The Dark Side of “Rigor”: When student achievement jeopardizes student wellness, and what we can do about it

In the school communities where we serve, the word “rigor” is like catnip for parents. The term is brandished about liberally in college preparatory secondary schools, from teacher syllabi and school websites to glossy marketing materials, social media campaigns and parking lot conversations.

Parents ascribe value and credibility to a course, program, or school labelled “rigorous.” Rigor is seen as fundamental to effective academic preparation for young people, and is associated with favorable outcomes ranging from high standardized test scores and weighted grades to the grand prize, admission to elite colleges and universities.

What exactly do we mean by rigor? How is it delivered in classrooms? How is it measured? And is rigor – however we define it – good for children?

One of the most common associations we make with the word “rigor” is difficulty. A rigorous class is a hard one. Why is a rigorous class hard? Is it that the teacher of a rigorous class demands that students think deeply and stretch their intellectual grasp, to push beyond their assumptions and apprehensions, to tackle academic challenges they might not have tried were it not for the task’s or teacher’s rigor? Or is it simply that the teacher assigns an inordinate amount of homework or course reading, gives tests that are beyond many students’ capabilities, and otherwise places such heavy demands on students’ time, energy, and resources that they must subject themselves to sleep deprivation, isolation, emotional fatigue, and anxiety in order to earn high marks? 

The latter scenario is more accurately the case in many of the most “rigorous” schools where we are in Seattle and Silicon Valley, as parents come to associate rigor with stress, and by extension, stress with desirable outcomes like matriculation at highly selective colleges and elite universities. As a result – astonishingly – we’ve normalized adolescent stress and its debilitating effects on our students.

Rigor and Stress

Entering the second year of a global pandemic, research examining its impact on children and wellness is still emerging. In schools, we know that children of all ages contend with pandemic-related mental health challenges brought on by social isolation, uncertainty, fear of illness, and more. Current studies depict increases in childhood and adolescent depression and anxiety since the start of the pandemic. For instance, Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital witnessed a 35% increase in mental health assistance for children in 2020, as well as an uptick in suicide attempts.

Such an alarming pandemic-related surge in mental health concerns among young people aggravate an already-grim outlook for adolescent wellness. Our obsession with (and emphasis on) rigor for rigor’s sake may help account for the alarming increase in stress and stress-related concerns young people began to suffer in the two decades leading up to the pandemic:

●      According to a study published in the journal Pediatrics, teens are sleeping less than they did 20 years ago, losing the restorative benefits of adequate sleep

●     The National Institutes for Health reports that between 2007 and 2012, anxiety disorders in teens went up 20%; today, one in three adolescents will experience an anxiety disorder

●     The odds that a teenager will experience clinical depression have increased 37% since 2005, according to research by Johns Hopkins University

●     Three million young people between the ages of 12 and 17 report having had at least one major depressive episode in the past twelve months, and depression is on the rise equally among urban, rural, and suburban adolescents, reports the National Institute of Mental Health

●     According to a study published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, the number of teens and tweens visiting emergency rooms with suicidal thoughts or having attempted suicide doubled between 2007 and 2015

●     A study by Harvard Medical School finds one in five college students reported thoughts of suicide in the past year; the Harvard Crimson reports that the attempted suicide rate among Harvard students is nearly double the national average for college students

●     Dangerous stress-related behaviors including self-harm, anorexia and bulimia, and associated hospitalizations are also increasing, according to sources including the National Institutes of Health and the Cleveland Clinic.

Is it plausible that parental demand for rigor in school -- e.g. increased academic workloads, more homework, de-emphasizing fine and performing arts and other “non-academic” pursuits, and unrealistic academic expectations – is contributing in part to a teenage mental health epidemic of its own that paradoxically threatens their own children? Granted, other factors including social media, peer pressure, family finances and other ubiquitous sources of adolescent anxiety most certainly play a role in the academic stress crisis, doubtless exacerbated now by pandemic conditions across the globe.

However, prior to the pandemic, studies repeatedly ranked school and apprehension about getting into college as the top sources of stress for teens; these stressors, still weighing on adolescents in all of our schools, are compounded today by layers of anxiety brought about by COVID-19.

It’s important here to distinguish between eustress and distress. Eustress is normal psychological stress that’s actually beneficial, such as the familiar stomach butterflies we get before delivering speeches or our elevated concern about an approaching deadline. Distress is harmful stress that impairs us physically and emotionally and can have a lasting impact on our health. Distress is what young people today deal with when punishing homework loads, compulsion to stack their résumés with accomplishments, and relentless pressure to achieve – especially under the constraints of distance learning and fears about the virus – all masquerade as “rigor.” Distress is unhealthy for children, and contributes to an array of mental and emotional debilities.

