Original subtitles

- I can't really remember the last time I had a chance

to go out in the backyard and just run around.

- School's just so much pressure that every day, I would wake up,

and I would wake up dreading it.

- There's definitely been times when I've sat doing my homework,

you know, and then just started crying.

- Not eating made me have more energy,

and I could get so much stuff done at night,

but it still was not enough time to get everything done.

- My mom checked me into a stress center.

- You think you know your children.

I thought I knew my little girl.

- We definitely, at college, we still do whatever it takes

to get the A, Just like in high school.

- Things that actually get our students to think

are pushed aside.

- How come no one's insisting that it change?

♪ - When I was a child ♪

♪ Everybody smiled ♪

♪ Nobody knows me at all ♪

♪ Very late at night ♪

♪ And in the morning light ♪

♪ Nobody knows me at all ♪

♪ I got lots of friends ♪

♪ Yes, but then again ♪

♪ Nobody knows me at all ♪

♪ Very late at night ♪

♪ And in the morning light ♪

♪ Nobody knows me at all ♪

♪ And, oh, ♪ ♪ when the lights are low ♪

♪ Oh ♪

♪ With someone I don't know, ♪ ♪ oh ♪

♪ I know how you feel ♪

♪ No secrets to reveal ♪

♪ Nobody knows me at all ♪

♪ Nobody knows me ♪

♪ Nobody knows me ♪

♪ Nobody knows me at all ♪

- I came from a family where my parents were divorced.

My mother was a single parent

raising four kids on very little income.

That drove me to work really hard

so that I could be independent.

My mom taught me from a very young age

that an education was something

that would help you go far in life,

and it was something that couldn't be taken away from you.

"Good night, moon.

Good night, cow jumping over the moon."

When I had kids, I wanted to be a really good mom.

- Dada. - Yes, Shelby?

- Dada. - Yes.

- I wanted to provide my kids with the security

of a stable family,

and I wanted my kids to have a good education.

I wanted to give them

the opportunities that I didn't have growing up.

So what do you think? - It was fun.

- Was it good? - Yes.

- I also really wanted to have time together.

- Everybody wave.

What are you growing this year?

- Corn. - Corn? What else?

Pumpkins?

- To the sky.

- And that worked out well for a few years,

but as my kids got older

and the pressures on them from school were greater

and the time commitment

for extra-curricular activities increased,

it became much more complicated.

- Zakary.

Let's go. Let's go. Here.

- I didn't think when I had kids

that the only time I would see them

was for 20 minutes at dinner.

In all three of my kids, I started to see the toll

that the schedule and the stress was taking on them.

Our oldest daughter looks like all is fine.

She's doing really well in school,

but she doesn't have time to sleep at night

or to hang out with friends.

For Jamey, when she started seventh grade,

the workload really increased.

No matter how much time she spent doing homework,

she wasn't getting the grades that she expected.

In Zakary's case,

when he started fourth grade this year,

the homework level increased.

Every evening became a battle around homework.

Right now? - Yeah.

- Well, you need help 'cause you weren't doing it.

- No, I didn't! - Let him do it himself.

- Do your-do it.

- All three of my kids started complaining about headaches

from school or stomachaches,

or they would wake up in the middle of the night

worried about a test the next day,

and I didn't really know how seriously to take it.

At that same time,

a 13-year-old girl in my community committed suicide.

She was the exact same age as my oldest daughter.

When something like that happens,

you can't help but start worrying about your own kids.

I started checking more often on them.

There was a night where I found my daughter out of bed,

doubled over in pain.

Doug and I took her to the emergency room,

and after a series of tests,

the doctors concluded that her condition was stress-induced.

I wanted to understand what was going on.

I started talking to parents in my community, to students,

to experts, and visiting schools across the country.

I was determined to find out how we had gotten to a place

where our family had so little time together,

where our kids were physically sick

because of the pressures they were under,

and where a 13-year-old girl had taken her life.

- These kids are so overscheduled and tired.

We are always looking at the next step,

and this is what the kids say.

They say, "In elementary school,

I was worried about high school."

We've stolen 11th and 12th grade from them.

I'm afraid that our children

are going to sue us for stealing their childhoods.

- We're a New York City suburb, high-powered parents,

who are very competitive themselves, many of them,

and, you know, and they'll go to parties and things,

and they want to be able to talk about their kid

is going to be going to Harvard or the equivalent,

and I worry.

What happens when their kid is not going in that direction?

- You have a system that is trying

to further robot-icize students, mechanize them, if you will,

to be, you know, these academic competitors,

these producers.

The very nature of it in itself is very dehumanizing.

- I put so much pressure on myself.

- I definitely felt a lot of pressure to have perfect grades.

- The stress definitely first comes from home.

- Because my mother wasn't able to graduate,

she puts extra pressure on us.

- You need to have the best grades.

You need to be able to afford the college.

- My family is low-income,

so there's no way I could afford college without financial aid.

- Until senior year, I haven't had any free periods.

I haven't had lunch periods.

- I didn't want to take out loans, not for my family.

- When I was in middle school,

I would sometimes stay up till 1:00 in the morning.

- I would spend six hours a night,

at least, on my homework.

- It's not just your homework.

- I have soccer practice every day from, like,

after school to 6:00, and then from 6:00 to 8:00,

I have my outside-of-school practice.

- We're in so many different clubs.

- Now it's all about preparing yourself

to look good for colleges.

- High school is about learning how to pass tests.

- You try to stuff as much information

into your brain as possible,

then as soon as you're done with it, out it goes.

- You start out in, like, kindergarten.

- You have to get into the top schools.

- You have to take tests and do interviews

to get into public high schools.

- And then AP, and then a four-year college.

- If I don't get into college, you know,

my mind-set is basically, like, you know, I'm screwed.

- And then graduate school.

- Now, how are you gonna get into

a top-tier medical school or law school?

- And then what?

People get caught up in this, like, race to nowhere.

- I'm Jessica Vaughn,

and I'm a senior.

I just wanted to put it out there

to parents and teachers that the worst question

you can ask your child in high school is, "And?"

Like, they'll say, "I'm in three AF' classes."

"And?"

"Well, I do sports." "And?"

"Well, I work at the theater."

"And? Well, what else are you doing?"

"I'm in three clubs."

"Well, you know what looks really good?

"Community service.

"They're looking for all of this on college applications.

Why aren't you doing this, this, and this?"

And I find that that question comes up all the time.

Everyone expects us to be superheroes.

We need to be doing more.

Why aren't we doing more for our community?

We need to be doing more.

Why aren't you working harder in school?

And I think sometimes parents need to just step back and say,

"You know what? You've done a really good job."

- Some of the pressure that is out there is real.

If you want to have the same opportunities

that your parents had,

to attend those kinds of schools and all, you have to do more.

You have to have better test scores.

You have to have better grades.

You have to have more activities.

So there is definitely some part of the pressure

that's created by the demographic.

- I can't help it, I mean, you know,

when you start their freshman year

and you go to the orientation at the high school

and all they talk about is what is necessary

to get into college.

People are raising their hands and asking about AP courses and,

"How do you get into UC?"

I mean, you look around, and you think,

"I guess this is what everybody's gonna be doing."

- I think if you ask them,

they'd probably say that we did pressure them in some way,

because we did want them to have a choice.

