Higher Education [Brooklyn Free School]

by Aaron Gell

[see www.brooklynfreeschool.org for more information]

On a Wednesday morning in November, the weekly Democratic Meeting of the Brooklyn Free School, a progressive private school housed in a Methodist church in Park Slope, is called to order. The school's thirty-five kids, ranging in age from 5 to 16, and several teachers and volunteers sit in a circle on metal folding chairs in the "big room," as the agenda turns to a crucial issue. "I've had a bunch of people come up to me and say, 'I'm so bored, 'I need something to do,'" begins Sophie, a sage, dark-haired girl of 14, who is inexplicably wearing a pair of butterfly wings, "and I've felt it myself, so I just wanted to open it up for discussion, ways to, basically, alleviate boredom."

This is no small matter for BFS, a self-described "democratic, free school," at which boredom is not so much a minor annoyance as a pedagogical imperative. Located in the lower floors of a nondescript Methodist church on the edge of Park Slope, BFS, which is now in its second year of operation, is the city's most radical school—a romantic gamble on the idea of laissez-faire learning and an audacious repudiation of the current preoccupation for standards and testing. At a time when the federal government is imposing national achievement guidelines through the No Child Left Behind Act, and Mayor Michael Bloomberg has just coasted to reelection after his implementation of even tougher policies—a regimented curriculum, carrot-and-stick system of performance goals, and a steady diet of high-stakes tests—children attending the BFS can theoretically go for weeks, or even years, without ever laying eyes on a sharpened No. 2 pencil or one of those fearsome grids of ovals. They are not graded, ranked or formally evaluated in any way. The only homework they're liable to get is the kind that their nervous parents take it upon themselves to assign them. And they're not required to attend classes. Ever. Instead, students are encouraged to design their own educations, or not to, as the case may be. The idea being that real learning only occurs when it's self-directed and "non-coercive," rather than imposed from on high—which, it turns out, can occasionally make for some very long days, as kids try to figure out just what, exactly, they want to do.

Not that there's any shortage of options. Sophie, for instance, is in the process of casting a student production of Macbeth. The school's principal and founder Alan Berger offers classes in Japanese and cheese-tasting (last year, the students sampled 80-some varieties, and Berger threw some geography, biology and chemistry into the bargain). Children made soap. There is an active book club, which spent September discussing Jon Stewart's America. There are video production workshops, classes in philosophy (Plato's Euthyphro, anyone?), psychology, sociology, astrology, business, film-appreciation, storytelling, circus arts and current events, many of them initiated and, in some cases, taught by the students themselves (15-year-old Nick's course on Tibet is one of the best attended). There also seems to be a lot of tag, sword-fighting, maintenance of MySpace homepages, wandering around and napping. One morning early in the year, I nearly get beaned by a tube sock—collateral damage in a game called Asoxination (participants stalk and assassinate opponents by walloping their targets with athletic socks). All of it, Berger insists, is learning; all of it valid. "We try not to pass judgment," he says with a smile.

New York City currently has hundreds of independent schools offering a wide range of teaching styles. But according to Victoria Goldman, coauthor of the Manhattan Directory of Private Schools, BFS is off the charts. "This is extreme," she says. "It's left of left." Indeed, the school traces its philosophical lineage to the work of progressive educators John Dewey and A.S. Neill—whose 1960 best-seller, Summerhill: An Approach to Childrearing, sparked a wave of free schools across the country—institutions offering various degrees of "child-centered" learning, many of them run on democratic principles. But the emphasis on individual responsibility might better be described as libertarian than liberal, "accountability" taken to an extreme. In any event, there's little doubt that it's as revolutionary an approach to education as currently exists in New York—a fundamental reordering of what it means to teach, and to learn.

Student empowerment at BFS is not limited to how kids spend their own time. To a large degree, they run the institution themselves through the weekly Democratic Meetings, at which nearly every element of the school's day-to-day management—from behavioral issues to admissions criteria—can be brought up, debated and put to a vote, with even the very youngest children having a say equal to that of the teachers and principal (parents get a vote as well, but only if they volunteer at least one day per week).

