Product Description

The bestselling author of Pledged returns with a groundbreaking look at the pressure to achieve faced by America’s teens

In Pledged, Alexandra Robbins followed four college girls to produce a riveting narrative that read like fiction. Now, in The Overachievers, Robbins uses the same captivating style to explore how our highstakes educational culture has spiraled out of control. During the year of her ten-year reunion, Robbins goes back to her high school, where she follows heart-tuggingly likeable students including "AP" Frank, who grapples with horrifying parental pressure to succeed; Audrey, whose panicked perfectionism overshadows her life; Sam, who worries his years of overachieving will be wasted if he doesn’t attend a name-brand college; Taylor, whose ambition threatens her popular girl status; and The Stealth Overachiever, a mystery junior who flies under the radar.

Robbins tackles teen issues such as intense stress, the student and teacher cheating epidemic, sports rage, parental guilt, the black market for study drugs, and a college admissions process so cutthroat that students are driven to suicide and depression because of a B.

With a compelling mix of fast-paced narrative and fascinating investigative journalism, The Overachievers aims both to calm the admissions frenzy and to expose its escalating dangers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #250174 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-08
• Released on: 2006-08-08
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 448 pages

From Publishers Weekly
In this engrossing anthropological study of the cult of overachieving that is prevalent in many middle- and upper-class schools, Robbins (Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities) follows the lives of students from a Bethesda, Md., high school as they navigate the SAT and college application process. These students are obsessed with success, contending with illness, physical deterioration (senior Julie is losing hair over the pressure to get into Stanford), cheating (students sell a physics project to one another), obsessed parents ( Frank's mother manages his time to the point of abuse) and emotional breakdowns. What matters to them is that all-important acceptance to the right name-brand school. "When teenagers inevitably look at themselves through the prism of our overachiever culture," Robbins writes, "they often come to the conclusion that no matter how much they achieve, it will never be enough." The portraits of the teens are compelling and make for an easy read. Robbins provides a series of critiques of the system, including college rankings, parental pressure, the meaninglessness of standardized testing and the push for A.P. classes. She ends with a call to action, giving suggestions on how to alleviate teens' stress and panic at how far behind they feel. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
At a time when "underperforming" seems to be the sorry watchword of American education, it's unsettling to come across a book bemoaning the plight of the overachievers. Forget the impoverished teenagers stuck in anarchic schools that would shame the worst Third World potentate; it's the kids with a shot at Harvard who've really got problems. They have too much homework in too many classes, extracurriculars that require their leadership and parents who feel entitled to a sticker from a name-brand college on their car. And then there are SAT prep classes to attend, recruitment calls from Ivy League coaches to field and prom to dread.

At least, that's how Alexandra Robbins reports it in her latest book, The Overachievers. She spent three semesters in 2004 and 2005 at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, her alma mater and one of the top public high schools in the country, to gather evidence for her sweeping indictment of the "twisted values of an educational system gone wrong." While Whitman hardly seems like an appropriate first stop on a tour of educational dysfunction (its average SAT scores are more than 200 points above the national average, and 95 percent of its students go on to college), Robbins found ample evidence that its top students are overwhelmed by all that they have to do.

She follows eight students (four juniors, three seniors and one college freshman) who are all struggling to cope: Julie's hair is falling out; Ryland has panic attacks before physics tests; Audrey is so afraid of falling behind that she goes to school even when she's terribly sick. (Most of the names were changed.) And what's it all for? Admission to a top-ranked college. "As Sam explained to me in only our second meeting," writes Robbins, "if he didn't get into a school whose prestige reflected his exhaustive work and the nights he spent studying until three A.M., he would feel he had 'done a lot for naught,' even if he fell in love with a non-elite school that was perfect for him."

Robbins's strength is in the particular, in spending hours and hours with her subjects, earning their trust and serving as the scribe to their anxieties. Her description of Julie's elation at beating her own best track time is thrilling, while Frank's frustrated rage at his mother's dictatorial control ("You want [to] spend time with friends?" she screams on one occasion. "You are a social whore!") is heartbreaking. The agonizing over romances gone awry and test scores that don't measure up reads truer than any yearbook ever could.

But Robbins, whose previous books investigated sorority life and the Yale secret society Skull and Bones, stumbles when she widens her lens to what she says is a nationwide crisis of "overachieverism," in which high school has become "a competitive frenzy . . . a hotbed for Machiavellian strategy." While that is undoubtedly true for a subset of students from a subset of high schools gunning for a subset of very exclusive colleges, most students graduate blissfully unscathed. (Teachers and parents in schools across the land, not to mention Education Secretary Margaret Spellings and her No Child Left Behind acolytes, beg for such a plague of competitive frenzy.) Indeed, according to the Department of Education, the vast majority of students attend colleges that accept more than half of those applying -- and don't particularly care what club an applicant presided over as a high school sophomore.

