by AaronGell
On May 7th The New York Times ran a piece on Brooklyn Free School
entitled, "Land of the Free." Originally the writer, Aaron Gell,
had written a 6,500 word piece for a feature in New York Magazine. After
five months of waiting, NY Mag killed the story. Aaron then sold it to
the Times, but the Times wanted it cut down to 2,500 words. Below is the
original, unedited version that was slated to run in New York Magazine,
printed here with permission from Aaron Gell.
Alan P. Berger, Director
On a Wednesday morning in November, the weekly Democratic Meeting of the
Brooklyn Free School, a progressive private school housed in a Methodist
church in Park Slope, is called to order. The school's thirty-five kids,
ranging in age from 5 to 16, and several teachers and volunteers sit in
a circle on metal folding chairs in the "big room," as the agenda
turns to a crucial issue. "I've had a bunch of people come up to
me and say, 'I'm so bored, 'I need something to do,'" begins Sophie,
a sage, dark-haired girl of 14, who is inexplicably wearing a pair of
butterfly wings, "and I've felt it myself, so I just wanted to open
it up for discussion, ways to, basically, alleviate boredom."
This is no small matter for BFS, a self-described "democratic, free
school," at which boredom is not so much a minor annoyance as a pedagogical
imperative. Located in the lower floors of a nondescript Methodist church
on the edge of Park Slope, BFS, which is now in its second year of operation,
is the city's most radical school—a romantic gamble on the idea
of laissez-faire learning and an audacious repudiation of the current
preoccupation for standards and testing. At a time when the federal government
is imposing national achievement guidelines through the No Child Left
Behind Act, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg has just coasted to reelection
after his implementation of even tougher policies—a regimented curriculum,
carrot-and-stick system of performance goals, and a steady diet of high-stakes
tests—children attending the BFS can theoretically go for weeks,
or even years, without ever laying eyes on a sharpened No. 2 pencil or
one of those fearsome grids of ovals. They are not graded, ranked or formally
evaluated in any way. The only homework they're liable to get is the kind
that their nervous parents take it upon themselves to assign them. And
they're not required to attend classes. Ever. Instead, students are encouraged
to design their own educations, or not to, as the case may be. The idea
being that real learning only occurs when it's self-directed and "non-coercive,"
rather than imposed from on high—which, it turns out, can occasionally
make for some very long days, as kids try to figure out just what, exactly,
they want to do.
Not that there's any shortage of options. Sophie, for instance, is in
the process of casting a student production of Macbeth. The school's principal
and founder Alan Berger offers classes in Japanese and cheese-tasting
(last year, the students sampled 80-some varieties, and Berger threw some
geography, biology and chemistry into the bargain). Children made soap.
There is an active book club, which spent September discussing Jon Stewart's
America. There are video production workshops, classes in philosophy (Plato's
Euthyphro, anyone?), psychology, sociology, astrology, business, film-appreciation,
storytelling, circus arts and current events, many of them initiated and,
in some cases, taught by the students themselves (15-year-old Nick's course
on Tibet is one of the best attended). There also seems to be a lot of
tag, sword-fighting, maintenance of MySpace homepages, wandering around
and napping. One morning early in the year, I nearly get beaned by a tube
sock—collateral damage in a game called Asoxination (participants
stalk and assassinate opponents by walloping their targets with athletic
socks). All of it, Berger insists, is learning; all of it valid. "We
try not to pass judgment," he says with a smile.
New York City currently has hundreds of independent schools offering a
wide range of teaching styles. But according to Victoria Goldman, coauthor
of the Manhattan Directory of Private Schools, BFS is off the charts.
"This is extreme," she says. "It's left of left."
Indeed, the school traces its philosophical lineage to the work of progressive
educators John Dewey and A.S. Neill—whose 1960 best-seller, Summerhill:
An Approach to Childrearing, sparked a wave of free schools across the
country—institutions offering various degrees of "child-centered"
learning, many of them run on democratic principles. But the emphasis
on individual responsibility might better be described as libertarian
than liberal, "accountability" taken to an extreme. In any event,
there's little doubt that it's as revolutionary an approach to education
as currently exists in New York—a fundamental reordering of what
it means to teach, and to learn.
