Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Parenting and Advocacy Race to Nowhere- any thoughts?

I was able to attend a screening of Race to Nowhere last night at the local middle school. I had heard of it and seen clips, but I was surprised by how much I didn't realize was going on. Anyone here see it and have any thoughts? Especially since we seem like a 'pushy' lot...parents of gifted children.

I was thinking about stress- a lot of the source of stress in the film was not only not being able to do the work but the sheer amount of work (even if its easy). Wouldn't this be an issue with acceleration...3-4 hours a night is mind boggling.

Overall, American students are NOT working hard in high school, in part because it is so easy to get into a college. The highly selective colleges are exceptions. A survey from 2005 found that only about 10% of college-bound students spend 15 or more hours per week preparing for class.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2005-05-08-high-school-usat_x.htm
Survey: High school fails to engage students
By Alvin P. Sanoff, special for USA TODAY
A majority of high school students in the USA spend three hours or less a week preparing for classes yet still manage to get good grades, according to a study being released today by researchers who surveyed more than 90,000 high school students in 26 states.
The team at Indiana University in Bloomington calls the findings "troubling." The first large study to explore how engaged high school students are in their work, it adds to a growing body of evidence that many students are not challenged in the classroom.

Just 56% of students surveyed said they put a great deal of effort into schoolwork; only 43% said they work harder than they expected to. The study says 55% of students devote no more than three hours a week to class preparation, but 65% of these report getting A's or B's.

Students on the college track devoted the most time to preparation, but only 37% spent seven or more hours a week on schoolwork, compared with 22% of all high school students. Among seniors, just 11% of those on the college track said they spent seven or more hours a week on assigned reading, compared with 7% of all seniors.

Surprisingly, 18% of college-track seniors did not take a math course during their last year in high school. That could help explain why studies show that 22% of college students require remediation in math.

The Indiana study also found that 82% of students said they planned to enroll in some form of post-secondary education, and most said they expected to earn at least a bachelor's degree. But the study says "a substantial gap exists" between what students do in high school and what they will be expected to do in college.

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I like Caitlin Flanagan's mockery of the Good Mothers who like Race to Nowhere:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/the-ivy-delusion/8397/

...

'You should know that the good mothers have been mad�and getting madder�for quite a while now. The good mothers believe that something is really wrong with the hypercompetitive world of professional-class child rearing, whose practices they have at once co-created and haplessly inherited. The good mothers e-blast each other New York Times articles about overscheduled kids and the importance of restructuring the AP curriculum so that it encourages more creative thinking. They think that the college-admissions process is �soul crushing.� One thing the good mothers love to do�something they undertake with the same �fierce urgency of now� with which my mom used to protest the Vietnam War�is organize viewings of a documentary called Race to Nowhere. Although the movie spends some time exploring the problems of lower-income students, it is most lovingly devoted to a group of neurasthenic, overworked, cracking-at-the-seams kids from a wealthy suburb in Northern California, whom we see mooning around the enormous kitchens of their McMansions and groaning about sleeplessness and stress. It posits that too much homework can give your child stomach pains, chronic anxiety, anhedonia.

The thesis of the film, echoed by an array of parents and experts, is that we can change the experience and reduce the stress and produce happier kids, so long as we all work together on the problem. This is the critical factor, it seems, the one thing on which all voices are in concert: no parent can do this alone; everyone has to agree to change. But of course parents can do this individually. By limiting the number of advanced courses and extracurricular classes a child takes, and by imposing bedtimes no matter what the effect on the GPA, they will immediately solve the problem of stress and exhaustion. It�s what I like to call the Rutgers Solution. If you make the decision�and tell your child about it early on�that you totally support her, you�re wildly engaged with her intellectual pursuits, but you will not pay for her to attend any college except Rutgers, everything will fall into place. She�ll take AP calculus if she�s excited by the challenge, max out at trig if not. It doesn�t matter, either way�Hello, New Brunswick!

But the good mothers will never do that, because when they talk about the soul-crushing race to nowhere, the �nowhere� they�re really talking about (more or less) is Rutgers. And more to the point, while you�re busily getting your child�s life back on track, Amy Chua and her daughters aren�t blinking.'

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I'm on Chua's side. If a child is overwhelmed by taking too many A.P. classes, she should take fewer of them.

That is missing that...Over forty percent of the students who apply to Rutgers are not accepted. And, those who are have to figure out a way to pay for it. Maybe a nonissue to the snobs, but for us regular folks $28,000 instate (or $37,000 out of state) is nothing to sneeze at. Saying it doesn't matter a bit what your kids do in high school is not a luxury afforded to middle class families who are worried about paying for college. Good GPA and test scores do matter in access to merit scholarships. So, no many of us don't have the option of just ignoring the realities of college admissions and financing.

And, I'd like to see gifted students having more choices. Your only option to be with bright students shouldn't come with a gigantic homework burden that destroys your options for having a good and interesting life with time for extracurriculars, daydreaming, etc.

They screened the movie for parents at my D's private high school. Unfortunately, the movie is long, so we didn't have any parent discussion afterwards. Having had two kids go through the school, I can say that my perspective has changed over time. The highest stress periods for us came from:

- Pressure on our less gifted kid to stay on the "most challenging" academic track. She is the one who wanted to do this (because her friends were), but it added a lot of stress. Her homework load was huge. Second D (much higher IQ) is having a fairly easy time with exactly the same course load. In fact, coasting a little too much for my taste

- Extra curricular activities - Too many of them, and too big a time commitment from some of them. Some chosen by the kids, some I blame the school (why does every middle school kid there HAVE to start an instrument? My kids already had piano, and were in choir. For 2nd D, we opted out of band/orchestra in spite of pressure to do otherwise. She is happy now in choir as a hs sophomore, and no worse for missing out on the instrumental experience).

