Is Any High School Really Worth $136,000?

As always, my 13 year-old son has waited until bedtime to download his anxieties. He's a bright, sensitive kid whose worries run the gamut from global warming to how long his gerbil will live.
Tonight his questions revolved around his private school applications, which we submitted just before Christmas. Will he be admitted to any of the schools he applied to? We calculate the odds. What if he gets into all of them? How will he choose? We talk about visit days and how he can decide which school suits him best. What if he starts at one school and decides he'd rather be at another? We discuss that, too.
The one thing we don't talk about is money. I'm glad. Not because I'm avoiding the issue – well, maybe just a little – but because I still haven't managed to wrap my mind around how much money a private high school education costs.
My husband and I are already tiptoeing through the college tuition minefield. We have two older sons who have just graduated from college. Our two daughters are still at university. We've paid and paid for our kids to grow into educated, worldly citizens with college degrees in hand. That's been tough enough. So what business do I have, thinking that I should pay $136,000 for this last kid of ours to attend a so-called “independent school” for grades 9 through 12? What will our son get for this money? A gold-plated locker?
We didn't start down this road by choice. We went to public high schools. Our four older children also went to public high schools and thrived. They played sports, participated in music and theater, belonged to clubs, did the proms and parties. They complained about the usual things: boring classes, teachers who yelled, mean kids, crowded classrooms, stupid homework assignments. Yet all four of them were accepted by good colleges, even Ivy League schools. They majored in subjects that ignited their passions. Our two graduates – one in 2009, the other in 2010 – even managed to find jobs right away in their chosen fields. Hallelujah!
Our youngest son, though, has been different from the start. He always hated his public school, starting with kindergarten, where he fumed about rest time. Why would he rest, when there were so many other, more interesting things to do?
In elementary school, he was chastised soundly by one teacher for making a gingerbread house that wasn't like the A-frame house his teacher showed them, but more like a Frank Lloyd Wright design, all flat roofs and porches. A fifth grade teacher complained that he asked too many questions that weren't on topic, while he ranted about her making mistakes, especially in science. He was selected for the Gifted and Talented Program in fourth grade, but that consisted of just more research papers. He hated going, but went because it got him out of class.
Here in Massachusetts, we have a tense, worksheet-driven MCAS curriculum that puts teachers and kids through their paces so fast that there's little room to do anything else. “Don't learn the math in that chapter,” one teacher warned our son. “Those problems aren't on the MCAS test.”
By the time he hit middle school, our son was complaining about “having to learn too many dumb things that I can't remember” as well as the typical mean or absent-minded teachers. His classmates bothered him, too. Their idea of fun was to push each other into lockers, smoke dope between classes, or de-pants each other in the hallway. His “most exciting day at school ever” was when his seventh grade math teacher lost his temper and chased one ornery kid down the halls with a chair.
At home, meanwhile, our son continued to be enthusiastic about everything, especially when he was building machines, like an automatic card shuffler or a robot that fed his fish for him automatically once a day. “School is just something I have to get through until I can come home and learn things,” he told me with a shrug. “I can't wait until I'm old enough to drop out.”
Uh oh. In desperation, I stopped by a local Montessori School to ask about their middle school program. Amazingly, they had space for him. Even more shocking, we could afford it. Yes, ten grand was a lot of money. But, if it made our son love going to school, it would be worth it. We were fortunate enough to have an education fund for him. We decided to use part of it for middle school instead of saving all of it for college. “It's just a different resource allocation,” my husband rationalized. I saw it as an incubation period, one where he could take a breather from the rigors of public school.
The result was shocking. Our son was transformed within a few weeks. He was happy, polite, and sweet again. He was not only allowed, but encouraged, to follow his interests at school. The first year, he built a camel out of wire and paper as a visual aid for a research project on the desert; he also built an architectural model of our bathroom to scale, and performed as Lysander in Midsummer Night's Dream, reciting Shakespeare in the car on the way to and from school.
