Schoolhouse rocked

Maureen Carey's Cambridge living room looks more like a teenage slumber party than an English class. Eight kids sprawl across the faded Oriental rugs and overstuffed armchairs in various degrees of slouch. Two huddle under blankets, and several wear knit hats, even though the room is comfortably warm. One ponytailed boy sits cross-legged on a trunk. Toe socks poke out from blue jeans and sweats, while a pile of shoes waits at the door.

Despite the blankets and the posture, this is not a sleepy bunch. Fueled by tea and homemade challah, the teens - who hail from Cambridge, Newton, even Reading - are 300 pages into Umberto Eco's weighty novel The Name of the Rose, and they're slogging forward, undaunted by the dense, medieval mystery. In this class, students never take a quiz or write a report. They don't even have homework. All the reading happens here on the second floor of Carey's multifamily house, where she's led literature classes for home-schooled students for eight years. On this winter day, 15-year-old Amos Lichtman has been reading aloud for an hour, with occasional breaks for questions, jokes, or Latin translations from Carey, who holds a readers' guide.

" 'Books are not made to be believed but to be subject to inquiry,' " reads Lichtman.

"Remember that," Carey interrupts. "One of the problems with school is you get textbooks that you're told are true, and they're not."

There's no doubt that Carey embodies counterculture of a particularly Cambridge type, with her long, gray hair, wire glasses, and lack of makeup. She's a Quaker, and a pacifist, and a staunch believer that children - not their teachers and not their parents - should be in charge of their own educations. She looks and talks like every bit the radical, but labeling her as only that would not only be too simplistic, it would ignore the fact that Carey is an iconoclastic leader of what has become an increasingly mainstream movement: home-schooling teenagers.

While the trail of modern home schooling was blazed more than 20 years ago by religious fundamentalists on the right and anti-institutionalists on the left, increasingly, as the annual costs of private schools rival college tuition and the disenchantment with public schools grows, it's middle-class parents who are choosing this path - and still sending their kids off to the same colleges as the traditionally educated. And where home schooling was once the province of only young children, more and more teenagers are skipping conventional school as well. In the past, home-schoolers were packed off to public or private school at high school age, but these days many of them are electing to extend the experience all the way through - for lack of a better word - graduation.

To be sure, as the movement has found more solid footing, its critics have become only more vocal. "People feel free to make pronouncements about home-schoolers when they've never even met one," says Carey. Those pronouncements, made by teachers, grandparents, and especially parents of conventionally schooled kids, are most often these: You can't possibly have the expertise to teach every subject; you're sheltering your children from the world; your kids will be social outcasts.

The critics' reasons are many. Some homeschoolers are driven by a deep mistrust of public schools and a lack of confidence in those schools' ability to meet the specific needs of individual children - particularly those at the gifted or special-needs ends of the educational spectrum. Some fear for children's safety against the backdrop of school shootings and violence. Others retreat from schools too focused on the MCAS tests. Many, like Carey, who refer to themselves as "unschoolers," are guided by the belief that children know best and should be empowered to follow their own educational bliss, be it nuclear physics, beekeeping, drama, or war reenactments. And many see school - with its assemblies, discipline problems, and busywork - as a waste of time, time that could be spent learning rather than waiting.

Exact numbers of home-schooled teenagers are difficult to come by. The Massachusetts Department of Education doesn't maintain statistics on home-schoolers or keep tabs on them, leaving it up to individual school districts to set local policy and keep track. "There really are so few of them," says Heidi Perlman, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education. The best guess of statewide figures comes from Tammy Rosenblatt, who runs a Salem-based business called the Family Resource Center, which coordinates museum trips and classes for homeschoolers throughout New England. Rosenblatt estimates that 20,000 children are home-schooled in Massachusetts, a number that she says reflects 25 percent growth each year since 2000. It's so hard to measure the number that a recent study by the Center for Education Research Policy at MassINC, a nonpartisan think tank, puts the range of Bay State home-schoolers somewhere between 2,300 and 20,000. If, as Rosenblatt estimates, the figure is at the high end, the number of Massachusetts home-schoolers is greater than the number of students enrolled in the state's charter schools. Nationally, the Department of Education estimated in 1999 that there were 850,000 children being schooled at home, up from 360,000 a decade earlier.

