I haven’t done any official polling, but I think most people agree that our current education system is broken. I’m not sure that there is any consensus on the ways in which it is broken, and I’m positive there is no agreement on how to fix it. Me, personally, I think it needs to be dismantled entirely and rebuilt from the bottom up. And, I think we missed a huge opportunity with COVID to do this. We finally saw, as a society, some of the huge problems with the system. But I think there’s one thing pretty much everyone can agree on—schools rely too much on standardized testing. We test too frequently, rely too heavily on the results, and under circumstances that are never going to accurately assess what children actually know. This issue, all by itself, is education’s biggest failure.

The point of education is to learn necessary and vital living skills and information. And the point of testing is to assess what they know, fill in the blanks, and build on that. But if the testing conditions result in children having a panic attack and being unable to answer a single question because of anxiety and sensory issues coupled with their body’s literal refusal to comply with external demands, no one will ever discover how much they know, and we destroy their self-esteem in the process. Children who receive various necessary accommodations end up testing in different rooms from other children, raising the likelihood of their peers declaring that their scores are “invalid” because they got “extra” time or other “unfair advantages.” But if the noise in the testing room is so overly distracting that I cannot hear myself think, how is providing me with a quiet room an unfair advantage? Rather, it’s the person who doesn’t need the quiet room who has an unfair advantage in this situation.

Also, why is a child’s ability to properly transfer their answers from the test booklet onto a scantron bubble sheet the final arbiter of the child’s knowledge? One miss-bubble could cause a child who answered every question correctly to end up with a failing grade. Why do we demand that third graders complete this skill under a time crunch? What if transferring all of the answers became a secondary task completed at the end of the test? Why does each section have its own time limit? Why not let kids who are great at math have some extra time to work on a more difficult language section and vice-versa?

This week I administered a standardized test to my homeschooled kiddo. We took five days. Day 1, they powered through the two reading sections. Day 2, they struggled through a single math section. Day 3, they struggled through the second math section. Day 4, we took a break. Day 5, they breezed through all four language sections. Next week, we’re going to take all of the answers they put in the test booklet and transfer them onto the bubble answer sheet. Why? Because it’s a difficult skill for them—just ask their OT. There’s absolutely no reason to ask them to do it under high-pressure circumstances. I also let them listen to music because it helped make them less anxious. And there was no chair scooting, coughing, sneezing, pencil tapping, finger drumming, loud gum chewing, or innumerable other distractions that naturally occur when you have 20 or more kids in the same room, which also improved their ability to concentrate and focus.

My role as proctor on Day 3 was less than traditional. I spent the entire time clipping the tops off and handing over a continuous supply of ice pops to keep kiddo’s blood sugar up and numb their painful teeth because they had their braces tightened earlier in the week. What do we do for the poor kid at school whose braces got tightened the week of standardized testing? Or the diabetic child who needs to eat throughout the test? These are circumstances I can easily accommodate in my home administration of the test, but which unnecessarily disadvantage students who must take the test under the rigid conditions at school. I can guarantee you that if my child was required to take a standardized test, it would in no way reveal their truest knowledge. Indeed, their standardized test scores in third grade were so low that they were placed in remedial classes—classes the teachers immediately advised were unnecessary because my child had the vocabulary and reasoning skills of an eighth grader.

But that isn’t why I homeschool my kiddo. In fact, I never intended to homeschool my kiddo. I was adamant that they were going to go to public school. I became extremely angry and frustrated when it became evident that school wasn’t working for them. My internal rant went something like this: “I had to suffer through it. We all did. It’s just the way things are.  Suck it up.” But as the demand avoidance increased and the meltdowns at home began to destroy any chance of ever having a relationship with the kiddo, it became clear that I had to adjust to who they are and how they learn, and regular school was never going to work for them.

In this way, COVID was a blessing. Watching them do school at home, I was finally able to see the mask drop and teachers and administrators finally saw the child I saw—the one that was overwhelmed and struggling to be perfect and not cause trouble, but entirely physically and emotionally dysregulated. I was soon as frustrated as my child as I tried to navigate the system to get my kiddo properly assessed and fought to get them the services to which the law entitled them, but that the school continually refused to provide. I even had to fight the school to get it to acknowledge that their own assessments revealed a need for accommodations.

