Building an Alt-School Ecosystem One Brick at a Time
I’ve been fortunate to have discovered several non-mainstream approaches to education this past year. It’s exciting because in 2015 we now have an almost end-to-end offering that sits outside traditional schooling.
At the onset, you have a school like Apogee Academy, which uses a Sudbury-style approach to non-coercive schooling. The kids, who range from 7 years old to high school age, have a remarkably free choice of what to learn and when. They can play video games all day, or choose to learn to make those very same games.
In the middle school years, you might have the opportunity to visit a maker lab, a hackstudio, or Bitspace, where you can custom fabricate your own skateboard. Yes, these are not school-replacement programs per se, but they do offer compelling enrichment experiences that may one day be a school replacement.
Then we come to the high school years. Don’t have something to share for that yet, but with projects like the XQ Superschool Challenge, in a few years you may see high school radically transformed.
So finally we come to college. Yes, that very institution that is putting young people and their parents into a huge load of debt, so that armed with an Ivy League education, they can become prepared to serve a Grande Latte no whip in some urban metropolis. One promising alternative I visited is Till School in Chicago, which aims to provide kids with a 2-year design and portfolio approach, which might then lead to traditional college, or directly into the working world. The youngsters work with coaches and mentors who are by and large working professionals in their field of expertise. The students work on projects which they present as portfolios each semester. This gives them practical experience should they choose to forego college.
I’m hopeful this end-to-end ecosystem can continue to grow, network, and nurture each other as they stumble, pivot, and figure out a sustainable model for the long run. Our nation needs a counter-narrative to the test, punish, privatize school reform movement which has largely advocated for de-funding public schools in favor of privately run charters. Progressive reformers could advocate for these alt-school approaches and work to feed their innovations back into the mainstream.
