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The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids

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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

Let me give a personal perspective on The Overachiever "phenomenon." I am about to start a year off before college because of the extreme mental and physical toll high school took on me.

I took on too much throughout high school because my father pushed me. I interned at a biotech company, I headed three clubs at school, I took a full load of AP classes, and I missed lunch each day. I routinely stayed up all night, or slept 2 or 3 hours, to fit it all in and maintain my grades.

Red Bull was my life. Coke didn't do it anymore. Neither did coffee.

And then one day I passed out in the hallway at my house, and wound up in the hospital for two weeks with an irregular heartbeat from all the caffiene. I was so worn out, so out of shape, such a mess.

And you know what my father's first reaction was? "You're never going to get into Harvard if you're in this hospital and missing all this school!" I kicked him out of the room and cried. I thought I was dying and he was worried about Harvard.

The stories in this book are very real, and very helpful. I thought I was the only one who went through this. And the characters' stories give me hope. Thank you for writing this.

Last year I had to come to school on one of the days SATs were administered. I had to pick up a textbook I left in my locker. I showed up probably about 45 minutes before the SAT started. There were kids throwing up in the bathroom. Others were curled up in tiny balls in corners studying flashcards. And there were three small groups of girls crying in eachother's arms.

I swore I would never be like that. But after a summer of SAT prep courses, where kids even compared how much they were studying every day--and it's supposed to be summer and they're competing over homework!!--and friends coming back from vacation starting to talk about "reach schools," and everything, I'm already feeling the pressure. I told my mom, and she bought me this book. The book could have been written about my school. I mean I know it's not, the author was in Maryland, but the sense of school today, and all the pressures, it's the same here, too.

Now, I don't know of anyone quite like Frank, but I know of people who drive themselves close to that hard. And Taylor and Audrey and even Ryland seemed like some of my friends. I enjoyed the stories, but I also liked the sections telling why things are the way they are. The writer clearly did a ton of work on those sections, too. I didn't spend time reading that part, but she lists the sources at the very back of the book if anyone really needs to fill free time.

I don't think anything will be done for me, since I'm going into junior year and I don't think change happens that quickly. But I hope some good comes of the awareness this book causes.

Alexandra Robbins makes a compelling case for parents and their children to reexamine success and prestige in her latest expose. This book should be on all parents' must-read list, especially if you have kids in middle school who are already worried about their "resumes" and private college counselors.

The Overachievers profiles nine students at one of the top public schools in the country. Most of the students are from wealthy families and do not need to worry about how they will pay for college. In fact, most of them are not actually worried about getting into college so much as getting into the Right College. You know, Harvard, Yale, Stanford. So why would I care about these kids? They have it made, and if they are stressing out about whether they are accepted into Princeton or have to settle for Duke, well boo hoo.

And yet I found I was very interested in what happened to these students. Alexandra Robbins (who attended this very high school and then Middlebury College and then graduate school at Yale) tells the stories from the students' perspectives. In between finding out what is motivating these teenagers, Robbins explores a host of relevant subjects: peer pressure, family pressure, No Child Left Behind, the SAT and AP exams, prescription drugs (especially Ritalin), teenage sleep patterns, college rankings, education in other countries, teen suicide rates, gap year, cheating, and more. Any of these subjects would make a compelling study on its own, but taken altogether, you begin to understand, and even sympathize with, these overprivileged students. Several of these subjects have already been excellently covered by books such as The Cheating Culture by David Callahan, My Freshman Year by Rebekah Nathan, and The Winner-Take-All Society by Robert Frank.

Obviously, The Overachievers isn't just about high school students. It's also about their parents, the schools, politics, and money. It turns out that what motivates these kids most is fear. Fear of failure, of disappointing their families and friends, of not getting a great job, of not making scads of money. It's easy enough to see how the students could be in for a lifelong series of stressful situations: getting into a prestigious graduate school, acing the job interviews, making partner, nailing that big account, winning the election. But in the end, the students all seem to be satisfied with the colleges they get into and appear to have gained a bit of perspective by being subjects for the book. I hope it lasts.

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.

"The Overachievers" is a fascinating investigation into the lives of some of America's top students - the kids who want to do it all and oftentimes do, but at great personal cost and for dubious reasons.

Alexandra Robbins befriends and follows several students from Whitman High School in Maryland through one school year as they try their best to score perfect 1600s and 2400s on the SATs, be accepted into Ivy League schools and pad their resumes to impress the admissions officers with tons of extracurriculur activities (one student she interviewed had SIX typewritten pages of extracurricular activities!).

Robbins intersperses research and interesting facts with her stories of the students and discusses the unhealthy obsession with perfection and how the true values of education (knowledge, exploration, wisdom, self-discovery to name a few) is often subverted in the name test numbers, be they SAT, ACT or No Child Left Behind tests. She correctly notes tha honesty and any actual learning is routinely sacrificed for the GPA points due to widespread cheating, especially by the good and even great students. I've been teaching for 19 years now and I've never encountered so much cheating (and plagiarism) as I have in the last three years. It's rarely the weak students - the ones that outsiders would suspect. Nope - it's the good students - the ones with so much riding on maintaining super-high GPAs that they cannot afford even one off quiz.

The students ring true to me. I know kids like she's profiled here - the flirt, the Slacker, AP Frank, the Meathead, the Superstar. They come from a variety of homes and financial situations (though most are upper class - money does not seem to be a worry for most of them).

I hope that Alexandra Robbins turns her talents to documenting other groups of kids in schools someday, but in the meantime this is a fine and thought-provoking introduction to the modern American high school.

I read Robbins' Pledged and decided I wanted to read this book, just based on what it was about. After I checked it out of the library, I realized it followed students at Whitman. I am around Robbins' age (my ten yr reunion is this year) and attended a school at the lower end of the scale of the same county. I currently work at an elementary school in the county, and my mother has (and still does) teach high school in the county (at a school always competing with Whitman academically).

Anyway, with my knowledge of the county and schools in general, I knew a lot of the pressures discussed in this book, but didn't even think about the extent to which they are discussed. Robbins is a great writer and has great suggestions at the end of the book for this country to help with this "overachievism." I highly recommend reading this book to anyone, ESPECIALLY if you work in a school or have children.

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.

This book gives good insights into what's going on in the lives of high-achieving students. Although they may seem well-adjusted on the outside, adults need to be aware of the overwhelming stress they are dealing with. They need compassionate and understanding adults to help them step back understand that success in life truly does come in many forms, that comparing yourself with others gets you nowhere except depressed. It would be good for the overachieving students to read this book - they will probably find a character with whom they identify with and can learn from . . . and perhaps be inspired to back off and allow themselves to relax once in a while, and not have to be perfect.