Needham High School Honor Roll

Needham, Massachusetts made national news from CNN to Jay Leno when the high school principal, Paul Richards, sent e-mail to parents that the school council had decided to stop publishing the honor roll in the paper out of concern that the stress of grades might be contributing to the string of deaths the school had experienced. Boston Globe coverage.

According to freerepublic.com,

Principal Paul Richards said a key reason for stopping the practice is its contribution to students' stress level in "this high-expectations-high-achievement culture."

Needham High's principal said the decision to no longer publish the honor roll is not nailed in cement. Richards said it is "subject to review." He said, "We'll go through this year without it and assess the impact on the school culture."

The decision to drop publishing the honor roll comes at a time when the Needham High community is dealing with heartache. Last month, two seniors were killed in a car crash. Last spring, a Needham High student committed suicide.

The move comes as the town copes with a string of tragedies in the past two years, including four student suicides and a car crash that kill two seniors last month -- Soledad.

Worcester (Mass) Telegram.com discounted the deaths and focused on the message of devaluing grades, as follows:

The notion that published honor rolls contributed in any way to the four suicides among Needham High School students in the last two years is highly conjectural at best. What is certain is that by eliminating the public acknowledgement of a job well done the schools send a message that high achievement is somehow an embarrassment.

The recently formed Needham Coalition for Suicide Prevention conducted a survey that found one-third of Needham high school students engage in binge drinking and smoke marijuana, behaviors they say are now “part of the Needham teen culture.”

===============

My comments:

This is certainly a microcosm that reflects problems of the entire US educational system.

There are two distinct but related problems I see here. One is the question of getting realistic feedback about reality, and the other is how that message can be dealt with.

First, consider realistic feedback.

The fact that some students are doing worse than others in a given US high school is only the tip of the iceberg, the rest of it being that the whole US grading curve is far below our international competition. As jobs are increasingly globalized, we're graduating students who mistakenly think they are highly competitive and will discover they can't even make the first cut, internationally, and there go more jobs and more companies that will elect to build their facilities somewhere besides the USA.

Americans are famous world-wide for thinking that learning one language is a challenge, when the competition typically is fluent in several. Many companies, such as Intel and Microsoft, are moving their research facilities and jobs abroad -- where the talent is.

Forget Needham, and ask whether the US as a whole wants to hear about how we're doing. Here's one example. There's an international college-level computer programming contest that's been held every year for the past 30 years by the ACM called the International Collegiate Programming Contest. It used to be that Stanford or Caltech or some US school always won. Not anymore. It's really worth looking at the 2006 comparative ratings Here's the recent winners:

2006 - Saratov State U. (Russia)

2005 - Shanghai Jiao Tong U. (China)

2004 - St. Petersburg Institute (Russia)

2003 - Warsaw University (Poland)

2002 - Shanghai Jiao Tong (China)

2001 and 2000 - St. Petersburg State (Russia)

1999 U of Waterloo (Canada)

you get the idea...

Failure to recognize that we have a problem only makes the problem continue to get worse.

But, is this realistic feedback, or cold water in the face helpful? Or does it just make people depressed, stressed out, less likely to care, or actually suicidal?

I don't think anyone doubts that many people's response would be "I already know I'm not succeeding. I don't need any more reminders to rub it in." To some extent, this is true both on the personal level for the students, and on the national level, for the educational system as a whole.

As I've said repeatedly before in this weblog, the problems the world faces and the problems we face are simply too large for one individual to cope with, alone.

Does that mean we should abandon all hope and give up? No, it means we should stop trying to do this ALONE.

The operative word is "alone".

It's time to abandon this competitive "rugged individual" approach to problem solving, and start learning how to work as cooperating, mutually supportive teams.

The problem we have isn't that individuals are stupid - it's that the whole way we structure our interactions for working together is stupid. It's a structural defect.

