Home Schooling

I've thought a lot about home schooling during my career as an educator, and as my wife and I talk about having kids at some point. One of the first times I considered it from a professional lens was when I was traveling in Kenya in 2007 and I stayed with a missionary family in Kisumu, a small city on Lake Victoria. They had two sons aged eight and ten, and while they had enrolled them in an international school, it struck me how richly educational the experience of just living in another country can be for young kids, provided they have adults in their lives who would support their inquiry of authentic questions that emerge from the experience of travel.

For anyone who knows the history of education, and who follows many of the trends that are popular today in education, the narrative of the "industrial model" of schooling should be very familiar. As we talk about the information age, flipped classrooms, mobile learning, personalized learning, and project based learning, parent choice and accountability, it surprises me that there is not more of a discussion of the right place for home schooling in the education of every child. I imagine that we could provide great value to every student if, as a system, we encouraged a certain kind of home schooling.

Take Logan Laplante, the 13-year old who gave the popular TED talk last year about "hack-schooling." Setting aside any analysis of the content of his talk and what his story suggests about privilege, his performance and skill is evidence of the incredible value that can be built in a nurturing environment where individualized attention supports interest-driven learning.

What kind of changes could we make to traditional schools to foster this level of passion, drive, and exceptional development for all kids? What do these kinds of results suggest should be the role of parents in supporting education when their kids are enrolled in a traditional school? When does it makes sense for a kid like Logan to go back to school? What's the right balance? 

As I wrote a year ago, I think we'll make a lot of progress in providing for all students when we figure out a new model of financing and school choice that prioritizes strong community schools and a competitive ecosystem of private providers of specialized services. Let's add to that recipe a clear and purposeful place for home schooling. Perhaps we budget for training parents to be the kind of coaches and teachers that the best home school parents are; perhaps our public school system should be equipped with social workers who are tasked with visiting homes and helping to set up libraries, work spaces and virtual learning environments. I like the idea of encouraging small collaborative learning groups among families, so that home schooling responsibilities could be shared by several working parents and kids could benefit from group learning. Finally, we might make some real progress in considering the questions of time in school alongside the notion of homeschooling. 

For those of us who are serious about learning and like to talk about what future school should look like, let's seriously open up the exploration to how learning time at home is utilized, whether it's a radical re-imagination, or it's just evenings, weekends, vacation breaks, and… snow days.

Taking HS Students to Visit Colleges

This past week I accompanied thirty-two students on a three day trip to visit colleges in Maine. While on the campuses of Bowdoin, Colby, University of Maine and New England School of Communication, my students met college students, participated in tours and info sessions, and ate in college dining halls. Being that we are a college prep school, part of our mission includes getting our students on college campuses and gaining perspective on the range of possibility that college has to offer. To graduate from Bronx Prep our students must visit at least ten colleges and must be accepted to at least one college at the time of graduation, so attending these trips comprises an important part of a student's curriculum.

I had an amazing time over the three days in Maine. The highlight had to be the deep conversations about diversity and prejudice that took place throughout the three days, as our thirty-two black and latino students visited one of the whitest states in the nation. Our students learned to ask admissions officers important questions about diversity and retention rates, financial aid and student support services. In addition we subsequently worked with them to analyze the meaning of this data. The trip also presented multiple instances when we had to address proper conduct and demeanor when traveling with a group, out of one's home community, and when others might be inclined to prejudge us based on race or class.

I do have some reservations about the way we conduct our college trips: for instance, we have students "apply" for the trips, but we haven't found a way to capitalize on these process to make a substantial learning experience. Some of our students aren't prepared to fully appreciate how much they can learn from these visits, and others still have to work on their behavior. Despite these limitations, the fact that we take our students to visit colleges, especially a wide range of colleges, is impressive and remains one of the greatest assets of our school. We will certainly continue to improve this aspect of our program, and through collaborative dialogue with others we may teach and learn about providing the best range of opportunities for America's youth.

Fundraising and Budget Control

Essential school programs should not need to fundraise to meet core costs, and budgeting needs to be decentralized from the main administrative office.

Ok, some background: I spent over 10 hours last weekend (following 10-20 hours of planning) running two fundraisers to help get my students to Spain in February. We netted less than $800. While I'm confident we will eventually raise the $25,000 we need to substantially reduce costs for our travelers, the burden on me as the group leader is grueling, and attending to my teaching duties as well as our travel management agenda makes the phrase "work-life balance" sound like a sick joke. We have two students who are especially struggling to make payments. A firmer commitment from my school at the outset would make our fundraising stakes less dramatic and would signal a willingness to build the program for the benefit of future student travel. However, this type of commitment would place our school in an over-extended financial position, and since we depend on undependable state government and foundation grants, the launching of innovative programs require a sisyphean effort.