Having made no progress after spending thousands of dollars on an education attorney, I began to think that homeschooling was going to be the only way to make certain that my child’s needs were met. Unfortunately, my research only left me more frustrated as I tried to navigate the statutory requirements in New York—where we lived at the time. And I say that as a licensed lawyer! Worse, the homeschooling I had been trying with my kiddo didn’t seem to be working any better. It didn’t matter what traditional or online curricula or individual books I tried, the meltdowns and refusals continued to increase.

I finally decided to have my kiddo privately assessed so that I knew how best to meet their needs and get them the physical and mental developmental supports they needed. That also took forever and cost an arm and a leg. While we waited, I decided to use that time to “unschool” my kiddo. There are lots of definitions of unschooling and lots of explanations. For us, unschooling was essentially decompression time. Demands for learning were removed to give the kiddo’s nervous system time to calm down from the perpetual fight/flight/freeze/fawn/flop responses. It gave all of us time to essentially reset and create a new foundation from which we would try to build. It also gave us space to rebuild the relationship that had been severely damaged from all of my attempts to force my kiddo to fit into the broken education system. We talked a lot and began to rebuild trust a little at a time. The more they saw me keeping my word, the more they trusted me when I said things would change.

During this time, I was also lucky enough to discover a woman who knew all about homeschooling in New York and believed strongly in child-led learning. What I learned was nothing short of life-changing. Homeschooling is not the same as doing school at home—or at least, it doesn’t have to be. Indeed, this process taught me that I had to “unschool” myself. I had to relearn that education and school are not the same. One of the best things I learned from her was how to translate everyday activities into edu-speak. I was learning almost as much as my kiddo was, because I was learning to look beneath what most people saw and describe the learning that was actually happening instead. I suddenly saw the value of play and experimentation.

When we left NY for the Midwest, we were pleased to discover that our new state didn’t have the voluminous paperwork requirements NY had, which had made certain aspects of homeschooling easier. But the homeschool system is not easy to navigate—something I think is intentional—and it’s also unavailable to too many people. I see parents posting about their neuro-diverse kiddos and the struggles they are working hard to overcome in our cookie-cutter school system that demands quiet, passive compliance more than learning anymore and I worry about how many other kids are masking at school and exploding at home, or unable to be quiet and still for the ungodly long day, losing access to recess—the one things they truly need—as punishment for their non-compliance, and receiving emotional wounds that they will carry for a lifetime. How many parents know their kids need something else but can’t give or get it for them for innumerable reasons?

• parents/guardians who can’t work from home or stop working in order to homeschool;

• broken or overly burdensome systems designed to be so complicated that people give up trying to access or continue using them;

• the inability to get the assessment services necessary to properly diagnose kiddos, whether from inordinately long waiting lists, or the cost-prohibitive nature of a private assessment

• underfunded special education systems, unable or unwilling to accept anyone but the most obviously needy children;

• school systems refusing to provide required services because they know the parents can’t afford to litigate and there are no real consequences even if the parents do;

• overworked, underpaid, and demonized teachers with unwieldy class sizes that prevent them from meeting the needs of all of their students, but who still try because they are passionate and then end up burned out

• vouchers taking much-needed funding from public schools and funneling it into the hands of private schools where there is rampant and permissible discrimination, racism, and religious indoctrination and no accountability

I don’t have any answers on how to fix this. Not yet, anyway. But I have spent so much of my own time and energy discovering the fissures and problems, I want to become a resource that allows other families to save some of their energy and resources not having to do all of this same work. So I’m exploring what that would look like.

In the meantime, I want you to imagine with me an education system where kids are excited to go each day. Where their individual needs are met so that they can become the best version of themselves. Where they are excited to learn and grow and try and fail in a safe environment. Where they aren’t funneled in any particular direction. Where they are encouraged to play, to explore, to experiment, to try. Where they are rewarded for what they learn through failure as much as they are when they get things right. Where kids who need structure and limits get it, and those who don’t can receive space without excessive regulation. I’m feeling strongly pulled to research and advocate for radical changes to our education system to make this dream a reality. If you have thoughts or ideas to share or know of resources I should investigate or tap, please let me know.