Teen Suicide, Common Core, and the Price of Fear

We've known for a bit now that before the pandemic sent things all kablooey, suicide among teens was already reaching terrifying proportions. There are all sorts of ways to filet the data, all of them alarming (the suicide rate for 13-14 year olds between 2008 and 2018 doubled). 

If we hadn't been distracted by Covid or been spending all our energy on super-critical issues like CRT and naughty books, we probably would have been spending more time on teen suicide (though it doesn't lend itself as easily to scoring political points).

Peter Gray, the psychologist who often covers child and education issues for Psychology Today, has been running a multi-part series on the problem; in the latest installment, he tries offering some explanations. 

The broad outlines are striking enough. We're talking 15-19 year olds, from 1950 to almost the present. Things to notice right away-- most of the increase in suicides comes from teen boys. Not all, but most. For boys, there was a steady climb to 1990, and then a steep drop until 2008, when the rate climbed precipitously. The rate for girls stayed both lower and steady-ish until 2008, when it also climbed-- not as steeply as the boys, but to a height that it had never reached before.

So, why?

Gray has some ideas about what caused this most recent spike.

First, contrary to much popular wisdom, Gray believes that the decline from 1990 to 2005-ish was caused by modern technology. Seriously. He posits that the declined resulted, "at least in part, from the availability of computer technology and video games that brought a renewed sense of freedom, excitement, mastery, and social connectedness to the lives of children and teens, thereby improving their mental health."

But the most recent spike? Here's the short form of his theory.

My theory, in brief, is that during this period schooling became far more stressful and damaging to mental health than it had been before, and this resulted in increased rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among students. The damaging changes in schooling resulted from the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, which became U.S. law in 2002, and the Common Core Standards Initiative, introduced by the federal government in 2010 as follow-up to NCLB.

Or, in even shorter terms

No Child Left Behind and Common Core Reduced the Enjoyable Aspects of School and Augmented the Stressful Aspects.

Gray cites, among other things, what people who have talked to actual students find--that students in this time period experienced a great deal more stress and anxiety associated with school.

This all comes with a huge caveat-- Gray is a proponent of unschooling, so "discovering" that schools are at the root of everything is an insight he's predisposed to have. But I'm not prepared to dismiss all of this, because it all feels kind of familiar.

None of this will comes as a shock to teachers working during that time period. NCLB did indeed start the process of sucking the joy out of education, and Common Core with its one-size-fits-all drudgery did not help. Race to the Top simply doubled down on all of it, especially the high stakes testing that became the central focus of school districts across the country. 

And all of it was soaked in a particular ethic, the old "schools should be run like a business" model, in which teachers and students were all meat widgets whose job was to crank out satisfactory test scores and why would they be wasting time on any kind of frippery or foolishness? Even now, it seems like a radical notion to suggest that schools should include fun or joy, even if we take pains to note that we aren't saying schools should be only fun and joy. 

But as much as I agree with the notion that a couple of decades of school reformsterism has made schools objectively worse for teachers and students, I can't blame it all on those programs.

I think, for instance, of a piece I wrote back in 2015 in response to a Hanna Rosin piece in the Atlantic about the high rate of student suicides in Silicon Valley. What Rosin found was extraordinary levels of pressure to perform and succeed, evident not just in suicide rates, but in drug and alcohol use. The degree to which competition is soaked into all of it is scary:

As one soccer parent told Friedman during her research on parenting in such a competitive culture, “I think it’s important for [my son] to understand that [being competitive] is not going to just apply here, it’s going to apply for the rest of his life. It’s going to apply when he keeps growing up and he’s playing sports, when he’s competing for school admissions, for a job, for the next whatever.” Friedman concludes, “Such an attitude prepares children for winner-take-all settings like the school system and lucrative labor markets.”

Parents are wound up by a host of deadlines and scary outcomes. If your child isn't reading well enough by third grade, they'll be a failure in life. If they aren't the Very Best, they might not get into the Right School which means they won't get the Right Job. 

The competition is super-charged because of the vast gap between the top tier and everything else. The gap between middle class and the wealthy elite is now a chasm, and by the time a child is eighteen, the feeling goes, his trajectory is already set. And while the wealthy elite cannot pass on, say, their legal practice, they are the only people with the resources to get their children every inch of extra help available. The private lessons, the personal coaching, the top equipment, the best technology-- only the wealthy can provide those necessary tools to land on the right side of Prosperity Gulch.

This echoes the work of Robert Putnam in Our Kids, in which he discusses how soft ties and social capital give wealthier children an extra edge. Wealthy parents can always pick up the phone and make a call. Wealthy parents can always apply some money to the problem. That ties us back to studies like the one from John Hopkins that shows how family and neighborhood cast a long shadow over a student's future.

What Rosin and Rosen underlined is just how scared and worried the wealthy are-- just one wrong move and Little Pat will end up with a life that's Less, a life that's Not Good Enough. Little Pat will be a failure.