One of the more hotly contested issues last year was the playing of videogames on the school's three donated computers. Over a period of several months, a Talmudic set of guidelines evolved. One rule mandated that games only be played on certain computers. Another limited play to particular times of day, with sign-up sheets and half-hour increments. When it was later established that scholarly research should take precedence over more frivolous uses, a new regulation had to be adopted to allow gamers a three-minute grace period before getting kicked off.

Chairing the Democratic Meeting today is the budding Tibet scholar Nick, a confident young man with an impatient leadership style, a riotous tangle of hair, and a standard wardrobe of black tights, a velvet blazer and a long woolen scarf. Attendance at this meeting, unlike classes, is mandatory, but paying attention is not, and an inseparable trio of little girls, Sienna (5), Winny (7) and Lila (6), take the opportunity to draw pictures and munch cantaloupe. Five-year-old Noah, who wears his hair in a huge fro and is rarely seen without a Superman cape, works on catching dust motes in his mouth like a goldfish. Orion, a dreamy, long-haired boy of nine, digs in a bottle of frozen rootbeer with a knife. And Amiri and Rah, 11-year-old twins, play quietly with train tracks, something they've been doing for the better part of each day for weeks now, to the alarm of their mother. Nick opens the issue of boredom to discussion. Hands go up. "Contrary to popular belief," notes Silvan, 15, one of the school's elder statesmen, "boredom is always self-inflicted. The best cure is to just force yourself to do something, anything, no matter what. Go for a walk, choreograph a musical, anything. Just do something."

A few of the little kids glance up at this impassioned oratory, and several older students thrust a hand out, palm down, and wiggle their fingers—a special signal of their agreement. But Nick stakes out the traditionalist position. "I actually think the school has some real guilt in this," he says. "Some students here haven't been exposed to enough to necessarily know what we want to learn. And I realize it's the BFS philosophy, but the idea that all the impetus should come from a child who doesn't know even what he doesn't know seems like, basically, a total fantasy."

"I just want to say, there's nothing wrong with being bored," offers teacher David Easton, 26, an idealistic refugee from New York's teaching fellows program. "In fact, it's actually the first step in figuring out what you really want to do."

Nick turns to Sophie. "So, is there a proposal, or did you just want to open the discussion?" he asks.

"Well, I guess I would propose we come up with a list of things to do," she ventures, "suggestions for when someone's bored that we can post on the wall."

"A bored board!" someone says. The motion carries by a wide margin.

Of course, boredom in children is not limited to those who attend BFS. My own daughter, who is also, coincidentally, named Sophie, occasionally suffers from this malady at her own, more traditional public school, where she is in third grade. P.S. 107 is a small, cozy place, with a well-regarded principal and steady buzz as one of the district's more desirable public schools. Sophie has done well there and is reasonably cheerful about strapping on her bone-crushingly heavy backpack every morning and tackling her homework each night, which, I figure, is pretty much the most a father can hope for.

Still, like many parents, I was intrigued when flyers began appearing around the neighborhood advertising a new private school featuring an "active, flexible, and individually structured environment," "planned and spontaneous excursions and projects" and a priority on "social and emotional learning." And like many parents, I reread the part about there being "No tests, grades, homework, mandatory curriculum or age segregation" in open-mouthed disbelief. The child-rearing style of the day is built on structure, jam-packed schedules and anxiety, in light of which, the sort of do-your-own-thing approach practiced by the Brooklyn Free School sounds like something out of Lord of the Flies or Peter Pan's Never Neverland, an invitation to graffiti-covered walls, upended desks, marauding teens—the law of the blackboard jungle.

But such a mindset, Berger tells me a few days into the school year, is precisely what's wrong with New York's public education system. The entire edifice, he argues, is built on a deep-seated suspicion of the kids in its care, an unspoken operating premise that, in essence, children are savages that can only become civilized through constant supervision, routine and discipline. "There are all sorts of structures put into place to control kids," he explains, sitting behind a desk in the office he shares with the church pastor. "So they spend a lot of time and energy trying to beat the system." While admitting that students in more traditional schools may be more proficient at certain skills, he adds, "There's no reason a child of seven, eight, nine needs to know the particular content they're being drilled on. If you learn how to learn, you can always pick up the content later."

