Why We Are Failing to Make the Grade
AMANDA PARRISH MORGAN is the author of the nonfiction work Stroller. Her articles and essays have appeared in such places as The Washington Post, Real Simple, and ESPNW. She teaches a course in rhetoric and composition at Fairfield University.
When I was in high school in the late 1990s, my copy of The Princeton Review’s 310 Best Colleges was more dog-eared than any of the beloved books on my shelves. Occasionally during free periods, I’d visit the guidance office to pore over data (SAT scores, weighted and unweighted GPAs) from the previous year’s graduating class. I looked often at college websites, checked the results of the cross-country and track teams for which I hoped to compete, and imagined myself leaving behind my suburban public school in Connecticut and walking the grounds of some hallowed university campus. Senior year, I applied early to the University of Chicago, and on a December afternoon, I opened our mailbox and found the large acceptance envelope—a moment that would rank, for many years, among the happiest of my life.
Near the end of my four years at Chicago, I began thinking about a career in teaching. My own high school teachers had influenced me deeply, and English classes in particular had been a kind of refuge, a place where the focus hadn’t been on grades, test scores, and the quest for college admission. After finishing graduate school in 2008,I started teaching at an affluent public school. Then, in 2012,I went home.
Given how eager I’d been to leave Connecticut, I never imagined that I’d return not just to the area but to my alma mater—to teach the very same classes I once took and to coach the cross-country and track teams. Neither could I have imagined how different the place would be. The school’s population was more than twice what it had been when I graduated. But since the colleges to which my students were applying had increased enrollment only modestly, if at all, the obsession with getting accepted was even more intense. My students were habitually stressed about grades, test scores, and how to appear marketable on their college applications, making my own devotion to the process seem almost quaint.
The cross-country team, meanwhile, had grown from a motley crew of 18 intense girls with long ponytails and nylon shorts to a GPS watch–wearing fleet of more than 100 young women who knew exactly how many miles a week they were running, what pace they were keeping, how many calories they were burning, and often, because of social media and online training logs, how they compared with their teammates and competitors. Whereas my friends and I had often lounged around after practice, pretending to stretch as we waited for rides, as we gossipped about the boys’ team or shared flashcards for an upcoming midterm, my athletes often left practice early to make it to private music lessons, or to a variety of service clubs, or to tutors who cost several hundred dollars an hour. No
