As an educator in public school for over 25 years, I agree! I have to also add that the increased amount of educational technology is a huge part of the problem as well! Organizations such as https://www.edreports.org/ are being used and pushing online products that align to the common core standards. Not only are kids feeling increased academic pressures, they are being evaluated more often through these online programs. They are also spending an increased amount of time online which impacts their ability to interact and develop their social skills. The current education system is in a negative cycle of failure and it is only getting worse. I am hoping that more administrators will realize this and push for programs such as Let Grow. I think the formula is pretty simple and cost effective, more play/human interaction and less technology!
I teach as a casual / relief / supply teacher in NZ schools as a way to try to provide relief for children who are subjected to academic intensity. I provide toys & opportunities for play. I read 1-1 & do some zingy maths stuff where appropriate. Anyway, today sucked the life out of me as I heard a student teacher make these comments to 5 & 6 year olds:
- No drawing, we DON’T draw
- Well that’s not right
- No talking at eating time
- We don’t PLAY
- Try harder
- I’ve told you 4 times so don’t ask me again you should know
- You better not be playing, you know that’s not allowed
- You’re cheating & I can tell your table all did
- Throw away the ones without names - they should know better
- You are all too noisy
- What have I said about questions? If you ask questions you are wasting time.
I spoke at length to the teacher about whether what she’s doing brings her joy, suggested resources, challenged her thinking… but I know that she is qualified next year & that her training has led her to this point. It breaks my heart to think parents send their babies to school to be treated this way.
The work was boring & full of structured literacy for hours. When I asked why? She said she didn’t want them to fall behind. The above graphs give another pathway. I’d rather my children were behind the perceived norm than dead.
No drawing.
Well that’s not right.
No talking at eating time.
We don’t PLAY.
Try harder.
I’ve told you 4 times so don’t ask me again you should know.
You better not be playing, you know that’s not allowed.
You’re cheating & I can tell your table all did.
Throw away the ones without names - they should know better.
You are too noisy.
What have I said about questions? If you ask questions you are wasting time.
How is forcing children to do meaningless tasks, under scrutiny & criticism, without being allowed to move, or take toilet breaks without permission so different than child labour? I’m heartbroken today. When on earth will people wake up & start listening? I’m getting weary of my independent striking, protesting, re-shaping of environments & educating of teachers. Our children need so many of us to shout ENOUGH!
It is also forcing change. I’m seeing many children & parents here say ‘no way’ which is resulting in parents pulling their children out. The homeschool community is growing & parents are saying they need to see change. It just needs to happen fast.
I don't know anything about common core or educational standards in the US because I didn't grow up here. But googling tells me that there are states, including Virginia and Texas which don't follow common core, and there are other states which opted out of common core later. Are the kids in these non-common-core states less stressed out? If they are, that's clinching evidence against common core, right?
Good question, Lila. However, to get federal money all states had to present some sort of program that would provide proof of focus on the subject areas outlined by NCLB and proof that students were scoring higher in tests on those subjects. Most states adopted Common Core as the route for dong this, but a few states chose different routes. It is not clear that those other routes would be less stress-inducing.
Here's some things I'd like you to address in later posts on this topic, going by the comments and your responses - It seems like there's no real control group now for non-stressed kids. Kids are either in common core, or some equivalent program in a non-common core state, or they are in a stressful private school. So overall academics are stressful.
However the evidence presented by the smartphone-bad cabal (jon haidt et al) seems to point to kids being highly stressed internationally, and canada and australia don't have common core.
Would it then help to come up with a different metric than just "common core", to indicate academic stress levels and see if kids' stress levels correlate? The issue for me here is everyone keeps finding evidence of things that stress kids out and not enough of sustainable lifestyles that reduce kids' stress levels.
If high achievement pressure is what contributes to bad mental health, are kids in low-achieving school districts happier? We've got to be able to have data about that right?
Being in an upwardly mobile socioeconomic setting, every parent around me says they don't want their kids pressured to achieve, but at the same time wouldn't send them to a lesser school. Why? Because the kids there get up to no good and have worse outcomes. That's the choice parents face - put kids in an achievement oriented track, or kids get up to no good with all the free time and ruin their lives. So there really doesn't seem any kind of off-ramp here.