That was my, you know, feeling as a parent,

that the better you do, the more choices that you have.

- I want them to be able to do

what I wasn't able to accomplish.

Me, as a young parent having four kids,

I wasn't able to go back to school

and get myself an education,

and so I want them to have the things

that I never was able to have.

- Even though we know better,

even though we know we shouldn't be pushing our kids,

inadvertently, we are, you know?

I'm just as guilty of saying to my daughters

when they get in the car, "So how was school today?

"Did you get your test back? Do you have any homework?

"How much homework do you have?

How are you gonna study for that test?"

Because I am also feeling the pressure

that they need to work really, really hard.

- We want the best for them, but that, in the end,

is causing us to put pressure on them

to be whatever we think they ought to be.

Even though we send them to all these sports camps

and all their private lessons and the tutors and the-

we would drop anything any time for our kids,

but in my mind, it's gone way to the extreme.

- We're all caught up in it.

We're all afraid that our children

won't be able to be as successful as we are.

- And so you have a fear from the parents that,

"My kid needs to be able to get a job.

"Okay, I got 'em in the accelerated program.

"That's the first step, but now they need to perform

and compete so they can get into a 'good school, “

And it's out of love.

It's out concern. It's out of fear.

It's out of all these things that parents normally have,

but it ends up turning kids into little professionals.

All: I Oh, light the candles I

I All around the world I

I Let them shine I

I Let them shine I

I Oh, let them shine I

- We live in a society today where, like,

oh, you have to be smart, but also, you have to be pretty,

and also, you have to, you know, do sports,

and you have to be involved in the arts,

and amongst all that,

you have to find something unique about yourself,

and you have to know yourself,

because if you don't know yourself

before you do all of that, you're gonna lose yourself.

- I have grown up in Oakland, California.

I'm 19 years old.

I went to a private school starting in kindergarten.

It was a very competitive, small school.

A lot of homework started probably around fifth grade,

but middle school started about an hour per class a night.

I participated in soccer, took tennis lessons,

went to Hebrew school three times a week,

plus the homework on top of that.

It was a very hectic schedule.

Home life in middle school was difficult.

It was the time when my parents and I had the biggest fights.

I was expected to get straight A's.

I had so much homework.

They would want to know when I had tests

and tell me to study for them,

and I wouldn't want them to know anything about my school life.

I figured out that not eating made me have more energy.

I would stay up later. It gave me insomnia.

So I wouldn't sleep at night.

I could get so much stuff done at night,

but it still was not enough time to get everything done.

In tenth grade, my anorexia flared up.

I had so much homework in tenth grade,

so many papers, so many projects.

I would stay up all night.

I remember coming up to my history teacher

the day my history final was due.

I came up to him crying.

I had a huge coffee in my hand, and I was sobbing,

and about ten other people did too.

I got very sleep-deprived.

When you are sleep deprived, your concentration is off.

Instead of taking notes and remembering everything,

you're kind of just staring off into space.

I was sent to a facility for eating disorders specifically.

I was admitted to a medical hospital twice.

When I returned to school in 11th grade,

my weight had plummeted.

The workload had increased,

and the head of the school told me

she did not want me coming back,

because she could not have students and teachers

worrying about me.

I was too much of a distraction.

Another high school was really hard to go into senior year,

so I took my G.E.D.

Good boy.

- The common force that drives kids

towards so many negative behaviors is stress.

It's coming from schools.

It's coming from colleges,

and it's coming from all the places

that it's always come from during adolescence.

Don't forget, adolescence is a tough time.

You know, you worry about what you look like,

what you feel like, what you act like to your peers.

The media tells you exactly what you're supposed to buy

to be acceptable,

what you're supposed to look like

and how you're supposed to think to be acceptable,

and you're trying to answer this fundamental question

of adolescence, which is, "Who am I?"

- I think it's captured by this girl that came into my office.

She's got all the great social skills,

but she's wearing a cutter T-shirt.

That's a T-shirt that's pulled low over the wrist

to hide cutting.

And by the end of the session, she sort of pulls it back,

and that morning, she had taken a razor

and incised the word "empty" into her forearm.

And she's emblematic, to me, of the kinds of kids

that I'm seeing more and more frequently,

and that's kids who look terrific on the outside,

terrific presentation, but you roll up their sleeve,

and metaphorically, and in her case, literally,

they're bleeding underneath.

- When success is defined by high grades, test scores,

trophies, we know that we end up with unprepared, disengaged,

exhausted, and ultimately unhealthy kids.

- I've gone through bouts of depression,

just because you feel so swamped.

There's so much work.

It feels like there's piles and piles of work to be done,

and it's all kept in your head,

and you don't know how to sort through it all,

and you don't ever think you're ever gonna get it done.

- Sometimes when I get stressed out,

I feel a little sick.

Like, I actually get headaches.

- Usually when stress gets really bad,

I get a lot of stomachaches.

- I think it was in November where I almost, like,

had an emotional breakdown, because at the end of November,

that was when UC's application was due, November 30th,

and I was also applying for a scholarship.

I wasn't eating.

I wasn't even taking care of myself.

You care so much about getting in,

about making people proud of you

and living up to that expectation

and that standard that, like,

you start neglecting yourself, your health.

Everything gets focused on that piece of application

that you're putting in for people who never meet you.

- I was really stressed, and I- all my joints swelled.

- In sixth grade last year,

I had a lot of homework one night,

and it got really late, so my mom told me to go to bed,

but I thought my teachers would get really mad at me

if I didn't finish my homework,

so I woke up in the middle of the night to finish my homework.

- These kids are growing.

They need 9 to 11 hours of sleep in elementary school.

The high school kids are still growing.

Some of them get six hours of sleep

because they're taking six AP classes.

It is a form of neglect of the children

that they don't get enough sleep.

- I visited a high school once that had a drug problem.

Well, I assumed it was recreational drugs

like I knew about in my youth,

but no, I'm talking about stimulants and things like that

that help you stay up all night

or tranquilizers that help you come down

after you've been taking too many stimulants.

Those are the kinds of problems that we're seeing on the rise.

- I took Adderall my first time as a junior.

I knew a lot of people that took it,

and I would ask them for it every once in a while.

It seems like everyone has ADD now,

so most anyone you talk to knows someone that takes medicine.

I was a really well-rounded person in high school,

and it's hard to be the vice president of your class,

play on the soccer team, and do homework.

It made me feel focused and almost better,

because, "Look, I can keep up with everyone now.

I come to school, and my homework's done."

My senior year, I started doing it a little more,

'cause it was easier to get; all of a sudden, my-

I couldn't breathe as well,

and it was hard to catch my breath,

and I'd be trying to breathe, and it was scary.

Like, I'd be sitting there trying to catch my breath.

I couldn't fall asleep at night.

- I've often wondered. I mean, why am I doing this?

I'm doing this so I can go to college and get a job I like,

ultimately so I can be happy, but if I'm not healthy,

then none of that really matters.

Why am I-it just doesn't really seem to add up.

- We do have a sense that both depression and anxiety

are rising among adolescents,

and if we're seeing it in childhood, you know,

if we're seeing the stomachaches and the headaches

that clearly are related to stress in childhood,

then what do you think they're seeing in adulthood?

