Introducing The Spruce School
I’m starting a new school in Denver, and I’d love for you to join me. This long post explains my thinking. If you’d like to talk about enrolling your 3-6 year old for preschool this fall, working together, suggest a reading, or anything else, please email me at emily@spruceschool.org.
Imagine standing at the peak of a mountain in a range of other mountains and looking out. You can tell that there are other mountains taller than yours, and through the fog you can see imposing mountains of unknown height, but you will need to go down if you move in any direction. A mathematician would say that you are at a local maximum, but not a global maximum. A backpacker would say, “adventure awaits!”
I am both.
I am starting a new school. I am starting from scratch because I believe we are near a local maximum in our traditional schools; that is, we don’t offer an ideal education to children right now and any earnest tweaks of just one of the structural factors that influence that outcome are painful and ineffective. The vast majority of practitioners and outside experts are well meaning but making big changes within complex systems is hard. I suspect that using what we’ve learned from the past decades of schooling (and millennia of learning) to significantly change these structural factors en masse rather than individually and incrementally will let us realize stronger outcomes for our students. Extending the metaphor, to reach a new height, I propose we teleport to a taller mountain, rather than hike.
Taller, in my metaphor, is some metric of goodness of schools that reasonable (and unreasonable) people can argue about, both in shape and in how to measure it. Outside of the fringe, most of these arguments are quibbles. Some quibbles are useful, and I am an active advocate for the fringe. I also recognize the value of pragmatism when approaching a system so large and important as our education system, and believe that informed, honest, mainstream participants largely point to a similar sense of goodness that includes but is not limited to academic performance. Many states use an index that measures “College, Career, and Civic Readiness” in an attempt to measure how well schools prepare children to participate in the adult world that awaits them, whether their entry point is formal post-secondary education or not.
I am interested in quibbling on both my definition of goodness for schools and my implementation in the pursuit of it; my goal for my school today is to preserve optionality for children while supporting a happy and healthy childhood. Preserving optionality means that children are prepared for independent self-determinism as adults. I will write more about this in the future, and I expect my definition and implementation to evolve as the “adult world” also evolves. For now, for elementary schoolers, I believe there is a minimal set of academic skills and content knowledge as well as executive skills and metacognition that kids are at a significant disadvantage if they don’t have access to. The size of this disadvantage stems from a combination of regular demands for use (it is hard to navigate the world well if you cannot compare two quantities in the grocery store and decide which is larger, or read the directions in a recipe) and relative difficulty in acquiring the skill later (learning to read as a canonical example).
Enough math, reading, and writing skills to navigate public life independently, paired with the genuine curiosity, confidence, and ability to learn anything new is both an ideal and an attainable academic outcome for children to reach by age 12. That’s obviously not to say they shouldn’t learn anything else. Learning to learn does not happen in the abstract. The rest of the skills and content children learn ought to be driven by their own interests and motivations.
Setting our academic bar here requires us to acknowledge that we don’t currently treat learning like a black hole; we don’t actually hope that kids learn as much as humanly possible during their childhood. The admission that they are only expected to learn a limited set of content and skills allows us to ask the pose the thought experiment: how much time do children need to spend learning this academic core? Divorcing the answer from society’s real need for childcare, I think the answer is something like an hour a week of one-on-one, direct instruction.
That’s not a lot of time at all, and I share it both because I believe it, and because it’s provocative enough to make clear the paradigm shift I want to enact. Most of children’s day should not be spent in “classes” as we picture them today; instead, the bulk of their day should be spent in child-led play and discovery as well as working on projects that connect them and their learning to the real world. They should build garden beds, calculate how much soil they’ll need, test its pH, and debate which plants they should grow. They should write a play, sell tickets and decide how to use a budget, figure out how to cast it fairly, and trade tips on memorizing lines. They should run around outside and invent elaborate pretend games while getting the proprioceptive input their brains are craving. The things one child is doing in a day should look meaningfully different than what another child is doing because every child is unique. How can we make this work?
Most elementary school kids are in school 30-35 hours a week in the United States, and most elementary school classes have 20-25 kids in them. Many schools have at least a part time assistant in classes as well as dedicated teachers for physical education, art, and/or science. At one hour of one-on-one core academic instruction per week, perhaps you can see where this resourcing arithmetic is going. A teacher can focus on efficient instruction that is paced appropriately for each individual child while another supports on the rest of the group as they work on projects and play.
I would want to create such a space for my own child, but the powerful opportunity for me is creating a framework with sane defaults (How many children in a room? Who are the adults? What time should school start? How does summer work?) ready for thoughtful modification within local contexts formed in relationship between children, families, teachers, the community, and constraints. I am pursuing this because I think this is something that can work in much of the United States without significant changes to the amount of funding we already spend and without sneakily selecting an already likely-to-be-high-performing student population.
Some back of the envelope math follows. I expect the greatest costs for starting this to be salaries and real estate (noting that capital expenses like these are not typically well represented in annual per pupil funding):
A ratio of 2 adults to 14 children seems like a good default for ensuring kids can stay safe and engaged but still have enough play and project partners.
In Denver, where I live, the district spends about $10,000 per student per year.
In Denver, like most places in the US, teacher pay depends on years of experience and educational attainment. The median pay is about $55,000.
In my neighborhood, a good retail space retails for ~$25/sq ft/year. 1000 sq ft for two adults and fourteen children is not unreasonable.
At $55,000 * 2 + $25,000 = $135,000. That puts us uncomfortably close to the $140,000 we’d expect at local public school rates, but it isn’t damning. It is close enough that summer and vacation camps, renting the space to adult classes at night, and other creative income sources can confidently cover benefits, utilities, materials, insurance, and everything else not represented on the back of this envelope. It’s enough to pursue sustainably in the short term and, more importantly, points to the feasibility of 1:1 time at scale in the long term.
There is a growing blueprint being developed for “microschools” that this work intends to contribute to. Some microschools are purpose-built for children with a specific learning style or need, some have evolved from religious-minded homeschooling, and others connect kids with a specific interest with an adult with that expertise. I am interested in moving the microschool from an alternative school for children and families whose needs cannot be met elsewhere to a feasible strategy for improving the outcomes of our public schools.
I hope that you will join me on this adventure. Here’s my current plan:
Stage 1: Jump start! I’m opening an in-home preschool in order to begin this work today. If you have a child between the ages of 3-6 in Denver and are interested in enrolling them in the first class of students (or you know another family who does), please reach out. I am in the Baker neighborhood and am actively in the licensing process. I expect to be licensed by September 2022.
Stage 2: Learn and grow! I’m looking for the right location and will move the program into it as soon as possible, but by August 2023. I’d like to find a beautiful space that children in the city can walk to and has wonderful outdoor access. I’m open to purchasing or leasing space, and am not committed to finding a forever home for the school today. I intend to grow up with the same group of kids, which would mean adding more students in the 4-7 age group for the ’23-’24 school year. This would also represent a transition legally from childcare to private school.
Stage 3: Share what works! Using the framework of “sane defaults with thoughtful modifications,” I expect it will take several years to find out which set of defaults is indeed sane and what thinking is most useful for which modifications. The purpose of all of this is to offer a better education to all children, so I will openly share this discovery process. I’ll continue the school as both a lab to continue to learn from internally and a “city on the hill” to demonstrate those learnings externally. I am not sure what the final end state is: every public school is retrofitted to support smaller groups? Bill Gates endows a network of tuition-free private schools? The playground becomes the defining feature of the elementary school?
I expect The Spruce School to be my life’s work. The future is full of possibility and I am so excited for all we will accomplish together.