From what I'm seeing here, it feels like academic pressure, homework, cellphones, diet, lack of outdoor play.... all of these are just proxies to how much time kids spend with their parents just cherishing them and having fun with no ulterior objective like self-improvement or giving them a treat for success or achievement. I'm pretty convinced that's what it is.
Yes, kids in "low achievement schools" are doing much better psychologically than in those where academic pressure is high. I presented that research in Letter #43. The reasons I emphasize Common Core as cause of the sudden rise in suicides, depression, and anxiety in US teens since about 2010 is because that bumped so many public schools into the high achievement pressure category. In Canada, UK, and Australia there may have been other sources of increased school pressure, as they often follow the US on these things. Or, the cause could be something else there.
Having grown up in Virginia, I can tell you that while Virginia doesn't adhere to the Common Core, it does have its own Standards of Learning and "high stakes testing" has been a part of public schooling since my time in schools (mid 90's through early 00's).
I have to wonder what the states who adopted the common core were doing before. Was it a sudden switch to standardized testing for those students, or did they simply transition from state or county derived standards to the common core eatablished ones.
I can certainly hypothesize that a sudden switch to standardized testing would be stressful for students within the system; but I can also hypothesize that transitioning from one set of standards to another isn't significantly stressful for students, because they are already used to the testing and don't pay attention to the individual standards anyway.
All and all, I don't doubt a correlation between common core adoption and increased youth suicides, but I'm really skeptical that there is a causal link. Unfortunately I can think of so many things that happened in the mid 2010's that could have contributed to causing increased youth suicides; and I suspect it is indeed a combination of many things rather than one identifiable one.
Peter Gray makes a case that Common Core had an adverse effect on public schools. But I think that there were many factors making schools worse over the past fifty years. Parents and individual teachers used to have much more influence and involvement, but now teachers' unions, consolidated school district bureaucracies, and the Department of Education all are disempowering parents and teachers.
I agree, and elsewhere I have argued that schooling continued to become more stressful over decades. But NCLB and the programs that it induced--typified by Common Core--caused a bigger change, over a shorter period, than had happened before.
Dear prof. Gray, this hypothesis is worth investigating, but at the moment the evidence you provided is much weaker than the one supporting the social network hypothesis that you so easily dismissed. And what if students feel more stressed because of the lack of sleep induced by smartphones that in turn make them more susceptible to school failures? The emergence of common core is parallel to the diffusion of smartphones so it is hard to disentangle the effect of one vs the other. But in other nations depression is increasing and so is school stress, but without any high stakes test. Quite a puzzle. Is maybe paranoid parenting in the West playing a role? Or the three things at once?
Giovanni, I know that many people believe there is strong evidence about the SM hypothesis, but please read my Letter # 45--https://petergray.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/146150888?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts-- in which I go through the arguments presented by Haidt and show the weakness of each. In fact, much research shows that depression, anxiety, and suicide did NOT increase in most countries--including the entire EU--as smartphones and social media became prevalent. I also suggest reading reviews of this theory by the people who actually conduct research on smartphones and social media--such as Candice Odgers (arguably the leading US expert in this area. --https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2
Dear prof. Gray, thanks for the answer. To my knowledge depression and anxiety did increase in european countries too. In addition there are multiple lines of evidence from many different disciplines that suggest that smartphones has an effec5 and so far I think the smartphone argument is quite robust. More, for the moment, than the school stress hp, if taken alone. Best.
If evidence shows that suicide rates are lower during months/on days without schooling, i.e. when children have more time for smartphone and social media usage, doesn't that rather support Peter's hypothesis? Which pattern would one expect to see if the main cause was smartphones and social media?
This per se is not evidence of a causal link, it is a correlation that suggests a causal link. I am not dismissing the hp, but at the moment the fact that social media play a role is much more robust. I have the impression that these two factors are important. As I said, such type of school anxiety is on the rise everywhere in the West, with or without common core or high stakes testing or difficult tests to get to prestigious universities.
That's right, it's just correlation. So, here is another hypothesis: when young people have so much school pressure and don't get their core needs satisfied there, they go somewhere else, where something "takes care of them" (that something, social media, is designed to be addictive, I know). When they are so deprived of feeling their autonomy, relatedness and competence, they loose the ability to use social media as a tool, mastering it, instead of subordinating themselves. This hypothesis links together school pressure, social media dependency and mental health deterioration (in short: school pain => smartphone addiction).
