Aztecs vs. Greeks WSJ article

Aztecs vs. Greeks
By CHARLES MURRAYJanuary 18, 2007; Page A17
If "intellectually gifted" is defined to mean people who can become theoretical physicists, then we're talking about no more than a few people per thousand and perhaps many fewer. They are cognitive curiosities, too rare to have that much impact on the functioning of society from day to day. But if "intellectually gifted" is defined to mean people who can stand out in almost any profession short of theoretical physics, then research about IQ and job performance indicates that an IQ of at least 120 is usually needed. That number demarcates the top 10% of the IQ distribution, or about 15 million people in today's labor force -- a lot of people.
In professions screened for IQ by educational requirements -- medicine, engineering, law, the sciences and academia -- the great majority of people must, by the nature of the selection process, have IQs over 120. Evidence about who enters occupations where the screening is not directly linked to IQ indicates that people with IQs of 120 or higher also occupy large proportions of positions in the upper reaches of corporate America and the senior ranks of government. People in the top 10% of intelligence produce most of the books and newspaper articles we read and the television programs and movies we watch. They are the people in the laboratories and at workstations who invent our new pharmaceuticals, computer chips, software and every other form of advanced technology.
Combine these groups, and the top 10% of the intelligence distribution has a huge influence on whether our economy is vital or stagnant, our culture healthy or sick, our institutions secure or endangered. Of the simple truths about intelligence and its relationship to education, this is the most important and least acknowledged: Our future depends crucially on how we educate the next generation of people gifted with unusually high intelligence.
How assiduously does our federal government work to see that this precious raw material is properly developed? In 2006, the Department of Education spent about $84 billion. The only program to improve the education of the gifted got $9.6 million, one-hundredth of 1% of expenditures. In the 2007 budget, President Bush zeroed it out.
But never mind. A large proportion of gifted children are born to parents who value their children's talent and do their best to see that it is realized. Most gifted children without such parents are recognized by someone somewhere along the educational line and pointed toward college. No evidence indicates that the nation has many children with IQs above 120 who are not given an opportunity for higher education. The university system has also become efficient in shipping large numbers of the most talented high-school graduates to the most prestigious schools. The allocation of this human capital can be criticized -- it would probably be better for the nation if more of the gifted went into the sciences and fewer into the law. But if the issue is amount of education, then the nation is doing fine with its next generation of gifted children. The problem with the education of the gifted involves not their professional training, but their training as citizens.
We live in an age when it is unfashionable to talk about the special responsibility of being gifted, because to do so acknowledges inequality of ability, which is elitist, and inequality of responsibilities, which is also elitist. And so children who know they are smarter than the other kids tend, in a most human reaction, to think of themselves as superior to them. Because giftedness is not to be talked about, no one tells high-IQ children explicitly, forcefully and repeatedly that their intellectual talent is a gift. That they are not superior human beings, but lucky ones. That the gift brings with it obligations to be worthy of it. That among those obligations, the most important and most difficult is to aim not just at academic accomplishment, but at wisdom.

