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Happy back to school or NOT back to school week!
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 Discounted School Starter Course Extended Through Tuesday at Midnight!
Course Staring to Fill Up |
Click on the banner above to get the latest update on the Online School Starter's Course. It starts in three weeks and is offered only once a year.
It is discounted until Tuesday September 5th at midnight PST.
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If you have thought about starting your own school, you might want to take a look at a few of these examples of schools and programs that AERO has helped to start:
We started by doing an on-site consultation with a group of interested parents in Stroud. Stroud is a progressive community in western England, toward Wales. The parents built on this with the help of former Summerhill student and staff member Albert Lamb and opened A Place to Grow as a precident-setting home education center. Now, several years later and with its own building, several other groups have formed around England and elsewhere, Based on A Place to Grouw.
We started organizing
Brooklyn Free School after coming back to New York City after AERO co-hosted the International Democratic education Conference. People were saying, "Who don't we have any democratic schools in New York City?" So we started having regular meetings. We established two groups. One worked on starting a public democratic school. We created a great proposal but the school system decided not to implement it. Another group worked on starting an independent alternative with a sliding-scale tuition. We met every two weeks in apartments, churches, other spaces. This eventually led to the opening of Brooklyn Free School in 2004. The school is now going into its 14th year with 80 students, a waiting list, and its own 5 story building. The staff are paid reasonably and its graduates have been very successful.
AERO helped start Manhattan Free School which eventually evolved into the
Agile Learning Center. There are now Agile Learning Centers open or starting all around the world. One of them is the
ALC Mosaic in Charlotte, NC, also started by a student who took the AERO School Starter Course. Mosaic Founder and School Starter graduate Nancy Tilton wrote:" I'm continually amazed at what has transpired since I picked up the phone and called you in September of 2012!! I'm thrilled and grateful and happy and excited to have some articles shared about what I've learned along the way. It's amazing what you have created and done for alternative schooling." ALC Mosaic now has two campuses.
We've received many testimonials such as this:
"I took the AERO School Starter Course and now have
Iowa NET High Academy! I have graduated 13 in the past 2 years, with about 7 more finishing this summer!! Thanks for the help." Dr. Cynthia Knight, Director
Also:
"The course allowed me to feel connected with schools starters all over the world who, collectively, allowed me to be a part of a bigger community, which I needed more than I had realized." MP
"
I would recommend the school starters course if you are considering starting a school. My confidence grew throughout the course as my awareness of the possibilities grew and my thoughts crystallized around what I wanted for our school. It is really worth committing to this course early in your journey before you are overtaken by actually starting the school. I recommend using these 10 weeks as time to lay solid foundations for your project." RS
The school starter course is limited to 25 students or groups and will close when we reach that number. AERO has helped start over 100 alternatives. Click on the course to see a map of them. Again this year you can get graduate credit from Antioch University for the course. You can also pay for it in monthly installments.
We start by opening up one section at a time and guide you through the interactive process of starting a new alternative, with a peer group of others doing the same.
Register for the course
here.
Reply to this e news if you have specific questions.
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From Jamaal Bowman: An Open Letter to Black and Latino Public School Parents
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Ed: Jamaal Bowman was speaker at the recent AERO conference. The audio of his talk is available here.
Dear Parents,
I hope this letter finds you and your loved ones in good health and good spirits. I write to you as a Black man in America, and educator of almost 20 years. I grew up lower middle class to a single mom in the upper east side/east Harlem section of New York City. I have worked my entire career with Black and Latino students in K-12 settings throughout the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan in New York City. I have experience working in both district and charter schools, and I attended public schools throughout my entire life.
You can buy his Mini-Talk
here.
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| Note From Peter Gray; Lots of Audios From the AERO Conference Going Out |
Peter Gray wrote the following about the AERO Conference in his blog this week:
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Reflections from the AERO Conference
Last month several ASDE board and organizing team members attended annual conference of the Alternative Education Resource Organization (AERO). Highlights included the opportunity to gather and collaborate in person, hosting a workshop on how to talk to skeptics about SDE, and keynote speeches by two of our board members, Akilah Richards and Peter Gray. Those who attended left refreshed, energized, and even more excited to spread the word of our movement!
We have received some incredibly positive feedback about ASDE's presence at AERO. For example:
"The conference left me with new optimism that people were really starting to collaborate. Attendees seemed more interested than ever in uniting to bring about change. Previously I had felt inspired by the conference and the people I met at it, but until this year it always seemed like we were just doing our own things. Peter Gray and the Alliance for Self-Directed Education were a strong presence at the conference for a number of days and provided the kind of leadership we need to unite. AERO is selling
recordings and videos of conference presentations, and I particularly recommend the one by Akilah Richards."