You know, this translates into the same stomachaches

and the same chest pains,

but it also translates into high blood pressure

and heart disease,

and all of the other manifestations of stress.

- We do an awful lot of talking about kids who are stressed

and are working too hard,

but we sort of forget that there are just as many, if not more,

kids who have taken a look at this crazy system and said,

"I'm not interested in this."

I think we lose boys in particular,

because boys tend to act out, and we lose girls to depression.

- Ever since middle school, basically,

I've felt bad about school,

because I don't like to disappoint people.

You feel bad about yourself. You feel guilty.

You stay up at night.

I remember this all too clearly about not doing homework

and coming home from school and being like, "I'm sorry, Mom.

I didn't do homework," And I would cry.

- I felt basically like a prison guard,

that I had to constantly be asking,

"Did you do your homework?

Are you done with your homework?"

I personally felt a lot of anxiety

about what they were supposed to be doing.

Sam had trouble with school, really, from the very beginning.

He struggled through elementary school,

and he also struggled through middle school.

He always was at grade level or above,

but I think the struggle was always just the homework.

- Last year was gonna be my redemption year.

I took a bunch of hard classes, and I was like,

"I'm gonna pass all these classes."

- And so we would have heart-to-hearts

at the beginning of every year,

at the beginning of every semester.

"I'm gonna work harder this time.

I'm gonna do it. I promise."

- Halfway through the year, I was like, "This is ridiculous.

Like, no student should be put through this much work,"

and I dropped some of the classes.

Really, the only thing that kept me in high school

was the sport wrestling, because I've been wrestling

since my freshman year, and I just fell in love with it.

Wrestling was a very intense sport.

Like, last year, l weighed 160,

and I cut down to 145 pounds,

but that means, every day, you're starving.

Every day after practice, you don't get to drink.

You stand on the scale, and you're looking at the number,

and you're like, "Do I get to drink?

Do I get to have a piece of lettuce tonight?"

The school is like,

"You're dedicating your whole life to your grades."

And then the sport is like,

"No, you're dedicating your whole life to us."

- I started to understand more and more

what was actually going on with him and that,

you know, it just wasn't physically possible

for him to do the work.

Not that he wasn't bright enough.

It's just-that type of work,

hours and hours of sitting still just wasn't gonna work for him.

- I have school for seven hours. I get out of school at 3:10.

I go to my sport until probably, generally around 7:00.

I come home tired, wanting to go to sleep,

and then I got to stay up till 12:00 or 1:00

to finish all my homework and then wake up the next day

and do it all over again.

Yeah, eventually, school was so bad

that the negatives outweighed the positives

of being at the school just to wrestle,

and I couldn't do it anymore,

so I left that school, and I left the sports team.

- When you have students

that just have three hours of homework,

four hours of homework after soccer practice or after work,

and they're gonna have that every night,

and they have weekend homework, and it's all-

their whole future is on the line at that moment,

it's no longer about learning.

- Jamey has always been such a lighthearted,

fun kid with a great sense of humor.

She always loved school up until fifth grade.

- The last time I was really excited to go to school

and excited about learning was in fourth grade.

When we got to middle school,

I think expectations changed a lot.

- In sixth grade, the workload increased.

She would come home to hours of homework.

I started noticing that she was really, you know,

a duck trying to paddle as quickly as she could

to keep her head above the water,

and she wasn't having a really easy time.

- It's ironic,

and here's the thing that not everybody understands.

The countries that outperform us,

many of them, on the international tests,

actually give less homework than we do here in the United States.

There's almost no correlation between academic achievement

in elementary school and homework.

When you get to middle school, there's a slight correlation,

but anything that you're doing after an hour,

pretty much, that correlation fades.

And in high school, there is a link,

but really, we see a fallout after two hours.

So you have to look at the options of homework and say,

"What is developmentally appropriate?

"What can these kids handle?

"And what is the purpose of homework?

Why are we doing it in the first place?"

We have parents who do their homework for their kids.

We have parents who edit their kids' homework.

We have parents who correct their kids' homework.

If the teacher is using homework as a gauge for understanding,

that's not gonna work.

- I know you had a Japan quiz,

'cause you made me quiz you last night, so we know that's-

a large part of our time every evening is trying to manage

all three kids getting their homework done.

That's the question every night.

- So you do-finish this one and do your math page,

and then that'll leave you-

- And last night, you know,

my wife had to leave for a couple hours,

and my youngest was supposed to be doing homework,

and I wasn't quite aware of it, and so when she came home,

she asked him if he had done his homework, and he hadn't,

and so immediately, I mean,

the minute she walked in the door,

we were having to discuss

whether he did his homework or not.

You know, I get pulled into it.

I should have been aware and maybe applying the pressure

for him to have done it and done it well,

and we ended the evening with some turmoil about-

surrounding homework.

- This is what you do is, you have a mock one that you-

- At what point did it become okay for schools to dictate

how students live their lives once the bell rings?

Because that's sort of a private time.

That's family time.

There's some weird, interesting,

like, molecular communication here.

When I first started teaching AP biology,

the first thing I did was, I cut the homework load in half,

and what happened to the AP scores?

They went up.

Now, that's very telling.

When you cut homework in half and AP scores improve,

what's the value of the homework?

- So there's a couple of things that drive homework

at different grade levels.

There are the standards, and literally,

there is so much content to teach that the teachers feel

that they have to then load up the homework

to try and get that content across.

Parents expect homework.

It's going to seem like you're not doing your job as a teacher

if you say, "No homework today."

Parents need to educate themselves

about the fact that homework

is not going to make their kids any smarter.

The schools have our kids for seven hours a day.

That should be plenty for them to impart the kind of knowledge

that they want to do,

and then the kids should go home,

and there's so much more to a child's life

than just what's going on in school.

There was kind of a real lull period in homework

that went from the 1900s almost up to the 1950s,

and at the same time, the labor laws were changing.

Those two things went together very nicely,

and kids started to have more of a childhood.

And then there was Sputnik, and all of a sudden,

we were falling behind in the space race.

And then it kind of faded out again, which makes sense,

because when you think about what this country was like

in the late '60s and early '70s,

it was much more of a free-thinking time

and a big change of social ideas.

The upswing in homework has been going on since about 1983

with A Nation at Risk, but I think the level got upped

after the passage in 2002 of No Child Left Behind.

- So the principle behind the No Child Left Behind Act

is to set high standards, believe every child can learn,

and measure to see if we're getting results.

- This overwhelming feeling came down

from the federal government, from the state saying,

"No, no, no, we need to push our kids academically,

because we're not competing with other countries."

So all of a sudden, they're being forced

into this one mold that we never, ever had had.

- Our students don't do well compared to many other nations,

particularly in science and math,

primarily because the way we teach science and math

is to prepare for the test.

- When American students encounter questions

that are not just like what they've seen in their class,

they fall apart, partly because the strategy for teaching math

in the United States tends to be more formulaic.

- So Wilson's 14 Points offered these groups

the premise of self-determination.

When you did the review sheet,

this is something that was on there

that I just gave the answer,

but this is gonna be on your test,

so you should know about it.

- No Child Left Behind, what we know is,

the measures don't necessarily measure

what they're supposed to measure.

It becomes literally just drowning in content,

and the teachers are cutting out things that they know

to be very developmentally appropriate or very successful,

like project-based learning.