The "opposite" hypothesis would be: because of smartphone addiction, young people have issues keeping up with the school agenda, so they get school pressure, and their mental health deteriorates. Or in short: smartphone addiction => school pressure/pain.
For the second hypothesis, one would still need to find the cause why many young people cannot withstand the addictive part of social media/smartphones.
Both movements might be plausible. Wrt the phone part, brain development make it hard to resist addictions, to adults but especially to kids. Data on depression and suicides should be granular enough to exploit the staggered adoption of common core to explore the anxiety hp.
I wonder if you've also interacted with Jonathan Haidt's material over at After Babel? He talks about the loss of play-based childhood being a factor, as well as the loss of community and the rise of phone-based childhoods. https://www.afterbabel.com/
Yes, I know Jonathan Haidt well. We were among the four co-founders of Let Grow, aimed at bringing more play to children's lives. We agree on that, but disagree sharply on the effects of Smartphones. See my review of his arguments in Letter #46. https://petergray.substack.com/p/45-the-importance-of-critical-analyses
I think the link between the academic year and suicide is well established in Kim's Figure 2. This cycle alone, even without the yearly increase should give us enough motivation to take a hard look at our school systems and try hard to make improvements. I see regularly how school is a less welcoming environment for my kids than it was for me. Less welcoming, more "ordered," but less orderly. It's not clear to me that the degradation in the school environment is based on the introduction of common core. By law in my state, kids in middle school up have to wear student ID that include a suicide hotline on the back. That's given me a lot of pause over the years, in one sense it seems almost reasonable, but in another it's absurd.
Further, the fact that kids spend less time on school work serves as a major wrinkle for the "academic
pressure" argument. I suppose it's possible that the pressure is enough to be debilitating. But surely we would have seen a rise in time on school work before that kicked in, right?
So to me, it's still not clear how the adoption of Common Core drove (and continues to drive) increases in suicide over a full decade after its implementation. How do you account for the continued rise after the introduction instead of a step up over the years of introduction and then a leveling off? Do changes continue to be made each year that take the fun out of school and those changes derive from Common Core/high-stakes testing?
The smartphone hypothesis can point to increasing utilization of phones/social media and to the age at which the smartphone is received as getting lower and lower. And it can provide explanations for international changes. I still see the inability of the Common Core/high-stakes testing as a bad explanation.
If I had to have one recommendation that I would just shove down the public schools throats by fiat, it would be to demand that all elementary schools have a mandatory three hour recess/lunch break every day and homework be abolished.
"public schooling is the elephant in the room that almost nobody wants to look at." Schools in crisis?….. That vast infrastructure of buildings full of classrooms children and teachers. Kids spending their weekdays being taught by teachers – how could things possibly be otherwise? In this essay I dip a toe into the hazy waters of what could possibly replace them as the means by which society teaches its children. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/teach-your-children-well
As a professor of education and childhood studies in Dubai, I have noticed a similar uptick in stress and anxiety among the private school students here. The UAE Ministry of Education mandated Common Core for American Curriculum private schools in the UAE around 2010; thereafter, all GCC countries did this. Additionally, British curriculum private schools, IB schools, and other international schools started a push to align more to standards resulting in the gross implementation of standardized tests across all private international schools. These tests are implemented early and parents often pressure their young children to study for and attend private tuition to obtain maximum scores on these tests. The CAT 4 (Cognitive Abilities Test) has also been mandated in all private schools across the UAE adding more pressure to children and parents. Sadly, these tests are driven by profit; the school, the testing company, and the ministry make a profit off of the implementation of these tests.
I'm struck by how many readers want to make the relationship between your hypothesis and John Haidt's hypothesis an "AND" instead of an "OR" -- and I suspect the reason is that the readers themselves have personal and anecdotal experiences that reinforce how time online can make them feel BAD. I think to many readers it seems beyond reason that this thing that we all have experience with and that we KNOW makes us all feel bad could be completely unrelated to these negative effects.
