Are schools turning students
into stressed-out grade hustlers?

Lew Armistead

(This article is based on Denise Clark Pope’s book “Doing School” and a presentation she gave at Stanford University, October, 2007.)

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(A photo from our 2007 Summer Leadership Institute.)

    Is society creating greater pressures among students today? Are high schools teaching students to cheat rather than learn? That’s the contention of Stanford University Researcher Denise Clark Pope in her book, “Doing School” How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic, and Medicated Students.

    Clark, a former high school English teacher who loved being engaged in learning when she attended school in the 1980s, bases her beliefs on a recent shadow study she completed with five sophomores and juniors in a respected California high school. Her goal was to see through the eyes of these teens how students feel about school. She hoped to discover what motivated them, which curricula they felt was most meaningful, and what they spent most of their time engaged in.

     Working with school administrators and teachers, she selected five “successful” students who agreed to allow her to shadow them throughout their school day during one semester. In addition to attending their classes, she would eat lunch with them and shadow them during many of their extracurricular activities.

     What she found were kids who were stressed out over grades. As one of the students said:

“People don’t go to school to learn. They go to get good grades which brings them to college, which brings them the high paying job, which bring them to happiness, so they think. But basically, grades are where it’s at.”

     Each of the five students had different motivations but all demonstrated the pressures students are facing. Kevin strove to balance his expectations with those of his father, who wanted him to study engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Kevin carried a calculator with him all the time and updated his GPA whenever he received a corrected test or quiz. He could report his weighted GPA at any given time.

     Eve had her sights set on a Harvard education and was taking every AP or honors class available. Additionally, she participated in 26 extracurricular activities to build her resume. In order to meet these commitments, Eve never sat down to have lunch at school. Rather, she carried a bag of cereal. She got home around 10 p.m. and studied usually until 3 a.m.

Teresa wasn’t taking AP classes but was equally as stressed. In addition to school, she was working 35 hours a week to provide money for her family. She took classes in the business program but soon realized that was perceived as a “dumping ground for discipline problems” and worried about how colleges would evaluate her high school program.

Michelle was “the drama queen” of the school and was truly engaged in that program. She started out taking AP and honors classes, but found that they cut into the time she wanted to spend in drama so signed up for easier classes. She told Pope, “Sometimes it’s better to be a little bored in class to be able to do something you really want to do.”

Roberto wanted to be the first in his family to attend college and prided himself on his sense of values. He didn’t play the grade game as much as the others but was stressed because he didn’t have grades as good as he wanted.

Pope found that the students were totally focused on “doing school,” their term for doing what they needed to do to get through the school day. There was a belief that if students didn’t get good grades so they could get into a good college, “they would be failures in life.”

   One of the key strategies was building “treaties” with adults at the school. These treaties allowed students to take short cuts to achieve their goals rather than become engaged in learning. Michelle, taking easier classes so she had time for drama, knew most of the material in her math classes. So, the teacher agreed that she would only have to come to class on test days. Kevin, during an especially stressful day, kicked a hole through the gym wall, an act which easily could have resulted in suspension. However, Kevin was skilled at making friends with adults, and one friendship he had cultivated was with the principal. He convinced the principal that he would pay for repairs and no disciplinary action was taken. Another student befriended one of the school secretaries who would finish typing the youngster’s papers when she didn’t have time to do it herself and also allowed the student to use the school’s phone and fax machines whenever she needed.

   The five students became skilled at “playing the game,” according to Pope. One developed the strategy to raise his hand in class every 10 minutes to create the impression that he knew the answers. He told Pope if he was called upon and didn’t know the answer, “That’s what BS is for; that’s how you play the game.” Another student xeroxed his Spanish textbook so that he could complete that homework in physics class without the teacher seeing the wrong textbook.

Cheating was rampant among the students Pope shadowed, and it went far beyond writing the answers to questions on ones hand or copying work from another student. If they weren’t prepared for a test, they would cut class so they could take it later after discussing test content with another student.

   “Students find it absolutely OK to copy others work,” Pope said. “It’s simply not cheating in their heads. There’s now a culture of cheating.” She called upon educators to clearly define what is acceptable and what is cheating.

   She also found that students will beg teachers for grades. They “talk up” teachers hoping to build a friendly relationship with them, then will ask for a few extra points to get from a B plus to an A minus.

   “This happens almost on a daily basis,” she said. “None of the students are proud of doing this, but they say, ‘If I don’t do this, it will hurt me in the long run’.”

   Pope reported that school is making teens into “robo students.” Even the students complained that “This school turns us into robots. We are just doing the work, turning the pages. School is lifeless.”

   The students Pope saw no longer had a social life. They “lived for weekends” because it was catch-up time. During one Thanksgiving break, one student’s parents complained that their youngster spent the vacation in her room studying. The parents said they wanted family time, but the student responded that would “hurt grades.”

   Students are also becoming damaged physically and mentally because of the pressure. While research shows that teens need an average of nine and a half hours of sleep a night, these youngsters are getting two to three hours because they are studying. Pope reports that Stanford professors are seeing an increase in the number of students using anti-depressants and high schoolers she saw regularly took No-Doz to stay awake at night.

   She believes that “schools are impeding that which they claim to embrace.” The pressure for grades is creating a culture of frustration, hostility and deception instead of one of integrity, honesty and engagement.

    One of the biggest problems is assessment that focuses on testing knowledge of facts and individual achievement over cooperation. She contends that the paper and pencil tests which most schools use do not reflect the type of assessment people will face in the adult world. But they do build greater pressure on high school students.

   “One student said if she didn’t get into the college she wanted, she’d end up flipping burgers for McDonalds,” Pope reported.

   Stanford has created the Stressed Out Students Project to help schools and parents find ways to make school more engaging and meaningful. More information, including how to become involved, can be found at www.stanford.edu/dept/SUSE/sosconference/.

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