For years, high schools and middle schools across the United States have raced to address a well-documented and escalating mental health crisis among adolescents—a crisis that education data indicates was climbing steadily even before the disruptions of the COVID-19 pandemic. In response, institutions have widely adopted social-emotional learning (SEL) curricula, mindfulness exercises, and various wellness programs. Yet, a growing chorus of educators and researchers is raising a provocative question: What if some of these very institutional practices, schedules, and cultural norms are actually contributing to the acute stress and anxiety students experience every day?
In her new book, The Teens Are Not Alright: School and Classroom Practices to Support Student Well-Being, education researcher Cathy Vatterott argues that if schools truly want to champion adolescent mental health, they must look far beyond superficial programs, breathing exercises, and targeted interventions. Instead, she contends, educators must critically examine the structural and systemic environments they create for students.
According to Vatterott, professor emerita of education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, the primary drivers of school-related stress are deeply embedded in everyday academic life. Grades, high-stakes testing, relentless homework loads, and rigid school workloads rank among the top sources of anxiety for high school students. Traditional approaches to grading systems, daily scheduling, classroom management, and instructional delivery often run counter to the core developmental needs of growing adolescents.
Crucially, Vatterott emphasizes that addressing this systemic stress does not mean lowering academic expectations, watering down curricula, or sacrificing rigor. Rather, she advocates for a profound shift toward what she terms a "wellness paradigm"—a comprehensive approach that treats mental health as an inextricable component of overall human health and acknowledges that every adult within a school building shares responsibility for supporting student well-being. This reimagined environment can include granting students greater autonomy over their daily learning paths, rethinking traditional grading and homework frameworks, establishing consistent and empathetic schoolwide policies, strengthening meaningful relationships with trusted adults, and providing actionable opportunities for students to manage stress and cultivate self-regulation.
Recently, EdSurge spoke with Vatterott to discuss her latest book, the hidden traps of achievement culture, and practical ways to foster stress-free schools where students feel genuinely valued, heard, and empowered to take ownership of their education.
Unpacking Harmful School Practices
When asked about the practices that actively harm student mental health and why they prove so stubbornly difficult for schools to change, Vatterott points first to the structure of the school day. In a standard seven-period high school schedule, students are expected to navigate seven distinct classes, abruptly shifting their cognitive and emotional states from one complex academic subject to another with mere minutes of passing time—often sandwiching everything around an abbreviated 20-minute lunch break. She questions whether such frantic pacing serves the genuine needs of students or merely accommodates the administrative convenience of teachers and traditional institutional routines.
The second major hurdle, Vatterott notes, is the sheer volume of homework assigned in many secondary schools. She identifies three primary psychological traps that keep excessive homework loads entrenched: confusing sheer workload with academic rigor under the assumption that if some work is good, more must inherently be better; confusing compliance with responsibility, thereby mistaking obedience for genuine student agency; and confusing replication with preparation. The justification that middle schoolers need heavy workloads because high school will demand it, and that high schoolers need even more because college will require it, misses the fundamental objective. Instead of preparing students for higher education through burnout, schools should focus on fostering truly independent learners.
Balancing Rigor and Student Well-Being
Addressing the persistent fear that reducing stress equates to lowering academic standards, Vatterott argues that educators must hold two truths simultaneously: schools can transform their environments to alleviate pressure without compromising the integrity of learning. Student well-being serves as the essential, non-negotiable foundation for academic achievement. Drawing on trauma research, she notes that hungry, exhausted, or profoundly overwhelmed children simply cannot engage in higher-order cognitive processing. She champions the principle of "Maslow before Bloom," asserting that a student’s basic human and emotional needs must be met before they can successfully access rigorous academic material.
This holistic philosophy extends directly to assessment and grading practices. Vatterott suggests that schools need to change how they assess, rather than simply doing less of it. For instance, she questions the ongoing practice of counting routine homework into final grade weights—an approach she argues has become entirely untenable in an era of widespread student access to artificial intelligence tools. While homework remains a valuable tool for practice and formative feedback, schools should instead focus on clarifying learning goals, outlining clear assessment criteria, and helping students determine the specific steps they need to take to master the material.
Furthermore, classrooms can actively de-stress in-class evaluations by ensuring that all students are given adequate time to complete their work and verifying that they feel thoroughly prepared and supported before facing graded assignments.