In large part, home schooling through the teen years has evolved as the home-schooling community has grown, with more voices to provide encouragement and support to one another. At the same time, a cottage industry of book publishers, online courses, museum study, and degree programs has sprung up. And entire galaxies of cyberspace are taken up with home-schooling chatrooms and websites. But perhaps most significant is where the teenaged home-schoolers are going after "graduating."

Carey's daughter, Aidin, is a freshman at Harvard on a full scholarship. She chose her hometown school over Smith, Barnard, Hampshire, and Mount Holyoke. Amos Lichtman's home-schooled older brother attends Oberlin. Former home-schoolers are at MIT, Williams, Boston University, and Brown. Admissions officers no longer look askance at these applicants. Harvard's admissions office has a liaison specifically to consult with prospective freshmen who are home-schooled. Williams College admissions officer Connie Sheehy says, "We read home-schoolers' applications just like any other application. They don't get any special consideration, but they're not discriminated against, either. Their applications are interesting, and they've certainly done independent work their whole lives." The acceptance rate of home-schoolers at Williams is 20 percent. At Harvard, the acceptance rate of the general applicant pool is about 10 percent, which mirrors the success of home-schoolers.

Perhaps not surprisingly, home schooling has gained so much momentum that a growing number of parents are exploring it for their teenagers because they see it as a way to distinguish their children in a college admissions game in which so many high-achieving applicants boast of 4.0 grade-point averages, student council and drama positions, and enough internships to fill a spiral notebook, observes Patrick Farenga, a home-schooling father from Medford. Farenga lectures and writes frequently on the topic. His most recent book, Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling, is an expansion and revision of the home-schoolers' bible, written by the late, outspoken Massachusetts education reformer John Holt.

Advocates tout the success of home-schoolers on standardized tests. A 1997 study by the nonprofit National Home Education Research Institute, which promotes home schooling, found that home-schoolers outscored public school kids by more than 30 points on standardized tests. Of course, many home-schoolers shun standardized tests, so the study has been criticized as self-selective. But in 2000, The Wall Street Journal reported that home-schoolers scored 67 points above the national average on the SAT. Updated figures are not available, however, and even those 2000 figures are open to question: The College Board, which administers the Scholastic Assessment Tests, reports that some students may have mistakenly reported themselves as home-schooled, skewing the data. All of the numbers aside, there is no disputing that good home schooling at least shares hallmarks of any good school: small student-to-teacher ratios, close attention to each student, a nurturing environment.

For many parents of teenagers - especially those who breathe a sigh of relief every morning when their defiant teenager walks out the door to high school - the thought of home schooling is about as alluring as a trigonometry midterm is to their child. But parents who home-school rarely spend the day actually sitting beside their teenager at a dining room table covered with textbooks, papers, and No. 2 pencils. Creating a one-room schoolhouse at home for his three daughters has never been Farenga's idea of home schooling. "We're not just sitting around staring at each other," he says with a laugh. "That would be hell."

Adds Rosenblatt: "We're never home, and it's not school." Frequent haunts for her children, Bryanna, 15, and Aiden, 8, are Salem's Peabody Essex Museum, the Higgins Armory Museum in Worcester, and the Museum of Science in Boston. Bryanna spent a month in Spain last year living with a family friend to top off the Spanish classes she'd been taking at North Shore Community College and Salem State. "We don't really home-school, we car-school," says Rosenblatt, who makes the common home-schooler joke that the only credential a parent needs to home-school is a driver's license. Or a T token. That's how Amos Lichtman navigates the educational maze of Greater Boston. His parents moved to Newton, in part, for its much admired public schools, but he's taken only two classes there - world history and computer science at Newton North High School. He prefers to take classes at the Harvard Extension School, where, at 15, he has half the credits he needs for a bachelor's degree.

