A School of Our Own

by Samuel Levin

  However, I wouldn’t make it a few weeks, or an after-school program. For this to work, it needed to be real school. If it was an after-school program, only the truly motivated kids would do it. That didn’t interest me. And if it lasted only a few weeks, the students doing it would just use it as an opportunity to goof around. When I said this, a few teachers responded, “Aha! See! You admit they’ll just goof around!” I had to explain that if you marginalized it, or made it too short, it would seem meaningless, like a vacation, and then most high schoolers (most anyone) would use it as an opportunity to do just that—take a vacation. But if you handed over their whole education to them and said, “Here, for the coming months, your education is in your hands,” then it could become something more. So I agreed to make it a one-semester program.

  Similarly, in the second meeting, the committee raised the question of credits. Some of the on-the-fence teachers said, “Well, why don’t you have them do the IP for most of the day, but they can take regular English and math and meet their requirements.” I wouldn’t budge on this front. If the IP made up part of their day, but then they still had to do the “real” stuff, it would belittle the worth of the program. If they had homework for their other classes, they would end up doing that and not working on their Individual Endeavors. It would feel like their classes were real school, and the IP was free time. It would have to be the whole day, or it wouldn’t be worth doing at all.

  So, bit by bit, we worked through these logistics, and as we went through the process, some of the on-the-fence folks were gradually won over. I think this happened for two reasons. One, we made concessions (like making it only a semester) that took out some of the risk involved. And two, I think the more they heard Mr. Huron and me talk about it, the more an idea that had started out seeming radical and wild began to seem sensible and reasonable.

  At some point in the second meeting, we came upon one of our biggest stumbling blocks, the matter of credits. Barring one or two teachers, no one thought we should get subject-specific credits for the Independent Project. This seemed really unfair to the students who would take part. “Yes, you can do the Independent Project, which is officially part of our school, but you’ll have to double up on all your courses in the subsequent semester to make up for it.”

  I was able to win quite a few teachers over by explaining how we would approach academics. And for a while, I thought we might triumph. What I didn’t foresee was the influence of the teachers’ union. The union rep came down hard on this front: if we tried to award students subject-specific credits without having teachers teaching them those subjects, he would come down with the full force of the union. I didn’t really know what that meant at the time, but afterward the principal explained that I should back off on that front. It was a battle not worth fighting.

  So the students would get a semester’s worth of credits. But they would be general credits, and they’d have to make up half an English credit and whatever other subjects they needed to graduate.

  With that solved, we came into the final meeting. It was still about fifty-fifty at that point. There was really only one obstacle left to overcome. And that was to convince the CSC of the core tenet of the IP, the idea of its being student run. Of the three and half hours I spent with the CSC, two and half hours were spent trying to convince them that students wouldn’t just use it as an excuse to mess around. Of course, I didn’t have any proof. That’s what the Independent Project was supposed to be. But I had to get it approved first!

  While I was trying to make my case, one of the teachers in the “absolutely not” camp was getting more and more frustrated. He was actually visibly red in the face. Finally, he blurted out, “It’s ridiculous to think that kids can be trusted to learn on their own!”

  Interestingly, this teacher and I had always got along really well. I loved his class, even though most people hated it, and I did really well in it. We didn’t get along so well once I started the Independent Project.

  Once I had convinced about half the teachers, or maybe a bit more, it was time to go to a vote. My final appeal was this: “If you think that our school works for everyone, if you think that everyone is benefiting from the way we do things now, and we’re not failing anyone, then you shouldn’t approve the Independent Project. Why fix something that ain’t broke? But if you think we’re coming up short, if you think we’re letting a significant number of kids down, then why not give this a shot? I can’t promise it will work, but I can promise if we try it, we’ll be a little bit closer, one way or another, to doing the best for our students.”

  And it worked. I think the final vote was six to three, with some abstentions. The Independent Project was approved by the Curriculum Steering Committee to run as a pilot for one semester. After that, it would be reviewed and they would decide whether to make it a permanent school within the school.

  We still had to go to the School Committee, but after facing the faculty, and with the CSC’s, the principal’s, and the superintendent’s support, the School Committee was actually a lot less daunting. It took only two meetings to get its approval. And then my new school was officially a reality.

  At seventeen, Sam was naïve. And he was brash. From the time he decided to do this, it never seemed to occur to him that he might not get past the first stage. I was forty-nine. I had failed many times and watched others, even those with wonderful ideas, never get past step one. But the great thing about seventeen-year-olds is that they’re usually looking forward, sure that whatever they have imagined is just moments away from becoming a reality. It’s one of the strongest features of adolescence, and one worth nurturing—that combination of certainty, urgency, and determination. Sam had it in spades. At their worst, teenagers push past people, talk too loudly, assume everyone thinks that they are as funny and fun as they feel. But the other side of this strangely exuberant egocentrism is that they can make things happen.

