Good Goes Bad
There’s a school district about thirty minutes from my hometown, a district widely known for its superb academics, strong public schools, and high-achieving students. This district borders Princeton, the town that also boasts the eponymous university, and the general area has been described in The New York Times as a hotbed for “popular bedroom communities for technology entrepreneurs, pharmaceutical researchers and engineers, drawn in large part by the public schools.”
Long story short, though I’m far from buying a home or starting a family of my own, I fully recognize that parents and families — including my own, back in the day before they had either my sister or me — often consider the reputation of the public school district of their potential future-house options. You want to make sure that your kids have a good education, good teachers, and a good school.
Aforementioned school district, the West Windsor-Plainsboro community in New Jersey, truly represents a strong educational environment — boasting top rankings in categories of both state and national school districts, but funnily enough, the district also illuminates how too much of a good thing also apparently has a negative effect. Academics, especially in the context of a regulated school environment with teachers, faculty, and structured courses and homework, wouldn’t seem to put too much pressure, stress, or onus on students, but superintendents and students alike seem to feel differently.
What I learned in my research was that despite popular belief, a consistently high-performing, overachieving, and highly successful school district can do “too” well. Despite the structure of a school environment and the public nature of the two high schools of the district, West Windsor-Plainsboro represents how too much can be enough.
In a 16-page letter sent to the district in October 2015, superintendent David Aderhold expressed his concerns that “we may be failing them by reinforcing an educational system that perpetuates grades at the expense of deep and meaningful learning.”
Aderhold goes on to emphasize that “Unfortunately, perspective seems to be gone as we keep pushing the education system to the point where we — and, I mean the collective we (parents, teachers, and students) — have created a system where learning takes a back-seat to academic success. The grade has become the end point, not the learning.”
While district administration, school educators, and parents of course prioritize academics and support high performances, Aderhold states that success has a breaking point.
Specific changes that Aderhold outlines in his letter include the elimination of midterm and final exams within the high school. Perhaps most importantly, Aderhold notes the damning realization that “with final exams, students calculate the exact score needed to earn the grade desired and often did not study for mastery. Therefore, the final exams were essentially a game being played versus an opportunity to demonstrate one’s learning.”
Throughout his letter, the superintendent continually details the approach that the district aims to take in strengthening and developing the “whole child” as a student and individual, a holistic approach that values emotional and social growth beyond just grades.
Aderhold caps off his letter by including a quote from an email that he previously sent to district staff —
“While we strive to enhance teaching and learning, we also need to confront the social and emotional issues of all students; we need to answer the question: What does it mean to be successful?”
In a district of about 9,700 students, WW-P parents sided on varying sides of a debate that “broke down roughly along racial lines.”
On one side, supporting Aderhold’s proposals and the district’s renewed approach to back away from academics, white parents cheered the letter and its promise to take away some of the pressures from the increasingly competitive academic atmosphere.
On the other side, parents, among which some were a few of the “thousands of Asian-American professionals” who had in recent years past moved to the district, booed the changes and their potential consequences on the district and its success. Mike Jia referred to the superintendent’s reforms as the cause of future “dumbing down” of his children’s education and as a reflection of a “national anti-intellectual trend that will not prepare our children for the future.”
A Board of Education meeting for the district, held near winter break just a few months later after Alderhold published his letter, quite literally depicted this divide, with a middle school cafeteria boasting primarily white families on one side, Asian families on the other. It is easy to paint this photo as simply a racial one, but the cultural values underlying certain pushes to academics and education may derive themselves from the experience of first-generation immigrants rather than the generalizations of specific countries or ethnicities.
For their children to excel, immigrants push them deep, hard, and fast in the classroom, encouraging and urging and needing their sons and daughters to succeed in lieu of some of the social capital that immigrants may otherwise not be able to contribute.
All parents want their children to be successful. All parents want their children to have a great public education when growing up. As West Windsor-Plainsboro spins it, the definition of success, what exactly entails a student’s path or fast-track to success, and the lengths to which parents, teachers, and school administration can (or should) support high-achieving academic performances and track records vary from side to side.
The pressure, the drive, and the will to succeed are alive and well, but what is too much? When does the line get drawn, and how do you resolve the very real cultural, experiential, and value-driven divide of one district trying to promote the success, well-being, and health of all of its students?
