A School of Our Own: The Story of the First Student-Run High School and a New Vision for American Education

By Samuel Levin and Susan Engel

The remarkable true story of the high school junior who started his own school—and earned acclaim nationwide—“will make you laugh, cry and cheer” (John Merrow, author of The Influence of Teachers).
 
Samuel Levin, a teenager who had already achieved international fame for creating Project Sprout—the first farm-to-school lunch program in the United States—was frustrated with his own education, and saw disaffection among his peers. In response, he lobbied for and created a new school based on a few simple ideas about what kids need from their high school experience.
 
The school succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations and went on to be featured on NPR and in Newsweek and the Washington Post. Since its beginnings in 2010, the Independent Project serves as a national model for inspiring student engagement.
 
In creating his school, Samuel collaborated with Susan Engel, the noted developmental psychologist, educator, and author—and Samuel’s mother. A School of Our Own is their account of their life-changing year in education, a book that combines poignant stories, educational theory, and practical how-to advice for building new, more engaging educational environments for our children.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9781620971536

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

High school isn’t so bad. But when it comes to educating the next generation, not so bad is terrible. It has become something like a waiting room at a train station, a place for kids to hang out and pass the time on their way to somewhere else ostensibly more important, desirable, and interesting—adulthood. It is necessary, but not especially appealing or meaningful in its own right. For some teens, it’s an abysmal waiting room—uncomfortable, tedious, and pointless. For others, the waiting room is perfectly nice—they spend their four years doing well on tests, passing the time with buddies, and serving on the student council. But for most, the waiting room is merely tolerable. And there’s been too little talk about those kids.

We’ve been distracted by the extremes: kids who are so miserable in high school that they drop out, kill themselves, or get in legal trouble, or kids who thrive against all odds, working their way from poverty to great accomplishment.

But such vivid narratives of anguish and victory obscure the most common stories of all—the stories of the students who stay in school all four years, perhaps lucking into a good class every term or so, earning decent grades, keeping their heads down until college. These students seem okay. No triumph, no tragedy. But they are simply enduring school, thinking about what comes next, and waiting till it’s over. For most kids in this country, high school is, at best, mediocre.

Listening to teens and adults talk about high school, you would think it was inevitable for teenagers to spend four of the most important and vibrant years of their lives simply getting by.

The truth is, we know from a wealth of recent research that adolescence is a volatile and potent developmental moment in a person’s life. As Laurence Steinberg, a leading expert on adolescence, says, it’s the age of psychological opportunity. Sometime between the ages of thirteen and fourteen, teenagers achieve new heights of intellectual ability, explode with interest in the world around them, and begin relating to others in ways they weren’t able to before. They also are still cognitively flexible and receptive, intellectually and morally hungry, able to learn complex material, and filled with energy, a kind that won’t last beyond early adulthood. In other words, they have developmentally unique strengths and capacities. And yet, high school seems to make no use of all that potential.

Is there any inherent reason why teenagers in our culture must spend the bulk of their time in settings that are confining, rigid, ugly, and disconnected from their communities, doing tasks that feel (and often are) pointless, devoid of meaning, and irrelevant to the things that most concern them?

We don’t think so. One of us (Susan) is a developmental psychologist who has spent the last thirty-five years studying the paths by which children become adults and trying to figure out how schools can optimize rather than subvert children’s personal growth. The other (Sam) actually did it. When he was sixteen years old, Sam started a new kind of high school, the Independent Project, a school within a public school in western Massachusetts. It succeeded beyond expectations, and in unpredictable ways.

The school he founded was based on a few simple ideas about what kids are like, what they need, what they are capable of, and what they should get out of their high school experience. Though the ideas are simple, they are strikingly different from what you see in most schools throughout the country. Moreover, they are slippery: straightforward but easy to get wrong.

We wrote this book together because the idea of the Independent Project grew out of conversations between us. As the school came to life, we continued having conversations: about the ideas themselves, about how to embody those ideas in specific educational practices, and about what was working and what wasn’t. Susan talked to Sam about educational theory and the psychology of adolescence, and Sam talked to Susan about what he and his friends yearned for at school.

