Influential educators, bloggers and twitterati recognized at the Bammy Awards

What would happen if instead of being bashed, blamed, and scrutinized, educators were lauded, celebrated, and recognized. That is among the goals of what might become the annual Bammy awards.  The Awards aim to foster recognition of excellence in education, encourage collaboration and respect, elevate education and education successes in the public eye, and raise the profile and voices of the many undervalued and unrecognized people who are making a difference in the field.

In what is usually reserved for the actors and athletes of our society, instead, it was us on the red carpet in our flowy gowns and tuxedos who were being treated like movie stars as we were chauffeured in limos where we were photographed by paparazzi, taped, and interviewed as we made our way into the Arena Stage at Kreeger Theater in Washington, DC.

Posing for a picture on the red carpet.
Photo credit: Kevin Jarrett

The Bammys, presented by the Academy of Education Arts and Sciences International recognized the importance of those of us who blog and tweet because of our ability to help citizens sort out what deserves attention and provide insightful context. I had the pleasure of being selected as a top 100 education blogger at the first annual event and was honored to be among the top 20 who were called up on stage to be recognized for our role as influential thought leaders. 

Influential educational blogger honorees
Photo credit: Kevin Jarrett

One of the foremost educational leaders in using social media, Eric Sheninger known as Princial Twitter did a terrific job of coordinating the bloggers, micro bloggers and connected educators.  He and Joe Mazza served as presenters who recognized the following educators on stage: Adam Bellow, Angela Maiers, Chris Lehmann, Deven Black, Erin Klein, George Couros, Joe Mazza, Joyce Valenza, Kelly Tenkley, Joan Young, Kyle Pace, Lisa Nielsen, Mary Beth Hertz, Nicholas Provenzano, Patrick Larkin, Shannon Miller, Shelly Blake-Plock, Shelly Terrell, Steven Anderson, and Tom Whitby. You can see all 100 here. You can see us being honored at the event below.

The event gave us an opportunity to rub shoulders, take photos, and most importantly chat with some of the more renowned movers and shakers in education such as John Merrow, Randi Weingarten, Linda Darling-Hammond, and Diane Ravitch who said, "The depth of discouragement among educators in the trenches is at an all-time high and cannot be overstated." The Bammy Awards works to combat such discouragement by recognizing those who vigorously and thoughtfully blog and tweet about education as a very important part of the education community ecosystem. 

Lisa Nielsen, John Merrow, Patrick Larkin

As librarian Deven Black shared on his blog, "It is so outlandish for educators to get red carpet treatment, hear kind words and receive weighty trophies. We have become far more used to being blamed, attacked, criticized, sniped-at and otherwise vilified." Hopefully the Bammys are the first in a movement to bring our nation closer to those like Finland where teachers are trusted, honored, and respected. After all, as Linda Darling-Hammond pointed out, "There is another story we rarely hear: Our children who attend schools in low-poverty contexts are doing quite well. In fact, U.S. students in schools in which less than 10 percent of children live in poverty score first in the world in reading, out-performing even the famously excellent Finns."

Let's not blame educators for a societal issue and instead focus on rewarding one of our nation's most important professions. Educators are being intensely scrutinized, but not as intensely recognized for the great work being done. The Bammy Awards are one such effort to  change this. 

You have read this article #BammyAwards / Bammy Awards / education reform / Twitter in Education with the title education reform. You can bookmark this page URL https://benncam.blogspot.com/2012/09/influential-educators-bloggers-and.html. Thanks!

Transform education by measuring what matters. Hint: It's not test scores.

There’s been a lot of talk about the ethics behind corporations running schools and thus profiting off students. But if we’re really concerned about folks profiting off our kids why aren’t we spending more time focusing on assessment? If we do away with measuring success with test scores the result would be billions saved that could go toward resources and personnel dedicated to support students.

Let’s face it: Teachers know and parents are waking up to the fact that these tests are one of the most expensive and least effective ways to measure student or teacher success. So why are we willing to let the government and policymakers forcibly impose this corporate-driven assessment from companies like Pearson upon our children even if it makes them sick???

What if instead we measured success in things that really mattered to students, parents and teachers.  

For example...

Students have:

• A plan to find and develop their passion(s).
• A team of mentors, guidance, and/or advisors to help guide them in discovery and development of their passions.
• Customized success plans that they help design.
• Advisors who are deeply involved in and responsible for their lives and their success.
• An opportunity to learn about what they are interested in the world with real world experts.
• Reported they are satisfied with support they receive from the school.
• An authentic portfolio that can be used for career, academic, or civic pursuits.

