A number of years ago I was faced with the dilemma of what to do about the educational fate of my children. On the surface this seemed an odd concern. My children could not have had a better start in public school. They were succeeding academically, they were involved in extracurricular activities, they had nice friends, their teachers were great, and they got along well with all other adults at the school. So what was the problem?

The problem wasn’t so much how the children were learning; it was what they were learning. Depending on the teacher and the kinds of students in a classroom, the teaching methodology, or the how’, in any given classroom could mean either lots of hands-on projects and activities, or sitting in desks tediously filling out worksheets. Lucky for me, I had steered my children into the classrooms of the best. But how long was I going to be able to keep that up? Eventually, I knew they would get a dud and there would be little I could do about it. No, the problem seemed to arise from something deeper. It was the academic content of their education, or the what’, that I struggled with the most. Eventually, as I feared it would, it began to wear away at the children.

Educational content, I discovered, is determined by state standards. Very simply, each state holds its own standards and children are tested according to those standards. If children test well, levels of state and federal funding are made available for the school district. If they test poorly, extra funding is not available. The reasoning behind this is to give school districts an incentive to raise educational standards. Though the process has been severely criticized, most parents, like me, have asked the question: what’s wrong with school accountability? It’s a commonly known fact that American school children, as they get older, are not holding scores at the same level as other children around the globe. Then shouldn’t we check in, on occasion, with our school districts and teachers to find out what is going on in the classroom? Testing, I reasoned, should indicate that active, challenging, and inspiring learning was taking place in the classroom. But this was not the case. My child could not have scored higher on her third grade PSSA’s. Yet, every day that I picked her up from school she was tired, bored, and deflated. She constantly complained of having to repeat information already learned several grades earlier. Social studies and science (her favorite subject) were put on hold, she said, while everyone prepared for the tests. This seemed bizarre. Wasn’t it possible to practice good reading and writing skills across disciplines? When the opportunity to spend time in the classroom presented itself to me I was amazed at how simple and dull the classroom content was. No one, not especially those struggling with learning, could find this interesting. How could this be?

There are many reasons why public education has evolved to its present state but they would require lengthy analysis and are beyond the scope of this article. A quick glance through the state standards, however, may provide some insight into to the problem as well as some explanation as to why I eventually removed my children from public school and created an educational alternative that is, today, growing quicker than I had imagined possible.

The outline of academic standards for Pennsylvania school children by grade 3, 5, 8 and 11 is long, wordy, and vague about what is to be learned.
Below is an example taken from Academic Standards for Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening.

1.3 Reading, Analyzing and Interpreting Literature
A. Read and understand works of literature.
B. Identify literary elements in stories describing characters, setting and plot.
C. Identify literary devices in stories (e.g. rhyme, rhythm, personification).
D. Identify the structures in poetry (e.g. pattern books, predictable books, nursery rhymes).

And here are the same standards for 5th grade:

A. Read and understand works of literature.
B. Compare the use of literary elements within and among texts including characters, setting, plot, theme and point of view.
C. Describe how the author uses literary devices to convey meaning.

• Sound techniques (e.g. rhyme, rhythm, meter, and alliteration).
• Figurative language (e.g. personification, simile, metaphor and hyperbole)

D. Identify and respond to the effects of sound and structure in poetry (e.g. alliteration, rhyme, verse form)

There is no indication in the outline itself of what pieces of literature are to be taught or what poems are to be analyzed. Consequently, these choices are left to individual teachers or any particular reading basal chosen by each school district. And, as can be seen by the above outline, not much changes between the expectations of a 3rd grader and those of a 5th grader. Personification can be found in adventures about a frog and a toad no matter how old you are. The standards themselves give no solid guidelines to specific content requirements for each year. Consequently, with the pressure to bring children in a classroom – regardless of their individual abilities – to an arbitrary level of mastery in reading, writing and math, teachers and school districts make content choices that will ensure each child has a fighting chance at passing the necessary tests. Who can blame them, then, if they present children in the classroom with simplified, easy to understand, dummied-down books or reading texts? At least now everyone can identify Susie’s pet cat as having human-like qualities. But how many times can we expect children to read about Susie and her pet cat before they die of boredom?

Instinctually, we’re not wrong in believing that accountability in education is a good thing. But the current method of testing children on ambiguous curriculum content guidelines is driving children away from learning. Both the quick and the struggling learner are bored and frustrated as they each must buckle down in order to achieve that common denominator. When children get older, they become less interested in learning and more distracted by social concerns or outside school activities that have little bearing on academics. The ramifications of this are revealed in the upper grades. High school drop-out rates across the nation are ridiculously high for a country where, as one radio commentator put it, “today, you need a college degree just to get a job as a dishwasher”. Teachers are also struggling. Recent statistics show that the national average of teacher turnover is five years. With minimal administrative support, low wages, and unrealistic teaching expectations, it is little wonder anyone would remain in the teaching profession. On top of this, we ask our educational system to do work it was never designed to do. We ask teachers and schools to discipline children when it’s lacking at home, we ask them to tend to the medical care of children, to feed them, to keep them out of gangs and off drugs, to be on the lookout for unsafe home environments, and to take valuable time out of school operation to deal with these social needs. How long can this go on before our overtaxed public education system implodes? And what can we do for our children today?

This was the challenge that confronted me several years ago as I watched my daughter’s enthusiasm for learning evaporate. I discovered that I was not alone. I met other parents who talked of the same struggles and concerns. Most had taken active roles in their children’s schools to try to instill change – a garden plot for a kindergarten class, regular attendance at school board meetings, volunteering hours in the classroom, organizing assemblies – with disappointing results. Eventually a group of concerned parents, some with teaching degrees, began meeting regularly to explore the possibility of stepping away from public school. Many meetings took place with many hours of discussion contemplating problems, solutions, curricula, and systems. But the task seemed too overwhelming, too time consuming and too scary for most and our group ultimately whittled down to two.

