A School of Our Own

by Samuel Levin

  The resistance Sam met with from teachers did not surprise me one bit. All my years of visiting classrooms, whether as a mom helping out with a holiday celebration, a researcher collecting data, or an adviser supporting teachers, have shown me the wide range of teachers working in high schools today. There are a few terrible ones—teachers who don’t like teenagers, don’t know much about their subject matter, are not smart, or have no idea how to help others learn. But terrible teachers are actually few and far between. I have also seen my share of really wonderful teachers—smart, knowledgeable, skilled professionals who love kids—teachers who bring the class alive, give feedback that changes a student’s understanding, and give lively assignments that challenge kids of all abilities. However, the majority of teachers are like the rest of us—skilled in some ways, weak in others, teachers who want to do a good job. But most teachers, weak, strong, or in between, are deeply if unconsciously motivated to avoid stress, difficult challenges, and responsibilities that will make them feel bad about themselves.

  Which is why, even in good schools with a good faculty, it is so very hard to get teachers to change. Whether it’s a master teacher on top of his game or a struggling teacher who is barely controlling the classroom, the incentives and supports for making bold changes are low.

  Faced with disappointing results (poor test scores, disinterested students, complaints from parents), teachers, and those who guide them, tend to push for small changes—use a textbook, don’t use a textbook, give tests often, give them rarely, let students do homework in class, use class time for discussion only. Rarely do teachers consider the idea that the fundamental task of teaching should be reimagined. With a few striking exceptions, the basic model of what teachers should do, and what their relationship to students should be, has remained unchanged since the middle of the nineteenth century.

  But there is another reason why so many on the curriculum committee seemed resistant to Sam’s proposal. Years before, I knew a teacher at another school. We used to meet frequently, over coffee, to talk about how to improve his high school. This teacher was smart, well educated, and full of energy. He had a reputation as the dynamic, intense, excellent teacher, best suited to the most able kids. They read Plato and Thomas Friedman with him. They wrote essays answering tough questions. He demanded a lot of them and got a lot from them. If ever there was a teacher who seemed confident enough to consider new ideas, it was this guy. We had some terrific conversations, trading ideas about what kids should learn, good books they might read, what was wrong with the school administration, and so on. But when I began talking about all of the research showing that teenagers craved the chance to exert more control over their own academic lives, to make more of their own choices in what they studied and how they studied it, his long back stiffened, his head tilted back, and his deep voice got steely. He said, “I’ve been working with teenagers for fifteen years. I know them. I know what they want and need. I don’t care what the research says. They can’t make their own choices, and they aren’t even happy when they do. They crave authority, and they need it.”

  At the time, of course, I had absolutely no inkling that Sam would someday be starting a student-run school. But what hit me like a cold blast of wind, sitting in that coffee shop, was the teacher’s certainty that working with kids had taught him everything he needed to know about them. It seemed never to have occurred to him, a very smart and cultivated guy, that one’s daily experiences often serve only to confirm one’s preexisting ideas. Psychologists have shown time and again that people use daily encounters to confirm their biases rather than challenge them. Thus, for instance, if a teacher thinks kids are rarely motivated to learn on their own, they are likely to notice those moments when kids act bored, try to get away with little work, or resist difficult tasks. They are unlikely to notice the many signs that kids actually crave challenge and are eager to learn. To add to this dynamic, the teacher who assumes teenagers are not motivated to learn sets up situations that discourage intrinsic motivation (learning for its own sake), instead creating a class where the only possible motivation is extrinsic (a high grade, a free hall pass, a chocolate bar). Thus they form a classroom that, however subtly or invisibly, shapes young people to behave just as the teacher expects them to. Then they can turn to someone like me and say, “You see? These kids are only motivated by rewards.” Or in the case of this particular teacher, “You see? They can’t handle autonomy.”

  So I wasn’t surprised by the varying types of resistance Sam met with. Teachers are not given much encouragement to try new things, to take risks, and to think about kids in new ways. In fact, events of the past fifteen years or so have pushed many of them into corners. Good teachers feel less and less freedom to do their thing. Weak teachers have felt scared and shamed. And in all the talk of education reform, the discussion has almost always centered on specific pedagogical techniques—almost never on the role teenagers could or should play in their own education.

  When Sam proposed the Independent Project to the Curriculum Steering Committee, I thought back to that coffee shop exchange, seven years before. I couldn’t change that smart teacher’s ideas about adolescence. But maybe some adolescents could.

  Most public schools have something similar to the Curriculum Steering Committee. In my school, it was made up of the principal and about ten teachers, and they had to approve any change to the curriculum before it went to the School Committee for final approval. Creating a new school within the school counted as a change to the curriculum, so the CSC would be my first port of call for approving the Independent Project.

  Mr. Huron and I prepared for months, all the while checking in with the principal and superintendent to see where they thought we’d get hung up, so that we could be several steps ahead when it came to the first meeting. Lots of the details still weren’t worked out in my own head. For example, the idea to regroup the traditional subjects didn’t come to me until the August before the Independent Project started.