Teachers and schools are measured by:

• Success is moving students along to
• Career
• College and/or
• Civic endeavors

that enable them to achieve their plans and goals for personal success.

Pie in the sky?
No.

The ability to do this, do it at scale, and report progress already exists.

Here’s how it works?

Primary Schools
For primary schools it works by incorporating the Schoolwide Enrichment Model and Total Talent Portfolio. In schools incorporating this model students and their teachers know they’ve got talent and they build upon students talents, interests, passions, ability and learning styles.  This method honors the idea that children are more than numbers and data. Instead they use Total Talent Portfolios to help them pursue engaging activities in areas of deep personal interest. The portfolio reveals that our children are unique individuals who are represented by much more than a number but instead what they have done with samples of real work and meaningful work that is not just handed in but worthy of the world. Visit this and this to see what this looks like in action..

Secondary Schools
See how this works for secondary students by checking out Dennis Littky and Elliot Washor’s Big Picture School model. As I reported earlier this year, these schools take on the responsibility of ensuring each student moves on to the college, career, or experience that aligns with their interests and goals and their teachers are evaluated on their ability to help make that happen.  

This is possible. It can be done. It is being done. It is the corporations that are getting in the way with infiltrating our schools with the multi-billion dollar testing industry that is good for politicians and good for business, but we all know this is not good for children and is robbing them of the very resources they need for success.

If we work to move the conversation to measuring success by meeting our student’s personal goals in college, career, and/or life experiences we accomplish these goals:

• Instead of teaching to the test we teach to the student.
• Billions of dollars are restored toward resources for students.
• Schools are held accountable, not for test scores, but for placement in what matters: college, career, and/or civic duty.

Here are three things we can do about this.

1. Demand this data from schools.
2. Opt out of tests.
• There is a group for doing so in every state on Facebook. Find it by searching “Opt out of standardized tests” followed by the name of your state.
3. Talk to politicians about alternatives.

Let's stop celebrating test scores and accepting the status quo. Our children deserve to be more than a number. They deserve more than to be prepared to be compliant little beings who memorize, regurgitate and fill in bubbles on demand..OR ELSE! Parents and teachers must stand up for what matters for our children. The evidence is not one-size-fits-all tests. Instead let's honoring and recognizing the personalized success plans that are unique to each child and prepare them to move on to the college, career, and/or civic experience that will help them achieve their goals.

You have read this article boycott tests / education reform / personal success plan / standardized tests with the title education reform. You can bookmark this page URL https://benncam.blogspot.com/2012/08/transform-education-by-measuring-what.html. Thanks!

Is compulsory education really necessary?

Editor’s note: This post was born as a result of a #StuVoice chat that addressed the teaching characteristics most conducive to learning. In the chat I responded to a Tweet that stated, “If we're going to keep students in school, our technology needs to catch up!” I responded, “Why keep students in school if they can learn w/out it?” Elliot Hallmark had several insightful responses to that question. I asked him to expand on his thoughts and thus the following post was born. 

Guest post by Elliot Hallmark 
Staff member at Clearview Sudbury School in Austin, Texas 

There are many examples where compulsory education has been unnecessary such as un-schoolers, home schoolers, hunter gather societies, non-western modern cultures, and graduates of radical deschooled institutions. Yet the claim that school is unnecessary strikes many people as unfounded. After all, the circumstances of these various groups, privileged families and members of non-industrial societies, is not representative of everyone. 

So, the thinking persists that abolishing compulsory education would be ultimately abandoning most children, leaving them directionless and struggling fiercely to achieve even an adequate living. Underprivileged children especially would be left completely without the tools they need to succeed. Already, the correlation between family socioeconomic standing and success in school is striking. As funding to public schools decreases, the achievement of the underprivileged drops even further. To make attendance of public school voluntary would be madness! We must take steps to increase the effectiveness of schooling, which is surely the most influential tool we have to ensure the education of children. 

Right? 