The solution to this problem then, the appropriate intervention, is not antidepressant drugs, or alcohol binges, or marijuana, or other forms of oblivion or sedation or distraction. And it's not building in more insulation so we don't have to see how others are doing, abroad or at home.

The solution is learning how to overcome this unhelpful debilitating idea that each of us should somehow master this world separately, without help from each other, or else we're "worthless". That's just plain dumb. THAT is what needs to be fixed.

Can it be fixed? Yes, and that's what all the work in Positive Psychology or Positive Organizational Scholarship I've quoted in earlier posts is about.

Clearly, teams of people can still learn how to work together and learn together and be highly creative and productive together - if you get this idiotic constraint off that we should all be competing with each other while we do it.

People are not robots or machines. Human support matters. If we can get ourselves remoralized, collectively, re-inspired, re-awakened, the energy we're desperately needing to cope with life and deal with schoolwork will come back to us.

It's paradoxical that one property of depression is a lack of interest in interaction with other people, when it is precisely the reaffirming interaction with other people that is lacking and was lacking that made the world so depressing in the first place.

Our problem, nationally, is that we have too few "reaffirming interactions" and way too many negative interactions that put us down, or make us feel worthless.

So, it's a feedback problem. The news about Shanghai, or the honor role, only does some good if we're at the TOP of the energy curve, with power to spare. If our car battery is close to dead, and the alternator seems to have died years ago and no longer charges the battery each day, then, no, we don't need one more hill to climb.

In the short run, personal and national depression need to be dealt with enough to get us recharged somewhat. But then we need to also address why we spend all our time trying to discharge each other, instead of building up each other. Why do we think our "battery" of spiritual energy and motivation is "inside" us, or inside a bottle, when it is actually all around us, in the people we interact with daily?

Why do we keep trying to drive on the battery, running it down, instead of starting the engine we all have, the one that understands what the Boys' Town motto means: "He's not heavy father, he's my brother."

That is something we can do FOR each other instead of TO each other. It's non-linear, it's not zero sum, it's a possible win-win game.

This isn't rocket science. It doesn't require a trillion dollar budget, or high tech instrumentation. It only requires us to actually care about and be honestly encouraging to each other.

Maybe that's why we don't recognize the idea. We think it has to be hugely expensive or high-tech or something.

In other posts I discuss what researchers now see are the key ingredients in high-reliability organizations, and they all need a "safety culture" where people are free to say "I don't know" or "I don't agree."

Somehow, our school systems, up to and including college, don't understand the concept of teamwork. Perhaps teamwork is not very widespread among academics, and they are not specialists in it.

In industry, however, the difference is known between a group that "divides problems", with some moochers, and a group that "multiplies strengths". The latter is what I'm suggesting.

It's time to abandon the dream or fiction of a "superman", of one individual who can "do it all". If that ever was true, it's not true anymore. Computer scientists discovered several decades ago that it was just dumb to try to develop a "supercomputer" with a huge CPU - the way to go was to get a million small computers networked together so they add up to something more than they would if running separately. This is a very solid, very robust concept, not something "soft" or "squishy" or "touchy-feely."

It always seemed to me, in college's "group work" assignments, that no one really understood what the point was of the group, or how to make a group work, or why we were doing that.

Maybe, the idea of a "dyad" has a place besides a marriage and raising children. Maybe our schools should let people pair-up, and work as a team, get graded as a team, and our companies should hire them both as a team. It's bizarre. If 5 people get together and are spectacular, they form a corporation and get rich and everyone applauds. The company as a whole is hired to do work, not one person. But if 5 people in high-school or college get together and work superbly as a team, that's "cheating."

We need to rethink this whole concept of working as a team.

Photo credit: Amish barn raising by heyburn3.

technorati tags:Needham, honorroll, grades, stress, pressure, suicide, depression, teams, positivepsychology, psychology, psychiatry, hope, postivedeviance, systems, emergence, prosperity, success