Homeschooling Leaves Home: A Resource Center for Teens Who Choose to Leave School

Elizabeth arrives at 9:00 and together we go upstairs to the tiny room with comfortable chairs, a bookcase, art postcards on the walls. We walk past a few other teenagers who are curled up reading, or sprawled out on the couches getting the morning sleep that they missed at home because they wanted to grab the ride that would get them here early. We smile good morning at the small group about to begin its arcane discussion of Logic principles. It's still quiet here at this hour, but there's a nice feeling of easing into the day.

Elizabeth and I talk for a few minutes about where she is in the story she's writing and what might happen next. She spends some time writing a new scene, offers to show me what she's written, and we talk some more.

The day continues like this, with me welcoming one teenager after the other into this small, comfortable room. There's Christopher, who has hated school since kindergarten and whose writing and reading aren't at grade level; here he dictates his writing, and listens as I read aloud, finally getting a chance to absorb a book that challenges and moves him. There's Josephine, who doesn't just talk about writing a novel but actually works on it several hours a day; there's Jackie, who declares that she isn't good at anything academic but will offer astute observations and analyses if you toss the right questions her way. And once a week, in a larger room across the hall, there's the workshop of young writers, ranging in age from 14 to 17, who come together to write.

This is my particular corner of North Star, a resource center that offers an alternative to middle and high school for teenagers in Western Massachusetts. As its literature says, North Star makes homeschooling a viable option for any interested teenager in the geographic area. But doesn't homeschooling mean parents teaching their own kids at home? What does a center like this have to do with homeschooling?

New Definitions

Ever since homeschooling began to come to public attention in the late 1970s, many of the people engaged in it have wished for a less misleading name for what they do. "I don't spend all my time at home and a lot of what I do doesn't look anything like school," was -- and still is -- a common lament of homeschoolers trying to explain that they don't spend their days sitting at the kitchen table working out of workbooks while their mothers hover over them monitoring their assignments. Yet for most of the years that I edited Growing Without Schooling, a national magazine founded by the writer and education critic John Holt (best known for his book How Children Fail), that photo of children doing schoolwork at the kitchen table was the one that newspapers routinely wanted to use as an illustration of homeschooling, even if they had to stage it to get it.

By now, the word "homeschooling" is solidly entrenched in the English language. It's the legal term that describes parents' choice to educate their children themselves rather than by sending them to any kind of school. Most colleges provide "homeschooler" as an option for applicants to check when indicating their background, and these days listeners will generally give a nod of recognition, rather than a blank stare, when they hear the word. (It caused a lot of laughter in the homeschooling community when, in the 2004 movie Mean Girls, the girl at the top of the high school social hierarchy snaps impatiently, "I know what homeschooling is!")

Yet even with all these indicators that the term has entered fully into the public consciousness, there are still, in some ways, as many misconceptions about homeschooling as ever. Families whose children are unhappy in school don't consider trying homeschooling, even though it is legal in every state, because they fear that they would have to give up their jobs and become full-time teachers, or that they don't know enough -- especially about the harder, high school subjects -- to teach their children, or that homeschoolers never meet or socialize with other kids, or won't be able to get into college, or will be isolated from the real world. Less obviously but often just as pervasively, parents imagine that their children are not the type to homeschool, particularly that they are not self-motivated.

Gathering Resources Together

By providing services that address or eliminate these concerns, North Star makes the homeschooling choice feel possible to families who might otherwise have ruled it out. It offers a place to go during the day, help in developing a homeschooling plan, mentors and tutors and classes, a place to meet and hang out with other teenagers, connections to internships and apprenticeships, and myriad other kinds of help in navigating life outside of school. But in addition to gathering together all these resources, North Star serves as a kind of halfway house, a transition point both physical and psychological, between school and the vast and often frighteningly uncharted territory of growing without schooling.

