The good schools. The selective ones. The one with good teachers and a good campus. The schools with big stem programs and robotics teams that never seem to lose. The prep schools. The ones who dedicate students four years of high school to one goal. College.

Schools considered high achieving are usually academically rigorous and affect all of the students life’s inside and outside school hours. Kids at these schools have their life’s turned over by the school. It is shown by how you can’t miss a day without falling years behind and by the complaints left by students that are never listened to. It is shown by having games in class that focus on speed math than affect your ability to drop quizzes throughout the year. These intense methods of education lead to immense amounts of pressure and stress on the students. 

Independent schools use stress as a tactic to keep their students in line. Since stress is used as a way to force students into a place where all they can think about is grades it becomes an issue between the students. The students begin to compete for who is more stressed. Students compare how many hours of homework they did and how little hours of sleep they got. Competing over how many honors classes you can stack up and how much you can do in 24 hours. An anonymous eighth grade student gave us a quote speaking about her experience at a high achieving independent school saying “I love when teachers ask what my weekend plans are and if I plan to do anything exciting after just having told us we have a test, quiz, and two hours of homework due the next class. Teachers don’t understand that during the week we only get a maximum of seven hours of sleep because we're awake till 11 pm working or doing extra curricular activities, then we text our friends from 11 pm to 2 am since that's our only free time. So when the weekend rolls around all we have time for is sleeping and working.” 

Stress is forced upon students by comparing them and to their classmates and deans emailing congratulatory emails to students with highest grades at the end of every semester. Stress becomes a way to turn students against each other and make them more competitive. Stress becomes impossible hard to deal with and yet everyone wants to be more stressed out than the person to their left. Anxiety attacks and panic attacks in the middle of class become normal. Crying during tests isn’t a new event.

This stress creates obsession. Obsession with grades, obsession with standardized test scores that only measure your ability to take a test, obsession with winning and having the highest grades. Obsession are a coping mechanism from handling the stress you're faced with. The administration at these schools don’t care who they're hurting when it continues to make their school and make themselves look good. An anonymous ninth grader shared that when she was admitted to a new school and received an acceptance letter that she was also told they would take her acceptance back if her grades began to suffer. Another student shared that when her grades began to drop the school reached out to her simply to protect their reputation and not because they cared about her mental health or the reason her grades were dropping. We as the students do not matter to these schools. The students are only animals of a system looking to hurt them. 

A consensus study by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine included students in high-achieving schools as a high risk group along with kids living in poverty, foster care, recent immigrants and more. Rates of clinically significant anxiety and depression can be as high as six times the national norm in many of the schools considered high achieving. Children’s mental health problems in these intense schools are observed as early as the age of seven years old. All these statistics give us further evidence on the detrimental effects that the schools supposably considered “good” have. 

The good schools are often only good because their students have given up a part of themselves to achieve the highest feats. No one tells you that the schools who claim to set your child up for a promising future are the ones who make them hate their lives. Stress is not a tool and yet it is treated like one in these prep schools. High achieving schools often teach kids their worth is based on a number on a test and a letter in the gradebook. Sending your child to a “good” school without them fully understanding the amount of pressure they will be under is like sending an unprepared warrior into battle.