Stop Homework

(This is the lat­est in a series of inter­views I’ve con­ducted with edu­ca­tors and activists around the coun­try who are on my radar as peo­ple who are doing their best to change pol­icy and prac­tice in their communities.)

Alan Shus­ter­man, who lives in Chevy Chase, Mary­land with his wife and three chil­dren, is the founder of School for Tomor­row (SFT), an inde­pen­dent non­profit sec­ondary school (grades 6 – 12) located in Rockville, Mary­land which opened this Fall with 18 stu­dents, 3 full-time teach­ers and 6 part-time teach­ers. Its web­site describes the school as a “one-of-a-kind, cut­ting edge, student-centered edu­ca­tion model designed in and fit for the 21st century.”

I was intrigued by that descrip­tion, and by the fact that the school stated up front that research shows lit­tle value to home­work, so I inter­viewed him to find out more about SFT and his inspi­ra­tion for start­ing it.

Inter­view with Alan Shus­ter­man
by Sara Bennett

Can you tell me a lit­tle bit about your back­ground and why you decided to start a school?
I was a pub­lic school kid, always a good stu­dent but never par­tic­u­larly engaged in school. I was able to get As despite myself. Grow­ing up I loved hang­ing out with kids younger than me, I set up school for my younger sis­ter and taught her how to read, and I always had the teach­ing bug.

But because I was a good stu­dent, I ended up at the Uni­ver­sity of Penn­syl­va­nia, and becom­ing a teacher was never on the hori­zon. Back then, before Teach for Amer­ica, it wasn’t cul­tur­ally accept­able for some­one grad­u­at­ing from an Ivy League school to go into teach­ing. So, instead, I went to Har­vard Law School. As his­tory would have it, Barack Obama was in my class at Har­vard; as luck would have it, I didn’t befriend him.

Every lit­tle aspect of my life story has informed my phi­los­o­phy of edu­ca­tion, includ­ing hav­ing gone to Penn and Har­vard and see­ing first­hand what the best and bright­est sec­ondary school grad­u­ates are like and do. Of course this is an over-generalization, but, in gen­eral, the stu­dents who suc­ceed in high school arrive to col­lege narrow-minded, con­formist, and sup­port­ers of the sta­tus quo. That Pres­i­dent Obama, for one, has turned out to be a rather con­ven­tional politi­cian, espe­cially with respect to edu­ca­tion, has not sur­prised me, given his edu­ca­tional pedigree.

With my law degree I got a well pay­ing job in a big law firm – and ended up, at the age of 25, hav­ing what I describe as “a mid-life cri­sis.” I was mis­er­able and unful­filled. So, I made the “rad­i­cal” deci­sion – that is, rad­i­cal to my peers – to leave my first law firm job in under a year. For years I regret­ted going to law school but,as it turned out, the vari­ety of work expe­ri­ences I had over the next decade – in the legal and busi­ness and for-profit and non­profit worlds – were invalu­able. And there’s no way I’d be sit­ting here today, the founder of a unique new school, with­out them.

The big turn­ing point came 8 years ago, when I was try­ing to decide what to do next; one day my father began a con­ver­sa­tion with, “Alan, you’ve always wanted to teach.” And then he and my mother offered me this incred­i­ble oppor­tu­nity to make the tran­si­tion into teach­ing, with finan­cial sup­port from them; with­out that, I’d never have been able to do it, for at that point my wife and I had three young kids to support.

I was for­tu­nate to get a job at Sandy Spring Friends School in Mont­gomery County, Mary­land, a well respected Quaker pri­vate school, teach­ing U.S. his­tory to 7th and 8th graders. I had never taught a day in my life, and I had never taken an edu­ca­tion class. But very quickly I fig­ured out that I loved teach­ing, and that I had at last found my call­ing. Almost as quickly, how­ever, I fig­ured out that there’s some­thing very wrong with sec­ondary schools as they exist today.

