School's Out Forever

"The trouble with normal is it always gets worse."

— Bruce Cockburn


It's been a while since I've posted in this space, and for good reason: my kids graduated from high school last June, which means that our lives are no longer enmeshed in an education system whose flaws were the catalyst for many of my posts over the years. And although my daughters are by no means launched—one is in first-year university and the other is taking a gap year—I've been trying to pull back on the hands-on "parenting," as much for my sanity as for theirs. I've also been preoccupied with other things for the last year and half, things like working (or thinking about working) and sponsoring a Syrian refugee family. At the moment, I'm toying with starting a new, non-parenting blog (because, who says blogging is dead?), but before wrapping this one up, I wanted to offer some final thoughts on the end—and the ends—of high school.

Prom

The whole pre-and post-prom season was horrific, and I say that as a relatively uninvolved observer. It was worse than horrific for my daughters, both of whom participated reluctantly and afterwards wished that they'd taken me up on my offer to take them to Paris for prom week. From my perspective as a parent who skipped her own prom—called "the formal" back then, before the Americanization of every lower-key Canadian event—it was confirmation of my suspicion that everything or almost everything associated with education is getting worse, not better.

Worse, for instance, is the hype surrounding prom, and its sheer conventionality—how the girls stress (far more than I remember my girlfriends stressing about the "formal," and far more than the boys) about the outfit and the hair and the makeup and the promposals or lack thereof (although boys sometimes receive or fret about not receiving promprosals too—progress!). And how both boys and girls stress about the pre-prom parties and the pre-pre-prom parties, and how drunk they can or cannot get before prom, and how they're going to survive without being drunk, and which after-prom party they're going to attend and how they can ditch the date they wish they hadn't agreed to go with, without hurting his or her feelings. Worse also is how parents get conscripted into the madness by means of pre-prom events held by parents for the prom-goers and their parents. (What? When did this become a thing? Why?)

What bothered me most about the whole prom phenomenon is how conventional North American high schools (still!) are when it comes to thinking about ways to mark transitions such as the end of secondary school. Compare "prom" to the Norwegian tradition of russefeiring, a term that means "russ celebration," russ being the Norwegian word for the graduating class. Rather than staging nostalgic performances of 'fifties debutant balls, complete with strictly defined and still mostly enforced gender roles, Norwegian kids decorate buses and hold events and parties in and around them every night and weekend for nearly a month. While I can imagine that for introverted or non-partying types, this travelling carnival might induce its own anxieties, at least it is inclusive* and not predicated on tired, constricting gender norms. In fact, russefeiring allows and even encourages graduates to test and flout of all manner of societal norms, which seems like a healthier way to mark the transition to adulthood than a backward-looking dance that reinforces social conformity.

Nonetheless, in the end, the backward-looking dance that was my daughters' prom lasted only one night; my girls survived and were happy to have put it behind them. Mostly they were happy that it signalled that the four-year-long horror show of high school was also behind them.

Grad

Almost behind them. Because there was one final event that was also worse than I remember it being: graduation. Grad day managed, in the space of a few boring hours, to crystallize everything that is wrong with high school. Like high school in general, grad serves as a sorting mechanism for students, clearly marking out the winners and losers by means of the awards and honours bestowed, or very conspicuously not bestowed. The interesting thing is that although there were a few purely academic honours, a majority of the awards rewarded either sports excellence or "character" or both. Kids were singled out for having displayed "spirit," and though the term was never defined, it became clear from the comments of the teachers and administrators that "spirit" or "character" more or less equalled conformity to the school culture of competition, hard work (i.e., the ability to withstand the ridiculous pressures of contemporary high school), and—somewhat contradictorily—"teamwork."

In fact, the whole ceremony created a fog of cognitive dissonance that thickened and peaked during the valedictorian's speech. The teacher who introduced the valedictorian remarked that the first thing he noticed about her when she entered his classroom in Grade 9 was her competitiveness, which he clearly saw as her greatest virtue. In her speech, though, the valedictorian told an animal fable about cooperation and teamwork, which she analogized to her time in high school. The message, while sweet, was a little surprising given the context in which it was being delivered: a ceremony honouring a graduating class that had just finished tearing its collective hair out in a frenzied attempt to make the grades needed to ensure admittance to competitive universities. But what also struck me about the speech—and in this it mirrored the earlier speeches of the teachers and officials—was how apolitical it was (this in a year during which Donald Trump became president of the United States) and how unmoored from the reality of most kids' experience of high school. I don't know what I was expecting, and I'm not at all blaming the valedictorian: the truth is, she showed herself to be an exemplary product of the current secondary education system, equipped with precisely the kind of mindset regarding hard work, perseverance, and "teamwork" that for her, because she comes from the right school and the right socio-economic class, will yield the results regularly claimed for it. The problem for me was that in her speech, and in the doling out of award after similar award, the school's hidden curriculum—of conformity, hoop-jumping, and ranking—seemed to be clanging quite jarringly against the surface curriculum—of "critical thinking," hard work, and personal achievement. By the time it was over, I felt as if my head was going to explode.

