Parents at Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax received an email on the first day of state standardized testing urging them to see an “important film about high-stakes testing and the toll it takes on students, parents and teachers.” The email’s sender? Robinson Secondary School.
“Isn’t that coincidental?” said Suzanne Tsacoumis, president of the school’s Parent Teacher Student Association, which is sponsoring a screening of critically acclaimed documentary “Race to Nowhere” at Robinson on June 6.
“I’d love to say we did that intentionally,” said Tsacoumis of the overlap with Virginia’s Standards of Learning exams, adding that she “hope[s] the screening will encourage people to pause to think about the pressures we put on our students. We want everyone to do the best they can, but sometimes we go a little over the top. It’s a fine balance.”
Robinson is the latest of at least a dozen schools in the Washington area to show the documentary, which highlights the impact of homework and tests on students’ stress levels.
In the past six months, the film has been screened more than 2,000 times in 48 states and 17 countries, “most often sponsored by PTAs or education associations with local schools,” a spokeswoman for producer Reel Link Films said.
Fairfax County Public Schools spokesman Paul Regnier reiterated that the sponsoring parent organizations are independent from the school system.
The film’s creators “seem to think high-stakes testing is a bad idea — I don’t know that we have a position on that,” he said. “We certainly think we ought to evaluate students on things other than tests. Tests is one thing, but shouldn’t be the only thing.”
Laurie Levy-Page, a member of the “Stressbusters Committee” at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, said her band of parent volunteers decided to screen “Race to Nowhere” last fall at the suggestion of Whitman’s guidance counselors.
“I think people were very much in agreement with the thesis of the film, that we’re pushing our kids too hard, and for what?” Levy-Page said. “… It gave people a lot to talk about. People didn’t leave thinking, ‘That was a pleasant evening!'”
The Alexandria PTA Council organized a screening at the urging of Superintendent Morton Sherman, who “doesn’t shy away from the controversial” and met a packed audience with fierce concerns, Council President Karen McManis said.
“Parents were saying, ‘My kids are at school until 9:30 at night, they’re in drama club, they’re in show choir,'” McManis said.
“But,” she reasoned, “there’s not a perfect fix. Life is life.”
