(An exaggeration? Barely.)

This is the kindergarten-to-Harvard pressure cooker that is all too common in other privileged suburbs across America. We students are resume builders and extracurricular machines, SAT vocab masters and community service superheroes.

This high-stress education is profiled in the recent documentary, Race to Nowhere, a film, in the director’s words, “about the pressures faced by American schoolchildren and their teachers in a system and culture obsessed with the illusion of achievement, competition and the pressure to perform.”

The film is the alter ego of the better-known Waiting for Superman, which came out only a few months ago. Waiting for Superman, from the director of An Inconvenient Truth, is about the failure of the American public education system and urban schools in particular to successfully educate students.

Waiting for Superman comes out strongly in favor of charter schools and stronger standardized testing; Race to Nowhere argues that students need to be allowed to develop their creative desires and is staunchly anti-standardized testing. Waiting for Superman is about parents that don’t prioritize their children’s education; Race to Nowhere is about parents that prioritize nothing but their children’s education.

These two films tell the stories of the two Americas.

Race to Nowhere tells the story of the hyper-educated who are generally already affluent. The children in this America get at least a bachelor’s degree; this America enjoys the fruits of globalization, the advances of the information revolution, and carries iPhones. The unemployment rate for this college-educated America is a mere 5.1%.

Waiting for Superman, on the other hand, tells the story of the underprivileged who are stuck in criminally underfunded schools. The children in this America are lucky to graduate. For those who don’t graduate from high school – and in 2005, half of urban high schoolers didn’t – the unemployment rate is nearly 16%. This America knows globalization as the outsourcing of jobs to dirt-cheap labor in Third World countries and is not educated enough to feel the full benefits of the jobs brought by the information revolution.

This educational inequality has snowballed into economic inequality at the nation-wide level. Prior to the economic crash of 2008, income inequality between the top 1% richest Americans and the rest of the country was at the highest level since the year before the Great Depression. More likely than not, this disparity was a serious contributor to the recession. A more balanced economy will provide a strong foundation for future growth and restore the rags to riches opportunities that make the United States great.

That balancing starts with a smarter education system. The United States has not had a debate over educational legislation at the national level in nearly a decade. Shouldn’t improving public education be a higher priority?

Congress will soon pass a bill, if it hasn’t already by the time you’re reading this, that will grant tax breaks totaling $900 billion over the next two years, a price tag far higher than that of the President’s stimulus package.

With 1% of that, every teacher laid off because of the recession could have his or her job back. With 4% of that, we could double the budget of the Department of Education. With 10% of that, we could pay for universal preschool with high-quality teachers for every American toddler. Education needs to be more highly prioritized by the federal government.

So, I ask, can Race to Nowhere really argue that some stress is all that bad? As I count down the hours until I hear back on my college application, at least I know: Wayland, for one, has taught me to prioritize my education.