The
Well-Educated
Child

Where the vision came from, what it cost to chase it, and why ranking first in New York State left the woman who built those schools miserable. Kenny’s account moves from a summer camp in upstate New York to a basement start-up office to the moment she decided that everything she had built was still not enough.

Kenny was bored and disconnected in high school. Camp was the other world. For four years as a camper and three as a counselor, she was surrounded by serious thinkers — counselors who had come of age in the sixties, who read Baldwin and Friedan and Kerouac, and who believed that power should be rooted in “love, reflectiveness, reason, and creativity.”

The presiding figure was Mel, born in the Bronx in 1928 to Russian immigrants, the camp’s unofficial lead educator for decades. Hundreds of teenagers would sit cross-legged on the floor for hours while Mel elucidated an ethical code of responsibility for the vulnerable and disenfranchised. You could hear a pin drop. He treated them as serious young adults capable of thinking seriously about the world.

They argued endlessly, sitting in circles under apple trees. One day they were told to study an issue, choose the side they agreed with, and then prepare to argue the other one. The ethos was to be knowledgeable but skeptical, nonconformist, willing to question authority — but never merely rebellious. You were expected to defend your thinking.

What Kenny took from it was that every part of the program had an educational purpose, and that the purposes were legible. Overnight hikes that pushed campers through exhaustion and fear taught self-reliance and persistence. The mantra that “the kids run it” — with adults present only as guides — built confidence and self-direction. Circles and communal singing built the sense of belonging that made intellectual risk safe. Texts and topics were chosen to be nuanced precisely so that campers would learn to be discerning.

Mel’s students cared about learning because they could feel how much he loved them and how passionate he was about his subject. He recruited relentlessly, poaching the best educators from camp for his Hebrew school and back again. He drove students to the March on Washington in 1963 and, decades later, put teenagers on buses to the UN — always standing in the background so the students could shine.

When Mel died, hundreds of camp alumni gathered on Zoom. Kenny asked her three children to join, because she wanted them to know him. This chapter is the answer to a question the rest of the book keeps asking: what would it take to give every child that?

Her husband Joel — a graduate student in philosophy and religion who painted, played guitar, and could write a list titled “The Pros and Cons of Dying” from his hospital bed — was diagnosed with leukemia and died eighteen months later. Their children were eleven, nine, and eight.

Unable to sleep, Kenny read until two or three in the morning. One of the first books she picked up was Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities. Then a line from Viktor Frankl: “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.” She took it as an instruction. This was what life expected from her: to start a school.

It was 2001. There were almost no charter schools in New York City, so there were no models, no resources, and no training programs. She set up a start-up office in her basement and spent a year following educators around — Larry Rosenstock at High Tech High, Howard Fuller in Milwaukee, Dennis Littky at The Met, Don Shalvey in California, Geoff Canada in Harlem. Her benchmark was not another charter school. It was Sidwell Friends.

She hired for a specific combination: brilliant but humble, always wanting feedback; passionate about academic excellence; the sort of person who treats arrival and dismissal duty as a chance to talk to parents rather than a chore. The first month, she and her office manager Yohana ran six potluck dinners — potlucks, not pizza, and six small ones rather than one big one, so they could actually know the families. Attendance was 100 percent. At each, the adults stood in a circle holding hands while the children sat on the floor and looked up at them.

The students arrived in fifth grade about four years behind, some reading and adding at a kindergarten level, having learned at their previous schools that nobody noticed whether they did the work. One girl said she used to throw her books away. Another had hidden in the bathroom at lunch to avoid the fights.

Kenny opened the school without demerits, against the advice of everyone she had met during her year of research. The first week was a mess, and it stayed a mess until Thanksgiving. She relented — but on three conditions: no prizes for good behavior, no rigid or demeaning culture, and the system would be temporary. It took more than a decade to replace.

Meanwhile the academics went differently. On reading, she gave one instruction: no points, no prizes. The goal was for students to want to read. Half an hour of uninterrupted reading in class, thirty minutes at home, inviting classroom libraries, student choice, book talks, teachers reading the first pages aloud to get kids hooked. Students who had read one or two books a year began reading fifty. On math, she rejected both the chants-and-memorization approach common in urban schools and the “I do, we do, you do” procedure drill. Every lesson began with students grappling with a problem.

By 2007 HVA ranked first in eighth-grade math in New York State. The next year: 100 percent proficiency, against 32 percent in Harlem district schools. President Bush visited. Arne Duncan said the country needed more schools like it. Bloomberg declared an HVA Day. Oprah and Time wrote it up.

