Overachievers, The: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids (Hardcover)

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Key Phrases: senior superlatives, overachiever culture, helicopter parents, College Board, Mass Hall, Ivy League (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this engrossing anthropological study of the cult of overachieving that is prevalent in many middle- and upper-class schools, Robbins (Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities) follows the lives of students from a Bethesda, Md., high school as they navigate the SAT and college application process. These students are obsessed with success, contending with illness, physical deterioration (senior Julie is losing hair over the pressure to get into Stanford), cheating (students sell a physics project to one another), obsessed parents ( Frank's mother manages his time to the point of abuse) and emotional breakdowns. What matters to them is that all-important acceptance to the right name-brand school. "When teenagers inevitably look at themselves through the prism of our overachiever culture," Robbins writes, "they often come to the conclusion that no matter how much they achieve, it will never be enough." The portraits of the teens are compelling and make for an easy read. Robbins provides a series of critiques of the system, including college rankings, parental pressure, the meaninglessness of standardized testing and the push for A.P. classes. She ends with a call to action, giving suggestions on how to alleviate teens' stress and panic at how far behind they feel. (Aug.)
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From The Washington Post

At a time when "underperforming" seems to be the sorry watchword of American education, it's unsettling to come across a book bemoaning the plight of the overachievers. Forget the impoverished teenagers stuck in anarchic schools that would shame the worst Third World potentate; it's the kids with a shot at Harvard who've really got problems. They have too much homework in too many classes, extracurriculars that require their leadership and parents who feel entitled to a sticker from a name-brand college on their car. And then there are SAT prep classes to attend, recruitment calls from Ivy League coaches to field and prom to dread.

At least, that's how Alexandra Robbins reports it in her latest book, The Overachievers. She spent three semesters in 2004 and 2005 at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, her alma mater and one of the top public high schools in the country, to gather evidence for her sweeping indictment of the "twisted values of an educational system gone wrong." While Whitman hardly seems like an appropriate first stop on a tour of educational dysfunction (its average SAT scores are more than 200 points above the national average, and 95 percent of its students go on to college), Robbins found ample evidence that its top students are overwhelmed by all that they have to do.

She follows eight students (four juniors, three seniors and one college freshman) who are all struggling to cope: Julie's hair is falling out; Ryland has panic attacks before physics tests; Audrey is so afraid of falling behind that she goes to school even when she's terribly sick. (Most of the names were changed.) And what's it all for? Admission to a top-ranked college. "As Sam explained to me in only our second meeting," writes Robbins, "if he didn't get into a school whose prestige reflected his exhaustive work and the nights he spent studying until three A.M., he would feel he had 'done a lot for naught,' even if he fell in love with a non-elite school that was perfect for him."

Robbins's strength is in the particular, in spending hours and hours with her subjects, earning their trust and serving as the scribe to their anxieties. Her description of Julie's elation at beating her own best track time is thrilling, while Frank's frustrated rage at his mother's dictatorial control ("You want [to] spend time with friends?" she screams on one occasion. "You are a social whore!") is heartbreaking. The agonizing over romances gone awry and test scores that don't measure up reads truer than any yearbook ever could.

But Robbins, whose previous books investigated sorority life and the Yale secret society Skull and Bones, stumbles when she widens her lens to what she says is a nationwide crisis of "overachieverism," in which high school has become "a competitive frenzy . . . a hotbed for Machiavellian strategy." While that is undoubtedly true for a subset of students from a subset of high schools gunning for a subset of very exclusive colleges, most students graduate blissfully unscathed. (Teachers and parents in schools across the land, not to mention Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and her No Child Left Behind acolytes, beg for such a plague of competitive frenzy.) Indeed, according to the Department of Education, the vast majority of students attend colleges that accept more than half of those applying -- and don't particularly care what club an applicant presided over as a high school sophomore.

In a clumsy attempt to document the universality of this overachievement crisis, Robbins subjects readers to blasts of facts on sleep deprivation, suicide, eating disorders, cheating, college admissions and Asian educational systems. She interviews students from New Mexico to Nebraska to the famously competitive New Trier High School outside Chicago. But throughout it all, she skates past how issues of wealth and privilege (and their opposites) play into her thesis. That becomes most obvious when she takes a lengthy and puzzling detour through the admissions process at elite Manhattan preschools. Yes, it's bizarre that the schools observe toddlers at play to decide which ones will make the cut, but she never makes the case that what goes on in these rarefied schools is relevant to anyone but the very rich.

And yet she has prescriptions for everyone: Colleges should dump the SAT and boycott U.S. News's college rankings (I once served as deputy editor for education at U.S. News but did not work on the rankings, thankfully); high schools should stop ranking students, limit the number of Advanced Placement classes students can take and allow them to get healthy amounts of sleep by delaying start times; parents should "get a life," and students should "accept that admissions aren't personal."

