“Systems,” he said. “I see layers of systems. I now understand why the children can function so freely together. It is because of the systems in place. The adults aren’t managing the children. Systems are.” He pointed to the schedule on the fridge, and then to the checklist for studio maintenance. He spent the most time looking at the big tracking sheet on the wall where the Eagles wrote their goals and posted their progress. Just like Heather and Allan Staker had noted after their tour, Juan saw everything in the rooms arranged in a way that not only felt good, but was logically organized and labeled so the children knew where everything they needed could be found. The Contract was posted. The rules of engagement for discussions were posted. There was a checklist for the first draft of short stories the children were working on. Just reading what was hanging on the walls could tell an observer exactly how the children functioned so independently in this space.
Ana and Juan looked like they were on a mission. They walked through our small schoolhouse and into the kitchen, where they saw plastic goggles hanging on hooks next to white lab coats, each with a nametag. Stacked on the floor were plastic bins with holes cut into them, white PVC pipes duct-taped into the holes, and buckets of water. There was a map on the wall marking the progress of the students’ quest to discover the secrets of electricity. The display included the challenges for that afternoon: use water wheels to demonstrate voltage and amperage.
“Sounds like fun,” Ana said as she took Juan’s hand and led him to Charlie’s desk.
“Charlie, would you show us what is in the blue sack hanging on everyone’s chair?” she asked. Charlie, then eight years old and very serious about his work at Acton, pulled a blue binder from his sack and handed it to Mrs. Bonifasi.
“May we look through it?” she asked.
She and Juan read the first page. It was the worksheet the Eagles used to set and track their S.M.A.R.T. goals (for specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound, as created by George T. Doran). I saw her point to the checkmarks where Charlie had charted his progress: Done, In Progress, Not Started. They thumbed through the rest of the binder’s sections: reading, writing, math, projects. It was all there for an Eagle to manage.
“Thanks, Charlie,” she said. “Looks like you have a lot going on.”
They walked through the rooms, looking over the shoulders of Eagles as they worked on laptops or read books or jotted things down in their writers’ notebooks. They then sat in a corner on pillows to watch the day roll on. I saw Juan jotting down notes in his own notebook. Ana stood up to read the student contract and rules of engagement framed and hanging on the wall.
Soon, Ellie held up a rain stick to signal the time for a change. It was the “anti-school-bell.” The quiet sound of beads falling through the wooden cylinder was surprising in its gentleness and power. Rather than jolting students to attention, it coaxed them to focus on Ellie.
“Core skills time is over, and it’s time to organize the studio,” Ellie said in her quiet voice. “See you at the artichoke rug in fifteen minutes.”
Juan and Ana watched the Eagles, ranging in age from six to ten years old, as they scrambled around, putting laptops into the charging cart, picking up trash on the floor, pushing chairs in under the table, and placing books back on the shelves. One Eagle took a clipboard off the wall in the library. Juan asked if he could see it. It was a checklist of what needed to be done at the end of core skills time.
“Ah,” he said to me as I walked by, “the magic of checklists.”
Within exactly fifteen minutes, the entire class was sitting in a circle on the artichoke rug, silently awaiting Anna’s discussion question: “When did you find yourself in your panic zone today, and how did you get out of it and back into your challenge or comfort zone?”
For the next fifteen minutes, an engaged, rich discussion about work habits ensued.
The Bonifasis looked at each other, wide-eyed. All they said as I met them at the door was, “Wow.”
· · ·
A few hours later we sat in our living room with the Bonifasi family and watched the pink-and-orange sunset streaming through the windows.
“Tell us about Guatemala City,” I said.
“Guatemala is a developing country,” Juan explained, “but an increasingly vibrant one.”
Juan said the heart of Guatemala City was like a free-market oasis. In fact, that is why he was able to cofound with Jeff and other entrepreneurs an Acton School of Business within the Francisco Marroquín University in Guatemala City. Juan valued the principles of freedom, truth, learning, and excellence. “It is the shared principles that bind us,” he said. “I want for my children what I was able to experience as an adult under Jeff’s teaching. Would you share this so we could open an Acton Academy?”
“So much of what we saw today in your classroom was different from anything we expected or had seen before,” Ana added.
“And the children are so happy,” Juan said.
We spent the next couple of hours trading our stories of school and learning. As they got up to leave, Jeff handed Juan a copy of Clark Aldrich’s book Unschooling Rules.
“Juan and Ana, if anyone in the world could take what we have as a prototype and plant one elsewhere, it would be you,” Jeff said. “We’d love to see you start your own Acton in Guatemala.”
A month after their visit, Juan had already found families who would enroll their children. And with that, Acton Academy Guatemala City began to take shape.
· · ·
In January 2012, Jeff, Charlie, Sam, and I decided to venture to Guatemala to see how Juan and Ana were doing with their start-up Acton Academy. Because their oldest child was thirteen, they started both an elementary and middle school studio—they were ahead of us already. We couldn’t wait to see what our school model looked like in a different culture and with a larger spread of ages.