  I was completely unsure, in those first few months, if Sam’s proposal would make it past the committee meetings. I knew all the people, logistics, and institutional inertia that could stall it at any number of points. Sam, on the other hand, seemed blithely unaware that any problem could crop up that he couldn’t overcome.

  The process of the “dream school” passing through the chute can be really frustrating. So many things get changed, so many concessions made. But if you are able to keep the core tenets alive, in the long run, it’s worth it. Because what comes out at the other end of the chute is a real school.

  And now that my school was real, I needed to find its most important component: its students. This all started with wanting to make things better for my friends, who I felt were underserved by school. And my friends spanned the academic spectrum. That’s one of the reasons I love public school. It’s for everyone, regardless of background or ability. So I wanted my new school to be exactly the same. It should work for everyone, from students considering dropping out to students on their way to the Ivy League.

  But we couldn’t have more than ten kids. That was part of the deal. And we couldn’t force kids to do it. So we had to have some kind of application process. We started by spreading information about the Independent Project. We distributed letters to all students describing the program and inviting them to apply. I talked it up among my friends and told them to spread the word. In his role as guidance counselor, Mr. Huron talked to the counselees he thought would benefit from the program, both students who were coasting by getting good grades without applying themselves and kids who were considering dropping out, for whom this might be a last hope. This was really useful, because it was how we hooked some of the students who later admitted to thinking the program sounded “stupid” when they first heard about it.

  The truth is, we weren’t really planning to reject anyone. We knew we would be lucky if ten kids applied. Students who were really worried about college would think it was too risky to try an experimental school in their junior or senior year. And lots of kids just would
n’t bother—they had accepted that high school was mostly boring and were biding their time until it finished.

  So why have an application process at all? Three reasons. One, it would be a way to spread the word. Two, it would help legitimize the program, so that people wouldn’t just absentmindedly sign up for it, treating it as a joke. And three, it would serve as a chance to give interested students an insight into what the program would be like. I knew that one of the challenges we would face would be helping students overcome all the bad habits and associations they had learned so far in school. So the earlier we started, the better.

  In this way, the application was as much for incoming students as it was for us. I came up with three questions for students, and they could choose to answer them in writing or orally. The first question was: “If you could spend six months working on anything you wanted, what would it be?”

  I knew that many of my friends had never even considered the idea of working on something for an extended period of time, or paused to think about what they would do if they did have free time. It’s an alien concept, because it’s never been an option.

  During the CSC meetings, faculty members kept asking, “What about students who have no interests?” Well, I’ve yet to meet a high school student with no interests. Sometimes, they already have interests, but their interests don’t fall into the relatively narrow arena of high school subjects. After all, most people don’t spend their lives pursuing the subjects that are covered in high school. Perhaps even more commonly, they’ve never been given the opportunity to think about their interests, because they’ve spent so long being told what to learn.

  This was the reason for our first question. To get prospective students to start thinking about what they might be interested in pursuing if they had a real opportunity to do so. Indeed, it was hard, at the start, for some students to think about what they would do, because no one had ever asked them. But every single student who has ever done the Independent Project ended up finding something to be passionate about.

  The second question was actually a command: “List all of the uses for a stick.” This was partly for fun. But it was also to get them to start thinking outside the box, to realize that the questions we would explore in the IP would be unlike anything they had done before. It’s the kind of question that anyone, regardless of ability, can answer and push themselves with.

  And finally, we asked them to consider a challenge they had faced in the past and explain how they overcame it. The purpose of this was partly to let them know that the Independent Project was going to be hard work. It’s not easy to be responsible for your own education. But more important, it was to let them know that, in the IP, they would be responsible. No one else would swoop in to save them. They needed to be thinking about how they would overcome obstacles, not how someone else would do it for them.

  By the time anyone is in their mid-twenties, a key part of life is figuring out when to work, when to relax, and how long it will take to complete certain tasks. Perhaps that’s what teachers think they’re teaching when they talk, which they do incessantly, about time management. In my experience this is completely off the mark. Kids who are very organized and goal oriented become so focused on managing their time that they give little thought to how they’re actually spending their time. Which is why, when they get to a college like Williams, they schedule themselves up to the hilt, ticking off to-do lists and barely stopping to take in any of the experiences at their fingertips. Of course, there are many students who are not so put together and have no sense of how to apportion their time. They dawdle at dinner, watch too much TV, postpone their homework, and along the way forget essential assignments, materials, or even appointments. For those students, all the little tricks they are offered in the guise of “time management” hardly help. Telling kids how to manage their time for tasks they don’t care about rarely works. Tell a young basketball player who falls asleep dreaming of the net how to warm up better before a game, and she’ll remember that tip quickly and easily. But tell a kid who plays only because her parents make her, and she’s unlikely to use the advice. In order for students to learn how to manage their time, they need to be working on things that matter to them.