The culprit for educational deficit is often low intelligence.
The encouragement of wisdom requires a special kind of education. It requires first of all recognition of one's own intellectual limits and fallibilities -- in a word, humility. This is perhaps the most conspicuously missing part of today's education of the gifted. Many high-IQ students, especially those who avoid serious science and math, go from kindergarten through an advanced degree without ever having a teacher who is dissatisfied with their best work and without ever taking a course that forces them to say to themselves, "I can't do this." Humility requires that the gifted learn what it feels like to hit an intellectual wall, just as all of their less talented peers do, and that can come only from a curriculum and pedagogy designed especially for them. That level of demand cannot fairly be imposed on a classroom that includes children who do not have the ability to respond. The gifted need to have some classes with each other not to be coddled, but because that is the only setting in which their feet can be held to the fire.
The encouragement of wisdom requires mastery of analytical building blocks. The gifted must assimilate the details of grammar and syntax and the details of logical fallacies not because they will need them to communicate in daily life, but because these are indispensable for precise thinking at an advanced level.
The encouragement of wisdom requires being steeped in the study of ethics, starting with Aristotle and Confucius. It is not enough that gifted children learn to be nice. They must know what it means to be good.
The encouragement of wisdom requires an advanced knowledge of history. Never has the aphorism about the fate of those who ignore history been more true.
All of the above are antithetical to the mindset that prevails in today's schools at every level. The gifted should not be taught to be nonjudgmental; they need to learn how to make accurate judgments. They should not be taught to be equally respectful of Aztecs and Greeks; they should focus on the best that has come before them, which will mean a light dose of Aztecs and a heavy one of Greeks. The primary purpose of their education should not be to let the little darlings express themselves, but to give them the tools and the intellectual discipline for expressing themselves as adults.
In short, I am calling for a revival of the classical definition of a liberal education, serving its classic purpose: to prepare an elite to do its duty. If that sounds too much like Plato's Guardians, consider this distinction. As William F. Buckley rightly instructs us, it is better to be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. But we have that option only in the choice of our elected officials. In all other respects, the government, economy and culture are run by a cognitive elite that we do not choose. That is the reality, and we are powerless to change it. All we can do is try to educate the elite to be conscious of, and prepared to meet, its obligations. For years, we have not even thought about the nature of that task. It is time we did.
* * *
The goals that should shape the evolution of American education are cross-cutting and occasionally seem contradictory. Yesterday, I argued the merits of having a large group of high-IQ people who do not bother to go to college; today, I argue the merits of special education for the gifted. The two positions are not in the end incompatible, but there is much more to be said, as on all the issues I have raised.
The aim here is not to complete an argument but to begin a discussion; not to present policy prescriptions, but to plead for greater realism in our outlook on education. Accept that some children will be left behind other children because of intellectual limitations, and think about what kind of education will give them the greatest chance for a fulfilling life nonetheless. Stop telling children that they need to go to college to be successful, and take advantage of the other, often better ways in which people can develop their talents. Acknowledge the existence and importance of high intellectual ability, and think about how best to nurture the children who possess it.
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute

What's Wrong With Vocational School? - WSJ article

What's Wrong With Vocational School?
By CHARLES MURRAY
January 17, 2007; Page A19

The topic yesterday was education and children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution. Today I turn to the upper half, people with IQs of 100 or higher. Today's simple truth is that far too many of them are going to four-year colleges.

Begin with those barely into the top half, those with average intelligence. To have an IQ of 100 means that a tough high-school course pushes you about as far as your academic talents will take you. If you are average in math ability, you may struggle with algebra and probably fail a calculus course. If you are average in verbal skills, you often misinterpret complex text and make errors in logic.

These are not devastating shortcomings. You are smart enough to engage in any of hundreds of occupations. You can acquire more knowledge if it is presented in a format commensurate with your intellectual skills. But a genuine college education in the arts and sciences begins where your skills leave off.


In engineering and most of the natural sciences, the demarcation between high-school material and college-level material is brutally obvious. If you cannot handle the math, you cannot pass the courses. In the humanities and social sciences, the demarcation is fuzzier. It is possible for someone with an IQ of 100 to sit in the lectures of Economics 1, read the textbook, and write answers in an examination book. But students who cannot follow complex arguments accurately are not really learning economics. They are taking away a mishmash of half-understood information and outright misunderstandings that probably leave them under the illusion that they know something they do not. (A depressing research literature documents one's inability to recognize one's own incompetence.) Traditionally and properly understood, a four-year college education teaches advanced analytic skills and information at a level that exceeds the intellectual capacity of most people.

There is no magic point at which a genuine college-level education becomes an option, but anything below an IQ of 110 is problematic. If you want to do well, you should have an IQ of 115 or higher. Put another way, it makes sense for only about 15% of the population, 25% if one stretches it, to get a college education. And yet more than 45% of recent high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges. Adjust that percentage to account for high-school dropouts, and more than 40% of all persons in their late teens are trying to go to a four-year college -- enough people to absorb everyone down through an IQ of 104.