Student empowerment at BFS is not limited to how kids spend their own
time. To a large degree, they run the institution themselves through the
weekly Democratic Meetings, at which nearly every element of the school's
day-to-day management—from behavioral issues to admissions criteria—can
be brought up, debated and put to a vote, with even the very youngest
children having a say equal to that of the teachers and principal (parents
get a vote as well, but only if they volunteer at least one day per week).
One of the more hotly contested issues last year was the playing of videogames
on the school's three donated computers. Over a period of several months,
a Talmudic set of guidelines evolved. One rule mandated that games only
be played on certain computers. Another limited play to particular times
of day, with sign-up sheets and half-hour increments. When it was later
established that scholarly research should take precedence over more frivolous
uses, a new regulation had to be adopted to allow gamers a three-minute
grace period before getting kicked off.
Chairing the Democratic Meeting today is the budding Tibet scholar Nick,
a confident young man with an impatient leadership style, a riotous tangle
of hair, and a standard wardrobe of black tights, a velvet blazer and
a long woolen scarf. Attendance at this meeting, unlike classes, is mandatory,
but paying attention is not, and an inseparable trio of little girls,
Sienna (5), Winny (7) and Lila (6), take the opportunity to draw pictures
and munch cantaloupe. Five-year-old Noah, who wears his hair in a huge
fro and is rarely seen without a Superman cape, works on catching dust
motes in his mouth like a goldfish. Orion, a dreamy, long-haired boy of
nine, digs in a bottle of frozen rootbeer with a knife. And Amiri and
Rah, 11-year-old twins, play quietly with train tracks, something they've
been doing for the better part of each day for weeks now, to the alarm
of their mother. Nick opens the issue of boredom to discussion. Hands
go up. "Contrary to popular belief," notes Silvan, 15, one of
the school's elder statesmen, "boredom is always self-inflicted.
The best cure is to just force yourself to do something, anything, no
matter what. Go for a walk, choreograph a musical, anything. Just do something."
A few of the little kids glance up at this impassioned oratory, and several
older students thrust a hand out, palm down, and wiggle their fingers—a
special signal of their agreement. But Nick stakes out the traditionalist
position. "I actually think the school has some real guilt in this,"
he says. "Some students here haven't been exposed to enough to necessarily
know what we want to learn. And I realize it's the BFS philosophy, but
the idea that all the impetus should come from a child who doesn't know
even what he doesn't know seems like, basically, a total fantasy."
"I just want to say, there's nothing wrong with being bored,"
offers teacher David Easton, 26, an idealistic refugee from New York's
teaching fellows program. "In fact, it's actually the first step
in figuring out what you really want to do."
Nick turns to Sophie. "So, is there a proposal, or did you just want
to open the discussion?" he asks.
"Well, I guess I would propose we come up with a list of things to
do," she ventures, "suggestions for when someone's bored that
we can post on the wall."
"A bored board!" someone says. The motion carries by a wide
margin.
Of course, boredom in children is not limited to those who attend BFS.
My own daughter, who is also, coincidentally, named Sophie, occasionally
suffers from this malady at her own, more traditional public school, where
she is in third grade. P.S. 107 is a small, cozy place, with a well-regarded
principal and steady buzz as one of the district's more desirable public
schools. Sophie has done well there and is reasonably cheerful about strapping
on her bone-crushingly heavy backpack every morning and tackling her homework
each night, which, I figure, is pretty much the most a father can hope
for.
Still, like many parents, I was intrigued when flyers began appearing
around the neighborhood advertising a new private school featuring an
"active, flexible, and individually structured environment,"
"planned and spontaneous excursions and projects" and a priority
on "social and emotional learning." And like many parents, I
reread the part about there being "No tests, grades, homework, mandatory
curriculum or age segregation" in open-mouthed disbelief. The child-rearing
style of the day is built on structure, jam-packed schedules and anxiety,
in light of which, the sort of do-your-own-thing approach practiced by
the Brooklyn Free School sounds like something out of Lord of the Flies
or Peter Pan's Never Neverland, an invitation to graffiti-covered walls,
upended desks, marauding teens—the law of the blackboard jungle.
