But like most American teens, those urban students can get by without doing much, and so do just that.Ībeles says she wants more authentic learning and imaginative teaching. The urban high school teachers I know go to great lengths to be relevant and wish more students would worry at least a bit about exams. The vast majority of high schools do far less.Ībeles says that low-income students still suffer from academic pressure because of a narrow focus on testing and lessons irrelevant to their lives. My annual Challenge Index rankings, moving this year from Newsweek to, show that only 7 percent of high schools have AP participation rates higher than what would be achieved with only half of juniors and half of seniors taking just one AP course and test a year. But AP, like the college pressure that concerns her, is concentrated in only a few places. She tells interviewers she has heard that some suburban schools are dropping AP, when in fact the program is still growing and even altering courses to give students more of the depth and choice Abeles says they need.
She and her film blame Advanced Placement courses for some of the pressure. She doesn’t explain how average American teens, if they are really being dragooned into heavy studying, have shown no significant gains in reading or math the last three decades. She prefers to cite “our experience at screenings” as proof that we suffer from a “silent epidemic” of “pressure-cooker education” nationally, and not just in places like McLean, Winnetka or Brentwood. Even when tripled, that homework took less time than watching an episode of “Hannah Montana Forever.” (For the record: I’m dubious about the value of homework in elementary grades.)Ībeles and her film focus not on data but feelings, which are important, but some of us yearn for more. Daily homework for 6- to 8-year-olds increased on average from 8 minutes in 1981 to 22 in 2003. I pointed out that the annual UCLA Higher Education Research Institute survey of college freshmen shows about two-thirds did an hour or less of homework a night in high school.Ībeles replies: “The University of Michigan study you reference actually shows that the amount of homework assigned to kids age 6 to 9 almost tripled in the 1990s.” That’s true, but misleading.
#Education documentary road to nowhere tv
I cited time diaries collected by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research showing that 15- to 17-year-olds in 20 devoted about 3 ½ hours a day to TV and other leisure while their average time spent studying was 42 minutes. She agreed to have an e-mail discussion with me (the whole thing will be on my blog Friday) and did not waver when I challenged her notion that teenagers everywhere, not just the top 10 percent, were drowning in textbooks and term papers. Then the film goes haywire by suggesting too much homework is a national problem when the truth is that high school students on average are doing too little.Ībeles has spunk. It is a well-intended project that raises a vital issue, the harmful academic pressure on students in some college-conscious homes. Parents and students are flocking to schools and community centers where there have been more than 1,700 screenings in 47 states and 20 countries. Vicki Abeles’ film “Race to Nowhere: The Dark Side of America’s Achievement Culture” may be the most popular documentary in America without a theater distribution deal.
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