No data that I have been able to find tell us what proportion of those students really want four years of college-level courses, but it is safe to say that few people who are intellectually unqualified yearn for the experience, any more than someone who is athletically unqualified for a college varsity wants to have his shortcomings exposed at practice every day. They are in college to improve their chances of making a good living. What they really need is vocational training. But nobody will say so, because "vocational training" is second class. "College" is first class.

The culprit for educational deficit is often low intelligence.

Large numbers of those who are intellectually qualified for college also do not yearn for four years of college-level courses. They go to college because their parents are paying for it and college is what children of their social class are supposed to do after they finish high school. They may have the ability to understand the material in Economics 1 but they do not want to. They, too, need to learn to make a living -- and would do better in vocational training.

Combine those who are unqualified with those who are qualified but not interested, and some large proportion of students on today's college campuses -- probably a majority of them -- are looking for something that the four-year college was not designed to provide. Once there, they create a demand for practical courses, taught at an intellectual level that can be handled by someone with a mildly above-average IQ and/or mild motivation. The nation's colleges try to accommodate these new demands. But most of the practical specialties do not really require four years of training, and the best way to teach those specialties is not through a residential institution with the staff and infrastructure of a college. It amounts to a system that tries to turn out televisions on an assembly line that also makes pottery. It can be done, but it's ridiculously inefficient.

Government policy contributes to the problem by making college scholarships and loans too easy to get, but its role is ancillary. The demand for college is market-driven, because a college degree does, in fact, open up access to jobs that are closed to people without one. The fault lies in the false premium that our culture has put on a college degree.

For a few occupations, a college degree still certifies a qualification. For example, employers appropriately treat a bachelor's degree in engineering as a requirement for hiring engineers. But a bachelor's degree in a field such as sociology, psychology, economics, history or literature certifies nothing. It is a screening device for employers. The college you got into says a lot about your ability, and that you stuck it out for four years says something about your perseverance. But the degree itself does not qualify the graduate for anything. There are better, faster and more efficient ways for young people to acquire credentials to provide to employers.

The good news is that market-driven systems eventually adapt to reality, and signs of change are visible. One glimpse of the future is offered by the nation's two-year colleges. They are more honest than the four-year institutions about what their students want and provide courses that meet their needs more explicitly. Their time frame gives them a big advantage -- two years is about right for learning many technical specialties, while four years is unnecessarily long.

Advances in technology are making the brick-and-mortar facility increasingly irrelevant. Research resources on the Internet will soon make the college library unnecessary. Lecture courses taught by first-rate professors are already available on CDs and DVDs for many subjects, and online methods to make courses interactive between professors and students are evolving. Advances in computer simulation are expanding the technical skills that can be taught without having to gather students together in a laboratory or shop. These and other developments are all still near the bottom of steep growth curves. The cost of effective training will fall for everyone who is willing to give up the trappings of a campus. As the cost of college continues to rise, the choice to give up those trappings will become easier.

* * *
A reality about the job market must eventually begin to affect the valuation of a college education: The spread of wealth at the top of American society has created an explosive increase in the demand for craftsmen. Finding a good lawyer or physician is easy. Finding a good carpenter, painter, electrician, plumber, glazier, mason -- the list goes on and on -- is difficult, and it is a seller's market. Journeymen craftsmen routinely make incomes in the top half of the income distribution while master craftsmen can make six figures. They have work even in a soft economy. Their jobs cannot be outsourced to India. And the craftsman's job provides wonderful intrinsic rewards that come from mastery of a challenging skill that produces tangible results. How many white-collar jobs provide nearly as much satisfaction?

Even if foregoing college becomes economically attractive, the social cachet of a college degree remains. That will erode only when large numbers of high-status, high-income people do not have a college degree and don't care. The information technology industry is in the process of creating that class, with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs as exemplars. It will expand for the most natural of reasons: A college education need be no more important for many high-tech occupations than it is for NBA basketball players or cabinetmakers. Walk into Microsoft or Google with evidence that you are a brilliant hacker, and the job interviewer is not going to fret if you lack a college transcript. The ability to present an employer with evidence that you are good at something, without benefit of a college degree, will continue to increase, and so will the number of skills to which that evidence can be attached. Every time that happens, the false premium attached to the college degree will diminish.