Berger regards the usual way of educating children as so toxic, so antithetical to the natural learning process, that he never even bothers to look at the transcripts of BFS applicants. Unlike many private schools, BFS does not base acceptance on academic achievement (much less test scores or recommendation letters), and many of the students I talked to say they turned to the school only after experiencing difficulty in more conventional settings, ranging from overcrowded public schools to exclusive academies like York Prep and St. Ann's. A good student for years, Gabrielle, 16, was a sophomore at John Dewey High School in Gravesend, Brooklyn, when she began to fall behind. "I literally just couldn't keep up," the perceptive red-head says. "There's so much pressure, all these exams you have to take, and if you don't do well on them they tell you, 'That's it, that's the end, you've lost your chance to get into a good college.' I pushed myself, but I could only push myself so far." The stress became so unbearable for her, she began skipping school altogether. "Gaby wouldn't talk about what was bothering her," remembers her father, Richard Lipner, a financial proofreader, "but she just refused to go." After six weeks, BFS parent Corinne Goodman, who taught an extracurricular drama program Gabrielle had attended, suggested she visit BFS. "She called me that afternoon, and I could just tell," Richard says. "She snapped back to herself. It was sort of miraculous." Gabrielle, who'd never been one of the cool kids at John Dewey, remembers feeling welcome immediately. "People talked to me," she says with a smile. She took up creative writing, something she'd had little time for at her old school, and began studying psychology with Lily Mercogliano, 22, one of the BFS instructors. One of her major interests at the moment is prison welfare (a telling choice, perhaps), and Mergogliano is planning a field trip to a local penitentiary. Asked what she'd do if BFS didn't exist, Gabrielle takes a deep breath. "I'm afraid to think about that," she says.

For David Johnston, a shaggy-haired, easy going 11-year-old, who often chairs the Democratic Meeting, the difficulties began shortly after he entered second grade at the Brooklyn New School, one of the more progressive in the city system. "Basically, he hated it," says his mother, Randi Karr, recalling endless battles over homework. "He would say he's stupid and the worst kid in the class," she continues, "and it would just break my heart, because I knew he was really smart." Indeed, David scored well on standardized tests, but again, the pressure was too much. "When I dropped him off in the morning, he'd be crying hysterically, and I would sit there crying myself," Karr recalls. "It was killing me." BFS marked a turning point for David as well. "Last year he had chicken pox, and he was dying to get back to school," she says. "Things like that just make you so happy."

Talking to other BFS parents, a high percentage of whom seem to be educators themselves, I heard the same thing over and over—stories of bright, and often brilliant, children who'd simply shut down in the face of the increasingly rigid school environment. Gabe, a highly intelligent 14-year-old with a dandelionlike pouf of hair and a sharp comedic delivery, was diagnosed early on with dysgraphia, and has thrived at BFS after bitter struggles at top-notch public schools like P.S. 321 and the School for Collaborative Studies. After his first day at BFS, he excitedly listed the afternoon's activities for his mother, Brooke Russell: cooking, playing outside and Gabe's choice, acting out Monty Python skits. "I said to myself, Gee, I really have my kid in the right school!" Russell remembers. "Honestly, though, it has turned out to be the best thing that has happened in his life."

Even for kids who excelled in a more structured environment have been attracted by BFS's more open approach. Nicholas, a sloe-eyed 12-year-old, was one of the top kids in his classes at PS 295, according to his mom, Sandra Cole-McNaught. In second grade, though, he began to tune out. "The teacher told me he got to where she was going before she did," Cole-McNaught says. "And like some of us who think we know how the world works, he could get a little impatient." He also refused to do homework, and Cole-McNaught, who holds a doctorate in curriculum development and teacher education, backed him up—to the distress of his teachers. Now in his second year at BFS, "he's still developing academically," his mother says, "but he can also think critically." The approach at most schools these days is "input-output," she says. "But children are not raw materials to be made into a product."

