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Why a certain 14-year-old's traditional school career ended today

Image Credit: Angie Calabrese

The old templates don't work anymore - at least not for everyone.

I try not to wade too much into the use of this forum to tell personal stories, because I'm sure you really don't want to know that much about me. But I also thought you might find some insight and inspiration from a decision we've made that today takes my son in a very unconventional - and we're convinced, very positive - direction with his education and his life.

My son Tony (our only) is 14 and he's been in traditional public school ever since pre-school. For the most part it's been fine - apart from their silly attempt to sell us on "Young Fives" instead of kindergarten when he was clearly ready for the latter, and their attempt at the same time to convince us he was autistic. These are both gambits by school districts to get more state funding - the former by extending a student's years with them and the latter because those special ed aid dollars are greatly coveted - but I don't think the way this district played it was very different from what the rest of them do.

He did fine in elementary school, struggled a bit in the transition to middle school, and found his freshman year of high school to be like wrestling a tiger at first - although he got the hang of it and recovered from a rough start to turn in a nice performance in the second semester.

But during the course of that struggle, we realized some things about traditional, public, brick-and-mortar schools. One is that they spend at least as much time doing rule enforcement and crowd control as they do teaching. Another is that they handle you pretty well if you have a conventional learning style, but they have no idea what to do with you if you're smart but a little out of the ordinary. Another is that they're obsessed with testing, in large part (in fairness to them) because state legislatures have tied their funding to it, but nevertheless they put a lot of pressure on kids to do well on tests so they can get more money, and that's not right.

So when Tony walked out of Grandville High School today, he did so for the last time. He won't be back for his sophomore year. We've enrolled him with one of the most highly regarded Christian online academies, and he'll do his last three years of high school in that program.

There are several things about this that have us excited:

• Students can learn at their own pace as long as they complete their courses within a 12-month window.
• There's nothing to distract you from learning. That's all you do. There actually are student organizations and he may want to be part of some of them, but that's not the same thing as dealing with nonsense during class time.
• He's not under pressure to do well on tests so the school can get money. We pay the school. They teach him.
• Contrary to what you might think, all the classes are teacher led. He can talk to his teachers via e-mail or Skype, and they can work according to each other's schedules.
• We travel a lot - sometimes for business and sometimes for pleasure - and up until now if he's missed a day of school, he just missed it flat out. Next year when we go to spring training in Lakeland, he can either make up the classes when he works it out, or he can do a class while he sits in the stands watching Miguel Cabrera take batting practice. Yeah. You can do that.
• He is an aspiring actor, and a pretty good one, and a lot of auditions are during the day and out of town. If you want to get in my face and insist that "school comes first," OK, fine, but I challenge your premise that it's necessarily a conflict. With traditional brick-and-mortar school, sure. But if you can travel to Chicago, do your audition at noon, and do your classes online in the car on the way back to Detroit - why not?
• The ever-present worry about "socialization" is not the big problem people think it is. Between his church youth group and the actor's studio he'll be involved with in the fall, he gets plenty of opportunities to interact with other kids. And you know what? A lot of the socialization you experience in high school is really not so positive.

Now Angie and I certainly understand the challenges involved her. We opted not to do all-out homeschooling, mainly because we don't have time to teach him ourselves and I really think either of us is qualified to do so. But we do have to play the official role of his "supervisors," and self-directed learning requires a lot of discipline - probably more than you'd expect from a kid who's just turning 15 as he starts this. It's very much on us to teach him how to do that and keep him on point.

But what it comes down to is this: Traditional public school can no longer meet his needs. I don't really blame the people who run it for that, because they can only operate within the constraints of the system they're given. But for a lot of kids, something radically different is better, and today we move forward with the decision that our son is one of those kids.

Real innovation always comes from the private sector. I decided to share this because maybe there's something that's not working that well in your life either, and maybe you think you have no options aside from the traditional ones that have always been presented to you.

And maybe, just maybe, that's not true.

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