Here we were, a teacher and a student, a mother in her fifties and a young man in his teens, someone who had thought endlessly about schools and someone who started one—both of us eager to put theory and practice together.

Because we played such different roles in the creation of the Independent Project, and because we come to the whole enterprise from two vantage points, we thought it essential that we each tell our part of the story in our own way, one from the inside and one from the outside. Because our thinking about schools over the last few years has been a constant dialogue, the book follows suit. We alternate between Susan’s voice and Sam’s.

There’s one more reason we wrote this book together. In addition to being teacher and student, older and younger, psychologist and adolescent, we are also mother and son. The school, and the argument that emerged, began at our dinner table.

The book contains three interwoven threads. First, a new idea about teenagers and education. This idea draws on research and theory. But it also draws on the everyday experiences of kids, parents, and teachers who live high school day in and day out.

It is also the story of the Independent Project: what it took to start a new school in a public school district, who those first students were, and what happened to them; their missteps, their crises, and their victories.

Finally, it is a guide for those who want to start their own schools. And those doesn’t mean just grown-ups. We think teenagers should have a hand in shaping their own education. This book isn’t just for school administrators. It’s for everyone—parents, teachers, high schoolers. We feel that the core features of the Independent Project solve some important problems with our current educational system, and so we have provided a guide for re-creating it.

Each chapter of the book is a step in the process of building a school. There are eight chapters and eight steps. If you follow them, then at the end of this book you will have a blueprint for your own new school. Each chapter follows the story of the Independent Project, from inception to present day. Throughout, Susan tells her parts of the story and Sam tells his.a Each chapter is also a manifesto of sorts, an exegesis of the way in which we think high schools could better serve their students.

Susan’s is in one typeface, Sam’s in another, and italics are used, often at the beginning and ends of chapters, when they are speaking together.

Three threads, two authors, one school.

1

REALIZE YOU NEED ONE

I was pissed off. It wasn’t the first day I had come home from school feeling that way, but it would be one of the last. I was sixteen years old, and I had just started my junior year.

I was actually doing fine. My grades were good. Although a lot of my classes sucked, and I had a few teachers I hated, I also had a few I loved—teachers I could really connect to and learn from. And that was just about enough. After all, this had always been the case: mostly not very good teachers, mostly quite boring classes, but one or two life preservers to keep me afloat.

And I suppose it wasn’t that big a deal. My days were, by and large, good. I usually woke up at 4:15 to the pitch black, rolled out of bed, and yanked on some blue jeans and a few layers of shirts. I went into the kitchen, turned on the coffee machine, and packed my backpack. Often my mom had made me a lunch the night before, but if not I would throw a sandwich together. Then I put the coffee in a jar with lots of milk and sugar, shoved on my Timberland boots, grabbed a pair of sneakers, and drove ten minutes to the dairy farm where I worked.

I loved the farm. I was usually the first one there, and I loved sliding open the big red doors on their rusty tracks as the first light crept into the day. I loved walking deep into the back fields to find the cows wherever they had been lurking in the night, and I loved walking them back inside, moving at their plodding pace. And I was lucky to have a great boss. He was demanding but understanding, a good teacher, knowledgeable, and really, really funny. I loved listening to NPR while we milked, almost as much as I loved the mornings (and there was no discerning what mornings they would be) when my boss decided we would work in silence.

Most of all, I loved the cows—their smell, the way the heat came off them in the cold barn (as I worked, I would slowly shed the layers I had started the day with). I even loved, for whatever twisted reason, the way Dame tried to kick me every time I milked her. Whenever there was a quiet moment in the barn, when I needed a rest, I would lean up against Freckles, our biggest steer, and relax against his warmth for a little while.