But in an age of rampant grade inflation, college admissions officers use class rankings and standardized test scores to determine whether there's a brain behind all those A-filled report cards. And few students really need to cut back on AP classes. The average qualified high schooler takes just one a year.

The Overachievers hardly inspires hand-wringing about the state of American education. In fact, this reader came away thinking that even these stressed kids would be all right. Not all of them got into Ivy League schools, and not all of them will have the world-changing careers that they imagine for themselves. (But really, who does?) Even the unhappy ones -- Ryland and Frank with their cruel mothers, Audrey with her crippling perfectionism -- had slowly begun to feel their way toward saner ground by the end of the school year. These kids -- these bright, hard-working, overachieving kids, these kids who should make every parent and teacher glow with pride -- will be just fine.

Reviewed by Rachel Hartigan Shea
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 448 pages
• Publisher: Hyperion; 1 edition (August 8, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1401302017
• ISBN-13: 978-1401302016
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (58 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #531,028 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

39 of 45 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Recollections from an "average" kid..., September 10, 2006

By	M. Miller "evescaduceus" - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

The author's writing style does an excellent job of bringing these young people to life, and it seems easier to feel sympathy for these youngsters than it was to empathize with the rather bitchy young adults she described in "Pledged".

But Walt Whitman is not only a school for highly achieving, stressed-out, Ivy League strivers. It is also a school for average kids, quiet kids, goths, drug users, dope sellers, artists, devoutly religious kids, and single-pointed nerds who are the farthest thing from the polished, well-rounded, resume kings and queens portrayed in this narrative. At least, it was when I attended the school and graduated nearly twenty years ago, and to a large extent, it probably still is today.

The average students are rarely featured in the narrative, except in terms of their relationships with the overachievers, but it would have been interesting had the author focused a little more on how an elite public school like Walt Whitman shapes the expectations of its average kids.

Many of these youngsters probably benefitted from exposure to high achievers, particularly since they may have shared at least a few AP classes with them (not every AP student is a classic overachiever). But many of the average youngsters also feel the same stress that overachievers experience, along with a greater sense of inadequacy when comparing their modest achievements and SAT scores against the gold standard established by Whitman's top twenty percent. Some of the these average kids may deliberately model their academic and social behavior to contrast with the norm established by the school's dominant elite as a way of establishing their own identities, but whether this helps or harms them in the long run is a topic the author didn't get around to addressing.

On the other hand, one issue that Robbins does not shy away from is the way that schools like Walt Whitman give selected students better grades because their parents are community VIP's or on a school board or committee. In that sense, it becomes a private school for the top-performing students and/or children of elites, and a public school for the rest of us.

I found myself sympathizing with the "stealth achiever" who asks to see the paper that an English teacher may have graded unfairly, only to be told that the paper was unavailable in the classroom. This triggered a memory of my own experience with a 12th grade English teacher, an encounter that sadly recalls "Stealth's" anecdote.

I received "B's" all year on the papers I submitted, right up until the month before the school year ended, when our AP English exam scores became available. My score of "5" must have been an unexpected upset for this teacher, because she wrote a large "A+" in red ink on my two remaining papers that she graded after our scores were posted. Fortunately, I will never forget the look on her face when I tossed the papers on her desk after class during the final week of my Whitman career, and asked her to change the grades back to "B's", because I "preferred consistency to hypocrisy". Still, it is sad to see how little appears to have changed at Whitman in nearly twenty years.

Robbins' book will hopefully make the alumni readers of Walt Whitman and other elite high schools begin to consider if this is the same sort of experience they would want for their own children. My own informal inquiries among my peers have yielded the entire range of opinions, from "Of course not, its a public school, and we've given up on the public schools", to "Its hard on the kids, but its a necessary preparation for the real world", to "When it comes to my own kids, I want the experience to involve a little more happiness and contentment".

My own gut feeling is predisposed towards 'more happiness and contentment' - as a nondescript "average" kid, I went on to some solid achievements once high school and college were over -volunteering as a Peace Corps teacher in one of the world's poorest countries for two years, completing the necessary prerequisites to apply for a master's degree as a physician's assistant, and currently researching and writing what I hope will become my first book. What college did I attend? The University of Maryland, which was widely perceived as a dumping ground for average kids at the time I graduated from Walt Whitman.

M. Miller
Walt Whitman High School, Class of 1988

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Important Subject, Engaging Delivery, August 23, 2006

By	N. Bilmes "bookaholic" (Vernon, CT United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

As both a parent of two elementary school children, and an elementary school teacher, I found this look at the pressures that some kids have placed on them, or put on themselves, to be absolutely horrifying. Robbins does a terrific job making what could be a boring book into a compelling page-turning read. She intersperses looks into the lives of students with her arguments and examination of the SAT system, recess-deprived elementary school students, and college-admission fueled climate of our schools. Robbins puts a face to a damaging situation that prevails in a lot of our public schools.