I was 15-19 between 1990 and 1994, which as I understand it, was a time of greater teen suicide than today. School testing was not as intense back then, parents were pretty uninvolved, unstructured time was more available, but kids were still relatively pretty suicidal. I wrote about this in a look-back at the 1989 film Heathers. https://amyletter.substack.com/p/teenage-suicide-dont-do-it-heathers
I think it's important to not think necessarily in terms of yes this technology or no this administrative requirement, but in how the complex social contract adjusts itself to accommodate (or not) all the various unique and individual personalities that make up humanity. Maybe keeping kids safe at home all the time fitted nicely with the Web1.0 world, even if their school experiences were becoming less tolerable. Maybe freedom and no internet at all were even less tolerable in a world rife with peer pressure, date rape, homophobia, and binge drinking. Maybe Web2.0 made "safe at home" feel more like a cage and common core made school more like a sweatshop by virtue of turning the remaining avenue of escape/freedom (that online world) into a rat-maze with more traps than cheese.
I doubt there is much difference between schools with and without Common Core. The evidence you cited seems very weak. It’s plausible that schools overall have become more stressful for a variety of reasons, but it seems unlikely that it would be localizable to a federal policy shift.
I’d be more convinced with comparative studies between schools with and without Common Core, or schools more and less impacted by NCLB, across 20 years. Especially those that measured *students*. Studies of self-reported teacher/administrator sentiment are meh.
There are many studies showing that students in schools where pressure for high test scores is high suffer higher rates of mental breakdowns than those where the pressure is not so high. See Letter #43. The reason I cite Common Core as a major cause in the bump in breakdowns beginning after 2010 is because that put many more schools in the high pressure category.
This was a really great read! Thank you so much for taking the time to research and write a compelling argument. I remember standardized testing was always the worst possible week. At some point I just gave up after realizing that this was for the school not for my grade.
I am reminded of what Daniel Greenberg said about enthusiastic teachers who showed up to the Sudbury Valley, "so eager to give". School is at its best when it is maximally responsive to a students desire to learn. I always wonder how dejected teachers feel when they also discover how little student's care about a teacher's agenda. Lots of people think they are Robin Williams in Dead Poet's Society, but those people miss what could make school a good place to be.
As an educator in public school for over 25 years, I agree! I have to also add that the increased amount of educational technology is a huge part of the problem as well! Organizations such as https://www.edreports.org/ are being used and pushing online products that align to the common core standards. Not only are kids feeling increased academic pressures, they are being evaluated more often through these online programs. They are also spending an increased amount of time online which impacts their ability to interact and develop their social skills. The current education system is in a negative cycle of failure and it is only getting worse. I am hoping that more administrators will realize this and push for programs such as Let Grow. I think the formula is pretty simple and cost effective, more play/human interaction and less technology!
I teach as a casual / relief / supply teacher in NZ schools as a way to try to provide relief for children who are subjected to academic intensity. I provide toys & opportunities for play. I read 1-1 & do some zingy maths stuff where appropriate. Anyway, today sucked the life out of me as I heard a student teacher make these comments to 5 & 6 year olds:
- No drawing, we DON’T draw
- Well that’s not right
- No talking at eating time
- We don’t PLAY
- Try harder
- I’ve told you 4 times so don’t ask me again you should know
- You better not be playing, you know that’s not allowed
- You’re cheating & I can tell your table all did
- Throw away the ones without names - they should know better
- You are all too noisy
- What have I said about questions? If you ask questions you are wasting time.
I spoke at length to the teacher about whether what she’s doing brings her joy, suggested resources, challenged her thinking… but I know that she is qualified next year & that her training has led her to this point. It breaks my heart to think parents send their babies to school to be treated this way.
The work was boring & full of structured literacy for hours. When I asked why? She said she didn’t want them to fall behind. The above graphs give another pathway. I’d rather my children were behind the perceived norm than dead.
No drawing.
Well that’s not right.
No talking at eating time.
We don’t PLAY.
Try harder.
I’ve told you 4 times so don’t ask me again you should know.
You better not be playing, you know that’s not allowed.
You’re cheating & I can tell your table all did.
Throw away the ones without names - they should know better.
You are too noisy.
What have I said about questions? If you ask questions you are wasting time.
How is forcing children to do meaningless tasks, under scrutiny & criticism, without being allowed to move, or take toilet breaks without permission so different than child labour? I’m heartbroken today. When on earth will people wake up & start listening? I’m getting weary of my independent striking, protesting, re-shaping of environments & educating of teachers. Our children need so many of us to shout ENOUGH!