I worked as hard as I could there and loved every second of it. We milked, made cream, hayed the fields, cleaned the barn, stacked bales, moved the cows, cleaned the dairy room, fed the calves, moved the shit, and started again. I always left promptly at 7:30 a.m. Halfway to school I pulled off onto a dead-end dirt road, parked, took off my manure-covered boots, and put on my sneakers. If my pants were shit covered, and they often were, there was nothing I could do. I was lucky I had had the same friends my whole life, because there was no chance of making new friends smelling like cow crap every day.

I’d get to school before the first bell and park where my car was least likely to get keyed (a hangover from a brawl my friends and I had been involved in the year before). Then I’d sit through the first three periods of my day, mostly bored, occasionally annoyed. In the classes that were the least boring, I tried to think of ways to make them more interesting. I’d translate words to binary, think of alternative explanations for data that purported to support a theory, design math puzzles. In the most boring classes, I just thought about other things. I planned science experiments, wrote stories, or daydreamed. During chemistry class I wrote a speech that I would later deliver to ten thousand farmers and chefs.

Then, in period four, I had a one-on-one math class with my favorite teacher. She was a brilliant mathematician, excited, enthusiastic, humble, and quick to admit what she didn’t know. We’d cram as much math into the forty minutes allotted to us as we could. We’d search for better and better math books, more and more interesting puzzles, try our hand at original proofs, and then the bell would ring, always a few minutes too soon.

Lunch meant hanging out with my friends, on the lawn if it was sunny. That was also always too short—never enough time to complete our prank or hear Red’sa joke or slip into town to get doughnuts—but messing around with the guys provided fuel for the rest of the day.

The people and situations in this book are real, but we have changed the names for the sake of privacy.

After lunch was English, which was so bad it wasn’t boring. I usually got too infuriated to be bored. I argued endlessly with my teacher, who seemed to not like books, or kids for that matter. The kids thing bothered me a little, the books thing a lot.

I can’t remember the last two periods. And then the final bell would ring. The next three hours of my time would be spent at school (not playing basketball or baseball—I had already given those up by junior year—but I’ll get to those three hours later), and then I’d drive home. The first thing I’d do was go down into the basement, where I had constructed a makeshift lab. I had four lentic water tanks and one river tank, which I had bought with money from a grant I had won the year before. One of these tanks was usually covered by a black cloth; the others were under bright lights. The tanks were occupied by caddisfly larvae, on which I was experimenting. I’d spend an hour doing what needed to be done—dissecting the larval cases, marking the individual caddisflies, photographing their constructions, blinding them, and so on. And then it was dinner, and then a couple of hours of homework, and then some Simpsons before bed with a glass of water and a good Stephen King novel.

So I guess you could say I didn’t have that much to be upset about. Sure, there were long stretches of boredom in my day, and several moments of frustration, but there was also the farm in the morning, that stellar math class to break up my day, and the larvae awaiting me in the basement at home. Who was I to complain? I should have been happy, or at least content, but certainly not pissed off.

And yet, by the time I came home that day, I was furious. That’s because it wasn’t just about me. It was everyone else. It was what I saw all around me.

By the time Sam was in eleventh grade, his older brothers, Jake and Will, had finished college. I knew how easy it was to think teenagers needed a guiding hand at every turn. I had watched, intruded, kibitzed, meddled, admired, fretted, and engineered as they groped their way from puberty to adulthood. Part of this came from the fact that it was hard to step back from the kind of constant care younger children need. It took me a kid or two to get comfortable with my new role. But it was also true that I was painfully aware, like other parents, of the pitfalls of adolescence. After all, there are so many ways for kids between the ages of fourteen and eighteen to screw up. It would be hard not to quake at the potential disasters that lie in wait for the teen who goes astray. Many parents and teachers in our culture have a deeply rooted sense that if we let go of the reins for more than an hour, our teenage children will lose their homework, get a bad grade, stay out too late, have sex without a condom, make the wrong friend, drop out, turn to drugs, waste their time, get bad test scores, not get into college, and before you know it become homeless and jobless. In other words, all hell will break loose. Which may explain why we’ve drawn tighter and tighter circles around high school students.

