DEC. 25, 2015 :: 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.
”What
is happening here reflects a national anti-intellectual trend that will
not prepare our children for the future,” Mr. Jia said.
About
10 minutes from Princeton and an hour and a half from New York City,
West Windsor and Plainsboro have become popular bedroom communities for
technology entrepreneurs, pharmaceutical researchers and engineers,
drawn in large part by the public schools. From the last three
graduating classes, 16 seniors were admitted to M.I.T. It churns out
Science Olympiad winners, classically trained musicians and students
with perfect SAT scores.
The
district has become increasingly popular with immigrant families from
China, India and Korea. This year, 65 percent of its students are
Asian-American, compared with 44 percent in 2007. Many of them are the
first in their families born in the United States.
They
have had a growing influence on the district. Asian-American parents
are enthusiastic
supporters of the competitive instrumental music
program. They have been huge supporters of the district’s advanced
mathematics program, which once began in the fourth grade but will now
start in the sixth. The change to the program, in which 90 percent of
the participating students are Asian-American, is one of Dr. Aderhold’s
reforms.
Asian-American
students have been avid participants in a state program that permits
them to take summer classes off campus for high school credit, allowing
them to maximize the number of honors and Advanced Placement classes they can take, another practice that Dr. Aderhold is limiting this school year.
With
many Asian-American children attending supplemental instructional
programs, there is a perception among some white families that the
elementary school curriculum is being sped up to accommodate them.
Both
Asian-American and white families say the tension between the two
groups has grown steadily over the past few years, as the number of
Asian families has risen. But the division has become more obvious in
recent months as Dr. Aderhold has made changes, including no-homework
nights, an end to high school midterms and finals, and a “right to
squeak” initiative that made it easier to participate in the music
program.
At
a packed meeting of the school district’s Board of Education held
shortly before the winter break, a middle school cafeteria was filled
with parents, with Asian-Americans sitting on one side and white
families on the other. Some parents and students described rampant
cheating, grade fixation and days so stressful that some students could
not wait for them to end. But other parents, primarily Asian-American
ones, described a different picture, one in which their values were
being ignored.
Helen
Yin, the mother of an eighth grader and a kindergartner, told the crowd
that Dr. Aderhold was attempting to hold her and her children back. At
one point, a visibly upset Ms. Yin, who moved from Chengdu, China, to
pursue a master’s degree in chemistry, shouted to the room filled with
parents, “Who can I trust?”
“I
don’t think limitations can help,” she said later, in an interview. “If
children are to learn and grow, they need experiences.”
Jennifer Lee, professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and an author of “The Asian American Achievement Paradox,”
says misunderstandings between first-generation Asian-American parents
and those who have been in this country longer are common. What white
middle-class parents do not always understand, she said, is how much
pressure recent immigrants feel to boost their children into the middle
class.
“They
don’t have the same chances to get their children internships or jobs
at law firms,” Professor Lee said. “So what they believe is that their
children must excel beyond their white peers in academic settings so
they have the same chances to excel later.”
The
issue of the stresses felt by students in elite school districts has
gained attention in recent years as schools in places like Newton,
Mass., and Palo Alto have reported clusters of suicides. West
Windsor-Plainsboro has not had a teenage suicide in recent years, but
Dr. Aderhold, who has worked in the district for seven years and been
superintendent for the last two and a half, said he had seen troubling
signs.
In
a recent art assignment, a middle school student depicted an
overburdened child who was being berated for earning an A, rather than
an A+, on a calculus exam. In the image, the mother scolds the student
with the words, “Shame on you!”
Further,
he said, the New Jersey Education Department has flagged at least two
pieces of writing on state English language assessments in which
students expressed suicidal thoughts.
The
survey commissioned by the district found that 68 percent of high
school honor and Advanced Placement students reported feeling stressed
about school “always or most of the time.”
“We need to bring back some balance,” Dr. Aderhold said. “You don’t want to wait until it’s too late to do something.”
Not all public opinion has fallen along racial lines.
Karen
Sue, the Chinese-American mother of a fifth grader and an eighth
grader, believes the competition within the district has gotten out of
control. Ms. Sue, who was born in the United States to immigrant
parents, wants her peers to dial it back.
“It’s
become an arms race, an educational arms race,” she said. “We all want
our kids to achieve and be successful. The question is, at what cost?”
Alexandra Markovich contributed reporting.
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