“This doesn't even feel like school,” he confessed one day. “It's more like a place where everyone wants to learn things, even the teachers.”
It was true that Montessori didn't feel like a “real” school to me, either. There were no chairs lined in rows. The students wore slippers in the classroom. They snacked when they felt like it, worked together or alone as they wished, and called teachers by their first names. It felt more like learning in someone's living room. The philosophy of Montessori – that each child is naturally curious, and will do the work of learning if you just get out of his way, guiding him only as necessary – might as well have been designed for our son. It seemed to work for lots of other kids, too.
Alas, our Montessori School goes only through eighth grade. Now we're making another transition. Hence our dilemma: We've seen what a difference this private school education made in our son's life. We'd like to keep his enthusiasm level for learning high. But is it really worth paying $136,000 for a high school education?
Most New England independent schools average around $32,000 per year just for day student tuition – not much less than most colleges. These schools look like colleges, too, with their glassy science buildings, smart boards, indoor rowing machines, ice hockey rinks, music studios and playing fields. You name it, they have it: debate team, Latin, Chinese, AP Physics, study abroad, science internships, math teams. The teachers have masters and doctoral degrees. There are just 12 to 14 kids in a class. Who wouldn't want to go to a high school like that, especially if it's filled with other students and teachers who actually want to learn?
But – and again, I ask this in all earnestness, because I really don't know – is an independent school education really a better start in life than a public school education? Part of me thinks yes, absolutely, at least for this child. My hope is that our youngest will find a high school that fits him as well as Montessori has, and that his high school years will help him continue to blossom as a passionate lifelong learner; a concerned citizen of the world; and a confident, loving, generous young adult.
Then I am seized by doubts that aren't just nagging. They're like hammerhead blows to the back of my neck: What if we lose our jobs, I wonder, and we suddenly can't pay for this mythical, magical high school with smart boards and, for all I know, unicorns? What if one of us dies in the next four years, and we can't afford college because there is only one household income, and we've blown our education fund on high school?
Or what if paying $136,000 for a private school education turns out to be a mistake for other reasons? What if this money only continues to shelter my son from knowing what it's like to be around people who struggle every day to put food on the table and gas up their cars?
What if, by going to a school where it's considered normal for every child to have a laptop computer and a North Face jacket, he becomes one of the elite people who don't try to change the world, because they're busy maintaining their status quo?
My son is asleep by now. But I am wide awake, thinking about all of the decisions that we parents make for our children that are so much bigger than the here and now, starting with the kind of education we give them – both in and out of the classroom.

Kids + Computers = The Perfect Match

A few days ago, a friend stopped by while I was working at home. My 13 year-old son was home, too. As we passed the living room, my friend said, “How long will you let your son stay on the computer?”
I shrugged. “I don't know. Until it's time to do something else.”
“What? That's criminal!” My friend made a face. You know the face: the I'm-a-better-Mom-than-you-are face. “I let my boys have an hour a day on the computer. Tops. Then I kick 'em outside.”
“Well,” I said, and then stopped. What else was there to say? “You're a better parent than I am?” “Your kids probably have bigger muscles?”
I've been a mother for 22 years now. With three boys and two girls in our household, I've been doing battle with screens for almost that long. I still get exhausted remembering how hard I fought to keep our two oldest sons off the computer. Every time I made a rule, they'd find a loophole. Like the time I told them they couldn't have screen time between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. on weekends, and discovered – weeks later – that they were setting their alarms for 5 a.m. to ensure that they'd get their four hours of World of Warcraft in before breakfast.
Recently, one of my sons confessed, “You know, I was playing computer games until, like, 2 a.m. in high school. I just waited until you went to bed.” That was around the time that he was hooked on Everquest, an online role-playing game that drew in so many viewers that it was widely known as “Evercrack” http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/28/earlyshow/living/caught/main510302.shtml.
And where is that son now? He graduated from a great college, and found a job three days after graduation in an advertising firm in Boston. A company that specializes, by the way, in supporting web sites for their clients.