Most students find college life to be lots of fun (apart from the boring classroom stuff), and that alone will keep the four-year institution overstocked for a long time. But, rightly understood, college is appropriate for a small minority of young adults -- perhaps even a minority of the people who have IQs high enough that they could do college-level work if they wished. People who go to college are not better or worse people than anyone else; they are merely different in certain interests and abilities. That is the way college should be seen. There is reason to hope that eventually it will be.

Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Intelligence in the Classroom - WSJ article

Intelligence in the Classroom
By CHARLES MURRAY
January 16, 2007; Page A21
Education is becoming the preferred method for diagnosing and attacking a wide range problems in American life. The No Child Left Behind Act is one prominent example. Another is the recent volley of articles that blame rising income inequality on the increasing economic premium for advanced education. Crime, drugs, extramarital births, unemployment -- you name the problem, and I will show you a stack of claims that education is to blame, or at least implicated.
One word is missing from these discussions: intelligence. Hardly anyone will admit it, but education's role in causing or solving any problem cannot be evaluated without considering the underlying intellectual ability of the people being educated. Today and over the next two days, I will put the case for three simple truths about the mediating role of intelligence that should bear on the way we think about education and the nation's future.
Today's simple truth: Half of all children are below average in intelligence. We do not live in Lake Wobegon.
Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.
We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough.
Now take the girl sitting across the aisle who is getting an F. She is at the 20th percentile of intelligence, which means she has an IQ of 88. If the grading is honest, it may not be possible to do more than give her an E for effort. Even if she is taught to read every bit as well as her intelligence permits, she still will be able to comprehend only simple written material. It is a good thing that she becomes functionally literate, and it will have an effect on the range of jobs she can hold. But still she will be confined to jobs that require minimal reading skills. She is just not smart enough to do more than that.
How about raising intelligence? It would be nice if we knew how, but we do not. It has been shown that some intensive interventions temporarily raise IQ scores by amounts ranging up to seven or eight points. Investigated psychometrically, these increases are a mix of test effects and increases in the underlying general factor of intellectual ability -- "g." In any case, the increases fade to insignificance within a few years after the intervention. Richard Herrnstein and I reviewed the technical literature on this topic in "The Bell Curve" (1994), and studies since then have told the same story.
There is no reason to believe that raising intelligence significantly and permanently is a current policy option, no matter how much money we are willing to spend. Nor can we look for much help from the Flynn Effect, the rise in IQ scores that has been observed internationally for several decades. Only a portion of that rise represents an increase in g, and recent studies indicate that the rise has stopped in advanced nations.
Some say that the public schools are so awful that there is huge room for improvement in academic performance just by improving education. There are two problems with that position. The first is that the numbers used to indict the public schools are missing a crucial component. For example, in the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95.
What IQ is necessary to give a child a reasonable chance to meet the NAEP's basic achievement score? Remarkably, it appears that no one has tried to answer that question. We only know for sure that if the bar for basic achievement is meaningfully defined, some substantial proportion of students will be unable to meet it no matter how well they are taught. As it happens, the NAEP's definition of basic achievement is said to be on the tough side. That substantial proportion of fourth-graders who cannot reasonably be expected to meet it could well be close to 36%.
The second problem with the argument that education can be vastly improved is the false assumption that educators already know how to educate everyone and that they just need to try harder -- the assumption that prompted No Child Left Behind. We have never known how to educate everyone. The widely held image of a golden age of American education when teachers brooked no nonsense and all the children learned their three Rs is a myth. If we confine the discussion to children in the lower half of the intelligence distribution (education of the gifted is another story), the overall trend of the 20th century was one of slow, hard-won improvement. A detailed review of this evidence, never challenged with data, was also part of "The Bell Curve."
This is not to say that American public schools cannot be improved. Many of them, especially in large cities, are dreadful. But even the best schools under the best conditions cannot repeal the limits on achievement set by limits on intelligence.
* * *
To say that even a perfect education system is not going to make much difference in the performance of children in the lower half of the distribution understandably grates. But the easy retorts do not work. It's no use coming up with the example of a child who was getting Ds in school, met an inspiring teacher, and went on to become an astrophysicist. That is an underachievement story, not the story of someone at the 49th percentile of intelligence. It's no use to cite the differences in test scores between public schools and private ones -- for students in the bottom half of the distribution, the differences are real but modest. It's no use to say that IQ scores can be wrong. I am not talking about scores on specific tests, but about a student's underlying intellectual ability, g, whether or not it has been measured with a test. And it's no use to say that there's no such thing as g.
While concepts such as "emotional intelligence" and "multiple intelligences" have their uses, a century of psychometric evidence has been augmented over the last decade by a growing body of neuroscientific evidence. Like it or not, g exists, is grounded in the architecture and neural functioning of the brain, and is the raw material for academic performance. If you do not have a lot of g when you enter kindergarten, you are never going to have a lot of it. No change in the educational system will change that hard fact.
That says nothing about the quality of the lives that should be open to everyone across the range of ability. I am among the most emphatic of those who think that the importance of IQ in living a good life is vastly overrated. My point is just this: It is true that many social and economic problems are disproportionately found among people with little education, but the culprit for their educational deficit is often low intelligence. Refusing to come to grips with that reality has produced policies that have been ineffectual at best and damaging at worst.
Mr. Murray is the W.H. Brady Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

