DENISE CLARK POPE, Ph.D. Stanford University School of Education
An except from the Los Altos Town Crier by Eliza Ridgeway, February 7, 2007
A carefully scrutinized grade-point average, extracurricular activities booked every
second of the week, soccer game road trips every weekend - do you think Los Altos parent Denise Clark Pope was describing a typical high school senior? She was characterizing fourth- grade students. The Stanford University lecturer and researcher in the School of Education spoke to more than 450 parents . . . on "Life in the Fast Lane and How to Get Out."
Pope's book "Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out Materialistic, and Miseducated Students” (Yale University Press, 2003) examines a child's experience in the area's hypercompetitive, overcommitted school communities.
"Think about the (term) 'fast lane' - what (does) that mean?" Pope asked the audience. Parents called out responses: "taking four or five AP classes," "music and sports and arts" and
signing your kids up for activities just because their friends are doing it."
Pope described some survival strategies students adopt to "do school." Students "do school" to achieve all the marks of success, regardless of the cost or educational opportunities lost. Parents, and school systems that promote a single idea of success - getting into an Ivy League college, for instance - push them on without allowing for alternatives.
She asked the audience to guess the top two words students associated with school. "Bored" was number one, followed by "tired."
"They're robbed of the joy of learning, which is replaced with grades and tests," Pope said. "The system is not working. And kids are paying the toll."
Studies of student health list anxiety and depression, sleep deprivation, the abuse of drugs and alcohol, and suicide as some of the health risks facing students as young as middle- and late elementary school.
"Nine- to 13-year-olds are more stressed by academics than anything else in their lives," Pope said. "And it tends to be a suburban problem."
 Pope identified parental pressure as the primary source of the stress, but she did more
than point a finger at the community. She offered advice and solutions, for individual parents and the school district as a whole.
Adolescents need 9.5 hours of sleep each night, elementary and early middle school students between 10 and 11 hours. Sleep deprivation leads to illness, impaired ability to learn
and abuse of stimulants.
"It takes one caring adult to stop a suicide, but you have to know the signs," Pope said urgently. "If girls start wearing long sleeves all the time, they are cutting." She also listed a sustained change of affect or personality, dramatic change in friends, falling grades and severe fatigue as warning signs.
"Students feel hopeless, as though nothing is going to change, and as though nobody listens to them," she said.
She suggested that districts create a test and project calendar so that teachers don't
overlap large assignments, schedule exams before winter vacation so families can get a genuine break and question the purpose of homework and the extent to which excess amounts require too much parental participation.
"There is zero correlation between homework in elementary school and academic achievement," Pope said.