Our oldest son, meanwhile, graduated from a great college as well, and has made his way to Los Angeles, where he's working as a production assistant in the film industry. He was just named second assistant director for a Web TV pilot.
My youngest son, the last one at home, takes bass guitar lessons, does gymnastics, loves to rock climb and hike. But he's also on the computer every spare minute. Once in a while, it's homework related – his school gave him a great geography game to play online, and he can now name more countries on a map than I can. He also does math and science online rather than bring home textbooks. Usually, though, his time on the computer is spent pursuing his own interests.
He built a hovercraft after seeing someone do it online, out of a shower curtain, a piece of plywood, and a leaf blower. It actually worked. He learned all about microwaving potato chip bags and building Lego guns through Youtube. He plays his bass along with the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Queen online. (“Did you dress like that in the 80's, Mom?” he asked recently. “God, I hope not.”) He learned how to do flips on the trampoline by watching kids demonstrate on Youtube. And, lately, he has been learning the algorithms for solving the Rubik's Cube from Dan Brown online http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsQIoPyfQzM.
Does he read books, this boy of mine? Only if I make him. Which I do. I am, after all, a writer and a book collector, and sometimes I fantasize about having one of those dreamy kids who stays up all night reading books like I did. But, let's face it: kids seem well-equipped to learn online. This particular son of mine knew all about how BP was going to clean up its spill before I did; he also followed the recent elections online. He can tell me where the most shark attacks occur in the world and he's currently looking up the value of individual Magic cards – his new obsession. If this kid wants to know something, he Googles it.
“It's an age of instant gratification,” my sniffy mom friend declared, when I pointed out how much my son learns on the computer. “These kids don't know how to work hard. The computer is making kids stupider.”
Her declaration echoed that popular article, “Does Google Make Us Stupid?” originally published by Nicholas Carr a couple of years ago in The Atlantic Monthly. Carr's piece led to fiery debates about how human intelligence is changing. Read a great summary of that debate put together by the Pew Research Center here: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1499/google-does-it-make-us-stupid-experts-stakeholders-mostly-say-no.
Maybe it's true that access to technology, and to such rapid fire information, is making our children seem like they have shorter attention spans. My son recently declared that when he's reading, “I feel like I'm not doing anything.” On the computer, on the other hand, his hands are engaged, and the visuals on the screen are more entertaining than those black-and-white ants marching across the pages of his books. Books are slow, he complains.
Let me repeat: I still try to make him read half an hour a day, if nothing more. Yet, I'm also well aware that I, too, would have learned on the computer if I'd had one growing up. I don't buy my friend's argument that my boys have had their learning stunted by the computer. Whether children absorb information by reading or online, learning new things makes them want to learn more. Children are inherently curious, active learners. Aren't the skills of building cities and fighting battles online – especially done in teams – worthy? And isn't the ability to discover, sift through, and analyze new information essential to survival in the digital age?
There is an infinite amount of knowledge. Why not soak it up as fast as you can, in a community of online learners, game players, and musicians who come not just from your own neighborhood, but from around the world? For kids with computers, learning has no boundaries.

If No Child is Left Behind, Where Was Mine?

By the second week of middle school, I had to crowbar my son Aidan onto the school bus. The classes were boring, he said. The teachers spent a lot of time yelling. All they did was worksheets and tests. “I thought middle school would be more interesting than elementary school,” he fumed, “but it's way worse.”
I kept battling, bribing and threatening to get him out the door. My two older children had gone to the same public school, which draws students from three towns and has a good reputation. They were in college now. Why couldn't Aidan settle in? What was different?
Everything. The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in 2002 when Aidan was halfway through kindergarten, has turned the public school curriculum on its ear. This legislation requires public schools to administer standardized tests annually to all students. Where there was once time in the school day for projects and performances, there are now stacks of worksheets. Schools are expected to make yearly progress in upping student achievement scores, so teachers teach to the tests.