Although tuition at BFS is $9500, it is administered on a sliding scale, and Berger says the school is currently $35,000 in debt, scraping by on grants, donations and the occasional good-will gesture. The church cut him a break on utilities, for instance, and a few parents gave him the year's tuition in advance. Still, fewer than half are paying the full amount, and at least one desperate and struggling parent, Berger tells me, just slips him a twenty when she can.

Of course, just how much of an education her child gets for that money is entirely up to him. To the extent that the teachers nudge the kids into particular activities, they mostly do so on an individual basis, bearing in mind each student's particular passions, circumstances and favored methods of learning and letting the kids' interests hold sway. I get a chance to see some of this natural learning one afternoon with the younger kids, known as the Dolphin group, who range in age from 5 to 8 and are usually supervised by Kristen Palmer, 31, a sunny woman with cat-eye glasses and a bright smile. While Palmer shows me the project they've been working on—a car made from a big cardboard box, featuring a rear-view mirror and license plates—the kids squeal and pack themselves into a fort made of big foam squares. "Hey, guys," she offers, "what if we made a poster about how we built the car?" It's a neat attempt at redirection, but while it gets them out of the tent and over to the low table where she has set out pens and paper, the plan quickly fizzles: Chippy, a bright-eyed 6-year-old with the wily manner of a Dickens street urchin, has a better idea. "Hey, look how I make weird shapes," he announces, picking out a piece of construction paper as the other kids circle around him. He folds the paper in quarters, makes a few random cuts along the crease, and with a bit of fanfare, unfolds the paper to show a pattern of diamonds and stars. "Cool!" the others shout in unison diving for paper of their own while Palmer gives me a big grin as if to say, Yes! This is how it's supposed to work!

Before afternoon meeting and clean-up (every kid is expected to help maintain the space), I duck out to pick up my daughter from P.S. 107, a few blocks away. On our walk home, Sophie skips along, gleefully describing something called "compliment stars"—of which she and her friend Maddy each already have four out of the ten needed for a free pencil. "Good for you," I tell her, but I can only imagine what Berger would say.

A few days later I attend a curriculum meeting to hear about what her class will be studying. At the teacher's suggestion, I fold myself into the child-size chair in front Sophie's desk—noting with some concern that it's overflowing with crumpled work sheets, library books, show-and-tells and important-looking notices I've never seen before—and wait for the session to start. A sign on the wall explains the star system in depth: "How do we get a compliment? 1) Complete all our morning routines. 2) Follow directions the first time. 3) Raise hands before speaking or leaving seat. 4) Respect classmates and all adults. 5) Keep hands and feet to yourself. 6) Work quietly during individual assignments. 7) Walk quietly in hallways." There are other signs, too, entitled "Morning Routines," "How Can Our Table Get a Star?" "What Do Good Writers Do?" and "How Do We Write in Our Notebooks?"

Sophie's teacher is in her second year, and seems highly competent, affable and in control of the class. The kids love her. But I find myself wincing as she holds up a piece of loose leaf paper and tells the parents, "It's really important, I can't emphasize this enough, for them to write with the holes on the left, and to stay between the red lines. They're in third grade now, so that's a big priority." She hammers home the importance of those margins a little more, but never says a thing about the real content of the kids' writing—about imagination or self-expression or fun. She then turns to a homework chart full of check marks. "When they get twenty check marks, they get a free pass from homework," she explains as I squirm in Sophie's little plastic chair.

Bold, visionary schools tend to have eccentric figures at the helm—colorful, inspiring leaders with a flair for promotion. Think of St Ann's flamboyant Stanley Bosworth, Summerhill's A.S. Neill. The last free school in New York, Park Slope's Fifteenth Street School, which closed nearly three decades ago, was headed up by the actor Orson Bean, a fixture on Broadway and the well-known star of "To Tell the Truth," who'd been blacklisted in the Fifties and once discussed his LSD use on The Merv Griffin Show.