Sec­ondary schools are com­pletely dis­con­nected from the real world. It’s as if they are in a par­al­lel uni­verse. This results in out­dated cur­ricu­lum that doesn’t make sense for the world our high school grad­u­ates will be enter­ing, and a learn­ing envi­ron­ment that doesn’t take advan­tage of all that today’s world has to offer. For exam­ple, most schools today, whether pub­lic or pri­vate, will proudly show you their won­der­ful state-of-the-art com­puter labs, or mobile carts. Yet, in the real world, com­put­ers aren’t rel­e­gated to a spe­cial room or occa­sion, but are inte­grated into every­day life. And then there are the com­puter or tech­nol­ogy classes where what is taught has already been learned by the stu­dents, on their own, years before.

Which leads me to the sec­ond, even more pro­found dis­con­nect: that between schools, and many of the adults in schools, and stu­dents. Schools relate to and treat these com­plex, evolv­ing indi­vid­u­als, the stu­dents, in unreal, arti­fi­cial ways – expect­ing them to do things that sim­ply don’t make sense, yet not expect­ing them to do other things they are fully capa­ble of; and reg­u­larly plac­ing them in restric­tive, suf­fo­cat­ing “boxes.”

So, I decided, within the first few months of teach­ing at Sandy Spring, that some­day I would start my own school. I imag­ine that, had I gone straight into teach­ing from col­lege, I’d have been one of those teach­ers who spends his career try­ing to buck the sys­tem, or who ends up burn­ing out and leav­ing the pro­fes­sion. But, because I was 37 at the time, and had so much real world expe­ri­ence behind me, I could see every­thing with a fresh per­spec­tive – and, per­haps more impor­tantly, I had the abil­ity to envi­sion and ulti­mately cre­ate a dif­fer­ent type of school.

A few years later, I left teach­ing, I home­schooled my 4th grader for a year – because her 3rd grade year in school had been so debil­i­tat­ing – and I began full-fledged plan­ning to get my own school started. And, after work­ing full-time the next two years to get it off the ground, School for Tomor­row at last opened this past September.

What does the phys­i­cal space of SFT look like?
This year we are sub­let­ting three very large car­peted, win­dowed class­rooms in a for­mer pub­lic school build­ing, with addi­tional class­rooms avail­able for us in future years. We have our own bath­rooms and hall­way, as well as an admin­is­tra­tive office. We also have shared-use of a large multi-purpose room, library, and other parts of the build­ing. And out­side, there are a great soc­cer field, a full bas­ket­ball court, two play­grounds, and nice open space.

Our class­rooms are designed to be multi-purpose, with lots of dif­fer­ent work­spaces and con­fig­u­ra­tions pos­si­ble. All of our class­rooms con­tain a lot of IKEA fur­ni­ture, assem­bled by both staff and stu­dents, as well as desk­top com­put­ers and wire­less inter­net; all of our stu­dents have lap­tops. One of our class­rooms has a nice home the­atre set-up, another has most of our grow­ing book col­lec­tion, and another is where we do most of our art and sci­ence and other messy activ­i­ties. Like every­thing else at SFT, we are con­tin­u­ally trans­form­ing and improv­ing our phys­i­cal space.

Tell me about School for Tomor­row. What makes it unique?
Every­thing we do here at SFT can be traced back to two core ques­tions. First, what does a high school grad­u­ate need to know and be able to do in order to thrive in col­lege, the work place, and life in the decades ahead? Sec­ond, what are the most effec­tive and effi­cient ways for stu­dents in gen­eral, and each stu­dent in par­tic­u­lar, to mas­ter the learn­ing out­comes result­ing from the answer to the first question?

