A Race to Nowhere: Jasper High School holds screening of controversial documentary

Plano parents, teachers and students converged on Jasper High School on Monday evening for a screening of Vicki Abeles' documentary, "Race to Nowhere."

Opening with applause, the documentary featured heartbreaking stories of young people across the country who have been pushed to the brink, and educators who are burned out and worried that students aren't developing the skills needed for the global economy.

Abeles, a lawyer and concerned mother living in California, turned to filmmaking after witnessing her own family struggling with the pressures her three children were facing in school. Determined to learn more about the culture of "hollow achievement and pressure to perform" that has invaded schools across America, her documentary, "Race to Nowhere," is a call to ensure that the education children receive allows them to reach their full potential.

After speaking to experts, Abeles said she was stunned to learn of the soaring rates of youth depression, suicide, cheating and dropping out. As she began speaking with students, families and teachers, she realized how widespread the problems were, how they crossed economic and geographic lines, and how powerless parents felt in the face of current education policies focused on high stakes tests and competitive college admissions.

"This problem was affecting millions of kids and yet it wasn't being talked about," Abeles said. "Several months into the development of the film, without any warning signs, a 13-year-old girl in our community committed suicide after getting a poor grade on a math test, adding urgency to the need for change."

Touching on issues such as cheating, stress-related illnesses, depression and burnout, "Race to Nowhere" is a call to families, educators, experts and policy makers to examine current assumptions on how to best prepare the youth of America to become healthy leaders in the 21st century. The documentary also included interviews from Abeles and her children, which reflect their own personal struggles.

Teachers interviewed in the documentary asserted the heavy emphasis on testing -- a product of the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 -- has caused teachers to push aside the things that actually get their students to think. Teaching has become simply preparing students for the next test, the measures of which are not even as accurate as the federal government would have them to be, Abeles said. Project-based learning has been foregone and replaced with this "testing craze," making it hard for teachers to make a difference. As one teacher said, "you can only fight the good fight for so long." For this reason, some teachers have left the profession, feeling an inability to personify the phrase "learning is power."

Educators and psychologists interviewed in the documentary said there is a collective push from parents and schools for each child to be the best of the best in order to get into college. With adolescence being hard enough as it is, they said, such treatment is stealing their childhood and is a "dehumanizing" way of "mechanizing them to be academic competitors."

"Everyone expects us to be superheroes," one student said.

"Childhood has become indentured to test scores, performance and competition," Abeles said. "We face an epidemic creating a generation of unhealthy, disengaged, unprepared youth trying to manage as best they can. We cannot wait for large institutions or the government to make the changes our kids need today, and political and corporate interests should not drive education. There's too much evidence that this system isn't working for any of our kids. Layers of change are needed, starting from the ground up."

While many children lose vital sleep hours due to homework overload, after-school tutors and extracurricular schedules, the rigors of school are no longer about learning, but simply about the next step, or what one student called, "the race to nowhere."

The documentary asserted that less homework is given in competing countries; if that is the case, one teacher said, then what is the purpose? One teacher decided to cut his homework in half and was pleasantly surprised to see the AP scores of t hose students increase, a correlation he says was due to the fact that the less homework lessened stress levels and allowed that child to live their life and experience the other enriching facets of childhood.

Everyone can be the best of the best at what they are good at, but not everything, said Amanda McClure, a coach at Academic Life Coaches in Dallas who attended Monday's screening.

"The main thing I learned, doing what I do, is that we are trying to fit every child into the same box," she said. "I think the No Child Left Behind Act has lot to do with it from the teacher end, but tests should not be a big, bad thing. They should be a tool used to see where a child is so we can get them to where they want to go."

McClure, a former middle and high school teacher, believes some of today's parental pressures stem from the materialistic culture of the late 1990s early 2000s, where success was measured by how big your house was.

"I think there's been kind of a shift in this because people are losing their jobs and houses, and we are starting to see that was not a good measure of success," McClure said. "But that's all they know so they're pushing their children, saying you have to have a good, high paying job so they can maintain this standard of living. As parents, we need to step back and treat our children as an individuals and ask them what they're interested in and are passionate about, and give them time and the opportunity to explore those interests and passions and see if they're going to be lucrative."

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