Imagine a study 
Though compulsory education seems to dominate the waking hours of the youth, what evidence do we have that it is such an influential tool? To my knowledge, no such study has been done, so we will have to imagine it. In our imaginary study, lets sample a wide variety of people; people of all levels of income, high school graduates and drop-outs, drug users and those determined to succeed, public, private, home and un-schoolers as well as those who have attended institutions for youth with no curriculum, or adult initiated classes/evaluations. And lets control for a wide variety of variables:

• Family Income
• IQ, Knowledge-level and skill set of family members and other daily adult contacts
• Level of success achieved by members of family members and other daily adult contacts
• Quantity of quality (non-coerced) time spent with adults
• Access to enough healthful food
• The elusive factor "x", or destiny
• Frequency of extra-ordinary, non-habitual experiences (like camping and travel)
• 16,380 hours over 13 years of compulsory education
• Hours spent on unsolicited homework and examinations
• Time spent segregated according to age, gender, race or social class

In this imaginary study, I believe that we would find that the last few variables affect the ultimate success (achieved level of ability and happiness) of students the least. Considering the success of unschoolers and graduates of deschooled institutions, one may wonder if the effect of over 15,000 hours of compulsory education and thousands of hours of unsolicited after school work contribute more than negligibly. That schooling is effective at all may infact be a gross misinterpretation based on a lack of data. 

To my knowledge, there have been no large, quantitative studies done which account for these other factors and that compare compulsory education with simply supporting the activities of the young. Perhaps access to knowledgeable/skillful adult contacts, material resources (food, technology, comfortable space) and extra-ordinary experiences are the more important factors determining success. These variables may also strongly correlate with family income, neighborhood, etc. 

In this case, improving the quantity and quality of compulsory education is the least effective approach to achieving a populace that considers themselves successful and at peace. 

A solution 
A more effective strategy would be to spend funds on increasing access for all children and teens to the other, more important factors. This includes funding internship programs, mentors, access to inspiring and productive technology and opportunities for consensual formal pedagogy. Schools could be replaced by institutions that offer abundant resources for play, creation, engagement and learning. These institutions could be a refuge from a dysfunctional home life, or complement a healthy one. Peter Gray discusses his time at an institution like this:

Many years ago, when I was a college student in New York City, I worked at an after-school community center in one of the poorest sections of the city. It was sponsored by the YMCA, for kids who couldn’t afford the “real Y.” It was free, and the clientele were almost entirely Puerto Rican and African American. The center was in a run-down building and there was only one full-time staff member (a sweet, gentle man from the community) and me, who was there only part-time during the after-school hours. It served roughly two hundred kids. There was a rickety old gym, games, some books, and a place where kids could do homework if they wanted to. It was all their own choice. The kids who came ranged in age from about 7 to about 18, and they often played in age-mixed groups—both indoors and on the street outside the building. Sometimes I saw older kids helping younger ones with homework, and I frequently saw older kids reading to younger ones or teaching them games. This was a stimulating environment, almost entirely run by the kids. I never saw serious bullying. Shabby as the building was, the kids took pride in their center, and they took good care of one another in and around it. Today, most people don’t believe that such a thing can exist. Our estimation of the abilities of kids—especially poor ones—has reached an all-time low.

Dollars and sense 
There is one striking benefit of institutions such as these which support the activities of the young and do not impose an agenda. They are significantly less expensive to run. Gone are the several layers of bureaucrats and their associated salaries. Gone are hours adults need to spend preparing tests and grading assignments. Gone is the need to buy 150 copies each of dozens of different textbooks that very few (if any) of the students are interested in. Instead, these funds can be spent on items considered valuable by the students themselves. 

Institutions where the student body along with staff democratically decide how to allocate their budget have found that this is indeed the case. They are able to achieve a much more rich environment on a budget often lower per student than that of a public school. These institutions are filled with all the musical instruments, computers (with quality software), books, and innumerable other resources the students could want. 

Race to Nowhere 
Another benefit is that the young would no longer be burdened with unnecessary stress. The rate of anxiety disorders and suicide would likely decrease. Parents would no longer have to struggle along with their children over school assignments. Children would have all the time they need to play. 

Statistical data does not currently exist to support either the claim that compulsory schooling is necessary for many, or that it can happily be abandoned. Still, the amount of qualitative evidence that compulsory schooling is not necessary in many situations is substantial. Studies do support the theory that non-school related circumstances, which correlate with socioeconomic standing, do however play a significant role. 

It is worth considering whether our society can start to transition to a model the respects the young and addresses their desires. Such a mode of education would be beneficial in many ways. In this respect, the growing number of unschoolers and curriculum-less institutions for the young are promising and likely to advance this discussion.

You have read this article education reform / Transforming Education with the title education reform. You can bookmark this page URL https://benncam.blogspot.com/2012/08/is-compulsory-education-really-necessary.html. Thanks!