What follows is not an argument against academic achievement, ambition, or aspiration; it’s about unnecessary, unhealthy, and inhumane academic distress. It’s about the peril – and the ethics – of putting student achievement ahead of student wellness, and the fallacy that the two are competing aims.

What Is Rigor?

Returning to our analysis, let’s stop to reflect on the dominant contemporary notion of academic rigor that rests on difficulty as defined by a student’s workload rather than the depth and richness and intensity of his or her intellectual journey. From the Latin, rigor means stiffness, rigidity, cold, harshness. Dictionary definitions evoke equally menacing terms – “inflexibility,” “strict precision,” “exactness” – rigor is “a condition that makes life difficult, challenging, or uncomfortable.” (Think rigor mortis.) Indeed, these iterations of “rigor” all too frequently illustrate the learning environment in college-prep high schools today. And we want this for our young people?

Where these authors live and work, whether or not parents actually want to inflict this sort of rigor on their children, many of them cast the K-12 school experience as a clash among young combatants driven by fierce competition toward an elusive outcome. In this prolonged, every-student-for-themselves siege, the prize at the end – selective college admission, ostensibly, with an accompanying network of influential contacts and the promise of a launching pad to one’s career – makes the stress, exhaustion, and misery of high school worthwhile.

To be clear, there is a subset of students in Silicon Valley and Seattle and in our schools nationwide who thrive in the high-pressure, content-focused model that constitutes a rigorous education today. The norm for these young people is simultaneously taking a dozen or more AP classes, conducting independent research projects, founding international charities and taking leadership roles in student government, sports, performing arts, speech and debate, and clubs. In turn, some of these students are in fact rewarded with admission to elite colleges and all the advantages such a path provides.

For too many students, though, the pursuit of these same lofty goals crumbles when the endless, mind-numbing pattern of sit-get-spit-forget paired with constant stress and the fatigue from sleep deprivation saps their creativity, self-confidence, and love for learning. They plod on, frequently developing an intense dislike for school. Many ultimately fall short of the elite college prize, unrealistic though it may have been as a goal, despite the sacrifices they made for four years of their youth. In short, for too many of our students, academic rigor in college prep high schools amounts to suffering.

Rethinking Rigor

There are exceptions among the high schools themselves, of course:

●     Occasional rogue teachers who eschew the notion that a course is “rigorous” only if few students earn top marks

●     Unconventional programs that adapt course objectives to the ways different students learn, and help them to succeed differently

●     The small but growing number of schools that acknowledge the insidious effects of stress on young people, and reject the status quo when it comes to the conventional college prep academic menu.

These teachers and schools may deliver rigorous instruction without Advanced Placement classes, appalling homework loads, or brutal final exams that rely on mind-numbing memorization and recall. Indeed, exceptions to the model of rigor-as-suffering are increasingly prevalent on the educational landscape, if not yet a critical mass.

A few examples of schools we know that have courageously taken steps away from rigor-driven stress in favor of substantive, engaging learning activities include the following:

●     Notre Dame High School is a private Catholic girls’ school in San Jose, CA that eliminated final exams because the faculty decided a single test in one moment in time should not so heavily impact a student’s standing in a class, and also determined that their traditional final exams failed to adequately reflect the essential questions of their rich courses. In place of finals, girls at Notre Dame now can elect from a variety of ways to express their understanding of content – projects, Socratic seminars, debates – so that assessment is more closely tied to learning, rather than cramming.

●     Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco was the first college-prep high school in the Bay Area to discontinue its Advanced Placement program. LWHS moved away from the breadth, relentless pace, and rushed coverage that typically characterizes the AP learning experience, with the aim of enabling students to uncover the complexities and wonder of deep inquiry and exploration in their advanced studies. Lick-Wilmerding replaced APs with honors courses designed by faculty members with expertise in their fields. As a result, students were enabled to find greater relevance and connection with their academic work. “Instead of engaging with a course for the ephemeral stamp of AP credit,” says LWHS Head of School Eric Temple, “students follow their interests and learn for life beyond college.