The paradox here is that most parents and teachers readily agree that by the time our kids are somewhere around twenty years old, it’s imperative that they can make wise decisions, use their time well, choose worthwhile pursuits, and take good care of themselves. In other words, we want them to be independent. Yet, strangely, as Sam began to notice during his junior year, we want them to acquire all of those skills without giving them much practice at any of it while they are in school.

In Patterns of Culture, the anthropologist Ruth Benedict noted that many cultures lead their youngsters toward maturity by gradually giving them more autonomy and accountability. But our culture, she pointed out, did not. In fact, she argued, our society was notable for the disjuncture we create between childhood and adulthood. We baby them for a very long time and then fling them into a free fall toward adulthood.

That’s just as true today as it was when Benedict wrote her book, in 1934. We tell kids what to do every moment they are in school. We don’t even trust them to keep track of time, ringing a bell whenever they should get up and begin moving to the next class. If you’ve spent time in a public school, you’ll know what I mean. The students sit, slouch, or fidget in their seats. Then suddenly, from nowhere, a loud, ugly chime sounds, and everyone jumps up (even when the teacher or another student is still talking, or a film is showing), puts their books in their backpacks, and begins shuffling toward the door. There is absolutely no decision making involved. They each begin moving, like sardines on the conveyer belt, toward their next destination, another classroom in another hall.

And it’s not just their time we control. We tell them what to learn as well. For the most part adults decide what topics are essential to study, what books they should read, which math they should learn, and what kinds of experiments they should conduct. Teenagers are typically treated as if they have no clue how to choose what to apply themselves to, what they are interested in, or how to go about pursuing those interests. We also tell them how to learn the topics we have selected: what material they should study, which skills to practice, and the best way to prepare for a test. We even relieve them of any responsibility for deciding when they actually know something well enough. Instead, we tell them, usually with a test score.

Yet suddenly, when they hit their eighteenth birthday, everything changes. By then we have given them license to drive a lethal weapon and smoke as much as they want and have invited them to help select the nation’s president. During times of war, we send them off to protect us, to kill, and to make life-and-death decisions, all in a foreign country. We expect them to make a decision that will shape the rest of their lives by choosing college, work, or the army. Now they can get married if they want to. Last but not least, having kept them powerless long beyond puberty, we demand that they quickly become self-supporting. We ask them to leap from childhood into adulthood. But of course, though our society treats this transition as a leap, the truth is teenagers don’t leap: they stumble, jump, skip, slide, and trudge their way into maturity.

In describing this gradual and winding path toward maturity, the psychologist Kurt Lewin said that the teenager was the marginal man, standing outside, caught between two worlds. Teenagers have left the pleasures and freedom of childhood behind but do not yet have the responsibilities or autonomy of adulthood. It takes time to travel this sometimes circuitous and often difficult route. Yet our high schools have functioned less like a path from dependence to independence and more like a holding pen with a diving board at the exit gate.

This immobilizing has other bad consequences. By directing them through every waking moment, we all but guarantee that they are unlikely to feel much zeal or drive for what they are learning and trying to do. In the early 1980s the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Reed Larson wanted to get a detailed, vivid picture of adolescent experience. They gave teenagers in Chicago small beepers to take with them everywhere, and a packet of questionnaires. For more than a week, each teenager in the study was beeped at random times. When the subjects in the study heard the beep, they would take a moment to pause and answer a host of questions about where they were, what they were doing, who they were with, what they were thinking about, and how they felt (they had a chance even to sketch pictures of their moods). The study offered a gold mine of information about how teenagers spent their time and, more important, provided an amazingly intimate and gritty picture of what it felt like to be a teenager. The answers made it vividly clear that most kids feel listless and disengaged for most of the school day. But there were places and times during the school day when the opposite was true—when kids reported a sense of focus, energy, and excitement about what they were doing. When did those moments occur? When the students were doing things they had chosen: whether it was during a