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Senior Year: A Teenage Wasteland

By Mary Tedrow

In 2001, the U.S. Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley called the high school senior year a “wasteland.” In 2005, researchers Martha McCarthy and George D. Kuh studied data from the national High School Survey of Student Engagement and concluded that the majority of high school students were not challenged during their senior year in reading, writing, or math.

To many of us who work with high school seniors, these findings ring true. They best apply to the wide swath of "average" students who travel the featureless landscape called senior year.

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