But such a mindset, Berger tells me a few days into the school year, is
precisely what's wrong with New York's public education system. The entire
edifice, he argues, is built on a deep-seated suspicion of the kids in
its care, an unspoken operating premise that, in essence, children are
savages that can only become civilized through constant supervision, routine
and discipline. "There are all sorts of structures put into place
to control kids," he explains, sitting behind a desk in the office
he shares with the church pastor. "So they spend a lot of time and
energy trying to beat the system." While admitting that students
in more traditional schools may be more proficient at certain skills,
he adds, "There's no reason a child of seven, eight, nine needs to
know the particular content they're being drilled on. If you learn how
to learn, you can always pick up the content later."
Berger regards the usual way of educating children as so toxic, so antithetical
to the natural learning process, that he never even bothers to look at
the transcripts of BFS applicants. Unlike many private schools, BFS does
not base acceptance on academic achievement (much less test scores or
recommendation letters), and many of the students I talked to say they
turned to the school only after experiencing difficulty in more conventional
settings, ranging from overcrowded public schools to exclusive academies
like York Prep and St. Ann's. A good student for years, Gabrielle, 16,
was a sophomore at John Dewey High School in Gravesend, Brooklyn, when
she began to fall behind. "I literally just couldn't keep up,"
the perceptive red-head says. "There's so much pressure, all these
exams you have to take, and if you don't do well on them they tell you,
'That's it, that's the end, you've lost your chance to get into a good
college.' I pushed myself, but I could only push myself so far."
The stress became so unbearable for her, she began skipping school altogether.
"Gaby wouldn't talk about what was bothering her," remembers
her father, Richard Lipner, a financial proofreader, "but she just
refused to go." After six weeks, BFS parent Corinne Goodman, who
taught an extracurricular drama program Gabrielle had attended, suggested
she visit BFS. "She called me that afternoon, and I could just tell,"
Richard says. "She snapped back to herself. It was sort of miraculous."
Gabrielle, who'd never been one of the cool kids at John Dewey, remembers
feeling welcome immediately. "People talked to me," she says
with a smile. She took up creative writing, something she'd had little
time for at her old school, and began studying psychology with Lily Mercogliano,
22, one of the BFS instructors. One of her major interests at the moment
is prison welfare (a telling choice, perhaps), and Mergogliano is planning
a field trip to a local penitentiary. Asked what she'd do if BFS didn't
exist, Gabrielle takes a deep breath. "I'm afraid to think about
that," she says.
For David Johnston, a shaggy-haired, easy going 11-year-old, who often
chairs the Democratic Meeting, the difficulties began shortly after he
entered second grade at the Brooklyn New School, one of the more progressive
in the city system. "Basically, he hated it," says his mother,
Randi Karr, recalling endless battles over homework. "He would say
he's stupid and the worst kid in the class," she continues, "and
it would just break my heart, because I knew he was really smart."
Indeed, David scored well on standardized tests, but again, the pressure
was too much. "When I dropped him off in the morning, he'd be crying
hysterically, and I would sit there crying myself," Karr recalls.
"It was killing me." BFS marked a turning point for David as
well. "Last year he had chicken pox, and he was dying to get back
to school," she says. "Things like that just make you so happy."
Talking to other BFS parents, a high percentage of whom seem to be educators
themselves, I heard the same thing over and over—stories of bright,
and often brilliant, children who'd simply shut down in the face of the
increasingly rigid school environment. Gabe, a highly intelligent 14-year-old
with a dandelionlike pouf of hair and a sharp comedic delivery, was diagnosed
early on with dysgraphia, and has thrived at BFS after bitter struggles
at top-notch public schools like P.S. 321 and the School for Collaborative
Studies. After his first day at BFS, he excitedly listed the afternoon's
activities for his mother, Brooke Russell: cooking, playing outside and
Gabe's choice, acting out Monty Python skits. "I said to myself,
Gee, I really have my kid in the right school!" Russell remembers.
"Honestly, though, it has turned out to be the best thing that has
happened in his life."
Even for kids who excelled in a more structured environment have been
attracted by BFS's more open approach. Nicholas, a sloe-eyed 12-year-old,
was one of the top kids in his classes at PS 295, according to his mom,
Sandra Cole-McNaught. In second grade, though, he began to tune out. "The
teacher told me he got to where she was going before she did," Cole-McNaught
says. "And like some of us who think we know how the world works,
he could get a little impatient." He also refused to do homework,
and Cole-McNaught, who holds a doctorate in curriculum development and
teacher education, backed him up—to the distress of his teachers.