I was once in favor of this Act. Who doesn't want to see schools held accountable? But now I've changed my mind. Sure, the test scores might be rising, but at what cost?
Aidan – a bright, quirky kid identified for our regional gifted program in fourth grade, balked at many of his elementary school assignments and started sliding fast in middle school. Every Sunday morning, he'd moan about having to go to school on Monday. “The only time school is fun is when I'm getting into trouble,” he mumbled one night.
Uh oh, I thought. I'm losing him.
I met with his teachers. They noted Aidan's lack of focus and danced around the topic of medication for attention issues.
“He's getting A's and B's,” I pointed out. “He earns advanced scores on the MCAS tests.”
Meanwhile, Aidan was getting mouthier and meaner at home. He was withdrawing into his computer. When his dad and I complained about his attitude and threatened to take away the computer, he shrugged. “My life is over anyway,” he said. “I'm already dead at school.”
One afternoon, I noticed the sign for a Montessori school tucked between a couple of brick buildings in a nearby town. On a whim, Aidan and I went inside and talked to the head of school. She invited Aidan to spend a day with them.
The Montessori middle school classroom was nothing like the ones in his public school. There was a carpet and the walls were painted a soothing periwinkle blue. The windows were enormous. The kids called the teachers by their first names. In public school, Aidan switched classes every 55 minutes. At Montessori, group instruction was kept to a minimum and students were expected to organize their own schedules. Grades were almost nonexistent and students didn't have to take MCAS tests. Middle school kids still got an hour of recess.
After his first day at Montessori, Aidan came home puzzled but smiling. “I don't know what this is, Mom, but it doesn't feel like school,” he said. “The teachers aren't really like teachers. They're just people who want to help you learn.”
His dad and I spent a weekend thinking about this. We were on the fence about Montessori for two main reasons: 1) we worried that Aidan might just drift through Montessori's free-wheeling, creative curriculum without having to really learn anything; and 2) we felt like traitors and failures because our kid couldn't make it in public school.
I went online and looked up articles on Montessori. One of the most helpful was by Emily Bazelon in Slate on the eve of Montessori's 100th anniversary, at http://www.slate.com/id/2166489/pagenum/2. The Montssori teacher's site was also useful, at http://www.montessori-namta.org/namta/geninfo/whatismont.html. I discovered that Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page credited their Montessori school educations for their development as creative, self-directed individuals at http://www.michaelolaf.net/google.html.
We agreed to let Aidan switch to the Montessori school and waited for the other shoe to drop. Surely he would hang out with friends from his public school and beg to go back.
That didn't happen. In fact, each day Aidan was happier than the day before. He was excited about doing a project on the history of batteries. He started spouting facts about camels as he researched desert biomes. He began taking time on homework assignments. He respected his teachers and they respected him. No more yelling, in class or out, and no more resistance to going to school.
At the end of the second week, I picked Aidan up early from school for a doctor's appointment. When I entered his Montessori classroom, I saw two middle school students lying on the floor, quietly reading. A few children were gathered around the computers. One teacher was holding a writing conference with four students at a small table. Aidan and another boy were working on math puzzles. Music played in the background. There was the blissful hum of concentrated activity.
“You seem awfully relaxed,” I noted as we walked out to the car.
“I am,” Aidan said. “Maybe it's because at Montessori they let you do math in your socks.”
I thought about this, and decided that if I had to do algebra, I'd rather do it in my socks, too.
I left the Montessori school thinking about the students seated in rows at our public school, diligently taking multiple choice tests, memorizing the names of explorers, and studying pictures of rocks and plant cells. Our public school teachers work hard to do their jobs, and students work hard to do theirs. Somehow, though, we have managed to make factories out of our schools and drain all joy out of learning.
It was well-meaning legislation, but the No Child Left Behind Act has handcuffed our public school teachers and stripped the natural curiosity and passion that all children have for learning. There should be no child left behind, yet mine nearly was.