A Film Takes Aim at Pressures on Students and Finds a Ready Audience

In marked contrast, this looks like a totally misleading documentary, perpetuating the myth that U.S. students are overworked.  While this may be true for the top few percent of students, nothing could be further from the truth overall:

The homework tsunami has not hit my household yet. Extracurricular activities for my kids, 4 and 7, are practically nonexistent. So it was hard for me to understand why various people in my life were so excited about "Race to Nowhere," a documentary by Vicki Abeles of Lafayette. The film has generated a lot of buzz with packed pre-release screenings throughout the East Bay, the Peninsula and in Marin, where The Pacific Sun said it resonated with parents, students and teachers.

The feature-length documentary is in the same advocacy vein as "Food, Inc.," which takes a critical look at the food industry. "Race to Nowhere" takes aim at our educational system, the tests and pressures, that lead to stressed-out kids who are ill prepared for college and life. Students have responded to the pressure in a variety of ways, the film suggests, including cutting down on sleep, piling on the number of Advanced Placement courses, sometimes cheating, sometimes becoming depressed. Those who don't fit the mold of success just fade out. To get a sense of the film, see this Op-Ed video by Ms. Abeles in The New York Times.

A call to slackerdom? I wondered. The film is short on views that don't support its education-system-is-broken thesis. (No one in the country around to stand up for homework and the benefits of tests in assessing achievement and improving standards?) But the documentary has undeniably struck a nerve among many parents who have kids older than mine and are in the thick of schoolwork.

At the Piedmont High screening, which I attended, hundreds sat riveted as student after student complained about  stress. There was audible sniffling when the documentary told of the 2008 suicide of Devon, a Danville girl.

I guess the filmmakers didn't see the recent study (see www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/education/20wired.html), which shows that our children spend nearly 11 hours PER DAY (!) mostly messing around, including 7.5 hours daily in front of a screen, both up hugely in the past decade. 

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A Film Takes Aim at Pressures on Students and Finds a Ready Audience

By MICHELLE QUINN

http://bayarea.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/02/a-film-takes-aim-at-pressures-on-students-and-finds-a-ready-audience/?hp