This is so sad. This is what is happening in kindergartens throughout the United States and is why so many kindergarten teachers, especially, are quitting. See my Letter #40. https://petergray.substack.com/p/40-long-term-harm-of-early-academic
It is also forcing change. I’m seeing many children & parents here say ‘no way’ which is resulting in parents pulling their children out. The homeschool community is growing & parents are saying they need to see change. It just needs to happen fast.
I don't know anything about common core or educational standards in the US because I didn't grow up here. But googling tells me that there are states, including Virginia and Texas which don't follow common core, and there are other states which opted out of common core later. Are the kids in these non-common-core states less stressed out? If they are, that's clinching evidence against common core, right?
Good question, Lila. However, to get federal money all states had to present some sort of program that would provide proof of focus on the subject areas outlined by NCLB and proof that students were scoring higher in tests on those subjects. Most states adopted Common Core as the route for dong this, but a few states chose different routes. It is not clear that those other routes would be less stress-inducing.
Here's some things I'd like you to address in later posts on this topic, going by the comments and your responses - It seems like there's no real control group now for non-stressed kids. Kids are either in common core, or some equivalent program in a non-common core state, or they are in a stressful private school. So overall academics are stressful.
However the evidence presented by the smartphone-bad cabal (jon haidt et al) seems to point to kids being highly stressed internationally, and canada and australia don't have common core.
Would it then help to come up with a different metric than just "common core", to indicate academic stress levels and see if kids' stress levels correlate? The issue for me here is everyone keeps finding evidence of things that stress kids out and not enough of sustainable lifestyles that reduce kids' stress levels.
If high achievement pressure is what contributes to bad mental health, are kids in low-achieving school districts happier? We've got to be able to have data about that right?
Being in an upwardly mobile socioeconomic setting, every parent around me says they don't want their kids pressured to achieve, but at the same time wouldn't send them to a lesser school. Why? Because the kids there get up to no good and have worse outcomes. That's the choice parents face - put kids in an achievement oriented track, or kids get up to no good with all the free time and ruin their lives. So there really doesn't seem any kind of off-ramp here.
From what I'm seeing here, it feels like academic pressure, homework, cellphones, diet, lack of outdoor play.... all of these are just proxies to how much time kids spend with their parents just cherishing them and having fun with no ulterior objective like self-improvement or giving them a treat for success or achievement. I'm pretty convinced that's what it is.
What do you think?
Yes, kids in "low achievement schools" are doing much better psychologically than in those where academic pressure is high. I presented that research in Letter #43. The reasons I emphasize Common Core as cause of the sudden rise in suicides, depression, and anxiety in US teens since about 2010 is because that bumped so many public schools into the high achievement pressure category. In Canada, UK, and Australia there may have been other sources of increased school pressure, as they often follow the US on these things. Or, the cause could be something else there.
Having grown up in Virginia, I can tell you that while Virginia doesn't adhere to the Common Core, it does have its own Standards of Learning and "high stakes testing" has been a part of public schooling since my time in schools (mid 90's through early 00's).
I have to wonder what the states who adopted the common core were doing before. Was it a sudden switch to standardized testing for those students, or did they simply transition from state or county derived standards to the common core eatablished ones.
I can certainly hypothesize that a sudden switch to standardized testing would be stressful for students within the system; but I can also hypothesize that transitioning from one set of standards to another isn't significantly stressful for students, because they are already used to the testing and don't pay attention to the individual standards anyway.
All and all, I don't doubt a correlation between common core adoption and increased youth suicides, but I'm really skeptical that there is a causal link. Unfortunately I can think of so many things that happened in the mid 2010's that could have contributed to causing increased youth suicides; and I suspect it is indeed a combination of many things rather than one identifiable one.
Peter Gray makes a case that Common Core had an adverse effect on public schools. But I think that there were many factors making schools worse over the past fifty years. Parents and individual teachers used to have much more influence and involvement, but now teachers' unions, consolidated school district bureaucracies, and the Department of Education all are disempowering parents and teachers.
I agree, and elsewhere I have argued that schooling continued to become more stressful over decades. But NCLB and the programs that it induced--typified by Common Core--caused a bigger change, over a shorter period, than had happened before.