Though we were small we were undaunted in our determination to seek out an alternative for our children. For two years we researched educational models in an attempt to find one that would function best in our community and for our children. We looked at the structure of charter schools, private schools, magnet schools, home schooling, and combinations of the above. We studied books, essays, and articles to learn about the history of American education and to find out what was happening in schools around the country. We visited private schools, charter schools, and home schooling settings. We were amazed at what we saw: a science class in the creek dipping buckets into water to explore aquatic micro-organisms; a second grade water color class outside in the rain observing how rain drops splattered paint across the page; a 9 year-old and her mother sitting quietly in the forest composing a list of adjectives describing the sounds of nature for her poetry class; local and state politicians visiting a 5th grade classroom and the class composing opinion pieces about their favorite political candidates; children as young as 5 learning a foreign language; 10 year olds reading and discussing Tom Sawyer (not the abridged version); and an 11 year-old organizing a community-wide recycling program as part of his social studies and English requirements for home schooling. The list goes on. We were astounded. These children were not exceptional; these were not activities set aside for the gifted or the special needs children. These were the typical activities of all children in the classroom or at home. And guess what? Their test scores were not negatively impacted. In fact, these children were thriving.

A vision began to emerge the more we studied and contemplated. We knew we wanted a solid challenging curriculum taught by adults knowledgeable in content areas, but more importantly, we wanted teachers who were passionate about the subjects they were teaching. All of the successful learning environments that we observed had two main features. First, children responded enthusiastically and eagerly to learning when the adults in front of them, parents or teachers, were on fire about what they taught. Secondly, both private and public schools were successful when parents played an active role in the organizational process. It became clear to us that parents had to take an active role within our educational model. From everything that we had seen in our visits to home schooling environments, parents were more than qualified to take on the job as teachers. Participating families would have to agree to take full responsibility for the supervision of their children’s education and in turn we could create a structure that would give them the educational objectives they needed, the curriculum for those objectives, a classroom schedule, and the space to conduct the classes. In the end, the parents would need to get back into the drivers seat and reclaim control over their children’s learning.

Our educational structure began to emerge in the form of a home school cooperative. In 2004, The Noble Project Inc., a not-for-profit corporation, whose goal was to provide community educational alternatives, was born. The Noble Project would supply a building, provide a curriculum, structure regularly scheduled classes, hire certified teachers or tutors to fill vacant teacher positions, and organize extracurricular academic classes for anyone in the community. Parents of the cooperative would pay a tuition fee and would give a set amount of hours per week to the co-op. Their responsibilities would include assisting in the organization of the structure, maintaining it, and teaching core content classes. In the fall of 2004 our school opened its doors to seven children in grades and 3 participating families. Membership has expanded every year and this fall we have 15 children and 9 participating families.

We chose E.D. Hirsh’s Core Knowledge curriculum outline because of its rich, challenging, sequential content and its easily available resources for parents and teachers. Core Knowledge, we knew, would give us the content guideline we needed, but would allow us to determine the best methods for teaching the material. Children would study language arts, math, history, geography, science, and art history as soon as they started first grade along with a foreign language. Our goals were high but after witnessing schools and home schools where this type of learning was taking place, we knew it was not unrealistic. We also made sure to accommodate for plenty of scheduled playtime, additional classes in music, theater, and dance, and lots of opportunities for field trips to museums, art galleries, science centers, nature centers, and parks, to name a few.

Community support for our project since its inception has been remarkable. St. Barnabas Episcopal church, on Main Street in Kutztown, has leased us its fellowship hall for a reasonable fee and has been instrumental in supporting and promoting our organization. Professors and students from Kutztown University have held workshops, taught classes, and led field trips. Interns from Rodale have shared slide shows and have shown us how to build and maintain organic gardens. Local businessmen and women, artists, writers, historians, musicians, authors and illustrators have either visited us or welcomed us into their offices or studios while organizations such as Borough Hall, the library, the post office, the police station and the fire company have played key roles in teaching the children about our community and the people who run it.

Children at The Noble Project are flourishing. They are learning about the world, about their communities and about themselves. They travel to creeks and streams to explore water ways, they learn to play musical instruments, they build Viking ships, and they put on plays about Greek mythological characters. They cook food from ancient Mayan civilizations, they study Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam, they learn folk dances, and they perform edited versions of Shakespeare’s plays. They read Charlotte’s Web, Tom Sawyer, and Sherlock Holmes – the unabridged versions – and no one tells them they can’t. They write in all disciplines and they recite poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Blake, and Ogden Nash.

The Noble Project has been successful but it would be misleading to make one think it is an easy process. Parents in the co-op work very hard to organize instruction and to teach classes. Self-sacrifice is evident in the hours spent gathering materials and preparing for the academic classes. But the work comes with highly rewarding outcomes as we watch the children engaged and excited about what they are learning. So we struggle to be better organizers of our personal time and better communicators with each other in an effort to give the children the best possible education that we fundamentally we hope every child in America could have. And maybe someday after more community groups like The Noble Project are formed to do the same for other children in other parts of the country, we’ll have the guts as a nation to stand up to all that doesn’t work in public education. Then maybe we can give it back the job it was always intended to do: teach children.

For more information about The Noble Project, contact Jane Ferreira at thenobleproject@hometownu.com or call 484-646-9655.