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.htmSurvey: 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.