Dear prof. Gray, this hypothesis is worth investigating, but at the moment the evidence you provided is much weaker than the one supporting the social network hypothesis that you so easily dismissed. And what if students feel more stressed because of the lack of sleep induced by smartphones that in turn make them more susceptible to school failures? The emergence of common core is parallel to the diffusion of smartphones so it is hard to disentangle the effect of one vs the other. But in other nations depression is increasing and so is school stress, but without any high stakes test. Quite a puzzle. Is maybe paranoid parenting in the West playing a role? Or the three things at once?
Giovanni, I know that many people believe there is strong evidence about the SM hypothesis, but please read my Letter # 45--https://petergray.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/146150888?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts-- in which I go through the arguments presented by Haidt and show the weakness of each. In fact, much research shows that depression, anxiety, and suicide did NOT increase in most countries--including the entire EU--as smartphones and social media became prevalent. I also suggest reading reviews of this theory by the people who actually conduct research on smartphones and social media--such as Candice Odgers (arguably the leading US expert in this area. --https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2
Dear prof. Gray, thanks for the answer. To my knowledge depression and anxiety did increase in european countries too. In addition there are multiple lines of evidence from many different disciplines that suggest that smartphones has an effec5 and so far I think the smartphone argument is quite robust. More, for the moment, than the school stress hp, if taken alone. Best.
If evidence shows that suicide rates are lower during months/on days without schooling, i.e. when children have more time for smartphone and social media usage, doesn't that rather support Peter's hypothesis? Which pattern would one expect to see if the main cause was smartphones and social media?
This per se is not evidence of a causal link, it is a correlation that suggests a causal link. I am not dismissing the hp, but at the moment the fact that social media play a role is much more robust. I have the impression that these two factors are important. As I said, such type of school anxiety is on the rise everywhere in the West, with or without common core or high stakes testing or difficult tests to get to prestigious universities.
That's right, it's just correlation. So, here is another hypothesis: when young people have so much school pressure and don't get their core needs satisfied there, they go somewhere else, where something "takes care of them" (that something, social media, is designed to be addictive, I know). When they are so deprived of feeling their autonomy, relatedness and competence, they loose the ability to use social media as a tool, mastering it, instead of subordinating themselves. This hypothesis links together school pressure, social media dependency and mental health deterioration (in short: school pain => smartphone addiction).
The "opposite" hypothesis would be: because of smartphone addiction, young people have issues keeping up with the school agenda, so they get school pressure, and their mental health deteriorates. Or in short: smartphone addiction => school pressure/pain.
For the second hypothesis, one would still need to find the cause why many young people cannot withstand the addictive part of social media/smartphones.
Both movements might be plausible. Wrt the phone part, brain development make it hard to resist addictions, to adults but especially to kids. Data on depression and suicides should be granular enough to exploit the staggered adoption of common core to explore the anxiety hp.
Plus we can factor in daylight savings time - as this time often coincides with more mood changes as circadian rhythms are thrown off.
Common core may have been a flop, but was certainly a boon for Big Tech.
https://romanshapoval.substack.com/i/142250902/do-immersion-schools-use-ipads
I see common core as a loss leader in that way, don't you think?
Never drew these possible connections before!
I wonder if you've also interacted with Jonathan Haidt's material over at After Babel? He talks about the loss of play-based childhood being a factor, as well as the loss of community and the rise of phone-based childhoods. https://www.afterbabel.com/
Yes, I know Jonathan Haidt well. We were among the four co-founders of Let Grow, aimed at bringing more play to children's lives. We agree on that, but disagree sharply on the effects of Smartphones. See my review of his arguments in Letter #46. https://petergray.substack.com/p/45-the-importance-of-critical-analyses
I think the link between the academic year and suicide is well established in Kim's Figure 2. This cycle alone, even without the yearly increase should give us enough motivation to take a hard look at our school systems and try hard to make improvements. I see regularly how school is a less welcoming environment for my kids than it was for me. Less welcoming, more "ordered," but less orderly. It's not clear to me that the degradation in the school environment is based on the introduction of common core. By law in my state, kids in middle school up have to wear student ID that include a suicide hotline on the back. That's given me a lot of pause over the years, in one sense it seems almost reasonable, but in another it's absurd.
Further, the fact that kids spend less time on school work serves as a major wrinkle for the "academic
pressure" argument. I suppose it's possible that the pressure is enough to be debilitating. But surely we would have seen a rise in time on school work before that kicked in, right?