By contrast, Alan Berger seems almost religiously self-effacing. Tall and lanky, with a monkish haircut, he is gentle and unimposing, his voice carefully modulated, his temperament even-keeled. One parent describes him as "Gandhi-like," and compares his singlemindedness to that of explorer Ernest Shackleton (while expressing hope that he'll be more successful in his quest). He's 48 years old, divorced, a former mid-level manager for cable company, who, before going into teaching ten years ago, considered opening a restaurant. He lives with his fiancée, Alexandra Anormaliza—also the principal of a brand new school, the International High School in Prospect Heights—her daughter, Arielle, and his son, Alex, 14, who enrolled in BFS this year after spending a few days as a freshman at LaGuardia Arts.

Berger wasn't always a radical. After leaving the cable industry, he taught at the Murray Bergtraum High School for Business Careers, a public high school then serving some 3000 students in lower Manhattan. As a marketing teacher, he started a school store, part of an attempt at "project-based instruction," but he often tangled with his bosses and coworkers over his ideas for reform. "People were really hostile to me," he recalls, and the teaching environment was dismal. Teachers barked orders at kids, belittled their enthusiasms and used humiliation to keep them in line, "embarrassing them in front of their peers by pointing out their failures," Berger says. Worst of all was the teacher's room, "just a brutal, depressing, dehumanizing place," in which colleagues bitterly counted down the days till summer—beginning on the first day of school. "I was really idealistic," Berger says, noting that he'd decided to take up teaching only after becoming disenchanted with the business world. "But it turned out the education system was the same thing, a big, dehumanizing bureaucracy. Instead of profits, the bottom line was GPA and test results. That was the only difference." Education historian Diane Ravitch agrees. "What they're doing is taking a business model and applying it to education," she says. "But learning is not a business."

Though Berger was promoted to assistant principal in 2001, he later heard that two colleagues planned to challenge his permanent appointment. "That was the last straw," he says. "I realized that working there was going to be a series of battles, and I just didn't want to go back for more." Around that time, he read an article in the Times about the Hudson Valley Sudbury School, a democratic free school in Woodstock, New York, and "it just grabbed me to the core," he says. "I said, 'This is what I want to do,' and when the summer came, I took a leave of absence and started researching it."

In October of 2003, Berger published an open letter describing his idea in the circular of the Park Slope Food Co-op, nerve center of hummus-and-sprouts Brooklyn liberalism, and soon began holding meetings in peoples' homes. The vague plan was to open the school in the fall of 2005. But, recalls Corinne Goodman, who'd been home-schooling her son, Silvan, due to his learning disability, "Some of us weren't willing to wait."

Actually, Berger, too, was in something of a hurry. He was going through a contentious divorce from his first wife, and he and Anormaliza were scraping by on one paycheck. "It was a rough year," he says. "She was starting a school, too, and she didn't agree with some of the philosophies behind BFS." Indeed, Anormaliza urged him to start a progressive public school instead, which would have paid him a higher salary (he now makes half of what he earned as an assistant principal) and held considerably less risk. "It basically almost broke up our relationship," Berger admits. With his family's future and his own career on the line, he pressed on though, and the BFS opened in September 2004.

He could hardly have chosen a less hospitable moment. It had been 25 years since Orson Bean's Fifteenth School had closed his doors due to financial difficulties, and attitudes about education had only grown more conservative in the interim. The Bush administration was imposing a strict set of proficiency standards across the country, with heavy sanctions for schools that failed to improve, and although the No Child Left Behind Act had already attracted controversy, most of its critics were charging not that it was wrongheaded, merely underfunded. Mayor Bloomberg, meanwhile, was in the process of seizing control of the city's public schools, requiring most to adopt a uniform curriculum and attacking "social promotion" through a system of do-or-die tests.