From the airplane window, I could see the lush landscape hugging a volcano jutting up into the clouds just outside the city. This was my first visit to Guatemala, and bringing my children along as the expert ambassadors to our sister school was something I’d never imagined.
I had no idea what to expect. Jeff, who had visited Guatemala many times, had said only, “Get ready for the greatest hospitality you’ve ever experienced.”
Hospitality aside, I wanted to see whether Acton Academy in Central America was a true reflection of our vision. Driving straight from the airport, we pulled up to a home surrounded by a wrought-iron fence. Inside the fence, lush landscaping with flowering vines draped the entry. Three Acton Eagles stood at the door with big smiles on their faces and their hands extended.
As we walked through the home-turned-school, things began to look familiar. There was a framed student contract on the wall. There was a Hero’s Journey map. There was a chart of personal goals with marks showing progress. And when we walked onto the back porch, there stood thirty Eagles, ranging in age from four to thirteen years old. Everything was spoken and written in English. These children were bilingual—such an admirable discipline.
The rest of the day included a Skype session with our studio back home and observing their project time, a game-making quest. Charlie and Sam led the closing discussion of the day and asked the group which was more important—knowing you are on a Hero’s Journey or being part of a tight-knit community. They facilitated the discussion like Socratic guides, going deeper into the answers, asking for examples, taking a vote, and then asking for final lessons learned.
I was seeing our model taking on a life of its own and children forming bonds based on shared principles and a culture that transcended national borders.
Acton Academy Venice Beach
Dani and Russ Foltz-Smith had moved to Austin in 2010 with their young girls, Bella and Reese. The California transplants knew nothing about local schools in our area. All they knew was that they were not going
to send their children to a traditional public or private school. They had tried these and neither had worked for their daughters. Within a week of settling in Texas, they showed up on Acton Academy’s doorstep.
Dani, tan from beach living and dressed a black sundress, described her frustration at trying to find a school that would keep her girls, then only six and eight, engaged in learning. She had read our website, watched Jeff’s TEDx talk, and felt in her gut this was what she wanted her girls to experience. Russ, red-haired and quiet, gave me a bear hug as we finished our tour of Acton.
“What do we need to do to start tomorrow?” he asked.
Bella and Reese took to Acton Academy like eagles to the sky. But after only two years with us, California was calling them home. Russ’s company decided to move him back to Venice Beach. Dani burst into my office with the news.
“Laura, I’m in a panic,” she said. “I told him I don’t want to go, because there is no Acton Academy there.
“Is there any way we could be commuter students? I can manage the online learning and then we could Skype in for Socratic discussions,” she pleaded. It was the only way she could feel okay about leaving Austin.
“I’d love to try!” I said. “One idea is that their writing buddies could communicate their feedback by email. I think it could work if you keep up the goal-setting focus and accountability from your end.”
“What about the projects?” Dani asked.
“You can create your own projects or you can use the ones we are doing,” I replied. “We can send you the basic plan and you can adjust as needed.”
Several good-bye parties later, we found ourselves with two Eagles attending our school from Venice Beach, California. We quickly discovered this was not a sustainable option. “They tried to live on Texas time in California,” Dani told me after two weeks. “But it’s just too tiring to get up that early for the morning group discussions. I have another crazy idea. Can I start my own Acton here?”
I was getting used to crazy ideas. Without much thought I said, “Sure, and you can call it Acton Academy Venice Beach!”
· · ·
Dani, Russ, and their girls had made it a tradition to visit our Acton campus during their spring break. This gave the girls the chance to work again with their original Acton friends, and Dani and I got to catch up on how her work was going. Acton Academy had taken on a life of its own under her leadership, but the shared core principles were driving it to success.
She had a small but thriving group of Eagles working from her home, doing core skills on their laptops in the mornings. They spent the afternoons tackling big-project work out in the community and often had PE on the beach. The library had become a favorite place for research and discovery and to fuel their writer’s workshops.
“It’s simple, but it feels like Acton. We’ve got that same joy of learning,” Dani said.
Sharing tools for the journey
Were we going to actively spread the Acton Academy model or let it spread organically, like a grassroots movement? I remembered a Skype call I had that day with a young single woman in Denver, Samantha Simpson. She was applying to be our apprentice guide and closed the interview by saying, “It would be my dream to open my own Acton Academy someday.” Open your own Acton? Something was happening that was bigger than the two of us. People were quietly waking up to a new idea of “school” and we just happened to be in a position to equip others to build their own. I shared this interview with Jeff and he said, “Should we plan for 100 more Acton Academies—or 1,000?”
Just when I was getting comfortable.