I’ve yet to find any other school that seri­ously addresses these fun­da­men­tal ques­tions. Quite sim­ply, ask­ing these ques­tions is what makes SFT unique – and what results in a school that is rel­e­vant to today’s world and makes sense for today’s stu­dents. And the good news is that the answers are already out there – in work done by oth­ers within the edu­ca­tion world and out­side the edu­ca­tion world. For instance, over the past decade at least three or four well funded, com­pelling stud­ies have been com­pleted that address the first ques­tion. Most schools, how­ever, com­pletely ignore or pay lip ser­vice to them. But, unlike 20 years ago when they’d be sit­ting on a shelf some­where grow­ing dusty, now they’re sit­ting on the Web, avail­able for some­one like me to utilize.

Do you have a curriculum?

Yes, there are three main areas of cur­ricu­lum, in the sense of required learn­ing out­comes, that result from ask­ing our first core question.

* First, read­ing, writ­ing, and arith­metic still mat­ter. Or, put another way, all stu­dents must mas­ter what we call the trans­fer­able aca­d­e­mic skills of learn­ing – that is, how to ask the right ques­tions, prob­lem solve, find infor­ma­tion and under­stand it in what­ever form they find it, ana­lyze infor­ma­tion, use it, and be able to com­mu­ni­cate in writ­ing, orally, and with the assis­tance of multi-media tools. In addi­tion, the research shows that there’s a cer­tain level of quan­ti­ta­tive rea­son­ing and math­e­mat­ics that is ben­e­fi­cial for all stu­dents to master.

* Sec­ond, we have a core knowl­edge com­po­nent. That’s the basic foun­da­tional knowl­edge that some­one needs so they can then apply their generic learn­ing skills if they want or need to learn more about a given sub­ject. For exam­ple, at SFT our U.S. his­tory require­ment isn’t a one year course that cov­ers all you can cram into a text­book and 150 45-minute class peri­ods. Instead, it’s a pared down mix of key con­cepts, sto­ry­lines, and facts that might take a stu­dent, say, 20 hours to learn. Through this core knowl­edge approach, we enable our stu­dents to more effec­tively under­stand and retain impor­tant back­ground infor­ma­tion and con­cepts, while cov­er­ing many more sub­jects, than in reg­u­lar schools.

* Third is what we refer to as our right brain cur­ricu­lum – that is, at SFT drama, music, art, emo­tional intel­li­gence, char­ac­ter, col­lab­o­ra­tion, con­flict res­o­lu­tion, phys­i­cal fit­ness, and mind-body work are treated as seri­ously as tra­di­tional aca­d­e­mic sub­jects. In the 21st cen­tury, from a purely eco­nomic, earn­ing poten­tial point of view, let alone other rea­sons, all stu­dents must be given the oppor­tu­nity to develop their right brain, as well as their left brain, skills and abilities.

And, on top of this well-rounded edu­ca­tion, every SFT stu­dent will have time to pur­sue the area she’s most pas­sion­ate about to the nth degree. For exam­ple, we will arrange intern­ships for our stu­dents, and we will bring real world experts into the school. Kids are capa­ble of doing amaz­ing things before they’re 18, if given the oppor­tu­nity. We will break through the ceil­ing that holds kids down in other schools.

Do you have any “bottom-line” require­ments?
Our stu­dents will have to meet spe­cific grad­u­ate require­ments that fall under each of the three main areas of cur­ricu­lum; where stu­dent choice and indi­vid­u­al­iza­tion come into play is with respect to learn­ing means. For instance, all SFT stu­dent are required to mas­ter Alge­bra and Geom­e­try; but how they do it, and when they do, will nat­u­rally vary greatly among them.

How does this work?
First and fore­most, we rec­og­nize that every stu­dent is dif­fer­ent, and that the same stu­dent is dif­fer­ent depend­ing on the week, the month, and the year. So, every sin­gle stu­dent must have his own indi­vid­u­al­ized learn­ing path that allows him to learn at the pace that makes sense for him in the ways that make sense for him. And, given all the resources and knowl­edge that we have to assist learn­ing in today’s world, this absolutely can be done.