●     The Bush School in Seattle recognized that academic pressure and stress were undermining student participation in their experiential learning program, which students increasingly viewed as extraneous to college admissions and a distraction from their academic commitments. To support student wellness and foster engagement in experiential learning, instructional leaders at Bush created a daily schedule and calendar that improved student morale and buy-in, decreased stress (partly by reducing the number of periods in a day), and provided opportunities for end-of-term interdisciplinary immersive and experiential courses called Cascades. Each Cascade comprises a single interdisciplinary thematic course, led by interdepartmental teaching teams. Cascades require students to grapple with complex problems and face real-life challenges on and off campus, culminating in an exposition of what they’ve learned.

●     Teachers and school leaders at Oregon Episcopal School (OES, Portland) defined five “Aspirational Planets” to help reframe and guide their instructional priorities. According to Head of Upper School Asha Appel, “Spurred on by unrealistic expectations and depictions of success, students, teachers, and parents today sometimes confuse what it means to be challenged with the volume and pace of work.” To address this, the first of five Planets is “A Full but Not Frenetic Pace.” The faculty’s action steps toward this goal, to be implemented over time, include:

○     Expanding advisory from 15 to 40 minutes per week, increasing time OES students and teachers focus on relationship-building and SEL

○     Implementing a later school start time to support student wellness and slow hectic mornings for everyone

○     Developing a new class schedule that provides more unstructured down time

○     Creatively integrating co-curricular programming that was previously piled on top of academic coursework and contributed to overload for OES’s motivated, engaged students.

Faculty have aligned their programs and methods around a shared commitment to helping students find purpose in their studies, with an emphasis on making meaning versus covering content. All of these initiatives contribute toward reaching this first and central Planet, supporting both student health and authentic learning at OES.

●     Menlo School (Atherton, CA) is a highly competitive college prep 6-12 school in the heart of Silicon Valley, just minutes from Stanford University. They are keenly aware at Menlo that for many of their parents, admissions into schools like Stanford buoys the school’s reputation. As with the other schools in this set, Menlo’s senior administrative team witnessed increasing stress taking its toll on students. In response, Menlo chose to re-think the belief that “it has to be hard to be good.” This led them to several important action steps:

○     Developing a non-graded interim program that speaks to students’ interests rather than college admissions criteria

○     Creating an individualized study program that takes away some of the volume from the standard workload

○     Moving to a block schedule with fewer transitions (a design adopted in conjunction with Stanford University’s Challenge Success program), and

○     Instituting a re-do policy on tests that measures students’ development of mastery rather than the pace at which content is consumed.

In these steps over the past four years, Menlo sought to make its learning environment more engaging and student-centered. Despite some early resistance to the changes across Menlo’s constituencies, students now report enjoying increased time for sleep and leisure, and outcome data indicate that they are—not surprisingly—performing better, too.

●     University School of Nashville (USN, TN) sits on the doorstep of Vanderbilt’s campus in the heart of midtown Nashville. It is one of the most coveted area schools for the children of Vanderbilt professors and the esteemed researchers and physicians at the renowned medical center minutes away. In the past decade, Head of High School Quinton Walker grew concerned at more than 20 students needing to take time away from school to address emotional challenges or mental health concerns. After surveying the community to determine the causes, they realized that their design (i.e. schedule and school culture) placed a premium on more (more classes per day, more homework per night, more books per section, etc.). The team set out to change that with three ambitious instructional initiatives:

○     Adopting a block schedule structure to feature free time and electives so that students never transition from one academic class to another. This “cognitive downshift,” as Walker calls it, ensures that there are breaks in the day for students to restore, refresh, and re-energize

○     Reducing the homework load each evening as a result of the modified block schedule

○     Creating broader, more individualized pathways for high school students, allowing them to craft learning experiences that are meaningful and challenging

○     Refocusing instruction on deep understanding and incorporating more project-based learning.

As with any major change, there are trade-offs: at USN, teachers now have seven percent less time with students in their classrooms, but “more time to take care of kids.” USN is not only interested in helping students grow, but helping them “grow sturdy.” Since these changes, the number of students requesting time away from school has dropped to a handful.