Wonderful projects,

we no longer teach them, because they're not on the test,

and everything becomes about the tests.

- We're told, "Either you do it, or you don't have a job,"

And we've just kind of gone with the flow, because our job,

our bonus money was based on our test scores.

If your kids did well, you got bonus money from the state.

Well, you know, everybody pushes,

because it means a bonus check.

- One of the craziest things about No Child Left Behind is,

like, so your school's doing a bad job,

so we're gonna give you less funding

and less time and less support.

So these fairies are arguing, and all of a sudden,

winter's turning into spring, and spring's turning hotter,

and so what does that tell us about those two?

Ah, they're sort of powerful, right?

These fairies have some power.

I grew up in the Bay Area. My dad was born and raised here.

So I feel very tied to Oakland. I always knew I wanted to teach.

I went to graduate school. I found a program at UC Berkley.

You get your masters and credential at the same time

in two years, so l joined that program.

This was the school that hired me.

I just really dove right in and loved it.

I wanted to teach social justice,

and I wanted to really change the system

and change these kids' lives

and get them to see learning as a lifetime skill

that's important for them to move out of their

sort of socioeconomic strata,

and it's really hard to do in education today.

I mean, I pretty much was, you know, fighting

and was working hard and was feeling like

I was making a difference, but it's gotten harder

and harder to feel like I can teach the things

I believe in versus be a yes-man and sort of do what all the-

what the district and the state-

and, you know, federally, all the pressure's on us.

Demetrius ditches Helena in the forest,

where she finds Lysander.

The standards very much go along with the testing

and this whole idea that, you know, there's certain things

that kids need to know.

I believe that one of the main things

we are doing in schools is socializing,

and the jobs don't necessarily need you to know

how to use a semicolon.

They need you to be a critical thinker.

They need you to be a problem solver.

They need you to be-you know,

be able to work in groups with other people.

So things that actually get our students to think

and work together and care are pushed aside.

What's happened more and more with No Child Left Behind

and the testing craze is, instead of, you know,

professional developments

or making teachers more accountable

or working on getting rid of the teachers

who don't actually do any teaching,

they decided that they need to give more tests.

These tests that they do horribly on,

it's not related to my curriculum.

You're testing them on their culture,

and they are from a different culture

than this testing culture.

- CAHSEE is basically a test that determines whether or not

you will get a diploma for high school,

and I feel like I have set many goals for myself,

which is to graduate from high school

and go through college and become a lawyer.

I'm really thinking about Harvard.

I'm really trying.

I've been getting 4.0s for three marking periods already,

and so hopefully I can keep that up,

but when I heard about this CAHSEE test,

I became really nervous,

because I felt like this CAHSEE might, you know, end my dreams.

- My philosophy was, you know,

to get these kids to love learning,

to get them to see learning as power, you know?

Learning as power.

Like, if you want to have power in your life

to do whatever you want to do, you have to be a learner.

You have to read the paper. You have to care.

From day one, it was very clear

that that is not what the district wants me to do.

If you aren't teaching things that you love,

you cannot do this job.

- Wake up.

- So what's gonna happen now?

- He's gonna fall in love with her.

- Oh, okay, Lysander. Wake up lovingly.

I realize that my educational philosophy

and what I believe is just and efficacious.

I couldn't reconcile that with all the inefficiencies

and what the district believes I should be doing.

I just couldn't make that balance

and felt like the fight of that is just killing me.

It's sucking the life out of me.

I ended up resigning,

but it's been the hardest decision of my life.

I've always been a teacher.

I've always wanted to be in East Oakland,

and I love these kids.

I mean, one of the things that I never knew

about teaching was, I'm a mother.

I'm a friend.

I'm a mentor, and I don't want to leave them,

and, I mean, I see these kids more than their parents

half the time, because I'm with them every day,

and because I'm an English teacher,

they do all this writing for me,

and so I learn about their lives

and their fears and their beliefs,

and I don't want them to feel like I've just given up on them.

- Clearly, the first thing we need to improve education

in urban schools,

in schools that are serving students

who are economically disadvantaged

is greater equity, because right now,

students in more affluent communities

are going to schools that have more resources

than students who are in low-income communities.

It doesn't make sense to me that we don't invest up front

and then are willing to pay the costs through prisons,

welfare, health costs, and all the other ways

in which individuals suffer and society suffers

when we don't invest up front,

but I don't think the problem is really just with kids

in low-income schools.

I think the United States really needs to rethink

how we do schooling and how much we want to invest

in our next generation.

One of the things we know from research is,

it's the quality of the teaching that matters most.

I think countries that understand that

and have invested in quality teaching

are the ones that are killing us

on these international comparisons.

In Singapore, just as an example,

the government selects the top 20% of their high school class

and offers them a full ride, basically,

and a stipend to be trained to be a teacher.

It's very high-status, and there's no opportunity cost,

whereas in the United States, you have to go a fifth year,

and you have to pay tuition,

and you forgo a year of being able to work,

so the financial cost is quite great,

yet the financial reward is very small.

- Okay, so imagine you've got a long sequence of numbers.

Being a math teacher is something I always wanted to do.

I got close to adulthood and said,

"Wow, my life is really gonna be hard if I choose to do this."

How is that possible?

And you can only do it for the love of it for so long.

You can only fight the good fight for so long

if you feel that you don't have any reinforcements behind you,

that culturally, that financially, societally,

the fact that we don't have as great respect for our teachers

as we do for some other professions means,

well, why should I go on doing this thing

if it's clearly not very valued?

I do love this thing.

I do want to do this thing, but I'm gonna have to find a way

to do it on my own terms,

because the most popular way to do it is a way

that's gonna burn me out inside of five years,

like it does for most teachers,

so I became a private tutor.

- The tutoring industry is a multimillion-dollar industry,

and when I say tutoring, I mean individual private tutors,

but also the enrichment programs

like Kumon and Sylvan and the learning centers,

and sometimes this starts really young,

like with Brilliant Babies,

and the problem is this, what you're sending the message

to the kid is, "You cannot do this alone.

We need to help you."

- So what unit is this first mark?

- One.

- Good, and what's the value of the second one?

- The reason that kids are seeking tutors

is because we are teaching the majority of our kids

as if they were in the top 2%.

You'll see that at every level.

Everything has been pushed down, and we're really putting kids

under a great deal of pressure to be there.

When the kids feel like they're under pressure,

the parents are even worse.

They feel a huge amount of stress.

"Is my child where they should be?

What's everybody else doing?" There's a huge worry.

- Zakary started feeling at the beginning of fourth grade

like he was disappointing his teachers,

like he wasn't measuring up to what they were expecting of him.

- He started developing headaches and stomachaches.

There were nights that he came home this year

with math homework that I could not help him with.

It was clear that he was getting really frustrated.

It was suggested that he start working with a tutor,

but he spends seven hours a day at school,

and then we're asking him to do more sitting at a desk

after school with a tutor

and then to come home to another hour or two of homework.

That's not how I want to see

Zakary spending his young years,

but I didn't want Zakary, in fourth grade,

to convince himself that he wasn't good at math,

and my worry for him is that, if, at age ten,

he's already convinced himself that he's not good at anything,

how is he going to get back to a place where he's excited

about learning and where he feels confident

in his abilities?