A useful analogy is a health club, a YMCA, where one joins by paying a flat membership fee and thereby gains access to a range of offerings to take advantage of as one wishes, without tests or prerequisites or evaluation at the end. To join North Star, a teenager's family pays an annual membership fee (and North Star turns no one away who can't afford the full fee of $4,000 a year), but how each teenager uses that membership varies. There's a full calendar of weekly classes. Teenagers meet individually with adults to study Chinese or music composition or the Vietnam war or poetry. They also meet individually with adults to talk about what they want to do with their lives, right this moment and into the future; they talk about what they want to learn or do and, with help, they figure out what might make that possible and what, externally or internally, might be getting in the way.

Two full-time and three part-time staff members provide much of the adult continuity and decision-making, teach some of the classes, and meet individually with members and families. About two dozen other adults, many of them college students, come in to teach a class, offer a workshop, or tutor a teenager in a particular area of interest.

North Star was founded by two middle school teachers who wanted to work with young people in a different way. One is now the Executive Director; the other is president of the board. Their conventional education background reassures some concerned parents and carries a natural credibility for the teenagers; if these guys could take the risk of leaving school for a new, less charted landscape, maybe a teenager can, too.

The adults who come in to teach a single class or tutorial are not necessarily certified teachers, though. Like those who teach at community centers or centers of adult education, the teachers at North Star offer to teach what they know and love and want to share with teenagers. The senior staff has to be ready to supervise and answer the many questions of these less experienced colleagues. But without a specific curriculum that must be covered, and with such a small group of students who are there only because they want to be, the teachers have a built-in feedback mechanism and a good opportunity to figure out, together with the teenagers, what will be the best and most helpful use of their time.

Taking the Leap

By design, North Star is open only four days a week, and few members spend four full days there anyway. The idea is for North Star to be a base from which to explore the rest of the world. But North Star is also a welcoming social space where the members can spend time during the day, hanging out, falling into spontaneous and wide-ranging conversations, getting ideas from what they overhear others talking about. In this way, it's like an old-fashioned public square, where people can show up without necessarily having a firm idea of what they hope or expect will happen, but where they can fairly reliably count on running into other people and where something interesting will be very likely to happen.

From the start, the two founders of North Star have been interested in its being a model that others could replicate elsewhere. There are by now many homeschool co-ops and support groups, and a few have a physical gathering space of their own (though this might be shared space, such as a room in a church that the group uses weekly). North Star's fully staffed, regularly open building is unusual, as is its focus on helping people currently enrolled in school to take the leap and leave. Offering group activities and resources to already committed homeschoolers is one thing; helping people in school feel confident enough to make a major change, despite skepticism from others and their own fears and worries, is another project altogether.

But just as North Star has learned over its twelve years of operation how to increase the likelihood of a family's feeling ready to take this leap, so has the organization gradually learned how to help others to replicate its model. After a replication workshop held at North Star in the summer of 2007, one similar group is about to launch in urban Philadelphia and others are in some stage of thinking, researching, or planning.

Part of the challenge for potential replicators is the challenge of achieving financial stability. North Star succeeded at the start not only because its founders were willing to take the creative risk involved but also because they were able to live on personal savings for a while and draw only the most minimal of salaries. Even today, with staff now being paid a living wage, balancing the budget is a continual challenge. Coming up with creative fundraising and outreach efforts takes a lot of staff and board time.

Plenty of Motivation

However the parents and their individual teenagers approach homeschooling, and in whatever ways they view North Star as helping them to make that choice, leaving school for a self-directed life inevitably shakes up previous assumptions and reconfigures teenagers' sense of themselves and of what is possible. Routinely, we see a teenager who never thought of herself as college bound now taking community college classes and dreaming of law school down the road. Or an A student who felt anxious and depressed in a high-pressure high school environment now relaxed and eager to get up in the morning. Those who don't learn well through classes set up several individual tutorials instead. Those who thought of themselves as unmotivated discover that they're plenty motivated if they're working on something they really care about. Rather than assuming that what someone achieves in a school setting is an absolute predictor of what they can do in a very different kind of setting, North Star offers young people the chance to change a few variables and see what happens.