ABCs of College Loans - Barrons article

ABCs of College Loans
By Kathy Yakal

Barrons
December 11, 2006
ONE WAY TO JUDGE whether the resurgent democrats are making good on their recent campaign promises will be to check student-loan Websites in coming months. If interest rates and other lending conditions ease, you'll know the Dems have lived up to their word. If not, well, another round of elections isn't far off.
College access for all is one of the six major themes outlined by Congress' soon-to-be majority party in its "New Direction for America" platform. The Democrats say they want to ensure that tax deductions for college tuition become permanent and that the Pell Grant program is expanded. Federally backed Pell grants -- generally awarded to undergraduates -- are based on need and don't have to be repaid.
Perhaps dearest to the hearts of those in or about to enter college, the New Direction for America also advocates a reduction in student-loan interest rates.
If you or your children have been unable to cobble together through grants and family contributions the vast sums needed to meet the costs of today's colleges and universities, you'll likely be forced to apply for student loans -- a grueling process that U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings says is longer and more complicated than filing a federal tax form.
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Regardless of their political leanings, loads of American parents and their children will have to endure it. The National Postsecondary Student Aid Study estimates that 35% of all undergrads enrolled during the 2003-04 school year took out student loans. And the Department of Education says it will make or guarantee more than $60 billion in low-cost student loans in 2006, a $4 billion increase over 2005 levels.
College-related loans can be divided into four categories, according to the assistance experts at FinAid (www.finaid.org/loans1). These include loans that go directly to students (like so-called Stafford and Perkins programs); those for parents (generally known as Parent Loans for Undergraduate Students, or PLUS); private student loans (also called alternative student loans), and consolidation loans, which combine different types of borrowing into one program with a single rate ("Landing the Best Loan2," The Electronic Investor, June 12, 2006).
FinAid is a good source of information about financial aid in general, but it also offers dozens of calculators for specific situations. In addition, it posts a table of the most popular educational-financing programs, with loan information and links.
The Department of Education (http://www.ed.gov/3) provides a portal for students who need help understanding its Federal Student Aid options, including grants, loans and work-study assistance. You can learn about your eligibility here, fill out an application and explore the site's other helpful resources and tools. Of particular interest is the Financial Aid Wizard, which in seven steps helps you explore schools and scholarships and estimate financial aid and family contributions.
Many financial institutions offer student loans, and there are a handful of sites that allow you to compare several at once. SimpleTuition (http://www.simpletuition.com/4) makes available free of charge its database of more than 40 parent, private, GradPLUS and consolidation loans. You're asked a few questions about your needs and your target school, guided by a table of FAQs (such as, "I am an older student. Am I eligible to receive financial assistance?"), and then given a list of appropriate products.
I inquired about a $50,000 PLUS loan for a student attending Drake University in Iowa. I got a list of four loans, with annual percentage rates ranging from 7.07% from College PayWay (http://www.collegepayway.com/5), with a total loan cost of $80,789, to 8.33% from Collegiate Solutions (http://www.collegiatesolutions.com/6), with a cost of $89,705. These lenders, like most, offer "borrower benefits" such as interest-rate or principal deductions in return for things like auto-debit payments. (A box on the page warned us that Drake hasn't partnered with SimpleTuition and that other sorts of loans to meet the costs of this university therefore might be available elsewhere.)