But if that's what the wealthy of Silicon Valley are thinking, what about the rest of us? Remember Richard Corey? The poem has two characters-- Corey and the ordinary people who narrate-- and its power doesn't just come from saying, "The rich have troubles you know nothing about." It also says, "If the most successful guy we can think of is that miserable, what hope do we have?"

That fear of failure, and the massive depth of what failure will mean, slowly leaches down into the whole system. It works its destructiveness in different ways. The children of silicon valley end up super-pressured, hammered into the shape their parents demand. But on lower levels of the economy, levels where parental units don't have access to every possible advantage, there is fear mixed with hopelessness. And twenty-some years of reformsterism has accepted the premises behind that fear, from David Coleman's "nobody gives a shit what you think" to the Obama/Duncan administration's assertion that a good college education is the only way to escape poverty (which of course means that many of you aren't going to escape it at all).

And so, in different ways, children grow up on a razor's edge, imagining a world that will destroy them the moment they make One Wrong Move, raised by families that believe it, too. I'm also reminded of the work of Jessica Lahey, the teacher-writer whose book The Gift of Failure, has touched such a nerve with so many people. It has become a radical, revolutionary idea that children need to fail, that failure is a necessary part of growth, that you do not build muscles by having your parents lift weight for you.

But-- but-- let them fail??!! If they fail, that might be the One Wrong Move! It might be the moment that defines their downward spiral into failure and squalor and the child will end up living in a van by the river eating canned cat food warmed on a hot plate, alone and miserable and poor forever. They can't afford to fail. They can't handle failure.

My last generation of students fell chronologically right into Gray's upward spike, and if you ask me what defined them, my answer was, and is, fear. They were afraid, afraid that one wrong move would wreck them, that every new challenge in school was a potential disaster, a blaring klaxon that would announce to the world that This Child Is Not Enough!

Modern ed reform is steeped in that same brand of fear. NCLB was premised on the idea that students who were "left behind" were doomed to miserable lives and also premised on the idea that whether or not they would be left behind was beyond their control, just something that might happen to them, and which they probably wouldn't be able to handle if it did. The element of competition plugged into school was all about weeding out the losers. 

NCLB/CCSS/RttT didn't inject any of these elements into the culture, but they were napalm on the flames that were already there. 

And the scary part is that we're still doing it. Learning Loss is being used as an excuse to repeat a distilled version of all those reformy ideas. The editors of Rethinking Education absolutely nail this as they look at how Learning Loss panic is being used:

Shifting blame away from the for-profit healthcare system and the government’s response to the coronavirus is part of what makes the learning loss narrative so valuable to politicians who have no interest in challenging existing patterns of wealth and power. It is a narrative meant to distract the public and discipline teachers. Here’s the recipe: 1. Establish that closing schools hurt students using a narrow measure like test scores; 2. Blame closure of schools on teacher unions rather than a deadly pandemic; 3. Demand schools and teachers help students “regain academic ground lost during the pandemic” — and fast; 4. Use post-return-to-normal test scores to argue that teachers and schools are “failing”; 5. Implement “teacher-proof” (top-down, standardized, even scripted) curriculum or, more insidiously, argue for policies that will mean an end to public schools altogether.

The path ahead looks eerily like what Naomi Klein has called the “shock doctrine,” where powerful actors, like politicians, corporate tycoons, and pundits, use people’s disorientation following a collective shock — whether a devastating earthquake or a deadly pandemic — to push pro-business, neoliberal policies.

Those five steps are NCLB/CCSS/RttT all over again, with the pandemic and Learning Loss standing in for the general assertion that schools are failing. 

It is the shock doctrine again, and once again too many players and policy makers are forgetting that what gets shocked and punished are students. And those who say, "Well, these kids are too weak. Getting kicked around should toughen them up," know nothing about what makes a person strong, and if they are parents, we can expect to find them later among the crowd crying, "Somehow my child is estranged from me, and I want to punish someone for that, too."

I am not advocating for a warm fuzzy world where students just get warm hugs and happy talk all day, nor do I want to minimize the reality that we live in a country where the safety net for the poor and victims of bad luck--well, it's pretty raggedy these days. But pressuring and scaring the hell out of children, starting in what used to be kindergarten is not useful. It's not helpful, and it's no way to treat human beings, especially young, vulnerable ones. 

It is possible to teach hard stuff, to go at it with both hands and push its importance without tying it to a message of "Get an A on this test or else your life will who us the wretched mess we all suspect you might be." I know. I've done it, for years. You can teach hard and send the message, "You really need to get this stuff" while simultaneously delivering the message "You are strong and capable and you can do this and you can handle whatever outcome results." You can emphasize preparing students for the future and still honor that their lives are going on right now, not later, and those lives deserve to include fun and joy and hope. 

School can be a garden, not a pressure cooker. School can provide a nurturing warmth instead of some hellfire that refines a few and obliterates the rest. And since this is Gray, I'll point out that homeschools and unschools and all the rest as just ass susceptible to adults who are leaning on the panic buttons and stressing students out as any public school can.  

Read Gray's articles. They ought to be a sort of wake-up call, but my fear is that the only people paying attention are the one's already awake.