> I'm often asked a question like, "How are you able to award a diploma on the basis of nothing other than an essay and a letter of support?" The answer to this very reasonable question has two parts. First, I'm in a legal position to offer a diploma on this basis simply because there are no mandated requirements, in California law or anywhere else, for graduation from a private high school. (California law sets many subject matter graduation requirements for public high schools.)
A co-worker of mine formed her own private high school — while in public high school — and then graduated herself from it. She was running a successful business already, so it made sense to her at the time.
I was pretty shocked to learn this because I had no idea something like that was possible, and might have considered that route as well (although who's to say it would have turned out better?). For self-motivated, intellectual kids, I think it would be a dream come true — at least myself and several folks I went to high school with would have chosen to enroll in college classes much earlier, or do self-directed study, if we had the choice.
Some people have a learning style that is not compatible with public high school. This is true for both me and my kids. All of us had problems in school and were evaluated to see if we had learning disabilities. We all tested above the 98 percentile and were in AT/GATE programs. Also, we all tested out of high school via the CHSPE.
For me, it was a choice that I have never regretted (except for not going to the prom). It put me on a career track where I was years ahead of my peers.
For my kids, not so much. They had such bad experiences in high school that they are sour on higher education. I am still working on convincing them to finish a college degree, but I feel like a hypocrite because I did not get mine until age 50. Back when I was their age, I was lucky to work in jobs were nobody cared whether or not I had a degree. Today it's impossible to get a "professional" job without a degree.
Honestly sounds like you, and to a lesser extent your children, needed high school for non-academic reasons as much as most people need it for academic reasons. If you have problems in school and test in the top 2% of intelligence, you have problems in other areas that need to be addressed, and can be in a social classroom. Speaking from experience.
This is kind of rude. You are flat out saying that OP and their children likely have problems because they are both smart and don't go to school. Have you ever considered that school might be the problem? That maybe it doesn't work for everyone the same? Speaking from experience.
What you said may be true for many people in situations similar to mine, but I am pretty stable, well adjusted, and happy. Thus I have no "problems in other areas that need to be addressed." The main issue I had with high school was no escape from the tediousness of homework assignments for content that I had already mastered.
The CHSPE was a godsend to me. I fit right in at Jr. College and got along well with my teachers and classmates. The environment was different because my peers were (mostly) emotionally mature, and they wanted to be there. High school was like a prison in comparison.
I think you have to allow for the possibility that not all high schools have ’social classrooms’. Mine was filled with a bunch of children in adult bodies operating on hormones and hairspray. I hated it so much I didn’t want to be surrounded by it in college and decided to commute instead. I dropped out after three years.
I was also fortunate to find a career path that didn’t require a degree, and while my oldest child had no choice based on her career interests, I’m having the same struggle with my youngest who’s in her freshman year with an undecided major.
I get what you're saying. But other than my girlfriend, being a Muppet was my favourite part of high school. Screwed around so much. Learned how to be quick witted and fast on my toes.
Then came university and that all went away, seemingly forever.
TBH, if a person is in the top 2% of intelligence and don't finish basic post-school academia, then they are likely prevented from doing the types of jobs that appeal the most to them: new/novel research, high-level problem-solving, etc. Those individuals doing interesting stuff are almost always certified. Software Development is an anomaly.
So, sure, you can get hired as a web developer, or even some non-web development roles, but that's kinda pointless because if you could stand doing boring shit you'd finish the academia to at least a very basic level.
TL;DR: If you couldn't stand the uniformity of school, then the roles available to you without a formal education are going to be just as boring and unrewarding to you anyway.
You are probably correct, but there are always exceptions.
The last half of my career was spent doing cutting-edge research and development with some of the best and brightest people I have ever known -- about half of them with at least one PHD.
Sometimes ability can make up for lack of credentials, but it is rare.
For the people who you categorise as “thinking they don’t need it but they do”, do they really? It’s not like the majority of the folks around you remember an aorta of anything they learned in HS. The only things they remember are probably the things that happened outside of it. Not saying it’s justified that they skip HS but I feel like there’s more thought needed.
I agree that most of higher education is wasteful signaling. But in my (admittedly limited) experience, the typical American high school dropout lacks functional literacy, numeracy and basic factual knowledge.
