Mostly white parents applauded his decision to reduce academic stress, but many Asian parents were outraged. The latter feared their children would not be prepared for highly competitive colleges.
"This fall, David Aderhold, the superintendent of a high-achieving school district near Princeton, N.J., sent parents an alarming 16-page letter.
"The school district, he said, was facing a crisis. Its students were overburdened and stressed out, juggling too much work and too many demands.
"In the previous school year, 120 middle and high school students were recommended for mental health assessments; 40 were hospitalized. And on a survey administered by the district, students wrote things like, "I hate going to school," and "Coming out of 12 years in this district, I have learned one thing: that a grade, a percentage or even a point is to be valued over anything else."
"With his letter, Dr. Aderhold inserted West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District into a national discussion about the intense focus on achievement at elite schools, and whether it has gone too far.
"At follow-up meetings, he urged parents to join him in advocating a holistic, "whole child" approach to schooling that respects "social-emotional development" and "deep and meaningful learning" over academics alone. The alternative, he suggested, was to face the prospect of becoming another Palo Alto, Calif., where outsize stress on teenage students is believed to have contributed to two clusters of suicides in the last six years.
"But instead of bringing families together, Dr. Aderhold's letter revealed a fissure in the district, which has 9,700 students, and one that broke down roughly along racial lines. On one side are white parents like Catherine Foley, a former president of the Parent Teacher Student Association at her daughter's middle school, who has come to see the district's increasingly pressured atmosphere as antithetical to learning.
"My son was in fourth grade and told me, 'I'm not going to amount to anything because I have nothing to put on my résumé,' " Ms. Foley said.
"On the other side are parents like Mike Jia, one of the thousands of Asian-American professionals who have moved to the district in the past decade, who said Dr. Aderhold's reforms would amount to a "dumbing down" of his children's education."
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