Students need to be treated as kids, not robots. To be excited about school and want to learn they have to like coming to school.

Kudos to Ms. Robbins for delivering such an important and engaging book.

48 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars We Have Created A Monster -- And It Is US..., August 12, 2006

By	Dr. Jonathan Dolhenty (Port Orford, OR United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

This is a very disturbing book, but the problems with which it deals should come as no surprise to anyone who keeps up on current affairs and what is happening in the education "business." Furthermore, the facts and anecdotes related in this book constitute an indictment of the way in which "schooling" in this country is perceived and administered by education "experts," political "leaders," the students involved, their families, and our society in general. In my opinion, "The Overachievers" presents its case well and its author, Alexandra Robbins, deserves a note of thanks for addressing the issues she does and bringing them to national attention at this time.

The reason I say this is simple: It appears again that the federal educational bureaucrats implementing the latest "fads" in teaching and administration, under pressure from political leaders more interested in votes and public-opinion polls than what is best for the students in our schools, and with the "blessing" of large companies who make huge profits providing educational "services" and products, have created an environment where undue, unhealthful, and un-academic practices are promoted in the name of "educational progress."

The main thrust of Robbins' book is ably stated on the inside of the dust jacket: "High school isn't what it used to be. With record members of students competing fiercely to get into college, schools are no longer primarily places of learning. They're dog-eat-dog battlegrounds in which kids must set aside interests and passions in order to strategize over how to game the system. In this increasingly stressful environment, kids are defined not by their character or hunger for knowledge, but by often arbitrary scores and statistics." How sad, and how counterproductive to what genuine schooling is supposed to provide.

I spent over seventeen years in the public schools as a teacher, administrator, and college professor, and edited an education newsletter for five years after leaving that sector. At that time, I was becoming increasingly concerned about the way in which schooling was being viewed by all parties involved: teachers, administrators, policy makers, students, parents, and so forth. I was always insisting that education was not a "competitive" enterprise and that the concern with letter-grades, test scores, and all those statistics that were dear to the hearts of so many was leading our nation toward a crisis wherein the proper aim of schooling would be abandoned and other, less laudable objectives would become dominant. Robbins' book provides evidence for my concern at that time.

Unfortunately, I am not allowed enough space here to write a thorough review of this book, as I would like to do. So let me concentrate on two points that Robbins discusses that I think are especially significant: (1) The issue of educational testing and measurements, and (2) the issue of so-called "prestigious" colleges and universities. I will address the second issue first.

After noting that "The obsession over name-brand schools is the most frenzied it has ever been...," Robbins writes that a 1999 research study "sent shock waves through Ivyland when [it] concluded after a twenty-year study that graduates of prestigious colleges did not earn more than graduates of other schools." Furthermore, according to Robbins, "...surveys of top business leaders do not support the idea that a degree from an elite institution is necessary for success. By 2005 the percentage of CEOs at S&P 500 companies who did not graduate from an Ivy League school had risen to 90 percent from 84 percent in 1998."

I am not the least surprised at these findings. I have met quite a few Harvard and Yale graduates, none of whom particularly impressed me. I know professors at some of these so-called "prestigious" colleges and they are not any more knowledgeable or scholarly that most I know from other institutions which are not generally considered "elite." I graduated from a small liberal arts college in the Pacific Northwest (500 or so students) and consider to this day (more than 40 years later) that I received a superb educational experience. My master's and doctorate are from state universities not "recognized" to be in the top-ranked institutions in this country, and yet I will challenge any Ivy League graduate to a debate about any general subject of current concern. (I might say here that both 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry and our current president George Bush graduated from Yale, and neither is noteworthy regarding "academic learning" or "scholarly pursuits.")

Regarding the testing matter, particularly the SAT and allied measurements, Robbins makes a couple of important points. Parents and students drive themselves crazy over scoring well on these tests, yet "One problem is that so much effort and faith are put into a test that for decades researchers have proved to be flawed..." and, moreover, "...[S]everal researchers have concluded that the SAT assesses little more than test-taking skills." And what makes all this frenzy more suspect, in my view, is that, after the SAT underwent changes after being criticized by some observers, is that "... the test-prep industry has profited enormously from the new SAT." Is this another all-too-common case of an industry artificially "creating a problem" because it has developed a "solution" that it can sell at enormous profit to an unwary consumer?

Tests and measurements in education have an important role to play in schooling. They ought to be used to evaluate a student's performance relative to improvement. They should be used to diagnose where improvement is necessary. They should be used to plan a program for improvement relative to the objectives sought. They should not be used to compare one student with another, particularly regarding entrance into higher education or some career path. Enough said.

There is a lot more to be said about Robbins' book but space prohibits. It is important reading especially for parents and college-bound students. It is vital reading for school administrators and educational policy makers. I highly recommend "The Overachievers" to all readers concerned with this issue. Much food for thought and reflection.