Cultivating Meaningful Adolescent Autonomy
A central theme of Vatterott’s work is the profound developmental necessity of autonomy for teenagers. She pushes back against the false dichotomy that granting students independence inevitably destroys classroom structure or undermines educational standards. Comparing student learning to learning how to drive, she notes that no parent would ever hand a teenager car keys without prior instruction and supervision, but nor would they dream of never letting them drive at all. At some point, educators must hand over the keys and allow students to navigate their own educational journeys.
When introducing autonomy, teachers can move gradually from a strictly teacher-directed environment toward offering structured choices, eventually progressing into collaborative decision-making partnerships with students. This approach goes beyond academics into the very fabric of classroom management. Vatterott asks why students cannot participate in co-creating basic classroom rules and routines—such as guidelines regarding water bottles, restroom breaks, or appropriate conversation times. Empowering students with a voice in these daily operational details honors their developmental drive toward independence and prepares them to function as self-directed adults.
Confronting Achievement Culture and Adult Pressures
The intense pressure cooker of modern achievement culture is another major source of adolescent distress, and Vatterott places much of the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of adults, including parents, educators, and college admissions systems. While the competitive frenzy varies by community, the pervasive narrative that a student’s entire future hinges on a single elite university acceptance creates a toxic psychological climate. Adults, she argues, do not have to buy into this narrow, high-stakes mindset.
A critical step involves broadening the societal messaging around what constitutes true achievement. Schools frequently narrow their praise to traditional academic metrics and school-sponsored extracurriculars, often ignoring incredible community volunteer work, creative artistic endeavors, or alternative career paths. When adults project the message that one minor misstep at age 15 will permanently ruin a teenager’s life, they rob young people of the freedom necessary to explore diverse interests and discover their own authentic paths. Vatterott stresses that society must do a much better job of dignifying a wide array of post-secondary choices beyond the traditional four-year college track, placing renewed emphasis on comprehensive career exploration and vocational education.
Practical, Low-Cost Solutions for Schools
For school principals operating under severe budget constraints who want to make immediate, meaningful changes without hiring additional counseling staff or launching expensive new initiatives, Vatterott offers three concrete recommendations.
First, schools must actively listen to students. Mental health support cannot remain the sole domain of overburdened school counselors; instead, teachers and peers must look out for one another. Utilizing existing tools like social-emotional screeners can help identify red flags early, while instituting brief, weekly check-ins allows every student to connect with at least one trusted adult in the building who can carve out a few minutes during class or in the hallway to listen.
Second, schools must empower students by giving them authentic representative power. When students are invited to voice their everyday concerns directly to school administration, they regain a vital sense of agency and control over their environment.
Third, institutions operating within large, crowded facilities can stagger class dismissal times across different hallways or building zones. Vatterott notes that simply observing the chaotic scramble of trying to navigate a congested hallway packed with 1,000 students in a strict five-minute passing window reveals an immense, easily mitigated source of daily chronic stress.
Embracing a Whole-Child Perspective
Ultimately, Vatterott argues that schools must fundamentally rethink their approach to problem-solving. Traditional educational institutions rely heavily on reactive, behavior-based models that fixate narrowly on whether students are showing up, completing assignments, and obeying rules. When attendance or behavioral issues arise, schools frequently ask the wrong questions, focusing entirely on how to force compliance rather than investigating the deeper underlying stressors affecting the student’s life.
While recent years have seen positive shifts toward viewing attendance through a broader mental health and wellness lens, a deeper cultural mindset shift remains necessary. Schools must visibly demonstrate that student well-being and emotional health are valued just as highly as standardized test scores and academic metrics. Vatterott expresses frustration that post-pandemic conversations often default to simplistic solutions, such as banning mobile phones—an important step, she acknowledges, but far from the only root cause of adolescent distress.
If schools fully embrace this wellness paradigm, Vatterott envisions a transformed daily experience. Students would immediately notice a calmer, more relaxed institutional vibe—a supportive work environment where teachers and peers appear happy, grounded, and free from frantic rushing. Students would walk through the school doors feeling genuinely respected, valued, and in control of meaningful academic work, experiencing a healthy balance between rigorous learning, social connection, and personal exploration.