And Kenny grew more discontented, not less. Some of the teaching was mind-blowing; it was not consistent. New teachers arrived trained to manage behavior with clapping and countdowns. The worksheets kept reappearing. Remediation ate all the time. When a colleague bounded in to report that they had beaten Chappaqua, she did not believe it — not in the only sense that mattered.

“Why are you never satisfied?” a colleague asked, after she declined to go on the best-practices circuit. What she genuinely did not understand was how anyone could be satisfied.

In the summer of 2012 she stopped planning for the next school year and read instead — Ginsberg, Emerson, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. She called it her summer of existential crisis. Rebecca, her founding teacher, gave her the instruction that unlocked the next decade: don’t gather the best teachers. Gather the people they look up to. Find the master teachers of the master teachers.

So she made a list from the books stacked on her desk, marked up in highlighter and Post-its, and started calling.

Shelley’s instruction to the group was that they should stop advising and start teaching. She set the example herself: a nationally acclaimed former superintendent sitting cross-legged on the floor in the middle of a second-grade class, reading aloud, while twenty teachers watched from the back. Her method was gentle, unhurried, and pitched at a high intellectual level — the opposite of the hyperactive formulas young teachers are trained to use.

Kenny ran a recursive cycle for years: meet with the group, read what they recommended over the weekend, bring drafts to teachers on Monday, take their feedback, try it in classrooms, reflect on the results, revise, repeat.

It did not go smoothly. Some leaders wouldn’t take the risk. Ingrained teaching habits proved almost impossible to unlearn — what The Teaching Gap calls the cultural code of teaching. A schedule change to make room for new curriculum cut into reading remediation and dropped test scores. The high school eliminated demerits without a replacement and behavior deteriorated; a fight broke out in a classroom. A funder concluded the vision was unrealistic and suggested she was making the perfect the enemy of the good. Kenny’s answer was that in public education, good had been considered good enough for poor children for far too long.

A seventh-grade teacher told her that inspiration wasn’t enough — she needed to spell it out, literally, what to do and what not to do. That request produced the two-page list reproduced below. One teacher was delighted by it. Another disagreed and left.

Any serious discussion about how to raise a well-educated child has to begin by defining what that means — and then by looking hard at how schools measure it, because assessment is the lever that moves everything else.

Kenny’s definition is unfashionably direct. Well-educated students are intellectually curious, driven, and self-directed. They are interesting and interested. They recognize beauty — of art, of music, of mathematics. They are civil in discourse. They are independent thinkers, too savvy to be deceived: able to tell credible information from propaganda and to notice when a government is abusing its power. Their instinct on meeting a new claim is to assume there is more to it.

They are what Ted Sizer called informed skeptics — and the qualifier is load-bearing. For skepticism to be worth anything, you first have to know things. Which means being genuinely well read. Baldwin: “I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen.”

They are kindhearted and attentive to the greater good. And, most importantly, they are humble. Being well educated means knowing how much you do not know, and having the good sense to study an issue before forming an opinion about it.

What follows for a school. Students must read a substantial number of whole books of lasting value — literature, political theory, oratory, autobiography, history, philosophy. (Kenny notes this should be obvious, but alas it must be said.) A school must defend free inquiry, reject dogma, and protect the unencumbered search for truth. It must build a culture where students express their views without self-censoring for fear of being shunned, where arguing in good faith is understood as how you sharpen your mind, and where conceding graciously to a stronger argument is a skill rather than a defeat. Following the mob, she writes, is neither cool nor sophisticated, and is certainly not independent thinking.

And the highest purpose of school is not preparation for something else. If we spend thirteen years telling children that school is a runway for college, which is a runway for a career, what attitude does that produce as the years pass? Those thirteen years are the only childhood education they get. The point is the shaping of the inner life: the thrill of insight, the state of absorption where a student looks up and hours have gone.

If you want to know whether the children in your care are being well educated, Kenny says, start by looking at how their school assesses learning. Assessment drives curriculum, instruction, calendars, budgets, schedules, lesson plans — the entire educational experience. Get this wrong and nothing downstream can be right.

Sam Wineburg’s finding sets up the problem: students can crack multiple-choice questions with canny test-taking strategy, and then fall apart when asked to justify a response. David Conley’s point about exit exams sharpens it — those exams shy away from anything hard to measure, like a term paper, a research project, a lab experiment, or a critique of a source document, which is precisely the work that college readiness consists of.

Kenny’s test for any requirement became a comparison. Elite New York private schools are exempt from the Regents. If the Regents were not good enough for them, why should they be mandatory for children in Harlem? She tried teaching around the exam and found it impossible: the content was so broad that the only way through was to sprint. As one observation had it — if a student drops his pencil, he misses a whole century of European history.