In addition to the Regent's exams given to seniors, New York City public school children now take standardized tests in grades three through eight—each one producing a set of numbers that is duly crunched, spun and debated by pundits, academics and politicians. Overall, the news has been upbeat. Numbers have climbed steadily in most categories, and New York City has not seen the sort of scandals that have arisen in other districts. Dozens of schools in Texas, for instance, have been accused of outright cheating on standardized tests. In Florida and other states, underperforming students were simply purged from their class rolls just before tests were administered. Nevertheless, critics have suggested that New York City's better scores may be attributable to grade inflation. By quietly lowering proficiency standards and tweaking the tests, the argument goes, it's a simple matter to nudge up scores without actually improving education at all. "They not only create the test, they determine what the passing standards are," notes Steven Engel Phillips, New York City's former superintendent for alternative high schools and now a professor at Brooklyn College. "It's pretty easy to manipulate."

Assuming New York's numbers do reflect real progress, some wonder just how valuable the gains are. "At best, test scores measure only what the test asks, which is a very limited part of what we mean by intelligence or knowledge," points out Deborah Meier, a senior scholar at NYU's Steinhart School and the Macarthur Fellowship–winning founder of the much acclaimed Central Park East Secondary School. Calling the testing trend "a circle that's leading us nowhere," Meier regards the gains posted by New York City's students as reflecting nothing so much as the considerable time and effort that is now going into readying students for the tests. "When I started teaching, test prep wasn't allowed," she recalls. "It was considered cheating. And that's what's going on now. The schools, the teachers, the parents, the kids—everyone collaborates to figure out short cuts for getting higher test scores. And I think the quality of education is suffering as a result."

Which doesn't, however, prevent most parents from buying into the idea that the tests are all-important. "In an age of free-floating anxiety about our children's future," Meier says, "people who have no obvious reason to be anxious can really panic."

I see her point first-hand on a crisp morning in October, during a parent-teacher conference with Sophie's teacher, when she shows me Sophie's score on the New York City Interim Assessment test, a practice exam for the main event in January. My brilliant daughter had...well, there's no delicate way to put it. She'd whiffed. Blown it. Failed. With a 76 on English and a dismal 64 on math. "Now, this doesn't carry any weight," the teacher reassures me. "It's just a way to see what areas she needs to work on." I steal a glance at her score sheet and note that several of Sophie's friends have done just fine. Then, forcing a smile, I slink away in a cold sweat, already mentally writing off the standard parental fantasy of sending my kid off to Harvard.

Later that evening, I'm back at Sophie's school for a crowded presentation to explain the tests to parents. "How should we deal with anxiety?" one mom asks (neglecting to specify just whose anxiety she has in mind). The teacher leading the meeting shakes her head. "I've seen kids vomit," she says. "I've seen kids cry. I've seem them just not be able to complete the test. It's a really terrible thing."

Not to worry though, the teacher assure us. There's still plenty of time to get the kids ready. In addition to their two periods of mandatory test prep every Monday for four weeks, they're invited come in on Saturday mornings for three hours of additional worksheets, games and test-taking tips. And if we go to a special website set up by company that created the exams, Princeton Review, and key in our child's individual ID number and password, we can view her practice test, see exactly how she answered each question and tap into a seemingly bottomless trove of still more preparatory material. The focus on tests may be even greater at other city schools: A recent survey of elementary teachers by the United Federation of Teachers found that more than half are now spending a more than five hours per week, the equivalent of a full day, preparing for the exams.

With that kind of support, there seems little doubt that Sophie will make it to fourth grade next year. But prominent education experts are skeptical of the value of testing. "They don't have any vision of education—none," Ravitch says of Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein. "There's more to life than test prep, but that's all they're doing."