The ceremony had a similar effect on my daughters. At one point, one of them whispered that to save time, they should have given one humongous spirit award to one prototypical kid, since the awards all seemed to reward the same traits. I do think, though, that my daughters were less surprised than I was by the banality and hypocrisy of grad. After all, they had been forced to sit through myriad similar speeches and ceremonies during their four years at the school. Afterwards, during the snapping of photos with friends and parents, they seemed dazed and detached, as if the reality of what had just happened had not yet sunk in. It was only in the car on the way home that they both finally expressed a sense of release and freedom. High school was over.


*Options that are less heavy on the partying are typically available to religious kids, or kids who don't drink, etc.

Hazardous High School?

Not long ago, while walking down Yonge Street, I overheard two girls talking. One stopped for a moment and grabbed her friend’s arm: “So grade 11, fuck! I’m actually going to have to work. Every. Single. Thing. Counts.”

My twin daughters have started Grade 11 this fall, so I’m familiar with the anxiety underlying this snippet of conversation. My daughters worked hard in Grade 9 and 10, but they, too, are feeling the extra anxiety of this year’s marks “counting” for their university applications.

As I look back to my own Grade 11 year—a year in which I worked, but not too hard, and managed to find time to read for pleasure and explore my own interests—I can’t help but feel sad for kids entering Grades 11 and 12 in 2015. The workload, the homework, the near-mandatory, resume-fluffing extracurriculars, the anxiety-inducing university application process—all of it is symptomatic of the kind of “rat race” we used to deplore for adults, and now accept as a normal part of modern (middle class) adolescence. The question I find myself asking is this: Do the benefits of the education my kids are receiving outweigh the costs to their mental health and well-being?

A pair of American studies that caught my eye a couple of years ago, and which I recently stumbled on again, suggest that the answer to this question may be “no.” The first is entitled “Hazardous Homework? The Relationship Between Homework, Goal Orientation, and Well-Being in Adolescence,” by Mollie K. Galloway and Denise Pope, from Lewis and Clark College and Stanford University, respectively. The second study, by the same research group, is called “Nonacademic Effects of Homework in Privileged, High-Performing High Schools.” Both are empirical studies consisting of large-scale surveys of kids’ attitudes towards and experience of homework. The authors claim that their research aims to redress a perceived lack of student voice on an issue that affects students directly. Though the studies have slightly different emphases and scopes, their findings are similar and can be summed up by the following points:

• Students in middle and upper-middle class high schools have too much homework—an average of 3 hours a night, with many doing 7 hours per night or more.
• Homework adversely affects teenagers’ physical and mental well-being; effects include insomnia, headaches, weight gain or loss, exhaustion, performance anxiety and excessive worrying.
• Students in Grade 11 have the most homework and report the most distress from their homework load, possibly because (in the US) it is the year of SATs and ACTs.
• Time spent on homework is positively correlated with higher grades, since homework is often graded, but not with “learning” or “enjoyment.”
• A significant majority of students surveyed said that they had dropped an extracurricular activity that they enjoyed, due to too much homework.

The researchers draw a variety of conclusions from their work—including the insight that the collected data belie the commonplace notion that “homework is inherently good”— and call for more research into the relationship between homework load and student well-being.

For me, the first question the studies raise is, do the American data reflect the Canadian experience? It’s difficult to answer this question with any accuracy because comparable Canadian studies do not exist. The closest is an Ontario-focussed 2008 study out of OISE that surveyed parents’ views on the issue of homework, but did not consult students directly. The results of this survey suggest that parents in the demographic most heavily represented in the study—middle class parents with incomes between $100,000 and $200,000 per year—believe their kids have too much homework; according to the data collected from parents in the OISE study, students in Grade 12 have the most homework, followed by students in Grade 11. At all grades, parents report, conflicts arising from homework negatively affect home life. A census conducted by the Toronto District School Board in 2011 also uncovered high levels of student anxiety over school work, but questions were worded in such a way that homework worries could not easily be isolated from general worries about school and life.