Now in his second year at BFS, "he's still developing academically,"
his mother says, "but he can also think critically." The approach
at most schools these days is "input-output," she says. "But
children are not raw materials to be made into a product."
Although tuition at BFS is $9500, it is administered on a sliding scale,
and Berger says the school is currently $35,000 in debt, scraping by on
grants, donations and the occasional good-will gesture. The church cut
him a break on utilities, for instance, and a few parents gave him the
year's tuition in advance. Still, fewer than half are paying the full
amount, and at least one desperate and struggling parent, Berger tells
me, just slips him a twenty when she can.
Of course, just how much of an education her child gets for that money
is entirely up to him. To the extent that the teachers nudge the kids
into particular activities, they mostly do so on an individual basis,
bearing in mind each student's particular passions, circumstances and
favored methods of learning and letting the kids' interests hold sway.
I get a chance to see some of this natural learning one afternoon with
the younger kids, known as the Dolphin group, who range in age from 5
to 8 and are usually supervised by Kristen Palmer, 31, a sunny woman with
cat-eye glasses and a bright smile. While Palmer shows me the project
they've been working on—a car made from a big cardboard box, featuring
a rear-view mirror and license plates—the kids squeal and pack themselves
into a fort made of big foam squares. "Hey, guys," she offers,
"what if we made a poster about how we built the car?" It's
a neat attempt at redirection, but while it gets them out of the tent
and over to the low table where she has set out pens and paper, the plan
quickly fizzles: Chippy, a bright-eyed 6-year-old with the wily manner
of a Dickens street urchin, has a better idea. "Hey, look how I make
weird shapes," he announces, picking out a piece of construction
paper as the other kids circle around him. He folds the paper in quarters,
makes a few random cuts along the crease, and with a bit of fanfare, unfolds
the paper to show a pattern of diamonds and stars. "Cool!" the
others shout in unison diving for paper of their own while Palmer gives
me a big grin as if to say, Yes! This is how it's supposed to work!
Before afternoon meeting and clean-up (every kid is expected to help maintain
the space), I duck out to pick up my daughter from P.S. 107, a few blocks
away. On our walk home, Sophie skips along, gleefully describing something
called "compliment stars"—of which she and her friend
Maddy each already have four out of the ten needed for a free pencil.
"Good for you," I tell her, but I can only imagine what Berger
would say.
A few days later I attend a curriculum meeting to hear about what her
class will be studying. At the teacher's suggestion, I fold myself into
the child-size chair in front Sophie's desk—noting with some concern
that it's overflowing with crumpled work sheets, library books, show-and-tells
and important-looking notices I've never seen before—and wait for
the session to start. A sign on the wall explains the star system in depth:
"How do we get a compliment? 1) Complete all our morning routines.
2) Follow directions the first time. 3) Raise hands before speaking or
leaving seat. 4) Respect classmates and all adults. 5) Keep hands and
feet to yourself. 6) Work quietly during individual assignments. 7) Walk
quietly in hallways." There are other signs, too, entitled "Morning
Routines," "How Can Our Table Get a Star?" "What Do
Good Writers Do?" and "How Do We Write in Our Notebooks?"
Sophie's teacher is in her second year, and seems highly competent, affable
and in control of the class. The kids love her. But I find myself wincing
as she holds up a piece of loose leaf paper and tells the parents, "It's
really important, I can't emphasize this enough, for them to write with
the holes on the left, and to stay between the red lines. They're in third
grade now, so that's a big priority." She hammers home the importance
of those margins a little more, but never says a thing about the real
content of the kids' writing—about imagination or self-expression
or fun. She then turns to a homework chart full of check marks. "When
they get twenty check marks, they get a free pass from homework,"
she explains as I squirm in Sophie's little plastic chair.