  But I had worked out the basic tenets of the school and, with Mr. Huron’s help, had started to figure out some of the logistics. Some of these logistics just came about practically. For example, how many students should the school have? In theory, the Independent Project could have three hundred kids (the whole high school had six hundred students) or two kids. I wanted to have a wide range of students, so that meant definitely more than two. And I figured the more kids, the more we would learn about whether the ideas worked. But I was also nervous. What if it was a disaster? It would really suck if it failed for a hundred kids. So the fewer students, the less guilt I would feel if it crashed and burned. I settled on ten.

  Similarly, I thought the school could work for all students. But because freshmen and sophomores have more fixed requirements, and sophomores had to take statewide standardized content exams, I thought it would be a lot less messy if we limited the school to juniors and seniors. Plus, although I believed that high schoolers of any age were responsible enough to run their own school, in case I was wrong, it seemed less risky if we targeted older kids.

  These are the kinds of things that started to fall into place as I began to build the school. They’re different from the “design” stuff, because they’re not part of a grand vision for the perfect school. I didn’t think, “If I could design my dream school, it would be only for seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds, not fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds.” It just made sense logistically.

  So by the time I first presented to the CSC, I had a proposal with the basic components worked out. The Independent Project would be an alternative school within a school, run largely by students. To start with, it would have around ten kids, although, hopefully, if it was successful, it could grow. Legally, to be part of the public school, it needed to track the regular school year and the regular school day. In the afternoons, the students would focus on an Individual Endeavor, and that would be the same all year, barring extreme circumstances. In the mornings, we would do academics, focu
sing on the core disciplines: science, the humanities, math, and English.

  In Massachusetts, you have to get a certain number of credits, some of which have to be in particular fields, to graduate. You need four English credits (so you have to take English every year), three math credits, three science credits, two history credits, and so on. And you need twenty-two credits overall, so you need to take a relatively full load of classes every year.

  This meant two things for my proposal. One, the students would have to get a year’s worth of credits for doing the Independent Project. This was a given, because otherwise it wouldn’t be part of the school. If kids couldn’t get credits for doing it, they couldn’t do it (unless they dropped out). Second, as far as I was concerned, students should get a science, history, math, and English credit for doing the IP. This seemed pretty obvious to me. The whole point of this was that it was a replacement for regular school, in which kids would still learn the traditional disciplines (albeit in a different manner). If it really was a school within a school, then the work should merit the same credits.

  So that was what I had going in. The bare bones of my vision. But a real school—a brick-and-mortar, living, breathing school—is born when a vision, or a dream, gets molded by reality. Thinking back on the birth of the Independent Project, I often picture my vision for a new school getting thrown down a chute filled with booby traps. The thing that gets thrown in is untouched by the real world. But the chute is filled with spinning blades, cookie-cutter molds, and chisels. These are the opinions of other people, rules, regulations, enemies, and logistics. As the vision passes down the chute, a corner gets chipped off here, a side caved in there. The bottom gets dented, the top blasted with spray paint. At some point, it gets forced through a cutout outline like a plastic extrusion, and some of it rebounds to its original contours but much of it is forever reshaped. And eventually it emerges at the other side of the chute, a new entity.

  My vision was thrown into the chute during the first Curriculum Steering Committee meeting.

  We met with the CSC three times in the spring of my junior year, with each meeting lasting about an hour, and each one separated by about two weeks from the one before it. In between the meetings I was supposed to address the concerns raised in the previous meeting and come back with an altered proposal. In some instances I did; in others I didn’t.

  In the very first meeting, a few things became abundantly clear very quickly. First, there were a few teachers who, almost without a doubt, were never going to approve a program like this. Yet there were also a few teachers who seemed, from the get-go, excited and ready to help make it happen. They had questions and concerns. But they thought that, in principle, it was a good idea. And they trusted Mr. Huron and me to execute it well. These were the teachers who became involved with the Independent Project later on.

  The rest of the teachers—the majority of them—seemed on the fence. They were dubious but willing to listen and talk it out.

  I said earlier that most teachers resist real change, and I offered some explanations for why. But as Sam has described, the teachers in his school responded to his proposal with a wide range of reactions. Quite a number shut him down right away. Not all of the naysayers were bad teachers. In fact, at least two of them were considered among the best teachers in the high school. They were knowledgeable and demanding and their students got high scores on AP tests. The school was proud of them, and the best students chose to take their courses. But they were rigid, tied to a way of doing things that worked for them and the comparatively small number of students who liked that approach—the AP students, for instance.