You can listen to Akilah Richards' new podcast
here free.
You can get a download of her keynote
here.
You can buy Peter Gray's keynote
here.
You can get downloads of the other keynotes and minitalks
here.
We're been sending out a lot of audios of the the recent AERO Conference. You can get them as downloads, as a thumb drive, or as CDs.
Downloads of audios of any individual keynote or workshop are $5 each, including the two groups of three mini-talks.
If you want us to mail you the keynotes and/or workshops in physical form. as a thumb drive or CD, click here. If you want CDs and you do not select a total set, a
dd the quantity of the products that you want to your cart. Then write the numbers of the products from the list below that you would like in the order notes.
Click here for a list of all the presentations from the conference.
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Curious About Home-Schooling Families? Ask Them This One Question
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By
Sarah Bradley
In the time that my husband and I have been home-schooling our 6-year-old son, not once has anyone asked us about our curriculum.
Not family members, friends, our pediatrician or parents at the playground. Not even strangers in the grocery store, who wonder out loud why my son is there at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday when he "should be in school."
No one wants to know when we plan to educate him on addition and subtraction, parts of speech, the U.S. presidents or foreign language. No one asks about the time, effort and energy we expend each year dreaming up unit studies and supplemental activities. No one wonders about how many hours per day we spend on actual, sit-down instruction vs. more interactive learning.
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Why Pennsylvania Cyber Charter Schools Keep Growing
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A few weeks before the first day of school, a package arrived at eighth-grader Michael Darbous' home in Vandergrift. It was full of school supplies, and the 13-year-old student could hardly wait to tear it open.
Read the rest
here.
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| What I Know About Teaching and Learning (With Apologies to John Dewey) |
By Alan Singer
It is the beginning of the school year. Periodically I am asked, somewhat suspiciously, "What would you do if educational decisions where up to you?" I am sure they never will be, but just in case, these are my basic ideas about classroom practice. I call them "Alan's Pedagogic Creed" or basic beliefs about teaching in the age of Common Core and high-stakes testing.
I borrow the title from educational philosopher
John Dewey. Dewey, one of the most important thinkers about education in U.S. history, made a list of his basic beliefs back in the 1890s. He called it his "pedagogic creed."
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| New Democratic School Opens In Hungary |
Visit their website
here.
Here's a subtitled video about their school.
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Activity vs. "Activities"
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By Daniel Greenberg, Sudbury Valley School
It is not uncommon for people who come to an interview inquiring about enrollment to ask, "What activities do you have at Sudbury Valley?" After all, it is a school, and schools usually have, in addition to regular classes teaching the required curriculum, all sorts of activities for students to choose from. Things like athletic programs, chorus, orchestra, theater, science club, and so on. The people who ask about activities know that we do not have scheduled classes (they have come to us looking for an "alternative" or "free" school, and have found out in advance that we don't "do" the curriculum), but they expect that we at least have "activities". Otherwise, what would students do all day?
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| Banishing Fear |
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By Daniel Greenberg
I don't know why this came together for me just now, but it did. Everything simply fell into place on Tuesday night, March 10, 1992. I had completed an extraordinary novel about the Holocaust, David Grossman's book, "See Under: Love". At the very end, something clicked. It also had to do with a phone conversation with Hanna which really depressed me. She was calling from Portland, Oregon, recounting some of the difficulties the new Cascade Valley School was facing. She didn't say anything particularly upsetting, but I realized that I had really been unhappy thinking that school after school that's going to be set up along the lines of Sudbury Valley are going to go through the same problems. It was not a pleasant prospect. Here we should be exhilarated about groups starting schools all over the world, but what we're also thinking is that every place is going to have the exact same struggle. They're going to have people who won't understand the model, who will bring about deep upheavals, and so forth. We even have a similar situation right here. After twenty-four years we're still having the same kind of problems with parents, with students, with visitors. And I know that publication of our study of former students is not going to help. These realizations closed in on me, as the reality of the Portland situation made them much more immediate. Why does this have to be?
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Links and Calendar
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Ongoing
Calendar
Please send us feedback on this issue. also, we would like to have more articles written by AERO members and about AERO school and organizations.
Thank you for your ongoing support. With
your help
, we will make learner-centered alternatives available to everyone!
In Service,
Jerry Mintz
Executive Director
Alternative Education Resource Organization
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Please consider making a donation to AERO to help support our work. Thanks!
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