- So you multiply by three, so what's it gonna be?

How many groups of three?

- Mmm...

I'm not sure yet.

- My worry is he'll rebel and he'll check out,

as so many of the boys that I've met have done.

- When I want to school, a very small number of kids

were expected to be really super smart,

and they went on to great colleges.

Now every kid is expected to be that way.

That's just not the way it works.

There's a bell curve, and smart has many different meanings,

so there's academically smart,

there's kids who are incredibly creative.

There are kids who are totally hands-on kinds of kids,

and we're ignoring this great group of kids

because we're so focused on this narrow group

of highly achieving kids,

and we're trying to turn them all into that.

- We know it's absolutely developmentally appropriate

for some kids not to be proficient readers

until the end of first grade, beginning of second grade,

but we have schools now who are told they must have kids

proficient in reading by the end of kindergarten

or they go to a mandatory literacy camp.

You can send them to literacy camp,

and they can get completely turned off to reading

because they are literally not ready.

- Even younger, you know.

When you're doing flash cards with your six-month-old...

- Good job.

- Your six-month-old is supposed to be

sucking on his toes and thumbs, and there's reasons for that.

It's not just mindless work. It's learning about their body.

All along the way, we're missing the developmental tasks

with this tremendous preoccupation with performance.

- This issue of perform and produce, perform, produce,

produce, produce, produce, perform,

produce leaves out processing.

- Because of how much pressure and how much stress

is put on getting that A

so that you can get into an Ivy League school,

people don't know how to deal with that besides,

like, cheating.

That's what they have to result to,

because you're getting, like, five hours of homework a night,

and you just can't- you can't do it.

- We have a study where there's eight different ways

to cheat on our study.

Copying homework is one of them,

cheating off of a test, plagiarism, et cetera.

In our study, less than 3% of the 5,000 students

have never cheated.

- Cheating has become another course.

You learn how to do it from 9th to 12th grade,

and it continues, and you get better at it.

- I ended up getting a B in a class, and then I cheated,

and it really ended up backfiring on me,

but a lot of people- and I learned my lesson,

because I was caught and et cetera,

but a lot of people in this school aren't caught,

and there is a very high level of cheating going on.

- Kids cheat for a lot of reasons.

Most of the time, it's because they have too much work to do

and too little time to do it,

or the pressure on them is so great,

they feel like they need to get the grade by hook or by crook,

but we also have kids who are cheating

because they think the teacher doesn't care.

"It's busy work.

Why can't I just copy my homework?"

- How are you expected to learn?

Like, how do you expect us to do well

when you can't even make mistakes?

And it just motivates you to cheat more.

- We're producing children who,

all they know how to do is cut corners and cheat.

I mean, look around at the business world

and what we've done, okay,

because we were cutting corners and we were cheating,

and we're gonna pay the price for it.

We are paying the price for it,

financially, right now in the country.

- The point of education is to learn, not to memorize.

That's when you have to resort to cheating or stressing,

you know, your sleep and sacrificing your love to eat.

You're just molding yourself and buying into the thought

of being a better worker,

that I'm teaching myself to be able to live without sleep,

to be able to live without eating,

to be able to live with some bald guy yelling at me

to do his work.

I've got this message where because I'm black

and because I'm living under the poverty line,

you know, there's so much expected of me to excel

and try to be more mobile in terms of status in society,

you know, and that too much is riding on my grades, you know?

That outside of sports, education's the only way I can,

you know, earn money, and, you know, live a happy,

you know, American life.

Yeah, there goes me being funny again.

This is my older brother Justin, my older sister Courtney,

and my little sister Ashley.

There's me, my second oldest brother Cameron,

who's actually in the military right now.

I think he's serving a tour in Iraq, and my mother.

Middle school, I was, like,

the dude to go to if you needed help with your math work.

Like, I was a 4.0 student.

But now that you come to high school,

it's been really hard in high school.

It's been really hard.

My counselor said, "if you want to be competitive,

"you know, if you want colleges to look at you, you know,

taking the AP classes is a big thing on your transcript,"

and the transcript is almost as if it's a resume for us.

You know, going to college is like a job.

The harder my classes are,

not only does it mean the more looks I will have

but also the wider range

of scholarships I can apply to, you know.

Being an African American

and taking AP classes is what people are looking for.

People want to give money to me and colleges want to accept me,

'cause they, especially in California,

are having a model of being, you know, diverse campuses.

In the past four years...

I've done a lot of cheating.

The homework given by AP or honor classes is time-consuming,

so you can't stay up, you know, 11:00, 12:00,

1:00 in the morning doing homework each night.

I know that I want the A, I want that B,

I want that 3.5, that 3.8, that 4.0, and then this year,

I'm now taking an AP government class,

and I've gotten a D every marking period,

and even though it's bad to see it, it's all me.

When I got that D, I couldn't cope.

I wanted to get out of the class so bad.

I felt so ashamed.

And I wouldn't say I wanted to resort

to dropping out of school,

but I was really close to not caring anymore.

Existentialism means pertaining to existence

or it can also apply to a vision

of condition and existence of man.

Well, right now, we are at Youth Radio,

one of the studios broadcasting the show

that I co-host with my friend.

Youth Radio is a media-based nonprofit organization

that provides youth such as myself an outlet

to voice our opinions and thoughts.

We have another break.

I'm gonna try to come on

and deal with this and get back to you guys.

Doing Youth Radio for about 18 months, and I love it.

The biggest challenges for me going from high school

into college would be financial,

whether or not I can afford college

and whether or not I'm academically prepared,

and I just have a fear that I'll spend all this money

just to fail, you know?

That I'm gonna be at a high level of learning

and not be prepared to... be there.

- In order for students to have a more valuable experience

from their high school years,

they're gonna have to decide, you know,

"I don't need to take five AP classes.

"Here are some classes I'm really interested in taking.

"I'm gonna take AP English

because I really enjoy literature."

A majority of my students will sign up for my AP biology course

because they get a GPA boost on their transcript.

The course is a runaway train.

There's no way we can cover all of the material in one year.

It's impossible.

What do we do? We go as fast as we can.

And the students absorb some of it, maybe.

- High school now has become preparation

for the college application, not even for college,

just the college application.

And it creates a mentality

that was expressed very well by my daughter.

After her French AP test, she said,

"I never have to speak French again."

- I don't think what I'm learning

will help me that much in my college classes.

I think that college is gonna be a place where I start to learn.

- I'm never really thinking hard

about the meanings of any of this.

I'm just thinking about how to get done.

- Because the standards are organized

in sort of component skills,

they often lead to teaching which is very fragmented,

sort of compoted teaching.

"We can check this off now. We've done this in the class."

It also reinforces

what Americans are often criticized for

in their education system, of having an education system

that's a mile wide and an inch deep.

Whereas, if you really think about what adults need

to be successful in life,

it's not knowing a whole bunch of things.

It's really having critical thinking skills

and analytic skills, being able to learn.

- I've been teaching graduate school

and medical school and dental school for over 30 years.

In the last decade or so, they have this entitlement

that they need to know exactly what's gonna go on the test

and not have to think about anything beyond that.

So what is that going to mean

when we have a whole population of dentists and doctors

who've been being trained from a script?

How are they going to approach new diseases

as they emerge in our populations?