Lanky Amos Lichtman, with mop-top brown hair and a warm smile, is hardly the shut-in many believe home-schoolers to be. He's amiable and at ease, confident and composed. Except for the absence of a traditional school day, his activities are typical of the high-achieving, college-bound set. In addition to Carey's literature seminar, he's juggling several classes at Harvard Extension, where he took his first class, in algebra, at 11. Last semester's course load included anthropology, statistics, chemistry, and a computer science class focusing on Java programming. He plays fullback in the Acton Indoor Sports soccer league. And he's a cellist in the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestras.

"I know what I'm doing educationally is sort of strange," says Amos. "But it gives me control of my schedule in a way that school kids can't have." That's allowed him to have roles in two American Repertory Theatre productions and a play at Lyric Stage Company of Boston.

"When I took classes at Newton North, the kids were really curious about what I was doing, and they were jealous that I was leaving after class at 11 a.m.," says Amos. "But I'd say, 'Yeah, but I've got class until 10 tonight.' "

Bryanna Rosenblatt says her public school friends envy her, because they all think she's home in her pajamas all day. But she keeps herself on a regular routine: up, showered and dressed by 8 a.m., tackling a curriculum of her own design. Clonlara School, a Michigan-based home-school program, offers an accredited online high school that tracks Bryanna's classes, and will provide a transcript come time to apply to college.

Home-schoolers who don't correspond with online high schools are creative in how they document what they do, so that they can demonstrate to school districts - and later to colleges - what they are learning. Many are diligent in logging daily activities, with each tallied in a different column. Playing Monopoly is math. Chess is critical thinking. Collecting stamps is history. Attending concerts is fine art. Pen pals and e-mail count as writing.

Bryanna is a pretty, ponytailed girl who likes to keep her hands jammed deep in the pockets of her black sweatshirt, emblazoned with CKY, the culty band that celebrates skateboarding, skits, and stunts. Her home-schooling experience is much more structured than her mother, Tammy Rosenblatt, had ever envisioned. Since Tammy decided to home-school Bryanna in kindergarten, she's always imagined Bryanna following her intellectual abilities

into unusual educational opportunities. But Bryanna craves structure. She found some textbook catalogs in her mother's car and insisted that she get some. And she sets aside a few hours a day to lead herself through school books about literature, science, and algebra.

"I felt like a failure when she wanted textbooks," says Tammy. "I didn't think we home-schoolers were supposed to use them. But I also know that we're supposed to be flexible."

Jen Eckard, 17, took a different route to home schooling. She grew up in public schools. But at 16 they didn't work for her anymore. She left Westfield High School after her sophomore year with a grade-point average of 3.9 and a rank of 10th in her class of 410.

Her education now revolves around North Star, a center of "self-directed learning for teens," just over the bridge from Northampton in Hadley. The eight-year-old center is the brainchild of Kenneth Danford and Joshua Hornick, two former Amherst public school teachers who were disenchanted by constraints of conventional teaching and found that kids across the academic spectrum were listless. They wanted to create a place where students could be excited about learning, and Danford sees that happening regularly among home-schoolers. "If you ask most 14-year-olds about school, they mumble something and then wish for a snow day," he says. "If you ask a home-schooler, they go on for 45 minutes."

North Star sits in an office strip mall off Route 9. Oddly, it's adjacent to a Sylvan Learning Center, which focuses on standardized test preparation and tutoring. On an icy Friday afternoon in January, North Star is buzzing with two dozen teenagers. Two are jamming on electric guitars in the lounge. Others pack up drums, rain sticks, and xylophones from a music improv class that's just ending. In a rear classroom, Danford leads 10 students in a discussion of the Vietnam War. In the kitchen, a cartoon hangs on the wall showing Auguste Rodin chipping the finishing touches on his sculpture The Thinker. In the background, Rodin's cartoon father nags, "Yeah, yeah, but what about math and science?"