  By asking applicants, right away, to identify what they cared about, Sam was highlighting a key feature of the school—that students would need to manage their own time and they’d need to figure out what they actually wanted to spend their time doing. He couldn’t have known this, but he was inviting them to begin the process researchers now consider essential for healthy development: acquiring a sense of purpose.

  It’s not unusual to ask students to submit applications in school. It’s common for students to fill out forms or take tests in order to gain admission to AP courses or gifted-and-talented programs. In some cities students might need to apply in order to get into the “better” high schools. But in those situations, applications are used to sort out those who have potential from those who don’t. Sam’s application process was not selective in the usual sense. He wasn’t interested in whether kids were smart enough, or even hardworking enough. He wanted them to take a first step in becoming more self-directed learners. To me, Sam’s application process looked less like a barrier and more like an invitation—an invitation for teens to begin building their own paths, leading them from the world of childhood to the world of adulthood.

  So that was it. The whole application. Mr. Huron suggested we get the parents involved early in the process. Anyone who wanted to apply had to get his or her parents’ written permission. The thinking was that if it was a disaster, better that the parents were aware their kids were doing it and had given them permission to do it. Also, we figured, the more aware the parents were, the more support the students would get for it at home. We didn’t want anyone’s parent calling up furious that his or her child had no homework anymore.

  We actually lost a few potential students early in the application process this way. It was common to hear, “I really want to do this, but my parents would never let me.” This came both from students who wanted to go to Harvard and from students who were scraping by.

  In the end, we were right to expect few applicants. Though dozens of students expressed interest, only eight students completed the application, including myself. And all eight of us were accepted.

  We certainly did span the academic spectrum. We ranged from valedictorian to consistent Fs, and everything in between.

  You would be hard-pressed to find a school in this country that didn’t track students, one way or another. Separating students by ability and aspiration is so deeply woven into our educational system, it has become part of the fabric. Sit in on an AP class, almost anywhere in the United States, and you will find kids who stay quietly in their seats, keep their eyes on the teacher, write down their assignments, and raise their hands when a question is asked. Sit in on many CP (college prep, which is one euphemism for the less rigorous level) courses and you will see students talking when they are supposed to be listening, getting up to go before the teacher has given the assignment, and staring blankly when asked to contribute.

  But the kids’ classroom behavior is not the only thing that divides the academic tracks. Often the liveliest, most skilled, and best-educated teachers work in the AP classes, while the less adept or less educated teachers end up in the lower levels (as I mentioned earlier, this is not always the case). Finally, the work itself differs in almost every way. AP students are expected to do more, to read novels rather than excerpts, to write papers rather than fill in blanks, to solve mathematical problems rather than follow preset procedures.

  Smart, academically able kids are often relieved to be in a class with others who want to work hard, who have good ideas, who read the book. And kids who struggle frequently prefer to be among others who struggle too, so they don’t stand out when they fail the test. Yet ultimately, this system is bad for everyone. Research has shown that less able kids work and think at a higher leve
l when they’re around more able kids. The most able kids learn material more deeply when they have to explain it to others. Everyone benefits from figuring out how to work closely with people who are not like them. But mixing kids of different ambition and skill will not succeed if you keep everything else the same.

  Right from the get-go, with its admissions procedures, the Independent Project focused on what all kids have in common and what all kids need: time to think about what they want to learn, an expectation that they could choose things that were challenging and interesting to them, and a demand that they take some responsibility for their own learning. Because the kids would choose their own questions and map out their own strategies for finding answers, they would, by design, be working on topics, tasks, and goals that fit their intellectual abilities. Because they worked together in a close-knit group (more close-knit than Sam might have expected, since in the end they had only eight kids that first year), their differences became a strength, not something to be avoided.

  There isn’t a kid around (at least within the typical population) who won’t benefit from learning how to learn new things, form good questions, evaluate his or her own efforts, give help to others, take help from others, exchange views, and share knowledge. In this sense, the Independent Project represented the antithesis of tracking.

  I made three assumptions when building my new school. The first assumption was that the school I wanted to build would be a reality. It was only later, when people asked me how I made the leap from thinking that high school should be different to actually starting a real school, that I realized it could have happened any other way. Designing a new school just for the sake of thinking about how to improve education didn’t appeal to me. This was worth doing only if it was going to happen in the real world—if real, live students could experience a new kind of education.