I don’t think trigonometry or foreign language is an essential skill for 99% of people. But explaining simple ideas in writing, or being able to compare the costs of a yearly vs monthly billing plan, or knowing how birth control works are pretty important life skills.
I don’t know that that’s true for most people; often the topics being taught aren’t as important as the skills you’re being taught/exposed to. Many people, especially Americans, never attend college. High school is the only chance before adulthood to socialize with your peers and learn what it means to interact with people of various upbringings. Anecdotally, my sibling graduated with a class of nine from a private Christian school and they are very far behind from a social and educational standpoint when compared to me, who graduated from a normal public high school with a few hundred of my peers. She also never read any of the books I was made to read in high school... I could not fathom the blank spot that has created for my sibling. Maybe I was fortunate to go to school before Common Core, or lucky I had more good teachers than bad but 20 years out from HS I might not remember everything I learned there, but the stuff I do remember helped mold how I think about things.
What I concluded, especially I took a few neuroscience courses, after was that the computer/database/memory model is not good to explain school and learning.
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My take:
You don't learn to remember what you learn. You learn to build roads, pretty much literally inside your brain (it constantly rewires).
It's more like unpaved paths before road building: First there is wilderness, then there is a lot of traffic, and increasingly that traffic concentrates on more and more clear paths.
The learning of "stuff" is creating paths. The things - ideas, knowledge, facts - that you learn are like the carts travelling the paths. They may be gone - but the paths remain.
So even after every single thing is forgotten - every single traveler and cart is no longer there - what remains is the paths. The wiring inside your brain changes in the learning process. You may not remember much of what traveled through your brain, what created the paths, but your brain nevertheless remains changed.
Even if you forget every single thing, the way you think and react will have changed forever.
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Using the metric "what I remember from my courses" is the wrong metric. Instead, it should be "how did my way of thinking change".
I took a lot (really a lot) of (mostly university level) courses long after university, in fields unrelated to my career and previous study. That's when I noticed far more clearly than ever before, despite very good success (I was even made TA a few times), the concrete things I was able to recall even just a year later was really small. Then I noticed it's the same with my core field really.
The concrete things we know is actually rather small. I forgot sooooo much. Only things I use regularly are available in a way that I could pass an exam (school or university). Still, I changed quite a bit, but it's all "meta". I now know the path I have to take instead of being lost. Even if I don't understand the concrete items e.g. in a medical paper (e.g. names of some genes or proteins), instead of feeling lost I have a "feeling" what it is about, and I can easily look it up and understand very quickly because I have a framework ready to receive what I read.
Our actual "memory" is pretty small, it's all about the paths. Literally, in the brain.
I pretty much dropped out of high school the last mandatory year by taking classes that didn't have exams and breezing through knowing I already had university entrance through a scholarship. But honestly I regret it often as I missed out on extra STEM learning that I ended up having to teach myself anyway. Going to university a year earlier wasn't an option so I feel I was let out early with no oversight, at a time when my brain was a sponge.
>school anyways really isn't much of a roadblock or time waster.
I think it is both. It also discourages to think. I had to re-learn most of the things becasue I was told BS in the school. The current school system is outdated because it was designed too long ago.
My cousin went to a private high school to set him straight. It worked and he graduated and the school really improved his overall behavior and outlook in life.
Now, this was a real school with real paying students who physically went there everyday, real work, and real qualifications for graduation. However, he found out the hard way that it didn't count at all, because his high school wasn't accredited. He constantly had roadblocks put up in front of him because as far as anyone who mattered was concerned he didn't graduate high school because his school wasn't accredited.
He ended up having to get his GED in order to get into massage therapy school. Once he got his GED everything was fine - that "high school equivalent" hard qualification needed for literally everything he was trying to do in life.
So being cutesy with creating your own high school will work just as well as saying you have a degree from the school of hard knocks.
Most community colleges will partner with local high schools allow high performing high schoolers to dual enroll, couple people I know did that.
What kind of employers even give a shit about accredited high schools? I didn't even graduate high school and I don't think a single person has ever asked about it.
In cases were it matters, your cutesy personal school isn't going to me the requirements. In cases where it doesn't matter then it just doesn't matter. So creating a school is 100% pointless.