Bold, visionary schools tend to have eccentric figures at the helm—colorful,
inspiring leaders with a flair for promotion. Think of St Ann's flamboyant
Stanley Bosworth, Summerhill's A.S. Neill. The last free school in New
York, Park Slope's Fifteenth Street School, which closed nearly three
decades ago, was headed up by the actor Orson Bean, a fixture on Broadway
and the well-known star of "To Tell the Truth," who'd been blacklisted
in the Fifties and once discussed his LSD use on The Merv Griffin Show.
By contrast, Alan Berger seems almost religiously self-effacing. Tall
and lanky, with a monkish haircut, he is gentle and unimposing, his voice
carefully modulated, his temperament even-keeled. One parent describes
him as "Gandhi-like," and compares his singlemindedness to that
of explorer Ernest Shackleton (while expressing hope that he'll be more
successful in his quest). He's 48 years old, divorced, a former mid-level
manager for cable company, who, before going into teaching ten years ago,
considered opening a restaurant. He lives with his fiancée, Alexandra
Anormaliza—also the principal of a brand new school, the International
High School in Prospect Heights—her daughter, Arielle, and his son,
Alex, 14, who enrolled in BFS this year after spending a few days as a
freshman at LaGuardia Arts.
Berger wasn't always a radical. After leaving the cable industry, he taught
at the Murray Bergtraum High School for Business Careers, a public high
school then serving some 3000 students in lower Manhattan. As a marketing
teacher, he started a school store, part of an attempt at "project-based
instruction," but he often tangled with his bosses and coworkers
over his ideas for reform. "People were really hostile to me,"
he recalls, and the teaching environment was dismal. Teachers barked orders
at kids, belittled their enthusiasms and used humiliation to keep them
in line, "embarrassing them in front of their peers by pointing out
their failures," Berger says. Worst of all was the teacher's room,
"just a brutal, depressing, dehumanizing place," in which colleagues
bitterly counted down the days till summer—beginning on the first
day of school. "I was really idealistic," Berger says, noting
that he'd decided to take up teaching only after becoming disenchanted
with the business world. "But it turned out the education system
was the same thing, a big, dehumanizing bureaucracy. Instead of profits,
the bottom line was GPA and test results. That was the only difference."
Education historian Diane Ravitch agrees. "What they're doing is
taking a business model and applying it to education," she says.
"But learning is not a business."
Though Berger was promoted to assistant principal in 2001, he later heard
that two colleagues planned to challenge his permanent appointment. "That
was the last straw," he says. "I realized that working there
was going to be a series of battles, and I just didn't want to go back
for more." Around that time, he read an article in the Times about
the Hudson Valley Sudbury School, a democratic free school in Woodstock,
New York, and "it just grabbed me to the core," he says. "I
said, 'This is what I want to do,' and when the summer came, I took a
leave of absence and started researching it."
In October of 2003, Berger published an open letter describing his idea
in the circular of the Park Slope Food Co-op, nerve center of hummus-and-sprouts
Brooklyn liberalism, and soon began holding meetings in peoples' homes.
The vague plan was to open the school in the fall of 2005. But, recalls
Corinne Goodman, who'd been home-schooling her son, Silvan, due to his
learning disability, "Some of us weren't willing to wait."
Actually, Berger, too, was in something of a hurry. He was going through
a contentious divorce from his first wife, and he and Anormaliza were
scraping by on one paycheck. "It was a rough year," he says.
"She was starting a school, too, and she didn't agree with some of
the philosophies behind BFS." Indeed, Anormaliza urged him to start
a progressive public school instead, which would have paid him a higher
salary (he now makes half of what he earned as an assistant principal)
and held considerably less risk. "It basically almost broke up our
relationship," Berger admits. With his family's future and his own
career on the line, he pressed on though, and the BFS opened in September
2004.
He could hardly have chosen a less hospitable moment. It had been 25 years
since Orson Bean's Fifteenth School had closed his doors due to financial
difficulties, and attitudes about education had only grown more conservative
in the interim. The Bush administration was imposing a strict set of proficiency
standards across the country, with heavy sanctions for schools that failed
to improve, and although the No Child Left Behind Act had already attracted
controversy, most of its critics were charging not that it was wrongheaded,
merely underfunded. Mayor Bloomberg, meanwhile, was in the process of
seizing control of the city's public schools, requiring most to adopt
a uniform curriculum and attacking "social promotion" through
a system of do-or-die tests.
