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Gallery On Achievement

High school reform centers on fundamentals like helping students reach proficiency in basic skills and improving graduation and attendance rates. But what about the other end of the spectrum—the high-achieving students at high-performing schools?

Places like Lincoln High, the oldest public high school west of the Mississippi, can be pressure cookers where today's students face demands that their parents never knew. Two Lincoln students give us a glimpse of that world.

Essay by Ben Lansky
Photos by Sophie Smith

Education is a great equalizer of the conditions of men—the balance wheel of the social machinery. —Horace Mann, 1848

In all likelihood, you were there for the good old days. The days when jocks were jocks, nerds were nerds, and high school was an end rather than a means—the days immortalized in the teen comedies of the 1970s and 1980s. It's really not so simple anymore.

In June, I graduated from Lincoln High School in downtown Portland, Oregon. For those readers unfamiliar with Lincoln, it's a public school of about 1,500 students offering a variety of "magnet" programs such as the rigorous International Baccalaureate program and the International Studies Center. The student body comes from almost homogeneously white, upper-middle-class families, and Lincoln is consistently one of the very top-performing high schools in Oregon, as measured by college acceptance rates and test scores.

For all intents and purposes, and with few exceptions, you might recognize your own high school here—the same flickering hallway lights, the same pumpkin floor tile, the same 1,500 lives spilling haphazardly out of lockers and backpacks. More significantly, you might also recognize the same tacit alignments and cliques, the same fraternity-style clusters of friends. But, even if things appear very much like they used to, something has changed.

Fierce competition for admission to the best colleges—as well as state standards and benchmarks—has created a new breed of student: the paper student. While the cluster of jersey-clad football players across the hallway may remind you of the typical jocks you might have known in high school, you'd probably be surprised to learn that each of them volunteers several hours a week at community service organizations, most are on the honor roll, and many are involved in student clubs such as Model United Nations. And while the bespectacled "outcasts" in the computer lab might echo your own school's nerds, you may be startled to find that these are leaders in their community, politicians, and prom kings.

Particularly in an achievement-oriented school like Lincoln, résumé have become a central component of teen culture. With the swelling contention for college acceptance, even perfect grades are not enough. Each of the highest-ranked colleges and universities now reject hundreds of valedictorians every year. The secret to success when applying to colleges today has a lot to do with a person's achievements beyond academics. In order to get into the top schools, an applicant must be truly, deeply, an interesting person. Or, at least, an applicant must appear to be an interesting person. It is increasingly difficult for anyone to discern which students are genuine in their passion and conviction, and which students are simply going through the motions.

The truth is that, when excellence is the standard, the students who are genuinely engaged, involved, and committed are indistinguishable from those students who only present themselves to be. Achievement is a dazzling thing, on paper, and it is a simple enough thing to boast of. But what effect does this have on the individual?

In April this year, the New York Times ran an article entitled "New Lesson for College Students: Lighten Up." In it, journalist Sara Rimer describes the measures that the top colleges and universities are taking to slow down their overachieving students; Harvard University, for example, offers training to graduate students in counter-perfectionism. And the need for stress relief is dramatically on the rise: at the University of Michigan, the number of students seeking counseling has risen by 22 percent in the last three years. Rimer herself says it best: "Some college officials see the contradiction inherent in their new efforts to offset stress and encourage the joys of reflection and unstructured time. After all, it was multitasking, hyperorganized, résumé-building behavior that helped some students get admitted to their schools in the first place."

How did this happen? At what point did ambition usurp interest as the measure of scholarship? I certainly don't know, but it is a frightening thing. The common characteristic alleged by each of the colleges I visited during my junior and senior years as a potential applicant was that the students "learned for the sake of learning." When that is the biggest selling point for the best schools, it seems that more attention must be paid to this philosophy at the high school level.

In a public statement in February 2001, President George W. Bush said, "You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test." And, despite his ironic grammatical misstep, that's true. But that should not be any person's rationale for teaching a child to read. Too many students have similarly lost sight of the purpose of their educations beyond what is to be achieved by them. This is not to say that genuine passion has waned, only that the rise of the résumé has clouded its distinction.

Perhaps the most important issue facing educational reform is no longer outdated textbooks or overwhelming class size, but the goal of high school itself. To many students, jocks and nerds alike, at least the last two years of high school are in fact preparation not for college itself but for the college admissions process. Moments of woolgathering, daydreaming, and improvisation are few and far between. Aimlessness, it is supposed, cannot be afforded by any student with hopes of a future. But these years should be somewhat aimless, as teenagers wrestle with the world and work out for themselves who they want to be. That all-important process must be uncompromising to be complete, and sometimes it takes more than these four years—it may take a lifetime.

The résumés of Ben Lansky and Sophie Smith won them acceptance to Haverford College and Macalester College, respectively, where they're currently starting their freshman year.