The Advanced Placement exams were no better. Her daughter Rachel had loved science since kindergarten, read science books under her desk in history class, and then took AP Biology. “It’s miserable. All we do is memorize.” That same year the Scarsdale public schools dropped AP courses entirely, replacing “mountains of memorization” with internally designed honors courses culminating in extended research papers. Their principal wrote that the AP curriculum did not mesh well with the intellectual aspirations they held for their students. Kenny’s conclusion: if it wasn’t good enough for Scarsdale, it wasn’t good enough for hers.

That led to the two most consequential decisions she made.

Performance assessment is the mechanism that makes the profile testable. It requires students to transfer knowledge and skills to unfamiliar contexts, measuring the quality of thinking through open-ended questions and complex tasks. In science, that means designing, running, and analyzing an original experiment: forming a hypothesis, developing reliable methods, observing closely, interpreting data, building explanatory models, writing an original report, and defending it orally in front of experts.

Having defined the outcomes, Kenny and her team had to specify the teaching that would produce them. The result is a set of principles and practices for each of the three domains — the operational core of the book, and the part a teacher can act on tomorrow.

The primary purpose of school, Sizer said, is to teach students to use their minds well. In most schools, Kenny argues, students are barely asked to think at all — and the reason is that the adults have taken the thinking for themselves.

Consider the PowerPoint. To build one, a teacher researches, evaluates, summarizes, and organizes: hours of higher-order cognition. In class, the students take notes. “We need to flip this.” The same inversion runs through the fill-in-the-blank worksheet, and through “I do, we do, you do,” where the teacher does the hard work of breaking down complex material and the students copy and drill.

Even raising hands works against thinking. Students disengage the moment someone else is called on. New teachers read the forest of hands as engagement and ask for more of it; students raise their hands to collect participation points.

Then there is the language — the jargon, and the fashion for calling children “scholars,” as though a serious-sounding word conferred seriousness. And test prep, which has stopped being an activity and become the culture: Kenny watched a second-grade reading lesson in October built entirely around decontextualized test passages, and heard a seventh-grade math class told that when a problem is taking too long you should skip it, because you can still score well with a few wrong.

The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy. A school that believes its students can’t handle demanding work teaches in a way that guarantees they never learn to. The Education Trust found that just 4 percent of class assignments pushed student thinking to higher levels.

Agency is the capacity to be self-directed: taking initiative, pushing through difficulty, going beyond what is required. College readiness depends on it — on the degree to which students take ownership of their learning and are allowed to.

The defining feature of urban schooling is its opposite. Kenny catalogues it without mercy: snapping, clapping, chanting, countdowns from ten, jumbo timers beeping through the lesson, color-coded behavior charts, praise narrated over the class for children who are merely sitting still, rugs printed with squares that assign each child a spot, and instructions specifying exactly how to hold your body. Martin Haberman named it the pedagogy of poverty. It has become so common that it is no longer recognized as inferior — it is taken for great teaching. It is not, and it would not be tolerated for a moment in the schools that serve wealthy children.

Routines came first. Kenny studied Rebecca, who was calm and soft-spoken and utterly unrelenting: every student, every expectation, every lesson. By Thanksgiving she no longer had to remind anyone, because the behaviors had become habits — roughly seven weeks of practice, as the psychology of habit predicts. HVA built a three-day orientation of fifteen lessons, with skits and songs, teaching each routine and the reason for it. The famous example is the pencil debate, which a teacher proposed solving with a demerit and which the group solved instead by having students sharpen six pencils at home each night. Kenny’s principle: preventive discipline prevents the problem rather than punishing it afterward.

Then came the correction that reorganized the school. The adults were designing the routines, evaluating the students, spotting the problems, and revising the plans. The adults, therefore, had all the ownership and all the energy — and the students were following along. The mentors saw it on their first visits. HVA changed its language from respectful to respectfully independent, and then went further: good behavior at the expense of student agency is itself a form of failure. Behavior is the floor, not the focal point.

Class commitments. Students sit in a circle and write in silence: How do I want to feel at school? How do I want to be treated? Going around the circle, it dawns on them that everyone wants the same thing — which is where the empathy comes from. Then the second question: if this is how we all want to feel, how must we treat each other? Then the hardest one: how will we hold ourselves accountable when someone breaks a commitment? These are distinct from school rules, which remain strict and consequenced; commitments are aspirational, and when they are broken the group discusses how to make good on them.