And the pressure from athletic coaches to practice every day/play tournaments on weekends/join offseason teams, just to maintain a spot on the team, is crazy. Would LOVE to see more high school athletic options that were more like college intramurals -- a couple of days a week, scrimmage type games, no cuts, etc.

We were MUCH more savvy with our second child in avoiding the pitfalls that lead to too much pressure.

The idea that lots of students aren't doing enough homework, doesn't detract from the fact that some are doing way too much. Do we ignore the minority because of a characteristic of the majority?



You're assuming that the only choices are AP classes with tons of homework and no AP classes. Where is it written that there can be no middle ground?

You're also assuming that turning a child into a homework drone is a good thing. If the goal is to turn him into fodder for industry or an academic who churns out paper after paper, and if the child is suited to that life, fine. Many of these people are very good at perfecting old models and their work is important.

But these people represent only one part of the picture of innovation. They're very good at honing ideas, but they aren't typically original innovators. That job goes to quirky types who don't do well in a hyper-competitive, work-work-work environment. Work-work-work is anathema to creativity. When everyone has to become a homework drone just to get into college, we lose the quirky creative types who come up with new ideas.

Creative people respond poorly to a hyper-competitive, hyper-worked situation for the same reasons that gifted kids respond poorly to moving at the same pace as non-gifted age-peers. Re-read that sentence.

If you aren't a super-creative kind of person, try to see this idea in terms of gifted kids who wither when they're forced to "learn" material that they mastered long ago. Very creative people wither when not allowed time or mental space to let their imaginations roam. Three hours of homework after seven hours of school and required extra-curriculars leaves no time for imaginative thought.

If you're having trouble understanding how this could be so, you're in the exact same position as teachers who think that gifted kids are fine in the regular classroom, doing the same thing as everyone else, provide they get tossed an extra worksheet now and then or get a half-hour pullout on Wednesdays.

Not to derail the thread,but D (age 16) did drop out of her high school team sport this year, and joined the local fencing club. Practice 2 times per week, only internal matches during practice for the first year, she can skip practice without even letting them know if she has a conflict (or too much homework). It has been perfect... we just keep saying how glad we are that she quit her other sport because of the reduced pressure & time commitment. As a bonus, she LOVES fencing, far more than she liked her other sport.

I couldn't agree more.

The workload (as in VOLUME) is soul-crushing-- not the difficulty of that work-load. (I say that with respect to the expectations that are standard in my DD's virtual high school curriculum. It's insane-- even a reasonably competent and diligent student could easily spend fifty hours a week on just academics.)

In other words, all kids are being asked to do 25 math problems each night because some of them can't learn the material any other way. But what about my kid, who is ready for that level of mathematics instruction, but who is absolutely incapable of producing the volume expected of her?? What about kids that are ready to discuss literature critically... but don't see the point in ALSO writing a four page essay on the same exact subject (or don't have the ability/time to do so)?

I mean, I guess what I'm saying is that Bostonian is right, on the one hand. The movie is right, on the one hand. We are giving students way too much work. And it's way too easy. As in the other thread (the one about struggle/difficulty teaching more than edutainment does), it's not just quantity that matters here. But that seems to be lost on most administrators.

IMO where it also goes wrong is that not all of these concerned parents have kids that are appropriately placed to begin with. When the failure rate on AP exams in this country is now nearly 45%, that tells me that there are a lot of butts in those seats that probably don't have any business being there.

It's a problem, all right. But the problem is mostly with parents that WANT their kids to be... well, <blushes> like our kids.
Not all kids are like that. Why shouldn't they be allowed to be who they are? ALL of them, I mean.

Did anyone hear Donald Trump today? He said he would deal with China by imposing a 25% tax on imports and make them free float their currency.

China owns the US. They own our debt and the US can keep the government going because China buys our debt.

Yes, I am talking about the Race to Nowhere. We had a screening at our school. The US has fewer and fewer options for our kids. If you have a solution, perhaps you might have a solution for our unemployment problem too because the president and his advisors don't have one.

I am willing to put my kid in the race because I want her to go somewhere. Somewhere she wants to go and I am fearful that she won't have options because of where this country is heading.

I asked her if she wanted to take Mandarin because China was going to be the world power when she grew up. And she decided she would so she would have options.

To me, the title Race to Nowhere is really telling. Our kids have nowhere to go. I want my kid to end up somewhere.

The world has changed.

Ren

Yes, I agree. Again, I think this goes back to the everyone-should-go-college mentality and the everyone-should-be-able-to-try mentality.

No, everyone should not go to college.

Yes, everyone should be able to try calculus, but only after they've proved they know the prerequisite material with at least a B. How can you do calculus if you still don't really understand the quadratic formula or unit circles? It's one thing to have to look the formula up when you're doing an optimization problem because you forgot where 4ac goes, but it's something else altogether to have no clue about factoring and hence what the quadratic formula is even all about.

Plus, if people can't master calculus at the speed of an AP class, the schools should offer a slower paced course (say, spend a year on differentiation and applications). Educators are the ones who say that we should "give everyone a chance;" therefore, they have a responsibility to follow through and either fail the kids who can't keep the pace or provide a slower-moving course.

NB, HowlerKarma, what you said mirrors my thinking on why all that homework gets in the way of developing creativity. Too much volume = too much mental clutter = too little time for the imagination.