To answer your question, governments and any other employers who have codified job requirements (large ones, mostly), and maybe others. My husband spent two decades in the Navy, was hired for his job based entirely on his Navy experience, and still was required to prove he graduated from high school before starting. I thought it was very silly.
Beyond that, different programs (not specifically employers) my cousin was interested in were requiring his high school to be accredited. Massage school was one of them, there were others he mentioned but this was nearly two decades ago so I don't recall specifics.
The only employer that ever asked me about high school was the army. When I enlisted, they were adamant about it. Incidentally the army was the catalyst to get me from my lower class upbringing to 6 digit salary.
Aside from the army, I can't think anyone has ever asked me about it.
> A co-worker of mine formed her own private high school — while in public high school — and then graduated herself from it. She was running a successful business already, so it made sense to her at the time.
"Teachers hate her: smart student figures out secret hack for early graduation from high school!"
:)
Minimal-requirement/self-directed HS does sound like it could be great for some students.
College courses are also so much better than high school courses in so many ways, particularly the freedom and self-determination you enjoy in terms of selecting or rejecting classes, greater flexibility in time scheduling, and choosing whether or not to attend lectures. Not to mention more advanced material and potentially better teaching, lab, and library resources.
I wonder - do you need a high school diploma to enroll at a community college?
Not in my neck of the woods. Community College had us sit for placement tests and then we just started enrolling in classes at 16. It was great. Way better use of my time than highschool.
In what I have seen, colleges don't have better teaching. They are not designed to have better teaching then high schools. The student is basically expected to be already skilled enough to not need educator, but only expert that knows stuff.
It may be better fit for minority of students, but better teaching is that that thing they get there.
Even much more minor versions of hacks like that play well in US interviews, IME. Nobody wants to see the straight-laced head-down academic--they want the smirking rebel who broke all the rules and drove the homecoming float anyway. (Never mind that the people who broke the rules four years earlier now have criminal records for netsending "hi" to everyone in the school.) One of the things nobody tells you in college is what low regard employers have of college metrics, to the point that they actively reward subverting it even while they require the degree.
There’s more than just GPA. GPA is usually a function of how rich your parents are. I’ll take the kid who held a job and went to school over the kid who just went to school.
When deciding to home school our children for a year or two whilst living in Colorado - we considered paying some of these registered "setup-your-own-curriculum private home school service providers". When discussing on the phone with them - not one was ever able to give me a meaningful answer to "do your service actually provides anything that I could not do myself for free in a few minutes?"
I’m not sure what value they provide today but my prediction is that with continued momentum from teachers unions shutting down alternate education options, such services will provide legitimacy or certification to meet state imposed requirements in name only, so that parents retain freedoms to educate their own children as they see fit with the service providing a shield against the state.
This is both hilarious and slightly alarming, because it implies the existence of a lot more shadow schools that may not be as well intentioned but aren't subject to scrutiny.
I was homeschooled for a bit in the 80s in the UK, but I think it would be considerably harder these days as every form of schooling is subject to OFSTED inspection and there have been a set of scandals relating to tiny religious schools with weird curriculums.
The point in this case is to satisfy the state's requirements. The value? (Whatever the state says it is) + (increase in earnings) - (bureaucratic overhead)
I tested out of high school at 15 by way of the California High School Proficiency Exam (CHSPE). I was free to enroll in Jr. college and to work full time. I even bought my own car at 16.
Both of my kids did the same thing, but today the minimum age for taking the test is 16, so they had to suffer one year more than I did.
This is the route that I took as well. I dropped out, realized I needed a GED to start community college, realized I needed to be 18 to get a GED, then took the CHSPE and everything worked out.
One of my sons took it and passed it when he was 12, because the community college wouldn’t enroll him without it. We were homeschooling, so we had a california home private school - so we just had to certify that he had completed the 10th grade in our school, which he had.
I worked around this (with parental support) by simply enrolling the local community college and getting a home-school program (which I think had some connection to Wes Beach? It's been a while...) to say "yeah, you're doing at least what you'd do in high school".
>>16 then enrolled in a local Jr College and graduated at 18 with an AA
I could definitely have graduated from high school a bit earlier if I had wanted to but didn't see the need. I was one of those weird kids that did not actually want to graduate from high school because I liked it so much.
No one should ever take away from a kid something they like doing. For you apparently it was going to HS but I imagine for many many of your peers it was not as much fun.