Sec­ond, more often than not, you’ll see inter­dis­ci­pli­nary learn­ing at SFT, which is much more mean­ing­ful and effi­cient than the auto­matic divi­sion of the school expe­ri­ence into arti­fi­cial sub­ject mat­ter pods. Also, you’ll see multi-age group­ings of stu­dents. For instance, if we have a 14, a 12, and a 10 year old who are each ready to learn cal­cu­lus, then there’s no rea­son they can’t learn it together; on the other hand, if they haven’t yet mas­tered pre-algebra, then we don’t push them into alge­bra until they’re ready. More­over, multi-age group­ings help to facil­i­tate some­thing we con­tin­u­ally pro­mote at SFT — kids teach­ing and learn­ing from each other. Kids tend to accept help from each other more read­ily than from adults and, per­haps more sig­nif­i­cantly, teach­ing oth­ers is the best way to con­sol­i­date your own learning.

Which brings me to the role of the adult teach­ers at SFT, which is very dif­fer­ent than at other schools. Tra­di­tional teach­ers basi­cally play 3 roles – first, sub­ject mat­ter expert; sec­ond, behav­ior mon­i­tor (or class­room man­ager, as we refer to it in the busi­ness); and third, judge (Who is smart? Who is stu­pid?) Of course, great teach­ers tran­scend those three roles. But, unfor­tu­nately, truly great teach­ers are few and far between.

At SFT – and this is how it should be in every school – teach­ers are first and fore­most facil­i­ta­tors of learn­ing. What mat­ters is whether we help the stu­dents progress in their learn­ing, and not what our super­vi­sors or col­leagues or selves think about our “per­for­mance.” In doing so, our default posi­tion – which is the oppo­site of the tra­di­tional micro­man­age­ment teach­ing approach – is that we want our stu­dents to be as inde­pen­dent as pos­si­ble; at the same time, we’re there to pro­vide direc­tion and sup­port when it’s needed.

The sec­ond main role that SFT teach­ers play is that of mod­el­ing what it’s like to be a respect­ful, car­ing, con­tribut­ing mem­ber of a com­mu­nity and a true life­long learner. Our teach­ers model that it’s okay not to know some­thing, that it’s okay to make mis­takes, that, in fact, the most mean­ing­ful, sig­nif­i­cant learn­ing takes place through mak­ing mis­takes. To the con­trary, most stu­dents at other schools are pro­grammed to spend the day try­ing to avoid mak­ing mis­takes or reveal­ing what they don’t know. At SFT, how­ever, we’re cre­at­ing the oppo­site cul­ture, one which leads to a chal­leng­ing but safe learn­ing environment.

How else are you dif­fer­ent from most schools?
Well, as you’ve prob­a­bly fig­ured out already, I can go on and on and on. But I know our time is lim­ited. So, for now, I’ll men­tion just a few more differences.

Research shows, and any­one with com­mon sense knows, that kids learn best when they’ve had a decent night’s sleep and are well fed and well hydrated. So, SFT starts at 9:30, we have healthy snacks avail­able through­out the day so our stu­dents can eat when they’re hun­gry, and we have water cool­ers in our class­rooms so they can get drink when they’re thirsty. And our stu­dents are allowed to get up to stretch, to move around, to go out­side when they get antsy.

The gen­eral rule at SFT is we don’t care what your learn­ing looks like – for exam­ple, you can be chew gum in class or lis­ten to an iPod when work­ing inde­pen­dently – as long as you’re mak­ing suf­fi­cient progress in your work and you’re not dis­turb­ing any­one else.

What’s your home­work pol­icy
We have what we refer to as “a sen­si­ble home­work pol­icy.” The only manda­tory home­work is ½ hour read­ing a night – read­ing of the student’s own choos­ing. Beyond that, there is no built-in daily home­work at SFT. To be clear, our stu­dents will, on occa­sion, do school-related work at home. But the rule is that, before doing any school-related work at home, you should know why you’re doing it and what you’re sup­posed to be doing; if you don’t, then you should stop, not waste your time and energy, and check with a teacher the next day.

Posted in category Interviews on January 27, 2010 at 10:52 pm
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