Circles, every day, PreK through twelfth. Opening circle begins with greetings and mindful breathing. Closing circle ends with acknowledgments and apologies, which nine- and ten-year-olds deliver to each other with startling composure: “I want to apologize to Brandon. In math, I broke our commitment to not laugh when someone makes a mistake.”

Mindfulness is taught in every grade with brain science and no gimmicks — just slow, silent breathing. Teachers lead it at first; after a couple of months, students take turns. One fourth grader, Michael, put it plainly: it gives him a second to think, so he breathes in and doesn’t explode.

Restorative accountable discipline, learned from Carol Lieber over two years, is the system Kenny had wanted since the first week of school. It is not permissive, not unstructured, and not a substitute for consequences — a student who breaks a rule still earns one. But a consequence alone doesn’t change anything. So the student also works through five written steps: get the story out, take responsibility, problem-solve for next time, prepare and rehearse the repair, and arrange the support needed to stay on track.

Philip Jackson called it the hidden curriculum: the values a school transmits through its daily routines and structures rather than its lessons. Kenny’s charge is that most schools are teaching something corrosive without noticing.

Credits, extra credit, and class rank produce gamesmanship — figuring out what counts, raising hands to appear interested, currying favor, studying only what will be on the test, taking shortcuts, contesting grades. For younger children there are boxes of test-prep prizes, test-prep effort parties, bulletin boards posting each child’s score, and pep rallies that place the state test on a pedestal as the pinnacle of the school year. “Can you imagine such a spectacle at Exeter or Trinity? It is obscene.”

Add the surrounding culture’s fixation on money, status, and celebrity — and schools now advising students to build a personal brand. Kenny’s objection is fundamental: we are teaching children to see themselves not as souls to be refined but as brands to be promoted.

After thirteen years in that environment, students care more about grades than about the sophistication of their own thinking, more about awards than about knowledge. They do not arrive at this on their own. As William Deresiewicz puts it, a constellation of values is ceaselessly inculcated.

The counter-argument is that the three domains transfer out of school. Quality thinking, once learned on schoolwork, gets applied to the commercialism, the political ideologies, and the vapid content students meet everywhere else. Agency, once experienced, becomes intolerable to live without — students who have owned their work stop being satisfied with going through the motions. They become, in Kenny’s phrase, people of substance: self-possessed rather than self-absorbed.

Purpose, though, has to be taught deliberately. Not purpose as a college major or a career — purpose as a calling, a defining vision for a life.

Advisory is the structure that carries it. Students in grades five through twelve are divided into groups of about twelve, each led by a teacher, so that every student has at least one adult who knows them well and serves as the point person for their parents. Each group becomes a small family inside the school — a direct counter to the alienation so many students feel. It is the one guaranteed time and place to talk about character, ethics, and a purposeful approach to life: Why is it important to act with integrity even if no one is looking? What values are essential to the public good in a liberal democracy?

Service learning runs through advisory, with real choice at every step so that students approach it with intrinsic motivation rather than as résumé material. For younger children the choices are simple — what to collect for a holiday drive, how to design the posters. One year a group of seniors, worried about the drug trafficking their younger cousins walked past on the way to the elementary school down the block, researched the problem, connected with an anti-drug nonprofit, made public service announcements, and ended up at a conference in Washington meeting elected officials.

Goals and intentions are written on the first day of school, then interrogated: Why are these goals important to you? How will you go about achieving them? Looking back from the last day of school, how will you know?

The point is not any single goal. It is that a fifteen-year-old is asked, from the first day of the year, what they think about their own life — and hears their classmates grapple with the same question and arrive at different answers. You may not have found your purpose. But you understand that purpose is a thing, and you arrive at a place where you cannot imagine living anything less than a purposeful life.

A seventh-grade teacher told Kenny that calling for sophistication in pedagogy wasn’t enough — she needed to be emphatic and explicit, and literally spell out what to do and what not to do. This is what she wrote.

In the eight years Kenny spent writing this book, she argues, raising a well-educated child got harder: public discourse more superficial, culture more intolerant, social media more harmful, childhood itself more fraught. Her response is not despair but assignment. Here is what she asks of each group.

Kenny’s last charge is that American education is stuck in a chronic reinvention of the wheel — each generation discovering the same problems anew, unaware of the body of work behind it. Nearly everything now sold as innovative was conceived twenty, fifty, or a hundred years ago.

The book ends with Baldwin: “The purpose of education is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.” And with Kenny’s own closing image — children educated to be independent, curious, driven, knowledgeable, humble, and compassionate, sent out to bring kindness and light into the world. That, she writes, is the task of the next generation.