I found ostensibly better rates on PLUS loans at eStudentLoan (http://www.estudentloan.com/7), as well as a multi-step Wizard to guide me. I was asked about the school and loan amount, the graduation date and preferred payment term, and queried about the importance of securing the lowest APR and lowest monthly payments. Again, I was apprised of four possible loans, ranging from a surprisingly low 5.0% APR ($70,996 total cost) from Wachovia (http://www.wachovia.com/8) to a high of 8.25% ($74,655 total cost) from Goal Financial (http://www.goalfinancial.net/9).
Bankrate.com (http://www.bankrate.com/10) lets you search for student loans, but in a departure from its usual comprehensiveness on other sorts of borrowings, the results were less than helpful.
I'd advise using any of these comparative services as a launching point before getting the full story from lenders' sites, as well as from your school's financial-aid office. The intriguing 5.0% rate on the Wachovia loan that appeared on estudentloan.com seemed too low for a PLUS loan. Indeed, at the bank's site, the lowest rate I found was 8.50% for Dec. 1, 2006, (though rebates are available), so clearly more questions needed to be asked.
You can also go right to the horse's mouth -- lenders' Websites.
Sallie Mae (http://www.salliemae.com/11), which specializes in student loans, is a good place to start. In fact, if you're unfamiliar with the industry, head there first for some, well, education. The site does a terrific job of explaining different types of loans and passing along tips. For instance, it's best to max out your federal student loans before you consider private ones, since the latter generally have less favorable terms. You can apply online for Sallie Mae's undergraduate and graduate, parent, training and international student loans.
Nellie Mae (http://www.nelliemae.org/12), a sister company to Sallie Mae, also offers a full line of federal and private student loans. Other good sites are Next Student (http://www.nextstudent.com/13) and Student Loan Funding (http://www.studentloanfunding.com/14).
IF YOU'RE A PARENT with pre-college teenagers and want them to appreciate the relationship between hard work and money, check out the new PAYjr service (http://www.payjr.com/15).
For kids 13 and up, parents can obtain a debit card that's accepted by any merchant that takes debit MasterCard. Parents can set up a schedule of chores on a password-protected Website. Once an agreed-upon number of tasks has been completed, a payment will kick in and money is transferred to the PAYjr card for the hardworking teen's use.
It's a pretty safe bet that this money won't go for college savings. And in this case, the Democrats -- for better or worse -- shouldn't be held accountable for the lending terms

'The Overachievers': A Look at High School Competition Misses the Bigger Problem -- Underachievers

'The Overachievers': A Look at High School Competition Misses the Bigger Problem -- Underachievers
Published: January 10, 2007 in Knowledge@Wharton

Julie is perceived by her peers as a superstar -- a brain, a jock and a beauty all in one. CJ is seen as a flirt. Taylor is the popular girl, and Sam is the teacher's pet. All are academic "overachievers." And all attended Whitman High School, one of the nation's top public schools and the setting for best-selling author Alexandra Robbins' study of contemporary American high school culture entitled, The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids.

Robbins is herself an "overachieving" graduate of the Bethesda, Maryland school (barely 30, she has already published five books). Returning to Whitman a decade after she left for Yale, Robbins draws a sharp contrast between what the school was like then and what it is like now, using it as the basis for her analysis of the "competitive frenzy" that, she argues, has taken root in high schools across the country. "This is not just a book about high school," Robbins writes. "This is a book about how a culture of overachieverism has changed the school experience so drastically in even the last ten years that it has startlingly altered what it means to be a student today."