This option is something that should be publicized more widely, and perhaps even encouraged by junior colleges.
I think students in California would greatly benefit from 1) knowing that there are multiple educational options and 2) having the freedom to choose among them.
I've never met anyone in the US of at least high school age who wasn't aware that there exist way(s) to test out, including but not limited to the GED.
To be fair, it sounds like the success of this program is strongly rooted in the knowledge, wisdom and judgement of the individual running it.
As a homeschooling parent, I de facto ran a private school under California law for some years. I think we listed my husband as the Administrator and me as the teacher, but I did almost everything. He played a really minor role.
A student can do a lot with a modicum of the right guidance. That "right guidance" can be hard to come by. Many adults aren't really equipped to supply that piece.
One issue I see with this, unfortunately, is that most universities require a High School transcript that details the grades and subjects taken along with GPA. By getting this diploma, you won't get that. That eliminates a lot of choices for getting a university degree. Sadly many jobs in STEM require a university degree.
You can probably get around this by starting at. community college and then transferring to the school of your choice. Most schools have stricter admmissions standards for new freshmen than they do for older students transferring over.
It's true that a lot of entry-level technology(T) positions look for a university degree as minimum. Unlike some other parts of STEM it's not a regulatory requirement.
I graduated from Beach High School about 18 years ago. Without going into detail too much, the public school system failed me, and Beach High School was the stepping stone that allowed me to go to college. I would be living a very different life right now if Beach High School didn't exist.
I really wish something like this existed at a University level. I started and never finished a university degree in Australia (circa 2000), because I ran out of money and my home life was in a state of disarray (parents mid divorce).
20 years later I'm a working technologist and could probably teach almost all the undergraduate subjects, but I never got that piece of paper.
Universities usually have the ability to award credits for prior knowledge, but I doubt they would respond well to you rocking up and asking for credits in everything.
When I was applying for tech jobs, the lack of degree has never really mattered. Now that I'm self-employed it matters even less, except with things like long-term visas that often have requirements to have a bachelors degree as a minimum.
I don't keep up-to-date with how the computer-science degrees have changed over the years, though I'm not still programming in C/C++ either :)
> Universities usually have the ability to award credits for prior knowledge, but I doubt they would respond well to you rocking up and asking for credits in everything.
I did half of my BS this way, it was via an experiential knowledge option at my university. I was at a state school and it boiled down to money either way, so be ready to pay wherever you go. I had to pay most of the tuition for each class and take the final exam for the credit. Saved me 2 years of actual time though.
I wish I knew about this option growing up. Public schooling was a massive time sink full of problematic social dynamics that made life difficult but imparted no life lessons, lots of busy work and time consuming but worthless projects, and odd curricula dictated by the state but not useful in life or career.
I did my best learning on my own time, but of course that time was limited since I still had to attend school and also lose free time to homework. My parents would much rather have had vouchers and school choice, or at least the freedom to have me not attend any school, and instead spend my time in a self guided manner (or guided by my parents or some other person or group of our choosing).
I think such freedoms are especially required in this day and age, where schools are turning into ideological battlegrounds to propagandize children. Maybe that was always how it was to some extent, but it seems much more blatant today, with states like CA mandating ethnic studies, and schools injecting politics (like BLM) and critical race theory into schools.
Ultimately I see the massive centralization of education as being at odds with both the individuality of children and also parental choice over how they want to raise their kids. It’s especially dark how far parents’ rights are being reduced when you look at situations like Loudoun County’s schools in Virginia tweeting about silencing parents (https://thefederalist.com/2021/03/29/loudoun-county-crazy-di...). What little choice parents have today is already at risk, with academic ideologues like Harvard’s Elizabeth Bartholet calling for a ban on homeschooling (https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikemcshane/2020/04/21/harvards...).
A co-worker of mine formed her own private high school — while in public high school — and then graduated herself from it. She was running a successful business already, so it made sense to her at the time.
I was pretty shocked to learn this because I had no idea something like that was possible, and might have considered that route as well (although who's to say it would have turned out better?). For self-motivated, intellectual kids, I think it would be a dream come true — at least myself and several folks I went to high school with would have chosen to enroll in college classes much earlier, or do self-directed study, if we had the choice.