How are they going to diagnose people

who have the nontraditional, non-scripted kind of illnesses?

- We've created a couple of generations now

that have grown up in a world of training wheels,

and when you always have training wheels on your bike,

you don't have this opportunity to fall off

and realize that you can pick yourself up

and dust yourself off and you're gonna be okay again.

- Fire it in there. - Kick it low. Kick it low.

- They have been coached from the time

they were very, very young.

They were coached by T-ball coaches,

by their soccer coaches.

They have been coached by their parents.

They have been coached by their teachers,

and in my experience, they are very much looking

for their employers to provide the same levels of coaching.

- Make sense? Okay. So anything else?

- I'm sure there will be. - Okay. Yeah. I'm right there.

- Thank you very much. - No problem.

- The longer I was a lawyer,

I felt like the kinds of newer lawyers

that were coming into the office or the kinds of students

who were my interns didn't seem to have

the same kind of thinking skills as the ones from years earlier.

They seem to be so focused on, "How many cases do you want,

"and how many paragraphs should I write,

and what should I cite?"

rather then going out there and saying,

"This is the problem,

and how am I gonna find the answer to the problem?"

- Kids are our future.

These are many of our leaders, and without creativity,

they're not gonna be prepared to lead us,

and the bottom line is that what creates the opportunity

to be innovative is to say,

"I'm gonna think outside this box,

"and if I get a C, that's all right.

Maybe he just doesn't get it yet."

Maybe he just doesn't get it yet."

- We are known for being innovative thinkers,

and I think it's because we had time,

or we used to have time as children to be bored,

and it's really important just to have that downtime.

- Every minute of our kids' days are scheduled.

They go from spending their days in school

to their structured activities after school

to hours of homework in the evenings.

The only unstructured time seems to be the time

they spend on their computer.

I worry about the addictive nature of the time

they're spending on the computer,

and I worry about the isolation.

- If we take play away from childhood,

we're taking away the very tool that has always worked

to have kids figure out how to exist in the adult world.

- Play is children's work.

Play for older children teaches them the rules of the game,

teaches them that all structures have rules around them.

Play is just a critical part

of a growing mind and a growing body.

- I feel like I've missed out on a lot of my childhood

because I've been inside doing homework

instead of being able to go out and play in the street,

draw on the street with chalk, and I think that's sad.

I think that the teachers

are slowly taking away your innocence,

and what you have as a child, you're not gonna ever, you know,

have a chance to get back.

- I think what's happening to kids these days is,

they're not being allowed to find what it is

that they love to do, and it's really important,

because we're driven by our passions.

To be successful,

you have to really, really love what you're doing.

- If you're four and you're resume building,

if you're eight and you're resume building,

you lose all of that time,

the wonder, the joy of childhood,

which should be full of zest and adventure

and, you know, sort of a joie de vivre,

and I think it's lost for these kids.

- A lot of people say that you have to do well now

so you can get into a good college someday,

but I'm in third grade, so I have a long time.

- We don't have time for you to be a child.

We just don't have time. You're playing.

No time for play. It's about business.

You have to get into a good school.

No school other than a good school is gonna be good enough.

- This is a numbers-driven society.

We have ratings of all of the colleges,

and those ratings are largely driven by numbers.

- Every school has to have a good yield.

They have to show their donors, you know,

so that their endowment continues to grow,

that they are recruiting amazing kids.

- College now is more competitive

than it has ever been, partly because we have a bulge

of the children of the baby boomers.

They are in a very competitive situation,

but they don't have to make students feel

like they have to go to Stanford to be happy or Yale or Harvard

or some of the other handful of schools.

It's like going through the eye of the needle

to get into these schools now.

- For those who don't get into their dream school,

that rejection letter is like death.

If you don't get into a four-year university

and you're going to a junior college instead

or a community college, it's, like-

there's such a stigma around that.

It's like you're not good enough or...

- You're stupid. - You're not rich enough.

- The world is really run by C students.

You start looking at top CEOs across the country,

and few of them were from top schools.

Few of them were the top grads.

They're just people who were very, very persistent.

- The notion that there is a best school,

it goes against everything

that educators and psychologists and psychiatrists know.

There is no best anything. It's a match between children.

- College is really, at this point in time,

it is big business, and I think that colleges

have gotten so savvy and have really become major companies

that are selling their wares and their goods to kids,

because the more kids apply to schools,

that's going to increase a school's reputation.

Now we have over 48,000 students who are applying,

and we're only gonna accept 12,000

to enroll about less than half of that number.

The average weighted GPA is a 4.35,

but the average unweighted GPA is a 3.87,

so I say that to tell you, of course,

we're gonna always take the top students

who have taken every AP and honors course,

college-level course that they possibly can.

I feel that I've been a perpetrator of the madness

in a sense, because I've gone out,

and I've told kids, you know,

"You've got to take this AP, this, you know, honors.

"You have to take as many as you can,

"because we want to see if you've taken total advantage

"of the opportunities that are available to you

at your high school,"

and I don't think that we really realize the pressure

and the stress that is on these kids to perform.

We just know what the ultimate goal is that we want,

and we want the top students,

because we are a top institution,

but I wonder sometimes, at the expense of what?

- So this is a really striking statistic.

The University of California,

which is a tough school to get into,

and Cal State schools in California,

you need B average for the state schools;

you need, sometimes, over a 4.0 for the UCs.

They have to remediate 50% of their admits.

What that means is, almost half of the kids

who get into the University of California

have to retake basic high school level math or English

just to get to where they need to be as university freshmen.

So how are they getting these really high GPAs

and yet not being college ready?

They're doing school. They're cheating.

They're spitting back but not retaining the information,

and the schools are not teaching, necessarily,

in a way that's preparing them for college work.

- In high school, I was definitely doing school.

I was in a situation

where I wanted to get a good grade on a test,

and what that meant was learning everything I needed to learn

the night or two nights before the test

and making sure that I could memorize it

and throw it back down on a test,

and I would-l can't say that more than two weeks later,

I knew what the information was,

but I know that I got a good grade on that test.

When I got to college,

I was burned out from high school.

Freshman year was very difficult,

just adjusting to a new level and knowing that no longer

was I getting ready for tests like I was in high school.

I actually really had to know this information inside and out,

and, you know, my grades didn't reflect that I knew that,

and I ended up getting really sad about it.

- I think there's a lot of sort of hidden depression on campus.

I think a lot of students

will maybe secretly take a quarter off,

or they'll take a quarter off

and only tell their closest friends.

I've had a couple friends do that,

and when they're here, you have completely no idea

that they're this stressed out or depressed.

- We have folks that are going in the psych ward.

My dad works at a psychiatric hospital

in Berkeley, California.

He said, "I know when finals are.

I always know when finals are, because we have to clear-

"we get all-our beds start to fill up

with students from the local university."

Parents come in and say,

"Well, they need to get up and go do their work."

And my dad's like, "They can't."

"Well, they were a good kid."

No, they were a good performer.

You never knew if they were a good kid.

You never found out if they were a good, solid kid.

You knew they were a good student.

- I would get very good grades

in elementary school and junior high.

I was considered to be very intelligent,

and my parents expected me to get straight A's

and go to a very prestigious college.

I was a cheerleader, a gymnast.

You know, I've played sports, like, every year of my life.

I was getting my academic honors diploma to graduate.