In addition to the Regent's exams given to seniors, New York City public
school children now take standardized tests in grades three through eight—each
one producing a set of numbers that is duly crunched, spun and debated
by pundits, academics and politicians. Overall, the news has been upbeat.
Numbers have climbed steadily in most categories, and New York City has
not seen the sort of scandals that have arisen in other districts. Dozens
of schools in Texas, for instance, have been accused of outright cheating
on standardized tests. In Florida and other states, underperforming students
were simply purged from their class rolls just before tests were administered.
Nevertheless, critics have suggested that New York City's better scores
may be attributable to grade inflation. By quietly lowering proficiency
standards and tweaking the tests, the argument goes, it's a simple matter
to nudge up scores without actually improving education at all. "They
not only create the test, they determine what the passing standards are,"
notes Steven Engel Phillips, New York City's former superintendent for
alternative high schools and now a professor at Brooklyn College. "It's
pretty easy to manipulate."
Assuming New York's numbers do reflect real progress, some wonder just
how valuable the gains are. "At best, test scores measure only what
the test asks, which is a very limited part of what we mean by intelligence
or knowledge," points out Deborah Meier, a senior scholar at NYU's
Steinhart School and the Macarthur Fellowship–winning founder of
the much acclaimed Central Park East Secondary School. Calling the testing
trend "a circle that's leading us nowhere," Meier regards the
gains posted by New York City's students as reflecting nothing so much
as the considerable time and effort that is now going into readying students
for the tests. "When I started teaching, test prep wasn't allowed,"
she recalls. "It was considered cheating. And that's what's going
on now. The schools, the teachers, the parents, the kids—everyone
collaborates to figure out short cuts for getting higher test scores.
And I think the quality of education is suffering as a result."
Which doesn't, however, prevent most parents from buying into the idea
that the tests are all-important. "In an age of free-floating anxiety
about our children's future," Meier says, "people who have no
obvious reason to be anxious can really panic."
I see her point first-hand on a crisp morning in October, during a parent-teacher
conference with Sophie's teacher, when she shows me Sophie's score on
the New York City Interim Assessment test, a practice exam for the main
event in January. My brilliant daughter had...well, there's no delicate
way to put it. She'd whiffed. Blown it. Failed. With a 76 on English and
a dismal 64 on math. "Now, this doesn't carry any weight," the
teacher reassures me. "It's just a way to see what areas she needs
to work on." I steal a glance at her score sheet and note that several
of Sophie's friends have done just fine. Then, forcing a smile, I slink
away in a cold sweat, already mentally writing off the standard parental
fantasy of sending my kid off to Harvard.
Later that evening, I'm back at Sophie's school for a crowded presentation
to explain the tests to parents. "How should we deal with anxiety?"
one mom asks (neglecting to specify just whose anxiety she has in mind).
The teacher leading the meeting shakes her head. "I've seen kids
vomit," she says. "I've seen kids cry. I've seem them just not
be able to complete the test. It's a really terrible thing."
Not to worry though, the teacher assure us. There's still plenty of time
to get the kids ready. In addition to their two periods of mandatory test
prep every Monday for four weeks, they're invited come in on Saturday
mornings for three hours of additional worksheets, games and test-taking
tips. And if we go to a special website set up by company that created
the exams, Princeton Review, and key in our child's individual ID number
and password, we can view her practice test, see exactly how she answered
each question and tap into a seemingly bottomless trove of still more
preparatory material. The focus on tests may be even greater at other
city schools: A recent survey of elementary teachers by the United Federation
of Teachers found that more than half are now spending a more than five
hours per week, the equivalent of a full day, preparing for the exams.
With that kind of support, there seems little doubt that Sophie will make
it to fourth grade next year. But prominent education experts are skeptical
of the value of testing. "They don't have any vision of education—none,"
Ravitch says of Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein. "There's
more to life than test prep, but that's all they're doing."