Homeschoolers outperform publicly schooled youth on traditional measures

I've become interested in home education after discovering how amazingly well home educated children are learning. Once I dug a little deeper I began learning about families who were home educating following a philosophy that leans more toward unschooling also known as learning naturally via a life without school. As a result many of the myths I had been lead to believe about learning were quickly shattered.

Why is this important for someone who is passionate about public education and in fact has been a part of the system for more than a decade? Because educators have a lot to learn about learning from home educating families. In fact, if we don't, we are doing young people a disservice and moving further and further toward the irrelevance and disconnection that leads so many young people toward tuning out or worse, dropping out with rates around 50% in cities like those in which I've lived (Los Angeles, Las Vegas, New York).

One belief educators and parents often come back with is that home education can't possibly be the best for learning because young people deserve highly trained professionals, not just their parents, to best support their learning. Here are some reasons this belief is flawed.

• First, it is important to note that homeschooling doesn't mean you isolate your children and only one person supports their learning. Home educated young people learn from a variety of experts who are both experienced in teaching and in their profession as well as from peers, others, and from just doing stuff. You'll often hear home educated individuals praise the fact that they get to actually do so much stuff as opposed to school kids who spend a lot of time reading and hearing about other people doing stuff.  
• Second, the research shows that teacher certification does not correlate to higher student achievement. Additionally, when we go to the numbers, we see that home educated youth are outperforming their publicly educated peers.

Homeschooling author Linda Dobson shared this infographic with me and members of the homeschooling / unschooling / DIY learning group. (See her take here.) It provides an overview of some of those numbers.


Created by: College At Home

You have read this article education reform / homeschooling / unschooling with the title education reform. You can bookmark this page URL https://benncam.blogspot.com/2012/08/homeschoolers-outperform-publicly.html. Thanks!

Celebrating Women Educators & Philosophers Via Crowdsourcing

Guest post from David Loitz | Cross posted on The Cooperative Catalyst

The majority of teachers in this country are women, their impact on the history of education is vast, but only a few are covered in textbooks on education or talked about among the major thinkers in the history of education. Their wisdom, experience and action research in and out of the classroom has helped shape the history of education.

Until the 1970′s most books about education were written by men. When Vivian Gussin Paley, an early educator at the Lab School, wrote her first book, White Teacher, her work as an author/scholar was dismissed and chastised. Her fellow teachers and academics didn’t believe that it was the teacher’s place to study the lives of children she taught.

Action research is now taught in teachers colleges, but we still often forget to celebrate the work of women educators, for example, quotes by John Dewey show up daily on social media, but Helen Parkhurst, his contemporary and a pioneer in Progressive Education who created “the Dalton Plan”, is often forgotten.

We have some of the best voices in education at the Cooperative Catalyst and I thought it would be great to celebrate some of the women educators that inspire us, and celebrate some of the texts we look to and shape our own teaching, thinking and writing. I would like your help in creating a primer of women education philosophers and educators and/or wiki for students and new teachers.

We should be able to crowdsource more than 100 women educators and/or philosophers.  I am putting together a paragraph or two on each of them, along with annotations of some of their best work. Please help me by finding a woman you were inspired by and would like to write about. You can contribute at this link.

Here is the list so far ordered alphabetically by first name.

Adora Svitak Alice Miller Annetee Lareau Barbara Brodhagen bell hooks Betty Jones Beverly Daniel Tatum Carol Dweck Carol Gilligan Caroline Pratt Catherine Marshall Chris Athey  Deborah  Meier Diane Levin  Diane Ravitch Edith Abbott Eleanor Ruth Duckworth Elise Boulding Ellen Key Gayle Moller  Grace Llewellyn Helen Parkhurst. Jane Roland-Martin Jane Vella Jean Anyon Jill Ostrow Joan Almon Kirsten Olson Linda Darling-Hammond Linda Levstik Lisa Delpit Lisa Michelle Nielsen Lucy Calkins Lucy Sprague Mitchell Margaret Donaldson  Margaret McMillan  Margaret Wheatley Maria Montessori Maricela Oliva Marilyn Katzenmeyer Mary Leue Mary Pipher Mary Wollstonecraft  Maxine Greene Maya Angelou Michelle Fine Monika Hardy Nancy Atwell Nancy Sizer Nel Noddings Olivia Gude Paula White Gloria Ladson-Billings Rachael Kessler Rachel McMillan Rebeca Wild Riane Eisler Ruby Payne Sarah Lawrence-Lightfoot Sophia Blanche Lyon Fahs Sue Palmer Susan Fleming  Susan Issacs Susan Ohanian Sydney Gurewitz Clemens Sylvia Ashton-Warner Vea Vecchi Virginia Lynn Fry Vivian Gussin Paley Zoe Weil

If you want to write about any of these women, you can contribute to this work at this link.  