By our fourth year, there were four new Actons opening, and we were receiving email requests every day for information on how to start a school. We were overloaded. I was laser-focused on problems in our elementary and middle school studios. Jeff was trying to figure out high school.
We needed help. This was like a grassroots movement and we were only barely able to support it. And the kit—our collection of projects, quests, processes, and systems for others to use—was, frankly, pitiful.
Our help came in the form of Matt Clayton, the cowriter of the Christensen Report who had set up the phone interview between Heather Staker and Jeff back in 2010. He also happened to be Heather’s brother and had told her that since working on the report he could not get Acton Academy out of his mind.
At the time, he was engaged in a successful career at Goldman Sachs but was enthralled with the theory of disruption and, in particular, how it applied to education. We contacted Matt to see if we could lure him to come work with us in Austin. We got lucky.
In 2014, Matt moved to Austin with his new wife, Maria, to lead our expansion. As our lead evangelist, he would help us “bottle up” our processes, systems, methods, and learning design into a world-class kit to help others open their own Acton Academy.
Matt turned out to be the perfect fit for the job. Wicked smart, entrepreneurial, and bearing an impassioned dedication to change the concept of school forever, he took to Acton like, well, a hero to a journey.
Matt worked with software designers and interviewed Eagles on their work habits to help him build a software platform for Acton students around the world to view their daily challenges, track their personal goals, post their work, receive critiques, and compile badges. Never in the world has anything so user-friendly and information-rich been given to young people and their parents to show—in real time—details about the learning process at school.
Matt also created a simple sales funnel for prospective new owners to follow in their quest to open a new school. Our criteria for accepting new owners once we knew they believed in the mission? Just two things: Their own children would attend their school, and they had experience running a successful small business or community project.
I overheard Matt on his phone in May 2017. It was a conversation I heard many times since he’d begun working with us. I knew it must have started on the other end of the phone with the questions “What is your kit?” and “Are you a franchise?”
Think of Acton Academy as a network of world-class entrepreneurs united around a mission of building schools for their children. Not a franchise, but a workshop. We share tools online via a program called Acton Toolshed, plus meeting for a yearly Acton Conference in Austin.
There are three main benefits to the Acton network:
The people: The people are the best part of Acton Academy. The online Owners Discussion Forum is rich in on-the-ground experience, with several threads each day. We’ve found that schools experience similar issues across the network, so if you run into a problem or find something that really works, someone else is likely in the same boat. I could never oversell this group of people!
The systems: What Acton does better than anyone else in the world is build a studio where young people lead. These tools are all available to new Actons. So this includes tools for goal setting, Socratic discussions, studio maintenance, studio contracts, Eagle Bucks, our software platform, etc.
Curriculum or Learning Design: The biggest time-savers in the kit are all of the plug-and-play quests and projects developed over the years, the writing challenges, and civilization discussion material—all play-tested with Eagles in Austin.
In short, anyone looking to just “press play” like a franchise kind of school will likely be disappointed by what they find. But entrepreneurial parents who want a Hero’s Journey with their children will find a deep well of high-quality tools.
Reassurance and belonging
Like the Children’s Business Fair, which took on a life of its own and grew without our paying much attention to it, Acton Academy was lighting a fire in the bellies of parents who wanted something different from what conventional schools—public or private—were offering. They may never have imagined themselves as school administrators but were willing to take action on behalf of their children. After Guatemala
City and Venice Beach, Acton Academies took root in Houston, Chicago, New Orleans, Toronto, Sacramento, Las Cruces (New Mexico), and forty other cities around the world.
Although we would not be graduating high school students until the spring of 2018, Acton Academy Guatemala City had already launched one of their Eagles into the world. Maria Theresa was simultaneously and successfully taking courses through Udacity, Coursera, and edX while serving as a consultant for her local university. She’d recently given a TEDx talk on the future of education.
“She is now the youngest person ever invited to Peter Thiel’s 20 under 20 conference for the best and brightest youth in the world,” Juan wrote. “And she believes that a Wikipedia-like revolution is coming, one where individual students will source, curate, and sequence videos, problems, simulations, projects, real-world challenges, and other learning experiences, with each student finding the pattern that works best for them for a particular knowledge area or skill.”
Her analogy was DNA. Sequencing chunks of educational material is like sequencing genes: Each individual has a unique sequence that works best, but you can learn a great deal from sharing and studying the similarities and differences in the patterns and how they vary among different people. She designed a website where students share and compare different sequences for a variety of topics. In 2017, she took an apprenticeship with one of the top medical researchers in the world, looking for a cure for Lou Gehrig’s disease.
“At the age of sixteen, Maria Theresa was accepted to the University of California at Berkeley,” Juan said.
Our own Eagles began to feel part of something larger than our little campus. What Juan and Dani had started by taking Acton to their communities had rippled across the United States and beyond. And the Eagles felt the swell of opportunity. They were part of a global community.
Chapter 10
Courage to Grow Page 11