I have been thinking about public school, alternative school, and growing up, trying to reconcile my ideals with various pieces of reality. I know what felt good and not so good as I was growing up, and throughout my life as an adult working with kids in all different settings, as a teacher, child care provider, camp counselor, and parent. I was a pretty easy kid, a good student, not much of a challenge to parent or teach. Several years ago I went to a talk at the Cambridge Forum by Deborah Meier and others talking about the MCAS and NCLB. I was shaking when I got my turn at the microphone, as Deborah Meier has started many schools I admire, and one in particular that I worked in that really shaped my life as a teacher and parent, Central Park East Elementary. I asked Deborah what she could teach me about starting a small, alternative High School in Somerville. My son Ben was a young child then, probably in the early grades at our alternative elementary public school. I had high ideals about how much impact I could have on the school system as he grew up. Deborah’s response was that I should gather a group of others with like minds and start with a grassroots effort. Earlier in the q and a was the comment that triggered this memory. An older man in the audience wondered why Deborah’s alternative, small school approach was important, given his success in a large traditional high school. She reminded him that most of us in the room had positive experiences in school or we wouldn’t be here in the Cambridge Forum. She asked us to think of those in our high schools who may not have done so well and let us know her efforts are aimed at make education accessible to those kids. I thought of all the faces in my small rural high school that did not make the strides I had in education or in life. I met some of them at our 20th high school reunion. I talked with adults who had been too high on drugs or too busy sleeping with other teens in cabins in the woods to spend their afternoons at school with me attending spanish club or student government meetings or musical rehearsals.  I am not a successful person in the minds of most of the world. As a family child care provider in a working class profession, I don’t rank in terms of status or income. However, I do feel like a success. I have my own business, I have employees, I feel respected and I respect myself. I can’t help but attribute some of my feelings of success in life to my educational success. From elementary through graduate school I was in the top of my class. We had top reading groups, college track, ivy league status, and graduate school to remind us we were on our way someplace. We  had S +’s, high honor roll, and 4.0 status to let us know where we stood at or near the top of the heap. In a lot of ways that system worked for me. All around me, though, I have memories of people for whom that system didn’t do much, or did real damage. At the twentieth reunion one woman stumbled in drunk at 7 pm, another told me of her life running the liquor store, raising a daughter she had at a very young age as a single mother, a guy I had a hard time with in junior high where we had been in the faster track together until he fell behind and partied his way through school, told me about his life in town, working at a factory, and taking solace in the public elementary school where his daughter was in class with children of our classmates. And these were the ones I had known well enough to talk to twenty years later, the ones who had started junior high in the faster track with supposedly as much promise as those of us who made it through four years of college and on to lives we chose with more options available to us, to careers that seemed to give us real satisfaction, whether in education, in the CIA, or on the family farm. The kids who started off junior high at the bottom of the heap mostly didn’t show up twenty years later.

I wonder what I learned from these memories that can help me think about starting an alternative school. Could I support those kids who start off with so much promise but just don’t make it through school to an adult life full of good options? Would there have been a way to give those kids a better chance in life, many of whom had families who were falling apart, or who were predisposed to addictions or unhealthy relationships, who for whatever reason didn’t feel smart enough or interested enough or motivated enough to succeed in school?

And I wonder, would kids like that who live in families that are working well, who have education as a priority and finances available to support kids through the rough spots with counseling and tutors and advocates and that extra semester of college be ok anyhow? Is there a way that a model of schooling can even the playing field or give the kids on the margins the extra support they need to make it in life? Or is it all about who you know and what you have and your family and their economic, social, and educational status? And how will I know anyhow if the school we can create is only accessible to those who can pay? And is it worth it to try something that might help the kids on the edge socially or emotionally or academically or physically, if not those on the edges economically?

That’s when I get my pictures of the good things in life I want kids to have all day long every day of their lives. I remember swinging and playing football on the grassy playground of my elementary school, seemingly for a very long time. I remember working with our fourth grade class digging holes and planting seedlings we bought with money we saved. I remember Colonial Days, when we learned from many local farmers and craftspeople how to make bread, card, spin, and weave wool, and dip candles. I remember working with children in classrooms where active pursuits were as common as sitting at tables and working with pencil and paper. Fourth graders built with blocks every day, first graders used a water table to learn about measuring, preschoolers and kindergarteners had parallel bars as a daily choice in their classroom along with cooking, which was the way they made their class snack. I remember All School Sing, the Clay room, Observational Drawing, All School Meeting, dancing during recess with only kids in the classroom, the Pom Pom club, teachers meeting in small groups to study and implement whole language more effectively, to study the portfolio system and use assessment tools that were free of grades for young children, to study and try out mixed ages, and to come up with new ideas from amongst ourselves.

Most of these things happened in public schools, though in a different era. In the 70’s when I was in elementary school, in the 80’s when I was training to be a teacher, and in the early 90’s when I was a young teacher, progressive ideas were out there. It felt exciting to be a student and a teacher when trying new things meant studying children and creating ways of working with them that were holistic, student and teacher centered, and evolving. I want that energy back. For the last few years, when I have expressed a wish to go back to these roots in progressive education, rather than put my energy into standards and standardized ways of doing things, I have been told, “The train has left the station. Get on board or get out of the way.” “that is old-fashioned. We all know those ideas don’t really work.” I have been laughed at and marginalized for my belief that those ideas do work and in fact it would make a lot of sense to revisit them.

And then, this year, I found the Sudbury Valley School. It was like I was going back in time and yet it was also a modern version of freedom, with computers and the internet and video games and magic cards, things that didn’t exist in my childhood classrooms of the 1970’s and were just emerging in my early days as a teacher. From the Sudbury Valley School, I gained confidence that 40 years of students going on from a self-directed learning experience could emerge as successful adults. I also started to believe that maybe my ideas were not overly romantic or old-fashioned and unworkable in the modern age. I still think the train has left the station, but I am feeling more like creating a new divergent track than like getting out of the way. From studying about SVS I discovered all kinds of things I thought were dead and gone. There are in fact many Sudbury Schools, free schools, democratic schools, and alternative schools of all shapes and sizes functioning and even being started right now. The wish to do something different is not only taking root in the US, but all over the world. People around the US are homeschooling in ever increasing numbers and the number of unschoolers also seems to be growing. People are wondering if there is more than one right way to do things or if the one right way that most of us have as our public school option is the way forward for them.

The big difference I can see is that the public agenda seems not to have much room for these ideas today and there seem to be more barriers to experimentation in the public schools and even in the realm of independent schools. The standards that are increasingly being applied to public schools are impacting early childhood and also independent schools. The need to standardize teaching and learning in schools seems stronger than it was in the 60’s and 70’s when the last round of progressive energy took hold. The good news for me, and maybe for others, is that the internet allows the very small pockets of people trying new things to connect from their previously isolated worlds and share ideas and lend support. So, maybe, just maybe, the internet will give the added boost we need to get us over the increased barriers that seem to discourage innovation of the child and teacher centered variety. If individuals can work together from around the world, ideas just may take root in a new and exciting way that will be even stronger than the last round. I think I want to be part of that.