Alfie Kohn, the well-known education and parenting expert, agrees. "Every
hour that teachers are preparing students for standardized tests,"
he says, "is an hour not spent helping kids to become critical, curious,
creative thinkers." Education writer Jonathan Kozol, who deems the
testing regimen in New York City "pathological," notes how schools
he has visited for years in the South Bronx have had to forgo meaningful
lessons—like a class investigation into toxic waste factors in their
neighborhood—to focus on test prep. "They tell the teachers
every minute of the day has to be 'on task,' meaning related to the examination,"
he says. The costs to real learning can be hard to measure, but Kozol
offers an example: "You know how first and second graders sometimes
come out with these stories full of run-on sentences that just keep going,
better than Faulkner? If you listen long enough, at the end of that sentence
there's often a hidden treasure that could make you cry. A good teacher
uses that as a key to unlock a child's motivation and develop a writing
lesson. Under the drill-and-grill system, that child is actually a threat
to the test-prep routine. The teacher just has to cut him off."
But what of those who opt out, who while away the days with Asoxination
and Platonic dialogues and fancy cheese? To be sure, progressive ed has
no shortage of detractors. "The public school approach isn't very
benighted," admits E.D. Hirsch, founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation
and author of Cultural Literacy. "But that doesn't mean that this
providential approach to education, where by some natural process the
child will end up being educated, is going to work either. It may work
for children from well-educated homes, but it doesn't work for children
who haven't had those advantages."
Some parents of BFS kids have doubts as well. Several have hired outside
tutors to make sure the basics are covered. "I don't really know
what they're doing academically," admits Joe Gilford, whose son,
Jacob, 14, enrolled at BFS this year after flunking his classes at Bay
Ridge Prep. "I just have my fingers crossed." Randi Karr acknowledges
that her son, David, may not be getting all the skills he'd be acquiring
in a traditional school. "Honestly, I think sometimes he plays most
of the day," she says, adding having a child in the school means
adopting "a whole different way of judging your child." And
Berger's ex-wife was so upset when Alex chose BFS over LaGuardia, she
called the Department of Social Services and reported Berger for educational
neglect.
Perhaps ironically, it's Nick, with the rat's nest of hair and Mad Max
wardrobe, who turns out to be the school's sharpest critic. In many ways,
Nick is the ultimate BFS student, free-thinking, politically astute and
so ferociously self-motivated that he is currently spending his off hours
auditing three classes at the New School for Social Research, working
in a book store and researching Tibet (he's thinking of starting another
seminar on the Renaissance). But Nick isn't sure freedom is all it's cracked
up to be. "I think I was really fortunate to go to a public school
and get what I needed to pursue my interests," he says. "If
these kids were in a regular school, they'd do writing and math every
day. Here, they can play and stuff, but what happens when they want a
real education?"
The question highlights what is so fundamentally revolutionary about the
BFS philosophy, which essentially demands that students and their parents
abandon the very notion of a "real education," on the theory
that the less quantifiable benefits of the free-school approach—a
love of learning, a sense of self-reliance, enhanced critical thinking
skills, social awareness and so on—will offset what Berger readily
acknowledges will be, for some graduates, a total inability to diagram
a sentence or perform advanced calculus. While the more traditional skills
are, of course, no guarantee whatsoever of a child's eventual success
in life, this is still not a trade-off most parents are willing to make.
Whatever one thinks of grades and test scores and GPAs, they do offer
a level of comfort, a way to measure a child's knowledge, her progress
relative to peers and her future prospects. BFS offers no such reassurance:
To the extent that the school is conducting something of an experiment,
it's one without any yardstick for success or failure. No test at the
end will determine whether it worked.
This is a longstanding problem for free schools. Summerhill, the boarding
school in the English countryside founded by the Scottish psychologist
A.S. Neill in 1921, was faced with closure in 1999 due to the administration's
refusal to make lessons compulsory—"[mistaking] idleness for
the exercise of personal liberty," as government inspectors put it.
After a year of observation (and media attention), however, the government
backed down.
In an effort to counter such skepticism, the Sudbury Valley School, a
free school in Framingham, Massachusetts, which opened in 1968, recently
conducted a poll of its alumni about their experiences after graduation.
