Guide Provides Teens with An Innovative Way To Take Ownership of Learning - Leave School

This post was also published at Gotham Schools.  If you want to read it there, click here and read their take on it here.  

I work to support schools in New York City to innovate learning and I am also the author of a guide that advises teens to take ownership of their learning by leaving school. Here’s why.

I have more than a decade’s worth of experience in educational innovation. I spend my days working with administrators, teachers, and students finding ways to innovate learning in an effort to establish student learning environments that are more engaging, authentic, and connected to real life. I’ve worked in various capacities such as technology coach, literacy coach, and educational technology professional development manager, and I currently serve as a technology innovation manager. Before that I did similar work for Teachers College Innovations at Columbia University.

I am fortunate to work for an agency that focuses on and embraces technology and innovation. Despite outdated constraints involving issues like seat time, student funding, and resource allocation, we are making progress toward bringing more personalized and engaging learning opportunities to students through a handful of efforts, such as the iSchool and the Innovation Zone. But while students are doing better in a more innovative climate, ultimately, we are just using updated tools to meet narrow and outdated measures on which our students, teachers, and school leaders are judged. It is not enough to personalize learning for everyone to go down the same path — to college, without consideration of what comes next. Instead, schools need to embrace the many alternatives to the traditional college route that would better meet the needs of many learners today. What is missing at the DOE is the important work of letting students discover, define, and develop their own passions, talents, and interests and determine personalized, meaningful, and authentic measures of success.

This is why I have published an online guide that helps teens leave school. Recognizing that I am no better than a high school dropout, I created ”The Teenager’s Guide to Opting Out (Not Dropping Out) of School” because for many students, school has become a barrier, rather than a sanctuary, for learning. You need only spend a few minutes on Facebook groups like ”Parents & Kids Against Standardized Testing” and “Testing is not Teaching!” to get a sense of the frustration felt by parents about school systems that prioritize testing over the mental and physical well-being of children. You need only attend education conferences, like the recent iNacol Virtual School Symposium where the audience replied with a resounding “BORING” to the keynote speaker’s request for “one word to describe high school,” to realize something has gone very wrong. ”The Teenager’s Guide to Opting Out (Not Dropping Out) of School“ is geared directly at teens who don’t fit the standardized mold and are desperate for a life customized to their personal goals for learning and plans for success.

I also created this guide for the teenager I was back in the 1980s when I had no idea there were alternative options to traditional school. I thought my options were simply to graduate or drop out. I feel for today’s youth who, like me, dislike sitting still all day being told what to do. Instead of finding an environment more suited to student needs, they are being medicated at extraordinary rates to help them comply with the institutionalized setting. As movies such as ”Race to Nowhere” suggest, we also have students who are becoming physically and emotionally ill as a result of school, even to the point of suicide, and schools are telling parents flat out that they don’t care.

The guide was also written for those like my cousin Adam Ritter, a valedictorian-track high school honors student who said this to me:

School is torture because I am required to spend all my time doing menial tasks, worksheets, and rote memorization. This takes too much time away from being able to discover my hobbies, interests, or passions. I’m in tenth grade and I don’t foresee having the ability to do that before I graduate high school.

Not only is this situation hurting our children directly, but we are losing some of our most passionate teachers. Earlier this year, I met one such teacher who explained she was being forced to turn her vibrant, passion-filled classroom into a bubble-sheet-completion factory.  I asked if she could just close her door and continue the work she had been doing, but she explained there was no way out: Administrators do drive-by test prep collection. She and many others have reached out to me in desperation. They explain they can no longer stand feeling morally responsible for taking the light out of their students’ eyes with a test-prep, test-taking curriculum.

“We have an educational system that thinks weighing the animal more frequently is more important than feeding it.” - Stephen Krashen, education professor at the University of Southern California

During a professional development workshop I held last week, a few teachers who are aware that I, like others (i.e. Joe Bowers, Alfie Kohn, Chris Doyle), know standardized tests are poor measures of success for the 21st-century student shared their disappointment with me. They shared that there is so much test prepping, assessments, and tests, that they are left with little to no time for actual teaching and learning. Furthermore, they said, there is no talk of or time for passion-driven learning in today’s data-driven classrooms. They reported that morale is at an all time low, students and teachers feel beaten down, and some are just plain burnt out. With this in mind, it’s no wonder that drop-out rates are as high as they are or that for some, school might not be the preferred setting for learning.

The term “high school dropout” has negative connotations where youth and their parents are often viewed as being lazy or failures (see this heated thread on Facebook on the topic) if they don’t comply with the demands of institutionalized schooling. It implies something is wrong with the student. Sadly with no knowledge of other options, some students do go on to pursue lives that follow the stereotype. “Opt out,” however, is what students do who realize that the problem lies with their schools, rather inside them. As films such as “Race to Nowehere” and “Waiting for ‘Superman‘” show, for many, the problem is indeed the institution. But charter schools are not the only exit strategy for students who don’t want to stay: Instead, they can pursue alternatives to live and learn in their own way.

I aim to illuminate some of these alternatives in ”The Teenager’s Guide to Opting Out (Not Dropping Out) of School.” Contributors include parents and teens who have chosen this unorthodox path with much success. One such contributor is Deven Black, a New York City teacher-librarian, who is a two-time opt out. Black left the Bronx High School of Science at 14, tried again at his local school, and then opted out there, too. He explains that for him, Manhattan was a 12-mile-long, 1.5-mile-wide educational experience. A brief subway or bus ride could deliver him to any one of dozens of museums of art, natural history, craft, or occupation. Or he could emerge from underground into what seemed like a different city where the people spoke Chinese, Italian, Spanish, or Ukrainian and the food in the restaurants were the best kind of spoon-fed learning. He went on to have many successful careers. After finally finding a college that met his criteria he received his college degree at 43. Six years later, tired of restaurant management and looking for something else to do, his son’s elementary school principal suggested he try substitute teaching. It was magic. Deven signed up at a prestigious university, where he got a master’s degree to meet the city’s requirements, and became a full-time teacher at age 50. Now he is getting a second degree so he can remain his school’s librarian. He is still waiting for graduate school to teach him something useful that he doesn’t already know.

The guide dispels myths such as “you can’t be a high school opt-out to get into a good college” and “school actually prepares you for success in life.” It asks questions like, “How can school prepare students for life when all the tools we need to succeed in the world are blocked and banned in school?” and “How can we prepare students for the world when we give them little choice or control to discover, explore, and learn about what it is they are interested in?” It also reveals that even when people such as myself and contributors to this guide do everything they are told, which is basically “get good grades and finish college,” they are often left unsure of where to go or what to do next because the purpose of school has become to make students dependent learners who are good at doing as they are told for school life, rather than critically thinking about success in real life.

“The Teenager’s Guide to Opting Out (Not Dropping Out) of School” aims to empower teens and their parents to unplug from the status quo and take back their learning. For some people, this means opting out of traditional schools and opting into any number of options including attending alternative schools that are not required to submit to the same government mandates, pursuing learning online through an online school or by designing their own learning using Open Education Resources, or by completely claiming their right to own their learning like teenager Leah Miller did. As a high school sophomore at Oakwood School in California, Miller opted out of school. Now she has developed a presentation that outlines why she made that decision. Part of her plan includes a 2-week-long visit to New York City where she can investigate her passion for theater. She says she “plans to explore and soak in the city” and adds, “I know that I will learn bucket loads from this trip.”

My guide provides examples and ideas for individuals interested in opting out of school and opting in to a learner-centered life — one where they are able to pursue passions and outline goals for personalized (not standardized) success, not just in school, but in life.