“Harder” statistics on homework in this country are few and far between and can be confusing to parents. For instance, an OECD report, drawing on data from the 2012 PISA results, states that Canadian 10^th graders spend an average of 5.5 hours on homework per week, a statistic that does not jibe with what I have experienced as a parent of high-schoolers who average two or more hours of homework per night. My experience, and that of other parents I know, is more in line with the results of the OISE study, which documented the ways in which heavy homework loads place undue stress on kids and families.

An explanation of the discrepancy between the OISE study and the OECD statistics can be found in the OECD report itself, whose purpose is to answer the question posed in its title, “Does homework perpetuate inequities in education?” The report shows that in every participating country, advantaged students spend more time on homework than disadvantaged students—in countries, like Canada and the US, significantly more time. So the Canadian average of 5.5 hours per week does not capture the reality of students attending schools in advantaged communities (whether the students themselves come from socio-economically privileged homes or not). The authors of the OECD report argue that time spent on homework is positively correlated with results on international tests like PISA; they conclude therefore that measures should be taken to reduce the disparities in homework loads. However, many homework researchers—Alfie Kohn, for instance—have pointed out that the correlations between homework and achievement are weak, that they hold only for older students, mostly for math homework, and only when the homework is not too burdensome. Even the OECD report notes that “evidence from PISA 2009 suggests that after around four hours of homework per week, the additional time invested in homework has a negligible impact on performance.”

Which leads me to a second question that the studies on homework stress raise: given the consensus among both detractors and advocates of homework that more is not better, and given the mounting evidence—explicit in the US studies and implicit in Canadian research—of the deleterious effects of heavy homework loads, why does excessive homework still seem to be the default at middle-class and upper-middle-class North American high schools? Why is it that homework policies (such as the Toronto District School Board’s) designed to rein in homework are routinely violated or simply ignored? A charitable answer might be that, while research on homework and achievement is abundant, research on the link between homework and student well-being is relatively new and, in Canada, difficult to find. The less charitable but more plausible answer is that school boards and administrators are aware of the studies on the harmful effects of homework but have chosen to ignore them. For, despite the lip service paid in recent years to issues of student mental health, there has been a conspicuous unwillingness on the part of ministries and school boards to confront the source of much student distress: school itself. Rather than considering the ways in which overstuffed curricula and ingrained pedagogies can overburden students with the sheer quantity of work, while often leaving them under-challenged intellectually (qualitatively), many policy makers and administrators have jumped on band-aid bandwagons such as mindfulness, thereby restricting the discussion to individual, versus systemic or institutional, problems and solutions.

But the American studies also lead me to believe that there is more to the endurance of the homework status quo than simple laziness or head-in-the-sand avoidance on the part of educators. Galloway, Conner and Pope explain their focus on “privileged, high-performing” high schools by observing that it is in these educational communities that the “accepted value of homework appears to be entrenched.” This observation reflects and to some extent explains the OECD statistics on class-based disparities in homework loads. But while the OECD report implies that such disparities are an unfortunate side effect of our socio-economic and education systems, the American researchers offer a deeper, more troubling explanation. In their analysis, unequal homework is not merely an epiphenomenon of socio-economic inequity, but one of its key drivers. They note that homework is itself a socio-economic sorting mechanism: since it is primarily in privileged homes that there are supports available to allow students to survive excessive homework, heavy workloads act as a leg up to the advantaged, while further disadvantaging the disadvantaged. In other words, students who can handle the homework are going to do better in school than those who, for reasons beyond their control, cannot. 

Beyond the immediate context of high school, the authors argue that training in the ability to spend long hours on work of dubious inherent value constitutes another advantage for students seeking to “advance in a competitive, achievement-focused society.” So if, as the authors imply, and as the OECD statistics confirm, homework loads are significantly lighter in less privileged communities, then students in those communities are being denied the competitive advantages that experience with heavy loads confers. The authors suggest that it is privileged parents’ tacit understanding of the ways in which homework advantages their children that renders many of them complicit in maintaining the homework status-quo, despite its cost to student well-being.

But what about the parent who thinks the costs of excessive homework are too high, the parent who would rather that homework not be used as a means of reproducing privilege, even if that privilege is his or her own? What is such a parent to do? For my part, I plan to talk to my kids about the research on the links between homework and well-being, including the fact that Grades 11 and 12 are particularly “hazardous” years in this regard. I will suggest that they do as much homework as seems reasonable to them, and I will advise them not to worry excessively about getting into the “right” university or about losing out on vaguely envisioned longer-term advantages. Such advantages may or may not devolve to them as members of a relatively privileged community. The advantages of less stress and more enjoyment in the here and now are much more tangible.