I had been working really hard for that

up until my sophomore year, and a teacher-

I've never been good in math, and I needed his help.

I came in after school, and he wouldn't help me,

so I failed that class and lost my academic honors diploma,

which, you know, I needed,

'cause I wanted to go to a really good college.

I wanted to make my parents proud,

and so after that was gone,

I kind of gave up and stopped attending school regularly.

It was definitely a huge blow to my self-esteem

that I did not get the grade that I wanted in math.

I had a tutor.

I was trying so hard, and I still couldn't do it,

so I stopped trying, because if you don't try, you can't fail.

I just thought everything that I worked so hard for was over,

so it was really hard for me to get up in the morning

and go to school.

My mom was worried about me being expelled,

because I wasn't going to school,

so she checked me into a stress center

where I went for two weeks all day until it got under control.

- I hope that taking some of the pressure off

of Allison going to college helped her make some progress.

Just because you don't go to college

doesn't mean you're a failure for life.

There's other options. Maybe you go part-time.

Maybe you wait a couple years.

It's not the end of the world if you don't fit the same mold

as everyone else.

So I'm glad if that helped her.

I wish I could help her more. I just don't know how exactly.

- I am very disappointed that there's no artistic,

right-brain kind of measurement of talent and knowledge.

The SATs are about English and math.

There's no standardized test for art or just different ideas.

There's absolutely no appreciation for that kind

of interest or thinking or talent or knowledge.

I think success in America

is definitely defined by how much money you've made,

not by how happy you are with your life.

I mean, I just felt this enormous pressure to grow up

and get a really big house, but I don't know.

That's just not how it is in other countries.

They're like, "Oh, okay, so they have a modest living.

Cool."

But here it's like, "Okay, well, if you don't earn

a lot of money, something went wrong."

- The reason why kids want to go to great colleges

is to get a great job and to make a lot of money,

and I think people place so much emphasis on making money

and watching TV and seeing all the famous people

with their huge houses,

and everyone wants to be that and have all of that,

and that's not really

what's gonna make people happy in the end.

I think the whole culture just kind of needs to revise

what is important and what is not.

- The environment and the culture is so competitive

that kids don't ever feel they can let anyone

really see their true selves.

You can go online very easily and start to understand

how success is defined in our culture.

Part of it, I do think,

is this media and technology-driven culture

where kids are creating these identities online,

whether through Facebook or I.M.

or through their YouTube accounts,

and it's very easy for them

to compare themselves to their peers.

Kids are so trained to say everything is good

and to look a certain way.

- It's hard for parents to see

when their children are having difficulty.

It's not easily observable when kids are in trouble now.

You go down to the local supermarket,

and everybody's on line talking about how fabulously

their kids are doing,

and I know it's not true,

'cause I see a lot of their kids,

so, you know, there's, again,

even with the adults in this community,

there's a tremendous need to look as if, you know,

all is right with the world,

and that's really not what community is about.

Community is like family.

You have to be able to be who you are.

- I think we live in a culture

where all of us are trained to say everything is good.

Jamey had been struggling for a long time

and not letting anyone really know.

She was feeling really bad about herself.

- When a teacher tells me that they don't like the grade

that I'm getting in that class,

it makes me feel kind of like I'm not that smart.

- When this all started happening

and I would go into Jamey's school to say

that Jamey's struggling and she's having these issues,

the response I'd get over and over again is,

"She looks fine to us."

I so often was made to feel like I was the only person

experiencing these issues and that everybody else's kids

were doing soccer and juggling their homework just fine.

- Recently, the stress has been so bad at school,

sometimes I would come home feeling really sick,

and one night I went to bed at 5:00 p.m.,

and I didn't wake up until the next morning.

- When Jamey was having a really hard time

going to school one day, you know,

I was trying to talk her through it and said,

"We have to find a way and a school

"that's gonna work for you,

because you have a lot of school ahead of you,"

And her answer to me was,

"That's why I don't want to live anymore,

"because I think about all of the school

"that I have and how much anxiety I feel being at school,

and I don't want to do that."

The doctor that we saw in December, the pediatrician,

told us that we weren't getting the same Jamey back.

And so I worry about that,

because I worry about- for Jamey-

Jamey feels really frustrated and angry,

and she doesn't always have the ability to look long-term

and say, "Okay, this is a really bad time,

"but I'm gonna get through this,

and there's still really good times to look forward to."

- There's an increase in suicide for the first time in decades,

a significant increase, particularly among young girls.

We're seeing the fallout of many things.

You know, you can never say

suicide is simply about pressure,

but we do know that pressure

makes kids anxious and depressed.

We do know that depression leads to suicide,

and there's a higher rate and a very worrisome acceleration

of suicide in this country.

I think we need to pay attention to it.

- Devon, in sixth grade, she was my very first lab partner.

I thought that she was probably just,

like, the most perfect person,

and there were times where I thought,

"Wow, I wish I was like Devon,"

'cause she is someone who was just really good at everything.

What I noticed about her was her great talent in music.

She played violin, and she also played piano in jazz band.

I only realized she died at the funeral.

I felt like she was gonna walk through the door.

- Everything seemed so very normal,

and the difficult thing is, in many ways,

I thought I knew Devon really well,

and, well, Scott would say,

"I don't know what's going on with her."

I'd be like, "I do.

I was that child."

Scott actually went to the school counselor,

and he said, "I don't know my daughter.

What's happening?"

They said, "Oh, it's being 13."

And they're like, "Oh, get used to that.

You've got another five years of this."

So honestly,

we thought everything was very, very normal.

Both: Eight, nine, ten. - Jump!

- She always got great grades,

and she always learned things easily.

Until you get to a certain age, and it's just tough,

so even for smart kids,

I think sometimes they put pressure on themselves.

If you've always had A's, there's only one way to go,

and it's down, and so that B feels like a failure.

Devon had always been very good at math.

She really wanted to be in advanced math,

and she did start having a difficult time.

This was eighth grade algebra,

and she went from having 100% to-

she came home one day, and she said,

"I had this test, and I got an F,"

and it was hard for her.

The weekend before she died,

she was literally gonna be doing math homework.

That's what she was gonna be doing on the Saturday morning.

You think that with suicide that there are signals.

People tell you there are signals.

I mean, they've said, "Well, was she doing this?

"Was she doing- did she give everything away?

Was she- were there mood swings?"

And the answer to all of those questions were no,

and that's what made it and continues to make it so scary.

I looked at every phone call, every email, every chat to say,

"What did we miss?

How could I possibly have let this happen?"

And the only thing I can think of is,

she did have this internal pressure.

She was torn up about this math.

She was torn up about- "I can't do it."

And here is a child who had always been so successful

on so many fronts, and a stupid math grade.

All I know is, it's a lot harder being a teenager

than I think it ever was for us,

and whether it's grades, whether it's, "Are you popular?

Are you fitting in?"

l just - l don't know.

- Seeing how Jamey had changed from being a happy-go-lucky kid

to not being able to get out of bed in the morning,

it became clear we needed to change her school.

Right now, for me, success is just getting her health back.

- At the new school, I was really excited to get there,

and then a few weeks later, I guess I figured out-

like, it clicked that it was still school

and I still had to do lots of work,

so now I'm still kind of stressed out.