You have read this article education reform with the title education reform. You can bookmark this page URL https://benncam.blogspot.com/2012/06/celebrating-women-educators.html. Thanks!

Unwilling to learn?

Guest post by Lisa Cooley - Cross posted at The Minds of Kids

In most of today’s public schools adults feel so strongly that the standard subjects that have been taught for a hundred years are so crucial that no matter how different the world is today and how achingly indifferent kids are, they must learn it. Covering content is more important than learning. This idea is supported by the testing culture -- or perhaps the testing culture is actually doing the driving. So we design clever ways and means of getting the information in. Differentiated instruction, finding learning styles, teaching with multiple intelligences, rearranging tables and chairs in the classroom, unpacking standards, letting kids choose how they will learn a prescribed subject so that it can be “assessed”.... sound familiar?

All these methods are supposed to serve as shoehorns; ways to ease the information into kids, past that rock-hard wall of not giving a damn, into their brains in some form that they can access it (at least long enough to take a high stakes test).

But in the meantime kids are catching on as Marc Prensky shared in his article Engage Me or Enrage Me. Prensky points out that many of the kids we are trying to drug for non-compliance, don’t have A.D.D., they’re just not listening because they know what we’re trying to impose upon them is irrelevant for their success.  We now have a generation of students who are mad as hell and they’re fighting back. They are doing so by talking, throwing things, not listening, talking, leaning back in their chairs till they fall over, chewing gum, texting, skipping classes, taking bathroom breaks, and talking, talking, talking.

We adults are stumped! We must create rules for discipline and behavior, ban and block the tools for learning that they love, restrict their freedom of expression, and any other way we can think of for capturing them, holding them still and making them learn what they really really don’t care about. (What does this remind you of?)

And we are still so sure that if we allow kids to take the lead in their own learning, they will stray off to worlds unknown, frightening, dangerous. We MUST control what they learn.  There is in this system a willful ignorance of the facts: that true learning can only take place when the motivation comes from within. And there is a fear of taking a leap of faith: that if kids learn what they love, they will also learn what they need.

Let’s put down the burden. Just set it down and walk away. Make schools places where the first job of adults is to discover who these kids are, and provide support, time and resources to help them become the people they want to be.

Their futures are more important than our outdated ideas.  Let’s stop making learning hard. Let’s stop making schools into battlegrounds where the will of teachers is pitted against the will of students. Can’t we all just get along?

Let’s put teachers and students into productive partnerships, where trust and respect is at the core of the relationship; where teachers use their expertise and experience to guide and facilitate the learning that is most meaningful to students. Imagine the joy in our own hearts as we watch our kids work hard at stuff they love! Imagine how free we will all feel!

You have read this article ADD cure / education reform with the title education reform. You can bookmark this page URL https://benncam.blogspot.com/2012/06/unwilling-to-learn.html. Thanks!

Separate and Unequal

Guest post by Nikhil Goyal, A 16 Year Old Out to Put a Dent In the Universe | Cross posted at Nikhil Goyal

This Sunday’s New York Times features a hard hitting piece entitled ‘Why Don’t We Have Any White Kids?’ as part of the series “A System Divided.” It delves into the racial schisms of Explore Charter School, a K-8 school in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Of the school’s 502 students from kindergarten through eighth grade this school year, 92.7 percent are black, 5.7 percent are Hispanic, and a scattering are of mixed race. None are white or Asian.  

As more charter schools take over “failed” public schools, the resegregation of New York’s public school system has transpired. As a country, we are still attempting to justify the concept of separate but equal schools — the idea overturned by Brown v. Board of Education more than half a century ago. The 2010 campaign by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s administration to expand charter schools was dubbed “the fight of our life” in a recently released email by the city.  

The current obsession with creating even more charter schools has done very little to improve the outcomes of poor black and Latino students. The evidence suggests that charter schools are not a systemic silver bullet to America’s education crisis. In fact, they make the crisis worse, not only exacerbating inherent inequalities, but also distracting the public’s attention from our society’s ills.  