Tracking a group of juniors and seniors as they struggle to maintain their grades, excel at sports, rack up extracurriculars, ace the SAT and get into elite colleges, Robbins alternates between biography and commentary, using the daily lives of Whitman students to ground her claims about what high school does to teenagers today. Over the course of the book, Julie suffers from stress-related hair loss, CJ resorts to binge-eating and drinking to relieve anxiety, Taylor breaks down when she can't decide between Duke and Penn, and Sam cheats on a homework assignment. Their stories allow Robbins to reflect on the stressful, hyper-scheduled lives of teens growing up in a culture that is excessively focused on achievement.

Adolescence today, Robbins argues, is a highly professionalized experience in which one's resume, transcript, and scores are everything, and where both the innocence and leisure traditionally associated with childhood are nowhere to be found. Noting that the competition to get into top-ranked colleges has increased enormously in recent years, Robbins shows how teens' attempts to look good on paper have resulted in a host of disturbing trends.

Teens are more focused on productivity than on learning, for example; they also measure their self worth by comparing themselves to the achievement indices set by elite college entrance requirements. They are wracked with anxiety and they are sleep-deprived; they suffer from eating disorders, panic attacks, and depression; they cheat routinely and they take achievement-enhancing drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall illegally; they attempt suicide in growing numbers.

The picture Robbins draws is of a crushing cultural machinery that drives adolescents to the brink, flattening out their personalities and warping their characters while pressing them to become perfect, if somewhat generic, pre-collegiate products.

But Robbins is only telling part of the story. The Overachievers focuses on a small subsection of American teens -- the privileged elect whose parents care about education and who can afford to make sure that their kids go to good schools.

Whitman's website proudly notes that 80% of Bethesda's adult citizens are college graduates (as opposed to a national average of about 25%) and that they are "mainly professional and managerial." Whitman sends 94% of its graduating seniors to college -- 88% go to four year colleges, and 75% of those attend college out of state. Whitman's student body is 77% white, 13% Asian-American, 7% Hispanic and 3% African-American.

Compare those figures to national averages. A study released by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation earlier this year noted that while about 70% of U.S. high school students earn a diploma, there is huge regional variation in graduation rates. Fourteen of the country's largest urban school districts -- among them Milwaukee, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, Denver and Houston -- graduate less than 50% of their students on time. The worst numbers are to be found in three of the country's largest public school districts: New York graduates 38.9% of its students, Detroit graduates 21.7%, and Baltimore -- just a few definitive miles from overachieving Bethesda -- graduates a meager 38.5%.

The numbers become even more dramatic when broken down demographically: Nationally, according to the study, only 52% of black high school students graduate, and only 57% of Hispanics do.

These figures are a far cry from Whitman's, and as such they tell us something about Robbins' decision to treat Whitman as a representative case. If Whitman students take five or six AP courses and spend more than four hours each night on homework, they are the exception to the rule. The vast majority of high school students are taking it easy indeed. According to UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, about two-thirds of college freshmen report that they did an hour of homework a night or less during high school. One can only assume that the 30% of high school graduates who don't go on to college do even less.

As Washington Post education columnist Jay Matthews notes in his review of The Overachievers, the national picture of high school education is starkly different from the picture Robbins draws of Whitman. The National Assessment of Education Progress -- otherwise known as "The Nation's Report Card" -- shows that 17-year-olds' reading and math ability has been stagnant for the past 30 years; one likely reason is that teenagers spend far more time watching television and surfing the Internet (about 3.5 hours per day) than they do on homework (42 minutes per day) or recreational reading (seven minutes per day).

If the story of Whitman is one of high-stress overachievement, the national story is one of low expectations and diminishing returns. Only about 70% of today's high school graduates actually do go to college, and of those, nearly half will not graduate. And, again, the numbers are even worse when broken down demographically. Whereas more than 50% of children from wealthy families can expect to graduate from college, only 6% of low income students will earn a bachelor's degree by the time they are 24. Nationwide, says a new report from the National Conference of State Legislatures, only 18 out of every 100 ninth graders will graduate from college.