- I started to wonder whether when I was trying to ensure

that my kids had a stable and secure future,

we had gone too far in one direction

and had been doing more harm than good.

It's only after you've been a parent for a while

that you can look back and say,

"I wish I had this to do over again."

Doug and I have implemented a lot of changes in our home.

We don't ask about homework. We don't ask about grades.

We advocate at our kids' schools for less homework

and more time to play after school.

We've always made sure to have family dinners together.

I really hope that these things have a positive impact

on our kids and the way they feel about their childhood,

and yet, it's really hard to do this alone.

- We have an opportunity to change the way

that we conceive of being successful for kids,

and it takes bravery.

You're swimming against the popular culture.

You're swimming against the stream.

- Why did we want to start a school?

First of all, you start with, you've got to be crazy, okay?

So we qualify there.

Our question is, why can't we have children

who love going to school all the way through 12th grade?

Why can't we have happiness be as important a metric

as reading skills and math scores?

It's something about respecting the child

in a different way than our existing system.

The idea of having a kid sit at his desk

with his hands folded staring out for X number

of hours a day just being so antiquated.

- Then, Charles, what's going on up here?

- That's the blue guy's spaceship.

- These kids come to the table with this creativity

and this drive and this love of life and love of learning.

Let's just not take it out of them.

How about that?

- The model that we're using at Blue School

really takes the best practices

that exist in many different contexts.

We looked a lot at Reggio Amilia and emerging curriculums,

so a lot of the theories and the threads

that our teachers explore come from the children themselves.

- We want our kids to be great readers.

We want them to be able to do math at high levels.

It's just, how do you get there?

- We're also looking at Howard Gardner's

multiple intelligence theories and infusing a lot of values

of creativity and entrepreneurial thinking,

and then, of course, the social and emotional component,

which is, you know, one of the core values

that we have at our school.

- The schools of tomorrow may not resemble a lot

of what they looked like the past 100 years,

but, hey, the world is not resembling

what it looked like the last 100 years either.

- So our first task, I think,

is for people to really understand

that we have a very serious problem

and that the economic future of the country,

the well-being of the country, depends on our addressing this.

The second thing I think they have to understand

is that it's not an easy fix.

It's not fine-tuning this

or an extra year of teacher training

or teach for America or KIPP or vouchers

or any of the things, which all of which

may contribute to the answer

but none of which alone is going to be the solution.

- It's the complexity of the problem

that people get overwhelmed with.

You know, we could fix it,

but it requires really being willing to do a lot of things

pretty close together and change our culture

in some pretty substantial ways

and our expectations and put large resources in.

- There's a school in Wyoming that abolished homework

after reading the two homework books

that came out two years ago.

The elementary school principal just read them.

She thought, "That makes sense," and she did it.

She started with a trial period, and then it worked so well

that she just eliminated homework for K through five.

So I think that an educator has an ethical responsibility.

I think a parent has a responsibility

to really care about the child's physical,

mental, emotional well-being,

and so they have to stand up for them,

'cause they can't stand up for themselves.

- All over the country,

there are parents that are fighting this.

You know, there are schools who have eliminated AP courses.

1/3 of the colleges in America have now either eliminated

the SAT or have modified the use of the SAT.

There are changes going on everywhere.

- It takes somebody to say,

"Maybe we'll stop grading the kids, you know?"

That sounds radical, but in reality,

if you get rid of grades,

then you can really start to assess what students know,

and you can really start to think about education

as more than just a grade.

- Why can't there be something like that,

where you're evaluated by students, teachers,

the principal, and there's sort of a compilation of sort of

what you've done and what you've accomplished,

a portfolio system.

- You can put as much money as you want into schools,

but if you don't change the ideology

of what makes a good educational system,

what type of individual are we trying to create?

If you don't prioritize, you know, classes,

agendas that do character development,

that give kids free time, unscheduled time,

if you don't prioritize making cities safe enough

so that parents can let their kids have unscheduled time

to roam around in the first place-

taking the responsibility for raising kids

out of advertisers' and corporate hands,

giving parents more time off work.

It's a social issue.

- The biggest thing that needs to change is,

we need to look at kids as individuals,

and we need to redefine success for kids.

You know, I have two wonderful, early teenage daughters.

I got to tell you that I have anxiety sometimes

because I'm like, "So they're really happy,

"but are they gonna still get into the good college?

Am I making a mistake?"

I'm having trouble with this,

and I'm writing books on this stuff.

The reality is that we can create a system

that will still educate our kids,

probably educate our kids better,

without stressing them as much.

We have to get off this treadmill together.

We need to really think, "What does it take

to produce a happy, motivated, creative human being?"

- I think music is good for anybody.

Any type of artistic activity is healthy.

I plan to, like, be a teacher and then, like,

kind of do this on the side as a hobby.

- A couple weeks ago, there was a homework-free night

at Zakary's school,

and it was like having a different kid on my hands.

He was excited. He could go out and play.

And later that night, he commented to me

that if every day there wasn't homework,

he would love school.

- Letting Sam choose to leave Sam Ramon High School,

it was hard.

It was harder for me than it was for him.

He knew he was gonna graduate from high school.

He knew he was gonna go to community college.

So he's going now to Venture,

which is an alternative public school.

It's self-study, where they meet the teacher once a week.

I think the fear is there that if they don't take that path,

they may stray,

but then sometimes straying is what they need to do.

- If everything goes wrong,

there's still something I can do to get where I want to be.

Learning that took a long time

and a lot of visits to the hospital,

a lot of therapy, but it was definitely worth it.

I'm really happy now not having to worry

about what other people think of me

and what kind of success I'm supposed to achieve.

- I took a couple years off

after high school before starting college.

I'm actually applying to college as a freshman this year.

A lot of my friends were burned out after high school,

but they went straight to college,

and I'm finding that a lot of them are dropping out

to take their time off now.

- When our son comes home from school now,

where in the past, we would have said,

"What homework do you have?" and so on,

I deliberately ask him, "So how was school?"

And he'll tell me all the work, and I'll say,

"What did you have for lunch, and who did you play with?"

and try to put the focus in an entirely different area,

because otherwise, it's all about the math test

and the homework, and we forget about being a kid.

♪ - When I was a child ♪

♪ Everybody smiled ♪

♪ Nobody knows me at all ♪

♪ Very late at night ♪

♪ And in the morning light ♪

♪ Nobody knows me at all ♪

♪ Now I got lots of friends ♪

♪ Yes, but then again ♪

♪ Nobody knows me at all ♪

♪ Kids and a wife ♪

♪ It's a beautiful life ♪

♪ Nobody knows me at all ♪

♪ And, oh, ♪ ♪ when the lights are low ♪

♪ Oh ♪

♪ With someone I don't know, ♪ ♪ oh ♪

♪ I don't give a damn ♪

♪ I'm happy as a clam ♪

♪ Nobody knows me at all ♪

♪ Ah, what can you do ♪

♪ There's nobody like you ♪

♪ Nobody knows me at all ♪

♪ I know how you feel ♪

♪ No secrets to reveal ♪

♪ Nobody knows me at all ♪

♪ Very late at night ♪

♪ And in the morning light ♪

♪ Nobody knows me at all ♪

♪ Nobody knows me ♪

♪ Nobody knows me ♪

♪ Nobody knows me at all ♪