The emphasis on test preparation is uncanny at charter schools. Read this line from the piece:

“A great deal of teaching is done to the state tests, the all-important metric by which schools are largely judged. In the hallway this spring, before the tests, a calendar counted down the days remaining until the next round.”

What kind of sane parent, regardless of ethnic or social background, would want to send their kids to a school that drills kids all day long for a bogus exam that means absolutely nothing?

Put simply, the city turns a blind eye to the disadvantaged children of the education system — black, white, or purple. The situation has turned ugly after ten years of a billionaire running the show — a billionaire who hasn’t a clue what it means to live on less than a couple of million a year. In parallel, as Arianna Huffington may have put it, this is simply becoming a ‘Third World’ city.  

Across the board, schools deserve adequate resources and brilliant teachers no matter the zip code. Is the City of New York doing enough for the kids at Explore Charter School? Absolutely not!  

Compliments to Emily Berl, The New York Times

You have read this article education reform with the title education reform. You can bookmark this page URL https://benncam.blogspot.com/2012/05/separate-and-unequal.html. Thanks!

Dropping Out was a Great Idea

Editor's Note: I had the extreme pleasure of joining the author of this post, Nicholas Perez, as a guest on Paul Allison's Teachers Teaching Teachers. In the episode we discussed who drops out and why. I was invited on the show as author of the Teen's Guide to Opting Out of School for Success. Nick was invited because he was a teen who opted out of school to find success. I LOVED what Nick had to say and asked him to please consider sharing his story as I know it will be inspiring to parents, teachers, and teens across the globe. The following post is the result of several month's work. It provides amazing insights and lessons for every educator, administrator and parent. It also happens to be the most important post I've published. So, without further adieu, please read Nick's story. This is the first time it is being shared publicly.



“Drop out of school before your mind rots from exposure to our mediocre educational system. Forget about the Senior Prom and go to the library and educate yourself if you've got any guts. Some of you like Pep rallies and plastic robots who tell you what to read.” - Frank Zappa

       

Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot of questions raised about how innovations in technology will change education as we know it - Can machines replace teachers? Do internet resources provide everything needed to develop professional skills? What happens if you replace school with online learning? I’ve spent my life trying to find out, and the answers I have are both promising and a little horrifying.

The good news is that it worked. I’ve developed a wide range of interests and skills, with my lifelong field of choice being software. I have a software development job that I love, I have no student debt, and I feel secure about my long-term future. I’m pretty sure that this is what most students dream of. The path here wasn’t easy or well-traveled, but the experiment has been a success.

The bad news is that along the way, I discovered that public schools are not prepared to fairly compete for their students’ attention. This has resulted in a long series of slightly traumatizing events. From the prescription drugging, to the humiliation of being singled out from the rest of my peers, to the threats of litigation, it’s been a long road. I left school at the age of 17 after deciding that I’d had enough of my school district’s attempts to forcibly shift my attention toward the classroom, and away from my independent studies. This didn’t happen because of human evils, but because of old, rigid systems that have yet to bend and break under the pressure of progress.

One of the arguments in favor of schooling that I hear most frequently is that the diversity of curricula changes the way students view the world - it exposes them to things they never would have explored otherwise, and it’s the perfect recipe for a well-rounded individual. While that sounds great on paper, it is an obsolete notion. In the information age, exposure to new ideas is inevitable. The diversity of ideas being shared online and in the real world far exceeds the diversity of a single school’s curriculum, and it is highly unlikely that this will ever change. I’ve worked with entrepreneurs in tech, media, skincare/beauty products, marketing, and education. I’ve interned in a professional recording studio and written hundreds of my own songs.  I’ve had discussions and debates with people from all over the world, with passions ranging from evolutionary biology to international philanthropy to psychology to social activism to mechanical engineering to the arts. Opportunities to explore new ideas will always be incredibly abundant, but I’ve found it more important to focus on the things that I’m devoting my life to.

It is now easier than ever to discover your passion at an early age.

There has been no subject of interest that I’ve found to be more captivating than technology. I spent most of my early childhood playing video games and learning how to use my old DOS PC. In the mid-to-late 90s, computers began to transform our culture in a huge way. I figured out how to use e-mail to stay in touch with my aunt who, at the time, lived across the country in California. I learned how to browse the web and download games. Magazines started including interactive CD-ROMs with every issue as the downfall of paper media began. I could learn about anything imaginable with Encarta ‘95. As a curious elementary school student, I was witnessing and being a part of one of the biggest changes that humanity has ever faced in all of history. When the time came to get off the computer and sit in a classroom for seven hours, I felt reasonably preoccupied.

