"Achievement culture" is insufficiently descriptive... I'd like my children to want to achieve great things, and to be in school with others who're similarly driven to achieve interesting, useful and positive things. And that kids are pushed to succeed isn't, per se, a problem.

On the other hand, the comments in the movie on how, (1) the average GPA of Cal admissions was well north of 4.0 because of AP scoring; and (2) half the kids admitted then need to take remedial courses, suggests that there's a big demand to achieve *something* that isn't actually an education.

You could imagine the complaining. But the catch: we were assigned this project at the end of February. I drafted a reading plan to finish the books by April and took two hours every day of Spring Break and finished my research paper. It was virtually painless.
The video somehow correlates large amounts of homework with poor college success. They believe that homework impedes creative development and “real applicable skills”. First off, your creativity does not and will not allow you to predict projectile motion, mathematical modeling of markets, or any other “employable” skill. Creativity is great, but homework should not have to cater to it. Show it in your music, art, creative writing, or even your robots or algorithms. Make time for it if you truly value it. I'm not even going to try to punch holes in the logical fallacies with school achievement and poor college results. It should stand for itself. And the actual rankings of US per-collogiate public schools vs the rest of the world should speak wonders about inadequacy of the system. It's definitely not homework's fault if you look across national averages. I believe it's the attitude of students among different cultures.

Work habits develop young. Time management is easily the most important skill to learn before college or even highschool. And we should encourage ambition in students. If stress is difficult now, I can't imagine what it would be like unemployed with a family to support which I don't need to remind that it still is reality for many California residents.

Corwin, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on this. It means a lot to hear from you firsthand about your experience.

I think there are addressable problems with homework that just haven't been addressed. As mentioned above, some 6th grade teachers are giving 2-3 or more hours of homework routinely, and, worse, as next-day assignments (as opposed to your "plan your time and it's pretty comfortable" example) when others give a week's schedule of assignments in advance. I was also less than impressed with the nature of some of the homework, which was more grinding along on already-established problems, than any sort of practice on new skills.

It would be great if the middle school could normalize workloads more (i.e., rein in the few over-assigning teachers) and require that homework assignments be flexible, so that kids who've got afterschool activities can work around those commitments.

I agree with you Corwin. Although the problems described in Race to Nowhere exist in some parts of American society, and can be found in Albany, excessive workloads are not what plagues education in the United States (although excessive testing might be). The more urgent problem is reflected in these statistics out this week: that 21.7 percent of California high school students drop out before graduation (and apparently 14 percent of Albany students) i.e., that schools are not educating many kids. Yet neither California's legislature nor governor think education is important enough to spend more than about $5,000 per student per year. Our education system is failing our kids by suggesting their schooling isn't important enough to make it a priority. If we took notes on the successful education system in, say, Singapore, we'd notice that educating young people is deemed a national priority.
In Albany we are blessed with earnest teachers. But they scrape by with inadequate resources and kids do, too.