Though Robbins qualifies her claims about Whitman's typicality -- "Whitman could be any competitive school, public or private, almost anywhere in the country" -- the truth is that such schools are outnumbered by schools that are not competitive at all. And while Robbins spoke with students at schools in Kentucky, Vermont, New Mexico, Washington State, North Carolina, Illinois, and Texas in order "to make sure the views in this book represented as broad a range of students as possible," what she was really doing was tracking a small and exceptionally privileged cross-section of teens from state to state.

For all Robbins' claims to be describing a national trend, it's crucial to keep in mind that this "trend" exists for a small minority of high school students, and that these students are in turn those who have the highest expectations for college and career. While it's important to understand this trend, and important, too, to consider how the teens caught up in it might be affected -- even damaged -- by it, it's also important to understand that we can't get a clear picture of what's going on in American high schools if we don't take other, broader educational trends into account. Even more to the point: We can't begin to think about what kinds of changes in education policy we might need until we have an accurate understanding of American high school culture as a whole.

This is where Robbins' argument breaks down. Instead of presenting The Overachievers as what it is -- an anthropological study of an exceptional adolescent niche -- she casts her work in terms of policy analysis and ends the book with a series of sweeping recommendations for reform. These range from the mundane to the intriguing to the radical, and vary considerably in their wisdom and practicality.

Mundane: Students and parents should focus on mental health and well-roundedness. Intriguing: High school start time should be later in the morning, to accommodate teens' biologically unique sleep patterns; colleges should eliminate early decision, which creates outrageous pressure and favors those who do not need financial aid. Radical: Colleges and universities should boycott the rankings and scrap the SAT; high schools should drop class rank, de-emphasize testing, and limit AP courses.

Robbins may be right about things like early decision (which a number of elite schools have recently abandoned) and the need for students, parents, and teachers to remember that there is more to life than grades, scores, and acceptance letters. She's also right that the major college rankings are often rigged, and rarely measure the actual quality of undergraduate education and experience; she gives good advice when she tells parents and students to look beyond the top 20 schools to find the one that is right for them. And she just might be right about changing high school start time. But she flounders when she recommends policy shifts that would, to her mind, take the pressure off America's stressed-out teens.

If it makes sense to steer highly competitive students at highly competitive schools away from taking excessive numbers of AP courses, for example, it makes no sense to advocate a national move away from AP courses; there are more schools that could benefit from the curricular sharpening such courses can offer than there are schools that really need to cut back. And while it makes sense to tell parents and teachers who push teenagers too hard to back off, it makes no sense at all to recommend relaxation for those vast numbers of teens who are already slacking along at less than an hour of homework a night. Those kids need to learn to push themselves -- and in order to learn to do that, they need to be pushed by their parents and teachers.

Similarly, the SAT may not be an ideal guide to prospective college students' success -- but at least it allows admissions officers to begin to differentiate students whose padded resumes, boilerplate essays, and inflated grade point averages all look depressingly alike.

Such unevenness is to be expected when an author overreaches in the way Robbins does. Had she confined her recommendations to the demographic she is studying, she would have made some important points. But Robbins' attempt to generalize from her study of a select and unrepresentative fraction of American teens shows both a lack of restraint and a lack of understanding. Like the overachievers she writes about, Robbins confuses the minor daily struggles of the enormously advantaged with a pressing national problem; like the overachiever she acknowledges herself to be, she loses sight of what is reasonable in her effort to push her work to ever greater heights.

Robbins' error is ultimately symptomatic of the culture she writes about, and of which she admits she is a part; it is an error that flatters the people she writes about -- who are, significantly, also the people who read her work and who are responsible for her spot on the bestseller list. But as profitable as that error may be for Robbins, it is a costly error all the same. We should not be fooling ourselves into thinking that the problems facing American secondary education are the problems Robbins describes -- and to the extent that her book eases our ability to ignore the bigger, more troubling picture, it is part of the problem, not the solution.