interest in a serious field of work! Our teachers should be helping develop these interests. Instead they are required to teach to standardized tests that contain very trappy questions designed by the College Board to help “spread out the curve” so that elite colleges can determine who is “truly worthy.”
The stress of these tests and the race for college admissions is a significant reason students are “sad.” The attractiveness of our teaching jobs are also diminished by this system.
The AP system parallels the examination culture found in many Asian countries where large populations are competing vigorously for very limited resources. This is a culture of POVERTY, not one that fosters human development! We have become obsessed with our international test rankings to the detriment of our children and their teachers!”
Thanks for the addition, David.
Increasingly, bright, intrinsically motivated people don’t want to be part of the Deform system, with its idiotic numerology-driven micromanagement. It’s a credit to our teachers that so many continue to put up with the data walls and the data chats and the crappy test-preppy curricula and the continual demands to conform to testing-related mandates–give this benchmark test, use this test preppy online software, “teach these standards” identified as in need of remediation by the schlocky, pseudo-scientific tests and software. It is a credit to our teachers that there are many, like you, David, who remember why they are teaching–who continue to endeavor to spark that interest, to instill in kids that capacity to dream DESPITE all this other nonsense.
And yes, the US accomplished all that before anyone got the bright idea to wrest autonomy from individual teachers and place it in the hands of oligarchs interested in selling tests and software and bureaucrats happy to please those people in exchange for favors.
Quotes from Oprah’s web site:
Quote: “An education is not so much about making a living as making a person.”
—Tara Westover, in her book, “Educated”
“Ideas have consequence.”
—-David Brooks, “The Second Mountain”
“It’s time to begin to live life fuller rather than faster.”
—-Sister Joan Chittister, “The Time is Now”
“No one is successful alone.”
—-Kim Perell
“Am I good enough? Yes I am.” ——-Michelle Obama
“All people are beautiful, and the difference between us is so much less than the sameness.”
—-Berry Gordy
““All people are beautiful, and the difference between us is so much less than the sameness.”
Ahem. Hopefully, this is not true.