Conference looks at ways to help stressed-out kids
BY LISA TREI
Thirteen-year-old Jack Eastburn faced about 300 parents, teachers and secondary school students crowded into Cubberley Auditorium Friday night and announced that "cheating is rampant" at Jordan Middle School.
"Students cheat because they want to alleviate their stress and get good grades," the Palo Alto eighth-grader said in a deadpan voice. "We want to get good grades to please our parents." And gain entrance to a prized Ivy League school, he added.
Eastburn joined Anisha Gupta, a junior at Monta Vista High in Cupertino, and Jarreau Bowen, a Stanford freshman, to share their experiences as students in pressure-cooker academic environments.
The presentations opened a May 7-8 conference titled "SOS -- Stressed Out Students: Helping to Improve Health, School Engagement and Academic Integrity," co-sponsored by the School of Education and the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health. The event highlighted increasing concern that adolescents are compromising their health, personal values and commitment to learning as they try to cope with growing pressure to achieve in school.
Denise Clark Pope, a lecturer in the School of Education, said the conference grew out of a telephone conversation she had about 18 months ago with Doug Daher, a psychologist at Stanford's Vaden Health Center. Daher had read Pope's book, Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out, Materialistic and Miseducated Students. The 2001 book reveals how American high school students are being caught in a "grade trap" that makes future success dependent on high grades and test scores.
"Doug told me that Stanford was getting the aftermath of those students," Pope said. In 2002, compared with 2000, nearly twice as many students went to the center requesting help for mental health problems, including severe depression, she said. An increasing number of students were also being hospitalized, she added.
Doing School follows teenagers who will stop at nothing to become high school stars with the goal of gaining entrance to a good university. One of the students in the book told Pope: "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 brings them to happiness, so they think."
Gupta and Bowen confirmed that the pressure to succeed in high school exists.
"The problem at Monta Vista is that in order to be excellent, people have to be over-excellent," Gupta said. "Every Monta Vista student lives in fear they will go to De Anza," she added, referring to Cupertino's community college. "This stress causes normal students to do unethical things like cheating."
From seventh grade onward, Bowen recalled, success was judged by how many books a student had in his or her school bag. "By sophomore year, my friends' heads were buried in books," he said. "I was told that high school would be the best four years of my life. They weren't."
Deborah Stipek, dean of the School of Education, told the audience that everyone is part of the problem. "We're all overwhelmed by a culture and set of norms that seem totally out of control," she said. "School for many kids is not a place to learn but a place to perform. We need to begin to change the culture so our youth can take joy in learning."
On May 8, the conference organizers invited 15 local middle and high school teams of students, teachers, principals, counselors and parents to participate in workshops and develop an action plan to start changing the culture in their specific schools. The teams, which were paired with coaches from the School of Education, plan to reconvene in the late fall to discuss results, Pope said.
Richard Simon, principal of the Wheatley School, a competitive public high school in New York, said it is possible to institute change. "We need to reduce stress in an environment dripping with it," he said. Since last fall, his school has taken practical steps such as reducing the weight given to mid-term and final exams, instituting real vacations and reviewing practices regarding plagiarism and cheating.
"Beyond any specific steps we take, I believe awareness and acknowledgment of the pervasive nature of stress by all parties is the most important result," he said. "Living in a competitive world where happiness is equated with money and material possessions will only change through self-awareness and reflection."
Pope agreed that change must begin in the home and at school before the momentum touches university admissions offices. "We at Stanford have to do some serious looking at our admissions policy," she said afterward. "We're part of the problem."