North Star is a clearinghouse of information for teens - generally devotees of Grace Llewellyn's 1998 manifesto, The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education - who've opted out of high schools in the Pioneer Valley. It helps kids follow their interests at local community colleges and at the many four-year colleges in the area, especially Hampshire College and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. It offers field trips - ranging from a tour of a local food bank to a look at an organic pickle factory - and it helps students structure apprenticeships and internships in the community.

It's not a home for dropouts, even though that's what Eckard's father worries about. The center is helping Jen explore the visual arts. She has taken computer animation and acrylic painting classes at Holyoke Community College, and at North Star she takes literature, botany, and a history class called the "Rise and Fall of the American Teen." Though she's given up thoughts of conventional high school, she hasn't given up thoughts of college. She's considering MassArt and the Rhode Island School of Design.

"People who've always home-schooled don't usually come to us, because they feel they've been successful on their own," says Danford. "And we can be a difficult sell to parents and kids. The cultural message has been strong that if you don't finish high school, you're doomed." The success of North Star alums belies that idea. Nearly three-quarters of the students who come go on to four-year colleges, and some North Star veterans have ended up at Brown, Columbia, and MIT.

As home-schoolers get accepted into the Ivies and prove themselves worthy in the eyes of the mainstream educational institutions, it would seem inevitable that cultural stereotypes about them will eventually break down. But it won't happen easily. Many people just assume that home-schooled kids are awkward, antisocial, and culturally deprived because they're outside of the traditional school experience. Others criticize home-schoolers for channeling their tremendous energy for education away from the public schools. And some simply regret that the opportunity to home-school is incompatible with single-parent or dual-income families. Maureen Carey, the leader of the Cambridge literature seminar, feels the attacks from many sides. "We've been an oppressed minority for a long time," she says.

But the minority has been making strides. Though requirements vary from school district to school district, many Massachusetts towns ask for only minimal documentation of home-schoolers' curriculums. And you'll find home-schoolers playing on school sports teams across the Commonwealth, though not all districts permit this.

Patrick Farenga has been tracking the success of home-schooled teens who are now in their 20s and 30s, and he's finding that many feel pressured to excel if for no other reason than to prove that home-schooling didn't fail them. "If I do something crazy and people see I was home-schooled, they'll say, 'Oh! That's why,' " says Peter Griffin in the documentary Grown Without Schooling. A lifelong home-schooler, he's a graduate of Vassar College who went on to work in museum education in New York City.

"It's not for everyone," says John Sprague, whose two sons attended North Star and are now enrolled at Brown and the Manhattan School of Music. "You've got to have the parental support to do this. And some kids are desperate to be in the school social scene."

But Farenga concludes that that social scene, along with academic pressures, is a big turnoff for conventionally schooled kids. "Parents tend to think that sex and drugs are the big pressures for kids in high school," he says. "But that's not what the kids say." According to one 1999 study, 44 percent of high school students said their number-one pressure was to get good grades. The next biggest pressures were getting into college (33 percent) and fitting in socially (29 percent), with using drugs and having sex lagging at 19 percent and 13 percent, respectively.

What public schools teach children is how to conform, says Tammy Rosenblatt, and it's that belief fueling her continued choice to home-school her own, especially as Bryanna negotiates her teenage years. Rosenblatt acknowledges that the choice is not for everyone, but she's heartened that as more people select the home-schooling path, it is becoming a viable option.

"As we become more mainstream," says Rosenblatt, "the choice isn't just public or private school anymore. It's public school, private school, or home school."

Michelle Bates Deakin is a freelance writer living in Arlington.