Alfie Kohn, the well-known education and parenting expert, agrees. "Every hour that teachers are preparing students for standardized tests," he says, "is an hour not spent helping kids to become critical, curious, creative thinkers." Education writer Jonathan Kozol, who deems the testing regimen in New York City "pathological," notes how schools he has visited for years in the South Bronx have had to forgo meaningful lessons—like a class investigation into toxic waste factors in their neighborhood—to focus on test prep. "They tell the teachers every minute of the day has to be 'on task,' meaning related to the examination," he says. The costs to real learning can be hard to measure, but Kozol offers an example: "You know how first and second graders sometimes come out with these stories full of run-on sentences that just keep going, better than Faulkner? If you listen long enough, at the end of that sentence there's often a hidden treasure that could make you cry. A good teacher uses that as a key to unlock a child's motivation and develop a writing lesson. Under the drill-and-grill system, that child is actually a threat to the test-prep routine. The teacher just has to cut him off."

But what of those who opt out, who while away the days with Asoxination and Platonic dialogues and fancy cheese? To be sure, progressive ed has no shortage of detractors. "The public school approach isn't very benighted," admits E.D. Hirsch, founder of the Core Knowledge Foundation and author of Cultural Literacy. "But that doesn't mean that this providential approach to education, where by some natural process the child will end up being educated, is going to work either. It may work for children from well-educated homes, but it doesn't work for children who haven't had those advantages."

Some parents of BFS kids have doubts as well. Several have hired outside tutors to make sure the basics are covered. "I don't really know what they're doing academically," admits Joe Gilford, whose son, Jacob, 14, enrolled at BFS this year after flunking his classes at Bay Ridge Prep. "I just have my fingers crossed." Randi Karr acknowledges that her son, David, may not be getting all the skills he'd be acquiring in a traditional school. "Honestly, I think sometimes he plays most of the day," she says, adding having a child in the school means adopting "a whole different way of judging your child." And Berger's ex-wife was so upset when Alex chose BFS over LaGuardia, she called the Department of Social Services and reported Berger for educational neglect.

Perhaps ironically, it's Nick, with the rat's nest of hair and Mad Max wardrobe, who turns out to be the school's sharpest critic. In many ways, Nick is the ultimate BFS student, free-thinking, politically astute and so ferociously self-motivated that he is currently spending his off hours auditing three classes at the New School for Social Research, working in a book store and researching Tibet (he's thinking of starting another seminar on the Renaissance). But Nick isn't sure freedom is all it's cracked up to be. "I think I was really fortunate to go to a public school and get what I needed to pursue my interests," he says. "If these kids were in a regular school, they'd do writing and math every day. Here, they can play and stuff, but what happens when they want a real education?"

The question highlights what is so fundamentally revolutionary about the BFS philosophy, which essentially demands that students and their parents abandon the very notion of a "real education," on the theory that the less quantifiable benefits of the free-school approach—a love of learning, a sense of self-reliance, enhanced critical thinking skills, social awareness and so on—will offset what Berger readily acknowledges will be, for some graduates, a total inability to diagram a sentence or perform advanced calculus. While the more traditional skills are, of course, no guarantee whatsoever of a child's eventual success in life, this is still not a trade-off most parents are willing to make. Whatever one thinks of grades and test scores and GPAs, they do offer a level of comfort, a way to measure a child's knowledge, her progress relative to peers and her future prospects. BFS offers no such reassurance: To the extent that the school is conducting something of an experiment, it's one without any yardstick for success or failure. No test at the end will determine whether it worked.

This is a longstanding problem for free schools. Summerhill, the boarding school in the English countryside founded by the Scottish psychologist A.S. Neill in 1921, was faced with closure in 1999 due to the administration's refusal to make lessons compulsory—"[mistaking] idleness for the exercise of personal liberty," as government inspectors put it. After a year of observation (and media attention), however, the government backed down.

In an effort to counter such skepticism, the Sudbury Valley School, a free school in Framingham, Massachusetts, which opened in 1968, recently conducted a poll of its alumni about their experiences after graduation. The study found that eight in ten went on to college or professional schools, and nearly 20 percent attended grad school, many at top universities including Harvard and Yale. Still, in keeping with the free school philosophy, the survey's authors take pains not to place too much emphasis on conventional measures of accomplishment, pointedly entitling their study "The Pursuit of Happiness," and asking respondents a number of questions about their job satisfaction, relationships, values and overall sense of well-being. It concludes that Sudbury alumni are, "a wonderful collection of human beings—contemplative, purposeful, clear, happy, and able to cope with change, challenge and setbacks." Which is all pretty vague and touchy-feely. But then, imagine how New York City's schools might look if they made it their mission to help students live happy lives rather than merely teaching them to read a short essay and identify the "main idea."