In a clumsy attempt to document the universality of this overachievement crisis, Robbins subjects readers to blasts of facts on sleep deprivation, suicide, eating disorders, cheating, college admissions and Asian educational systems. She interviews students from New Mexico to Nebraska to the famously competitive New Trier High School outside Chicago. But throughout it all, she skates past how issues of wealth and privilege (and their opposites) play into her thesis. That becomes most obvious when she takes a lengthy and puzzling detour through the admissions process at elite Manhattan preschools. Yes, it's bizarre that the schools observe toddlers at play to decide which ones will make the cut, but she never makes the case that what goes on in these rarefied schools is relevant to anyone but the very rich.

And yet she has prescriptions for everyone: Colleges should dump the SAT and boycott U.S. News's college rankings (I once served as deputy editor for education at U.S. News but did not work on the rankings, thankfully); high schools should stop ranking students, limit the number of Advanced Placement classes students can take and allow them to get healthy amounts of sleep by delaying start times; parents should "get a life," and students should "accept that admissions aren't personal."

But in an age of rampant grade inflation, college admissions officers use class rankings and standardized test scores to determine whether there's a brain behind all those A-filled report cards. And few students really need to cut back on AP classes. The average qualified high schooler takes just one a year.

The Overachievers hardly inspires hand-wringing about the state of American education. In fact, this reader came away thinking that even these stressed kids would be all right. Not all of them got into Ivy League schools, and not all of them will have the world-changing careers that they imagine for themselves. (But really, who does?) Even the unhappy ones -- Ryland and Frank with their cruel mothers, Audrey with her crippling perfectionism -- had slowly begun to feel their way toward saner ground by the end of the school year. These kids -- these bright, hard-working, overachieving kids, these kids who should make every parent and teacher glow with pride -- will be just fine.

Reviewed by Rachel Hartigan Shea
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Robbins, author of the revealing Pledged: The Secret Life of Sororities (2004), investigates yet another troubling aspect of today's youth, the culture of high-school high achievers, a group to which she once belonged. To see if things had changed during the 10 years since she left high school, Robbins returned to her alma mater, one of the most competitive high schools in the country, to observe several students (juniors and seniors and one recent graduate, who was admitted to Harvard) as they balanced intense academic pressure, parental expectations, personal interests, social life, and their own drive to succeed. What she discovered is no surprise: the welfare of the individual has taken a backseat to academic success. Nor is her call for "massive change of both attitudes and educational policies" new. That said, it's difficult to ignore her perspectives on such issues as the influence of the SAT or the day-to-day struggles of the kids, who can't rest until they "outwit, outplay, and outlast" the competition. An addendum directed to parents, schools officials, counselors, and students sets benchmarks for activists who want things to change. Stephanie Zvirin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

AMAZING
LOVE this book and would recommend this to everyone!! Everyone I know who has read it has found some part applicable to themselves or their friends in high school! Informative and engaging - a must read for all students!!

great perspective into the overachievers lifestyle
thia book is great the author has some great points and the book gives you the information in an entertaining way. however there is some bias and you can see the author is only showing you the negtive aspects of an overachieving world. again i think thtat the book is great to read but one must take it in without buying into every word she says. overall an informative book well worth reading

Hurrah for Overachievers!
This perceptive examination of the lives of real kids gives us cause for concern, but also great hope. There actually are kids who work hard, do their best and want to make the world a better place. Maybe they need more support than they get. (Don't we all?) But they're out there, doing all they can to be all that they can be. That's a good thing. Robbins does a superb job telling the stories of nine young people fighting their ways through the high school jungle, not always getting what they deserve or what they want, but coping and growing. As we follow these kids through some important formative experiences, we can't help worrying about them and questioning the system that puts so much emphasis on being "the best." Guess what. Not every body can be the best. But the good news is this: to succeed in life people don't need to be "the best." They need to be motivated and competent. If these stretched and stressed kids can adjust their focus just a bit, to realize that happiness is more connected to being "their best" than to being "the best," they will do just fine. Thanks, Ms. Robbins, and thanks to these kids and their families, for this meaningful look at the lives of some terrific young people. For a fine fictional treatment of some of these issues, readers might also enjoy Crunch Timeby Mariah Fredericks.
Janet Gingold
author of Finch Goes Wild