●     Pasadena Polytechnic School (CA) is just a two-minute walk to the California Institute of Technology, and shares with its neighbor a tradition of rigorous academics that attract committed scholars. Observing signs of distress among their students, Poly recognized its responsibility in creating a more balanced school experience for its young people. Partnering with the national organization, Freedom from Chemical Dependency (FCD), Poly’s administrators surveyed students and parents about academic workload, levels of school engagement, and student stress. The results affirmed that students were experiencing high levels of academic stress and decreased engagement, and missing school as a result. Upper School Director Jennifer Fleischer worked with her team to fundamentally alter the way in which Poly students “did school” by implementing key interventions designed to help decrease stress and increase engagement:

○     Poly moved school start time later, to 8:30 a.m., and added a period between 7:45 a.m. – 8:30 a.m. for students to receive extra help from teachers

○     The school instituted a new homework policy in which each assignment must meet the standard of being “effective, essential, efficient.” Assignments cannot exceed 30 minutes per night for ninth and tenth grade students, increasing to 40 minutes per night for eleventh and twelfth graders. (With four periods per day, this limits homework to between 120-160 minutes per day, with time built into Poly’s new block schedule to complete the work)

○     Poly included three “L” periods per 6-day cycle. L periods are on-campus academic time in which all teachers are free for conferencing. Students check in with advisors and decide how to make L period time valuable 

In addition to these structural changes, Poly made a commitment to student wellness by hiring an Upper School mental health counselor. Fleischer’s team formed student anxiety and depression groups to destigmatize both phenomena, and to provide a forum for students to discuss their experiences with adults in the community. Through these determined steps, Poly is reshaping the academic experiences of their students by focusing on healthy learning outcomes.

●     Georgetown Day School (GDS, D.C.) implemented both structural and personnel changes to better nurture and support students within their academic program.

○     Dean of Students Bobby Asher admits that there is “no magic bullet,” but by increasing the number of adults advocating for and advising students, they have created an atmosphere of mutual trust and the sense that teachers are rooting for students’ success. GDS reassigned responsibilities from Asher’s role and divided them among the four deans dedicated to serve as student advocates and mentors. Each dean has a course release enabling them to spend more time with students before school, after school, and throughout the day.

○     The four deans, Asher, the athletic trainers and college counselors combine to create the Student Support Team (SST) that concentrates its efforts to identify student stress and intervene when students are overwhelmed.

○     Like Poly, GDS recently hired additional counselling staff to support the SST initiative.

○     Students are engaged in the effort to improve their experience of the school as well; for example, students in the GDS Youth Participatory Action Research project examined how smartphones impact the student experience at school, and have offered solutions to their peers to help make the learning environment less stressful.

○     What’s more, GDS reconfigured a classroom with dim lighting, Buddha boards, and iPads equipped with the meditation app Headspace to provide a space for students to relax between classes.

Across the U.S., schools like those depicted here are resetting their priorities around the academic demands of the 21st century while fostering increased student engagement, empowerment, and wellness. Along with acknowledging their responsibility to student health, schools that reject the status quo recognize – and repudiate – the dominant but archaic American paradigm of learning, i.e. that the primary objective of “learning” is mastering content. Educational reformers and researchers alike have written endlessly on the obsolescence of America’s factory model of learning, founded on acquisition of a standardized body of information measured by summative standardized tests.

Entire multi-billion dollar cottage industries feed hungrily on this model of learning, from the College Board to textbook and test preparation companies, remediation and acceleration boutiques like Kumon and its ilk, and independent tutors. “Rigor” as we know it has spawned a massive, profit-driven education economy whose lobbying influence and coercive grip on the throats of American schools, educators, policymakers, and parents is at once awesome and ominous.

Rigor Falls Short

Certainly students need exposure to direct instruction, core knowledge, memorization and recall, and automaticity; and some students truly blossom when fed and watered by facts. However, the notion that content mastery is no longer a particularly useful singular learning objective – much less the foundation for what “rigor” should be – is nowhere more evident than in the technology corridors of Silicon Valley and Seattle. Ironically, the same parents who urge their children to attend content-driven rigorous high schools in these future-focused communities – often investing substantially to make that happen – work for tech companies and startups that seek employees with a completely separate skill set than the ones their daughters and sons are building at school.

These companies depend on employees who know how to collaborate (rather than compete) with co-workers, who demonstrate creativity and problem-solving, who recognize that in fact there is more than one correct answer, and who contribute in teams by virtue of their ability to listen, empathize, and connect with others who don’t always understand or agree with them. This last attribute was highlighted in the widely publicized studies conducted by Google (Project Oxygen and Project Aristotle) that exposed the value Google employees place on such qualities as emotional intelligence, generosity, fairness and interpersonal skills, and in turn shifted the company’s hiring and leadership training systems.

Granted, the goal is not to develop a model of education to feed the tech industry in Seattle and Silicon Valley. We ought to demand a new template for schooling that recognizes the needs of young people as complicated, nuanced human beings with infinite potential. Employable graduates are a natural byproduct of a challenging, engaging, and intellectually-rich education.