In the 21st century and our globalized world, international travel programming is a fundamental need, yet schools seldom treat this aspect of education as anything other than a teacher's pet project, approved of by the administration but not underwritten financially. Whether it is travel, athletics, arts or engineering, "extra-curricular" activities are frequently the glue that bind kids to school and the inspiration that leads kids to their careers, yet they are treated as peripheral window-dressing by bureaucrats and administrators.

In order to improve our schools, departments and programs need to have independent budgets much like departments within local, state and federal government. Staff should be held accountable for how that money is spent as they exercise this unusual autonomy. School administrators are often overwhelmed with approval requests for purchasing everything from class sets of books to dry erase markers and projector light bulbs. This is inefficient for management and employees, as teacher and program leaders wait needlessly for supplies and management drowns in emails and paperwork.

The move to bring business leaders into education has not shown clear evidence of improved student achievement; however, there is no doubt that some expertise in organizational and financial management is sorely needed. Our kids need cleats, costumes and plane tickets; and school leaders need better ways to focus on strategy as opposed to micro-management.

What to write about? How about Peace and Global Citizenship?

So much in education this past week! Sorry I missed posting all last week, I've been running myself ragged--last Sunday I was at an event with some big Democratic party power players (I won't name names, but I will mention that I rubbed shoulders with a man that with a pretty important job in the White House), on Tuesday I attended an event hosted by the Open Center where the illustrious Deepak Chopra spoke on his new book Muhammad, and then on Thursday I met with representatives from my alma mater Haverford College, who came to NYC to speak about the incredible center there called the Center for Peace and Global Citizenship or "CPGC". All this, plus I came down with a nasty cold, and well, blogging had to take a backseat.

While I'm inclined to jump into the fray of the vociferous debates about charter schools or Waiting for Superman, two topics heavily covered in the media, these are debates that will still require discussion when the news networks have turned their short attention spans to other topics. Therefore, I will visit those topics another day, and let me take a moment to instead shine the spotlight on a truly incredible program at Haverford that I was lucky enough to benefit from when I was a student there in 2005-2006.

Haverford College has long distinguished itself as a school with a social conscience. We have the oldest and most robust honor code that exists at any college or university, extending from the academic realm into the social, such that the student body is largely self-governed. We also have fostered a serious concern for social justice, both as a function of our Quaker traditions and of the way we conceive of a rich, rigorous, and worldly education. However, about eight years ago, Haverford College established a new center that would be called the CPGC that would enhance and amplify these core values.

I won't list all the rhetoric and data about the CPGC that you can easily find on the website. Instead, let me quickly tell you about how the CPGC affected me so that you might have a picture of how powerful this program is and its transformative potential if brought to other educational institutions.

In the fall of 2005 I was in my senior year of college and, having studied abroad and backpacked around Europe the previous spring I still had a serious itch to travel. On top of that, being immersed in the study of politics I had a come to feel that I needed to be learning and leading not in the classroom or the library, but out in the world. These feelings had grown so intense that I seriously considered leaving Haverford before graduating to engage the world, to graduate at some undetermined point in the future.

Luckily, I did not have to make such a difficult decision. As my studies of international law and economic development pushed me towards the study of Hugo Chavez's policies in Venezuela, the CPGC presented itself as a resource for designing and funding a trip to Venezuela so that I could conduct my own research in a field typically elusive for undergraduates. Thus, after interviews, several drafts of proposals, and an intense week of final exams, right before Christmas of 2005 I took off for six weeks in Venezuela that would forever clarify my self-perception as a global citizen.

My stories from Venezuela could fill a chapter in a book, and the travels and experiences I have had since would fill many more pages to form a very large volume. From NGO corruption, environmental destruction, South American populism and mass democratic activism, I witnessed and studied up close, at the age of 21, issues that shape and define our age. These lessons have been infused in my teaching practice and have continually motivated my hard work and engagement and analysis of relevant contemporary issues. This is my testimony.

While I can testify to the value of the CPGC for my own education and maturation process, I can write with confidence that hundreds of other students and alumni from Haverford would speak with a similar level of passion about the CPGC. If this is then all true, then why aren't there other CPGCs popping up all over the map? In all the public debate about education in the United States--test scores, drop-out rates, etc--do we have the awareness of the programs that will truly serve the students and at the same time move us towards a more connected and just world? Perhaps this post can help advance another possibility.