The study found that eight in ten went on to college or professional schools,
and nearly 20 percent attended grad school, many at top universities including
Harvard and Yale. Still, in keeping with the free school philosophy, the
survey's authors take pains not to place too much emphasis on conventional
measures of accomplishment, pointedly entitling their study "The
Pursuit of Happiness," and asking respondents a number of questions
about their job satisfaction, relationships, values and overall sense
of well-being. It concludes that Sudbury alumni are, "a wonderful
collection of human beings—contemplative, purposeful, clear, happy,
and able to cope with change, challenge and setbacks." Which is all
pretty vague and touchy-feely. But then, imagine how New York City's schools
might look if they made it their mission to help students live happy lives
rather than merely teaching them to read a short essay and identify the
"main idea."
One day in early December, I stop by Brooklyn Free School for one last
time. Sophie comes along. Having heard me talking about the place for
months while researching this article, she wants to see it for herself.
She even offers to bring some of her workbooks from school, "so the
kids can see what homework is." In the morning, she decides to check
out the circus arts class and winds up learning how to catch a juggling
club. Later, she sits in on a Democratic Meeting, plays chess, and does
some drawing with oil pastels. I can't pinpoint exactly why, but she's
excited about her artwork in a way I've seen her before. At one point,
I ask her what she thinks of the place. (By now, I'm harboring a secret
fantasy of enrolling her at BFS no matter how she does on her test.) "Pretty
good," she replies with a shrug, adding quickly that she prefers
being with her friends. I quietly resolve to start working on her friends'
parents.
There've been some changes since my last visit. Macbeth has been shelved
in favor of A Midsummer Night's Dream. There's talk of more tweaks to
the computer gaming policy—specifically, a call to define "research,"
which is, after all, is a pretty broad category. And after determining
that the Brooklyn Free School is indeed a real school, operating under
a provisional charter from New York State, a case worker from the city's
Department of Social Services has cleared Alan Berger of educational neglect
for letting his son go there. The school's financial situation is a little
rosier as well: A direct mail campaign netted $3000 so far, and four more
kids have signed up.
In the afternoon, a handful of the older kids gather in the classroom
for a new weekly meeting entitled "Life After BFS," initiated
in response to some parents, who've been making noises lately about whether
their kids were really doing enough to prepare for college or careers.
Lily Mercogliano, who is herself the product of progressive ed, having
graduated from the Albany Free School, and is therefore held up as proof
that the approach can work, begins by asking the kids to talk about what
they'd like to do after they graduate (that is, once a set of graduation
requirements are hashed out and put to a vote). One student wants to go
to Harvard. Another mentions Berklee School of Music. Oxford and NYU come
up. Travel gets a few votes, especially to Tibet. "And let's not
forget the military!" Gabe chimes in, drawing a chorus of nervous
laughter.
Mercogliano then asks the kids to talk about what they think they'll need
to do to prepare themselves, and the tension in the room thickens perceptibly.
The SATs are brought up, and Mercogliano notes that one of the school's
volunteers, Abi Cohen, is a professional SAT prep tutor, and will be offering
a class in the coming weeks that everyone is welcome to attend.
"But I also think we need real classes," says Allegria, a 16-year-old
wearing a creatively modified Catholic schoolgirl uniform. "We need
four years of science. All we've been doing is making soap, and soap isn't
going to get me into Harvard."
Sixteen-year-old Adele, a recent transfer, agrees, adding that she thinks
maybe she made a mistake leaving York Prep. "My friends are all going
to get into college, and maybe I'm not," she says. "This is
nice, but I wonder if it's realistic or if I'm wasting my life."
Eventually, a rather radical suggestion is made: Maybe BFS should institute
a grading system, with transcripts that resemble the ones at "normal"
schools. And varsity sports couldn't hurt....
After the meeting, Mercogliano contacts Harvard to ask about their admissions
requirements. It turns out neither transcripts nor diplomas are necessary
for what the admissions office calls "non-traditionally schooled"
students, though SATs and teacher recommendation letters are, and portfolios
and examples of student work are a big plus. Due to ever-increasing numbers
of home-schoolers, many other colleges are adopting similar policies.
"I'm not going to guarantee we'll have a student go to Harvard,"
Mercogliano tells me, noting that very few kids from even the best high
schools actually make the cut. "But the things they're asking for
are not impossible," she adds.
As for Berger, he has little doubt that Brooklyn Free School's graduates
will be ready to enter the world and make their way when the time comes.
"Something I do think about, though," he continues with an almost
imperceptible smile, "is will the world be ready for them?"