To this end, we need to question the role that rigor – and the needlessly stressful, content-focused learning design it perpetuates – plays in secondary schools today, at least as the predominant model. Our students in this 20th year of the 21st century carry the information they’re asked to regurgitate on all 38 AP exams, along with most of recorded history, in the devices they keep in their back pockets. To many educators and school leaders today, the smartphone makes a mockery of the notion that a teacher, program, or school is rigorous because it makes content acquisition difficult. That’s simply a cultural relic from a prior century. Not only is this sort of rigor unhealthy for kids, it’s not what they need.

Reimagining Rigor

Where can we go from here? We can begin by reframing what matters when preparing young people to thrive in college and life, equip themselves for citizenship, and find fulfilment in their learning experiences – starting with a redefinition of rigor.

In the 21st century, rigor should mean “the degree to which a student is in equal parts intellectually challenged, engaged, enriched and empowered by an instructional program or course of study.”

Note that challenge remains the anchor term of the definition. But we must draw a distinction between the difficult workload that overwhelms students striving to read and memorize and dredge it all up for the test in schools today, and the provocative, stimulating, sometimes vexing challenge of grasping complex ideas that make learning meaningful and rewarding (as well as empowering) to master.

It is after all the love of learning, the questions that beget more questions, the desire to know and discover that we educators wish for every student in our classrooms and which, sadly, is often snuffed out by the so-called rigor that buries their creativity and suffocates their curiosity.

Whether we look at the existing or envisioned archetypes of rigor, we should acknowledge that there isn’t a uniform level of challenge or difficulty for all children. Rigor today and tomorrow will always depend to some extent on who a young person is, which disciplines are strengths and liabilities for the individual, and what advantages or setbacks the student carries into the classroom.

That said, finding the right level of challenge for any student is compatible with 21st century rigor because the model aspires toward challenge-as-student-engagement, -enrichment, and -empowerment, rather than challenge-as-suffering. Rigor reimagined for most parents will mean a place where their children are working at the Goldilocks level – not too hard, but not too easy either.

Reimagining rigor that engages, enriches, and empowers students will require courage, patience and grit from leaders of college-prep schools (like the ones we feature above) as they push forward with a determined parent education campaign to upend deeply set misperceptions about what matters in education. (Regarding homework load and other rigor-related topics, Stanford’s Challenge Success program offers white papers that equip school leaders with research to support shifting to a more humane, student-centered ethos.)

For a reimagined paradigm of rigor to take hold in our schools, it also requires that parents come to understand and value intellectual challenge, engagement, enrichment and empowerment just as they currently embrace rigor-as-suffering. That is a tall order, and it must happen over time; but as rigor for rigor’s sake today continues to take a toll that for too many young people outweighs its elusive and costly payoff, demand for an alternative way is building among parents concerned about the mental and emotional health of their children. In time, this demand – paired with emerging alternatives to the four-year college degree and the demise of standardized testing, both subjects for separate papers – will shift parental priorities toward a more humane, student-centered, and meaningful conception of rigor.

We believe that with a concerted effort on the part of college-preparatory schools, we can leverage this demand to inspire a gradual consumer migration away from rigor-as-suffering, as parents recognize the value instead of rigor that challenges, engages, enriches and empowers their children. This also entails a shift in the value proposition of secondary schools to emphasize the importance of social and emotional wellness and student agency as key values, speaking to the overwhelming desire of parents to raise healthy, well-adjusted, confident, and happy children.

Still, we recognize that parents conditioned for generations to identify and value rigor based on measurable and transactional outcomes will need convincing beyond the assurances of progressive and humanistic ideals. Indeed, parents, teachers, and university admissions officers will and should demand evidence of the value-added they can expect, including outcome data, to support the new vision of rigor. That’s where we already have formidable documentation building, as data points aggregate from the graduates of Notre Dame, Lick-Wilmerding OES, Bush, Menlo, USN, Poly, and GDS – among a growing crescendo nationwide – while these young people matriculate to colleges and universities and thrive, prepared to do so in life as well.

Rigor today should mean more than suffering. As schools courageously embrace a new conception of rigor that rises above merely a crushing workload, we expect to see both increased student wellness and higher levels of more meaningful academic achievement. We owe it to our young people, and to our future, to make this happen. 

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This editorial was co-authored with Dr. Percy Abram, head of The Bush School in Seattle, WA. A version was published in the Summer 2021 issue of Independent School Magazine: https://www.nais.org/magazine/independent-school/summer-2021/the-dark-side-of-rigor/