  Others (just a couple, actually) embraced the idea with excitement, recognizing it as an invitation to do interesting work with students and happy to support something that fit with their hunch about what wasn’t working. A select few of them were not one bit surprised that kids might have good ideas about their own education. This group included some of the most unusual and wonderful teachers in the school—among them two teachers who had the distinction of being equally terrific with the strongest students and those who were barely getting through high school. They were themselves very well educated, very confident of their own intellectual strengths, and, most of all, thought students had interesting things to say. These were teachers who not only loved students but also had a high regard for them.

  But as Sam said, most of the teachers seemed alarmed and wary. Among this group were the teachers everyone has met. They were informed on their topics but only to a degree. They knew just a little more than the students, whether it was in English literature, geometry, or chemistry. Several of these teachers had a reputation for being jolly with kids, good at reining in the smart aleck, helping the newcomer find her way, and reaching out to the kid having trouble at home. Yet they faltered when a student didn’t fit one of their categories (wiseass, shy kid, kid in trouble), and students who questioned their expertise made them uncomfortable. These were the same teachers who dreaded the involved parents as much as they disparaged the uninvolved ones. I have sat in many faculty lounges and heard the same conversation again and again. It goes something like this: “No wonder Joey struggles. I don’t think his parents have looked at his homework once this year” (or “Alicia’s mother is never home”; “Matt’s family life is a mess”; “Irene’s parents never say no to her”; and so on). They are discouraged by their students’ fractured and inadequate parenting and feel sure it accounts for many problems that fall in their laps. They’re not wrong. Ironically, however, these teachers are even more undone by educated, vocal parents who assert their right to have a say in what goes on in schools. I know because I was one of those parents, and all the good breakfasts and sound sleep and field-trip chaperoning I provided my children with did nothing to offset the teachers’ aggravation with my questions and concerns. One smart and talented English teacher told me that I had ruined her year because I asked her to explain to me the comments she had made on my son’s papers—that I had undermined her self-confidence and that I should have kept quiet. When I told her my role was not to help her self-confidence but to help my son have a good education, she stopped speaking to me. These teachers seemed comfortable at school—they liked all the familiar routines. Which may explain why they were so uneasy at the thought of the Independent Project. What the teachers said, however, was simply that it all seemed too risky.

  This part intrigued me. What exactly did they think might happen? I kept remembering a film that came out in 1968 called Wild in the Streets. In that film, hippies hell-bent on social revolution turned the political system (and the country) upside down. As a child, the sense that anarchy might be just around the corner, that crazy kids, high on LSD, might take over, was terrifying to me. As an adult, I kept thinking that some of the teachers in Sam’s school reacted to his proposal as if it, too, would lead to Wild in the Streets, as if letting a small group of students do something different was dangerous, as if it might lead to all kinds of unimaginable badness. I kept wondering, as I sat on the sidelines listening to Sam’s descriptions of those meetings, just what it was they thought might happen. Did they think the students would incite complete revolt among the other students? Did they think that the students in the Independent Project might suddenly unlearn all they knew and never again acquire an academic skill? Were they worried that the kids in the Independent Project might refuse to return to regular classes once the project had ended? And this led to the second mystery. It seemed, from what I heard, that they were particularly worried that kids would “lose ground” in key academic areas. That choosing and discussing books, or learning mathematics in a new way, would set them irrevocably off track. But if all their previous progress could be undone in a semester, what did that say about what they had learned before?

  This concern, which is likely to face any group of kids who want to change their high school experience, is reasonable only on the surface. Naturally teachers want to make sure kids aren’t painting
themselves into a corner, digging themselves into a hole, or in other ways sabotaging their own educational progress. And yet, that worry is based on a faulty assumption—the assumption that the regular courses the students have been taking are working well. We have more than enough evidence showing that that is not the case.

  Many students lose interest in learning while they are in high school. How do we know? Because too few students graduate and continue on to college. There is another even subtler way to measure the success of high school courses: the number of courses students want to take in college that are not simply utilitarian. Several recent reports show that students register for far more courses in economics and other job-oriented subjects than they do courses in literature, philosophy, physics, or mathematics. In other words, they don’t develop a love of learning, or worse, they lose the love of learning they may have had as children. If conventional high school classes turn students off and push them away from more education, the courses are not working well. Second, as the US Department of Education, elite colleges, state universities, and community colleges have all seen, students are arriving at college without the academic know-how they need to even get by, much less do well. More and more colleges have to offer remedial courses, tutoring, and special workshops, and college professors have to take material out of the syllabus, assign less complex readings, and simplify the requirements, because students cannot keep up. One clear cause of this downward slide is that the courses currently taught in high school are not working all that well—which makes one wonder what it was those reluctant teachers on the Curriculum Steering Committee were so worried about giving up.

  * * *

  It became clear very quickly that the IP would never be approved for a whole year. It seemed like too much of a risk all at once. Why not try it for a month? Or a quarter? Why not make it an after-school program, so there’s no risk at all! Either way, a year would never fly. I accepted that, partly because I didn’t have a choice, but also because I had my own doubts and fears. How could I know if it would work?