My experiences in classrooms largely consisted of staring at a clock on the wall and waiting for a bell to ring so that I could go home and learn about more interesting things. While I thought I was just “playing on the computer”, I was really developing indispensable skills and fully experiencing the joy of education. The enjoyment of  learning is a feeling that I cannot find words to describe, and a feeling that often seems to be lost on society. In the eyes of my school, this was not considered ‘work’, and I was failing.

The Westfield school district has what they call a “child study team”. They were called in to save the day. Their job was to figure out what was wrong with me, to completely disregard the dangers of a confirmation bias, and to have me somehow classified for special-education. The idea of a student primarily learning outside of the classroom was unheard of. It especially confused them when I scored highly on tests, despite ignoring all lectures and homework. I was always told that I had potential, but because I wasn’t doing the work that they provided, I wasn’t living up to that potential. School “experts” recommended that I see a psychiatrist. After all, it’s easier to fix a child by giving him a bottle of pills than to actually attempt to fix the bureaucratic, factory-like conditions that exist in public schools. I underwent a psychological evaluation and was diagnosed with ADD. I was placed in a ‘supplemental’ class where I could do my homework during school hours, and was placed on Adderall (an amphetamine) at 9 years old.

When I was 10 years old, my aunt noticed how inspired I was by technology, and paid for me to attend a computer camp over the summer. I was completely in awe of the realization that I could use my mind to build things for others to use. The possibilities will always seem endless to me, but these things are particularly enthralling when viewed through the lens of a young imagination. When I got home from camp with all of my new books and knowledge, my journey in independent education truly began. I knew that if I put enough effort into learning how to code, I could change the world. Unfortunately, it wasn't long before I discovered that I wouldn’t be able to do this in school. The inability to devote my time toward the pursuit of my dreams made me miserable. I began to stay up late into the night to write code, which resulted in exhaustion, lateness, and absenteeism during school hours.

If you defy the system, expect it to slowly tear you apart.

When Adderall failed to make me care about school, they decided to try more drugs. Wellbutrin gave me a seizure. Prozac made me irritable and hostile. One day, while on Effexor XR, I experienced a dangerously rapid heart-rate, turned pale, and couldn’t stop vomiting. I was too young to understand what it meant to take mind-altering drugs, and was unaware of how it was affecting me. The belief that chemicals are the answer to low classroom motivation is not only incorrect, but also extremely dangerous and completely unforgivable.

After failing to accomplish anything positive through the use of amphetamines and antidepressants, the Child Study Team came up with the bright idea of having a paraprofessional follow me around all day to keep me on top of things. She was a wonderful person, but everyone knew that this was an odd arrangement, and it became really difficult to develop socially. This was the beginning of my isolation in school - when I really started to believe that there was something horribly wrong with me, and I didn’t belong. Everyone else was normal, and I wasn’t. I still knew I was gifted in some way, but felt that I was broken in every other way.

Treat a student differently, and rebelliousness will become a survival tactic.

Lacking a healthy social life in school, I had to look elsewhere. At 13 years old, I started hanging out with a group of high-school students who loved to party. We drank a lot, smoked a lot, and wrote a lot of music. It was a huge comfort to know that even though I felt like an idiot in school, I could feel like a badass outside of school. We did a lot of stupid things, but in hindsight, it all ended up doing less harm than the prescriptions. One day my school district found out about our little party scene, and then they had a reason to call me a troublemaker.

The more my school insisted upon treating me like a problem child, the less I wanted to subject myself to it. My family started receiving legal threats from the school district because I so frequently refused to go to school. To this day, I’m proud of every moment of schooling that I missed. I felt confident and comfortable outside of that environment, and skipping school gave me a significant amount of extra time to focus on positive things that were important to me. I composed music prolifically. I learned about 3d modeling, the inner workings of synthesizers, databases, Internet security, reverse-engineering, and at this point I had coded in about a dozen different programming languages.

It became very apparent to me that compulsory schooling was working against my favor, and skipping school wasn’t just a form of protest, but also a necessity. My school wasn’t helping me in any of my areas of interest, and options like homeschooling & private schools weren’t feasible. My mom was raising three kids on her own and could barely afford to pay the rent, so there was a lot of stress and uncertainty about what was going to happen to us. Unless I wanted to surrender all control over my education to a system that was simply not equipped to provide what I needed, this was the best I could do.

