Race to Nowhere: The Dark Side of America’s Achievement Culture

“You have to be smart, also, you have to be pretty, you have to do sports,” says Kelly, a ninth grader in Danville, California. “You have to find something unique about yourself. You have to know yourself because if you don’t know yourself before all of that, you’re going to lose yourself.” Kelly’s eyes are wide, her braces glinting as she doesn’t quite smile.

Kelly’s poised and pained appearance in Race to Nowhere: The Dark Side of America’s Achievement Culture makes clear in an instant the difficulty of trying to meet all these expectations. Still, Vicki Abeles and Jessica Congdon’s documentary repeats the point, an important one to be sure, through testimonies by more kids, their parents, teachers, and a selection of education and child development experts. The film is inspired, Abeles says early on, by her family’s experience. While you watch them rushing to soccer and cheerleading practices, fretting over homework, and grabbing breakfast on their way out the door, she narrates, “In all three of my kids, I started to see the toll that the schedule and the stress was taking on them.”

This toll included headaches and stomachaches, sleeplessness, tension, and impatience. Even as she and her husband undertook to change their situation, Abeles realized that her kids’ situation was systemic: “We can’t do it alone,” she says. And so Race to Nowhere, her first film, is a call to action.

As such, it’s hardly alone. Like other recent documentaries on the American education system — from The Cartel to The Lottery to Waiting for “Superman” — this one locates multiple sources of blame, from competitive parents and economic anxieties to inflated grades in high school that lead to the need for remedial courses in college. Race to Nowhere takes particular aim at No Child Left Behind. After its passage in 2002, the film asserts, an emphasis on tests and homework meant that kids no longer had time to play, hang out, or just be bored. “You have a system that is trying to further roboticize students,” says educator Darrick Smith, “mechanize them, if you will, to be these academic competitors, these producers, a system that is very dehumanizing in itself.”

Smith’s point is reiterated in the students’ accounts: “I can’t really remember the last time I had the chance to just go out in the backyard and run around,” says Abeles’ daughter Jamey. “Until senior year,” adds 12th grader Matt, “I haven’t had any free periods, I haven’t had lunch periods.” As Abeles was assembling the film, she heard about a local 13-year-old who killed herself following a D on a math test, an emotionally affecting story that becomes central to the film’s argument, an example of the worst possible outcome of the “achievement culture.”

The children’s unease is echoed by teachers who resent having to prepare students for standardized tests. Instead of looking for ways to improve classroom experiences, says Emma Batten-Bowman, “They give more tests, these tests that they do horribly on… You’re testing them on their culture and they are from a different culture than this testing culture.” Batten-Bowman wants her classroom to serve her students’ needs. “I feel like the main thing we’re doing in schools is socializing and the jobs don’t necessarily need you to know how to use a semi-colon. They need you to be a critical thinker.”

Batten-Bowman’s focus on “the jobs” makes a practical sense that’s all but lost in the “achievement culture.” (Still, it’s distracting when an educator quips, “The world is run by C students,” an unconvincing argument against getting As, as George W. Bush so famously embodies.) All kids are supposed to meet exceptional standards, an academic top 2%, according to the film. It submits that these standards are unrealistic, that some kids are better suited to other sorts of achievement, in the arts, for example. If the movie stops short of advocating for what might be called tech schools, it insinuates that schools and families might encourage a diversity of kids’ talents and inclinations, rather than expecting them all to meet the same measures of success. As 12th grader Paris puts it, “The whole culture just kind of needs to revise what’s important and what not.”

Race to Nowhere points to the deleterious results of that whole culture’s current priorities, in students’ declining physical, emotional, and moral lives. Dr. Madeline Levine, author of The Price of Privilege, remembers a girl she counseled who wore a cutter t-shirt, one with sleeves long enough to hide the cuts she was making in her arms. When she revealed that she has “incised the word ’empty’ into her forearm,” Levine says, she seemed “emblematic” of “kids who look terrific on the outside, a terrific presentation, but you roll up their sleeve and metaphorically as well as, in her case, literally, they’re bleeding underneath.”

The film spends a few minutes on gender differences (boys tend to drop out more often than girls) and also class disparities (Deborah Stipek, Dean of the Stanford School of Education, observes, “It doesn’t make sense to me that we aren’t willing to pay the costs upfront, but 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 upfront”). It also observes that parents are pressuring their children and that some kids take to cheating and “cutting corners” in order to meet the increasing demands on their limited time and energies. (As Susan Kaplan notes, their role models in “the business world” only reinforce the idea that cheating is an effective means to “success.”)

All of these factors contribute to the simultaneous acceleration of the “achievement culture” and its failures, as test scores actually don’t improve and school funding is in perpetual crisis. The cycle seems daunting, until Matt Goldman of the Blue Man Group offers a solution in the Blue School, pictured briefly as a K-12 haven where kids are happy and engaged. “Why cant we have happiness be as important a metric as reading skills and math scores?” he asks. “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?”

It’s a sensible point, but the problem seems almost to extend beyond making sense. Race to Nowhere closes with the activist documentary’s requisite appeal to viewers — identified as students, parents, teachers, and administrators — to get together online. As the film illustrates, sharing stories and energies is a place to begin.