One day in early December, I stop by Brooklyn Free School for one last time. Sophie comes along. Having heard me talking about the place for months while researching this article, she wants to see it for herself. She even offers to bring some of her workbooks from school, "so the kids can see what homework is." In the morning, she decides to check out the circus arts class and winds up learning how to catch a juggling club. Later, she sits in on a Democratic Meeting, plays chess, and does some drawing with oil pastels. I can't pinpoint exactly why, but she's excited about her artwork in a way I've seen her before. At one point, I ask her what she thinks of the place. (By now, I'm harboring a secret fantasy of enrolling her at BFS no matter how she does on her test.) "Pretty good," she replies with a shrug, adding quickly that she prefers being with her friends. I quietly resolve to start working on her friends' parents.

There've been some changes since my last visit. Macbeth has been shelved in favor of A Midsummer Night's Dream. There's talk of more tweaks to the computer gaming policy—specifically, a call to define "research," which is, after all, is a pretty broad category. And after determining that the Brooklyn Free School is indeed a real school, operating under a provisional charter from New York State, a case worker from the city's Department of Social Services has cleared Alan Berger of educational neglect for letting his son go there. The school's financial situation is a little rosier as well: A direct mail campaign netted $3000 so far, and four more kids have signed up.

In the afternoon, a handful of the older kids gather in the classroom for a new weekly meeting entitled "Life After BFS," initiated in response to some parents, who've been making noises lately about whether their kids were really doing enough to prepare for college or careers. Lily Mercogliano, who is herself the product of progressive ed, having graduated from the Albany Free School, and is therefore held up as proof that the approach can work, begins by asking the kids to talk about what they'd like to do after they graduate (that is, once a set of graduation requirements are hashed out and put to a vote). One student wants to go to Harvard. Another mentions Berklee School of Music. Oxford and NYU come up. Travel gets a few votes, especially to Tibet. "And let's not forget the military!" Gabe chimes in, drawing a chorus of nervous laughter.

Mercogliano then asks the kids to talk about what they think they'll need to do to prepare themselves, and the tension in the room thickens perceptibly. The SATs are brought up, and Mercogliano notes that one of the school's volunteers, Abi Cohen, is a professional SAT prep tutor, and will be offering a class in the coming weeks that everyone is welcome to attend.

"But I also think we need real classes," says Allegria, a 16-year-old wearing a creatively modified Catholic schoolgirl uniform. "We need four years of science. All we've been doing is making soap, and soap isn't going to get me into Harvard."

Sixteen-year-old Adele, a recent transfer, agrees, adding that she thinks maybe she made a mistake leaving York Prep. "My friends are all going to get into college, and maybe I'm not," she says. "This is nice, but I wonder if it's realistic or if I'm wasting my life."

Eventually, a rather radical suggestion is made: Maybe BFS should institute a grading system, with transcripts that resemble the ones at "normal" schools. And varsity sports couldn't hurt....

After the meeting, Mercogliano contacts Harvard to ask about their admissions requirements. It turns out neither transcripts nor diplomas are necessary for what the admissions office calls "non-traditionally schooled" students, though SATs and teacher recommendation letters are, and portfolios and examples of student work are a big plus. Due to ever-increasing numbers of home-schoolers, many other colleges are adopting similar policies. "I'm not going to guarantee we'll have a student go to Harvard," Mercogliano tells me, noting that very few kids from even the best highschools actually make the cut. "But the things they're asking for are not impossible," she adds.

As for Berger, he has little doubt that Brooklyn Free School's graduates will be ready to enter the world and make their way when the time comes. "Something I do think about, though," he continues with an almost imperceptible smile, "is will the world be ready for them?"

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