Things could have been worse.

I graduated from Roosevelt Intermediate, and felt like I had just survived a long walk through hell. It almost seemed like the situation couldn’t possibly get any worse, but it always can. Next, it was time to go to Westfield High School.

For many, high-school is considered to be one of the most important stages of life. The social development that takes place during these years, in these environments, is irreplaceable. That’s what I’d heard, at least. I would never find out for myself, because I would never be allowed to experience a regular high-school class. From day one, my good friends in the Child Study Team decided to place me in a program called The Bridge. My ADD diagnosis was not a severe enough diagnosis to have me placed me in The Bridge due to Least Restrictive Environment laws, so they did another psychological evaluation and concluded that I was “emotionally disturbed”, which is not a legitimate term in psychology - it is an umbrella term invented exclusively for the purpose of placing severe classifications on students who can not be diagnosed with an actual severe disorder. Google it. The number of students in the program was constantly changing, because some would leave due to jail-time, pregnancy, etc, but it was typically between 5-20 kids, which is all age-groups combined.

There’s a threshold of desperation in schools, beyond which grades become a currency.

The Bridge was never challenging, and there was always a focus on convincing us to do a bare-minimal amount of busywork so that we could get a passing grade for the day. The teachers cared about us, but it was clear that the bar had been lowered due to our unwillingness to participate. I think we all realized that our grades didn’t stand for anything valid - in The Bridge, grades are an imaginary currency. There were attempts at having actual classes, but they were frequently interrupted by things like fights breaking out, or students yelling “Man, this is bullshit!” It wasn’t much of a healthy learning environment, so passing grades for each day were typically offered in exchange for good behavior and a boring worksheet. The whole program is an attempt to get the least motivated students through high-school, whether actual learning is occurring or not. I’m sure it makes the district look great on paper, but I find it shameful that our flawed metrics for success could cause a school to forget what its primary purpose is.

I didn’t want the bar lowered. I wanted to focus on my work. I didn’t want to be isolated from my peers. I wanted to feel normal. Westfield High School has an enrollment of over 1,500 students, and I was one of them, but I was one of approximately 5-20 students who were placed in a single room all day, and not allowed to be a part of the larger community. No matter how much I expressed that I wanted to be in a normal high-school classroom, they didn’t listen. In return, I didn’t listen to them either. I completely stopped going to school and was left back a year. In a strange act of desperation, they offered to let me take a regular science and phys-ed class with students who were a year younger, which was awkward, and kind of defeated the purpose. That was when I realized that it was too late.

My school had wasted my time until there was no time left.

I had my education covered all along - what they didn’t understand is that they had failed to fulfill the single greatest responsibility of a high-school, which is to provide an environment that promotes healthy social development. From an early age onward, I was denied the right to exist normally, all because I had the audacity to challenge the notion that compulsory schooling holds a monopoly on my education.

I left, and I still feel cheated sometimes, but it isn’t over yet. After leaving school, I realized that there exists a massive movement of current and former students, teachers, parents, thinkers, entrepreneurs, and leaders who believe traditional schooling is a mediocre and obsolete educational approach. The old-fashioned learning institutions that are failing our communities will be replaced by something better, and now is the time to build it.

The world outside of the public education bureaucracy is enormous, and the alternatives to traditional schooling will continue to rise up, until they’ve risen above everything that is currently considered to be the norm. There can be no tolerance for the dying breed of traditional education professionals who mismanage groups of children in destructive ways when they choose the alternatives. There is no ‘fixing’ traditional schooling to adapt to the age of information. We will need to re-evaluate our needs from the ground up, and the result will not resemble our current Industrial Age institutions. The reinvention of schools won’t be easy, nor will it be met without resistance, but one thing that history teaches us repeatedly is that progress cannot be stopped. I think it’s time to accept that the role of educators is changing, because classrooms literally face a world of competition, and I can confirm that the competition is unprecedentedly powerful.

____________________________________________________________________ If you are, have been, or know a School-Free Teen, you can keep the conversation going here or find out how to opt out of school for success here. If you are a parent who is living or is considering a school-free life for your child, join others who are doing the same here.

You have read this article dropout / education reform / Educational Technology / homeschooling / optout / unschooling with the title education reform. You can bookmark this page URL https://benncam.blogspot.com/2012/05/dropping-out-was-great-idea.html. Thanks!