So to me, it's still not clear how the adoption of Common Core drove (and continues to drive) increases in suicide over a full decade after its implementation. How do you account for the continued rise after the introduction instead of a step up over the years of introduction and then a leveling off? Do changes continue to be made each year that take the fun out of school and those changes derive from Common Core/high-stakes testing?
The smartphone hypothesis can point to increasing utilization of phones/social media and to the age at which the smartphone is received as getting lower and lower. And it can provide explanations for international changes. I still see the inability of the Common Core/high-stakes testing as a bad explanation.
If I had to have one recommendation that I would just shove down the public schools throats by fiat, it would be to demand that all elementary schools have a mandatory three hour recess/lunch break every day and homework be abolished.
"public schooling is the elephant in the room that almost nobody wants to look at." Schools in crisis?….. That vast infrastructure of buildings full of classrooms children and teachers. Kids spending their weekdays being taught by teachers – how could things possibly be otherwise? In this essay I dip a toe into the hazy waters of what could possibly replace them as the means by which society teaches its children. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/teach-your-children-well
As a professor of education and childhood studies in Dubai, I have noticed a similar uptick in stress and anxiety among the private school students here. The UAE Ministry of Education mandated Common Core for American Curriculum private schools in the UAE around 2010; thereafter, all GCC countries did this. Additionally, British curriculum private schools, IB schools, and other international schools started a push to align more to standards resulting in the gross implementation of standardized tests across all private international schools. These tests are implemented early and parents often pressure their young children to study for and attend private tuition to obtain maximum scores on these tests. The CAT 4 (Cognitive Abilities Test) has also been mandated in all private schools across the UAE adding more pressure to children and parents. Sadly, these tests are driven by profit; the school, the testing company, and the ministry make a profit off of the implementation of these tests.
I'm struck by how many readers want to make the relationship between your hypothesis and John Haidt's hypothesis an "AND" instead of an "OR" -- and I suspect the reason is that the readers themselves have personal and anecdotal experiences that reinforce how time online can make them feel BAD. I think to many readers it seems beyond reason that this thing that we all have experience with and that we KNOW makes us all feel bad could be completely unrelated to these negative effects.
I was 15-19 between 1990 and 1994, which as I understand it, was a time of greater teen suicide than today. School testing was not as intense back then, parents were pretty uninvolved, unstructured time was more available, but kids were still relatively pretty suicidal. I wrote about this in a look-back at the 1989 film Heathers. https://amyletter.substack.com/p/teenage-suicide-dont-do-it-heathers
I think it's important to not think necessarily in terms of yes this technology or no this administrative requirement, but in how the complex social contract adjusts itself to accommodate (or not) all the various unique and individual personalities that make up humanity. Maybe keeping kids safe at home all the time fitted nicely with the Web1.0 world, even if their school experiences were becoming less tolerable. Maybe freedom and no internet at all were even less tolerable in a world rife with peer pressure, date rape, homophobia, and binge drinking. Maybe Web2.0 made "safe at home" feel more like a cage and common core made school more like a sweatshop by virtue of turning the remaining avenue of escape/freedom (that online world) into a rat-maze with more traps than cheese.
I doubt there is much difference between schools with and without Common Core. The evidence you cited seems very weak. It’s plausible that schools overall have become more stressful for a variety of reasons, but it seems unlikely that it would be localizable to a federal policy shift.
I’d be more convinced with comparative studies between schools with and without Common Core, or schools more and less impacted by NCLB, across 20 years. Especially those that measured *students*. Studies of self-reported teacher/administrator sentiment are meh.
There are many studies showing that students in schools where pressure for high test scores is high suffer higher rates of mental breakdowns than those where the pressure is not so high. See Letter #43. The reason I cite Common Core as a major cause in the bump in breakdowns beginning after 2010 is because that put many more schools in the high pressure category.
This was a really great read! Thank you so much for taking the time to research and write a compelling argument. I remember standardized testing was always the worst possible week. At some point I just gave up after realizing that this was for the school not for my grade.
Interesting reading Peter, even for someone where Common Core does not exist
I am reminded of what Daniel Greenberg said about enthusiastic teachers who showed up to the Sudbury Valley, "so eager to give". School is at its best when it is maximally responsive to a students desire to learn. I always wonder how dejected teachers feel when they also discover how little student's care about a teacher's agenda. Lots of people think they are Robin Williams in Dead Poet's Society, but those people miss what could make school a good place to be.