I want to tell you about a girl I think you might recognize.

She is seven years old, and she loves school. She loves the smell of fresh ditto paper and the squeak of her chair and the particular silence of a classroom during a spelling test, a silence she knows how to win. Her hand goes up before the teacher finishes the question. She carries her award certificates home and pins them to the bulletin board in her bedroom, the one her parents hung for exactly this purpose. When the teacher needs someone to take the attendance folder to the office, she is chosen, and she walks the empty hallway feeling like a small ambassador of a country she adores.

She grows. The gold stars become honor rolls, then scholarships, then a degree. When adults ask what she wants to be, the answer arrives without effort, because school is where she shines, and she never wants to leave. She becomes a teacher. She is a good one, conscientious and warm. In time she becomes a principal, maybe a superintendent, because the system recognizes its own and lifts them.

Then one August morning, a mother sits across the desk from her and says, “We’re withdrawing him. School is destroying my son.”

The principal is baffled. She looks at this mother with genuine confusion, because the sentence makes no sense to her. Destroying him? School is where children are safe and known and given every chance. School is gold stars and kind teachers and the smell of fresh paper. She knows this the way she knows her own name. So she reaches for the explanations that keep her world intact. The boy must be struggling socially. The parents must be overreacting. Perhaps they read something alarmist. She offers accommodations, a schedule change, a counselor. The mother shakes her head, gathers her purse, and leaves. Walking to her car, this mom wonders why the one person in the building with the power to see what is happening seems to be the one person who cannot.

If you recognized yourself in that girl, this letter is for you, and I want you to know it is written with affection. I was a classroom teacher for years, across multiple countries and grade levels, before I founded the Spokane Learning Co-op, Washington State’s only outdoor, consent-based, sociocratic Self-Directed Education center. I loved school too. What I have to tell you is hard to hear precisely because your experience was real. Your gold stars were real. Your love was real. Here is what else is real: your experience was never the common one, and the very success that carried you into leadership is what makes the harm so difficult for you to see.

Why School Worked for You and Fails So Many Others

During the Second World War, the statistician Abraham Wald was asked where to add armor on bombers, based on the bullet holes riddling the planes that returned. Reinforce the damaged areas, the military assumed. Wald saw the trap. The planes that returned could survive those hits. The planes shot down over Europe, the ones nobody could examine, held the answer, and their damage was invisible only because they never came home (Wald, 1943; Ellenberg, 2014).

Education has the same problem, with one twist. We staff the airfield almost entirely with returning pilots. People who thrived in conventional school become teachers at extraordinary rates, and the teachers who thrive as institutional players become principals and superintendents. The sociologist Dan Lortie named part of this dynamic the “apprenticeship of observation”: by graduation, every future teacher has already spent roughly 13,000 hours watching teaching from a desk, absorbing the system’s logic as simply the way things are (Lortie, 1975). The people most harmed by school, the ones who disengaged, dropped out, or barely survived it, almost never return to run it. Their testimony is missing from every faculty meeting, every leadership retreat, every strategic plan. The system staffs its leadership entirely with people who believe it never harmed them, then treats their confidence as proof. The belief is the deepest cut of all.

There is a comic by Nathan W. Pyle that I think about often, in which two eagles sip their morning coffee and discuss whether the owl is really a predator. One eagle scoffs at the idea, because the owl has never bothered him. The other agrees completely. Meanwhile, somewhere out of frame, a mouse who tried to warn them has given up. The eagles are not lying. They really were safe from owls. However, their personal experience tells them nothing about what the owl does to mice.

When a parent, a student, or a burned-out teacher tells you the system is hurting them, and you find yourself reaching for the thought “that was never my experience,” notice what your mind is doing. Psychologists call it identity-protective cognition, our tendency to evaluate evidence in whatever way protects the story we hold about ourselves (Kahan, 2017; Jost, 2020). If school harmed enormous numbers of children, and you flourished there and now lead there, then some part of your success starts to feel implicated. Dismissing the testimony is easier than reexamining the self. This is a human reflex, not a character flaw, and the only remedy is deliberately seeking the evidence your position hides from you.

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What Student Disengagement and Teacher Demoralization Actually Look Like

Gallup has surveyed millions of American students, and the pattern is so consistent that researchers call it the school engagement cliff. Roughly three quarters of fifth graders report being engaged in school. By eleventh and twelfth grade, that figure falls to about one third (Gallup, 2016). Human beings are born learning machines, as Peter Gray documents in Free to Learn (Gray, 2013). A curiosity that survives infancy, toddlerhood, and the wildness of early childhood should survive fifth grade. Something in the environment extinguishes it.

The distress data is harder to read. In the most recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey, four in ten high school students reported persistent sadness or hopelessness, including more than half of teenage girls (CDC, 2023). Peter Gray and his colleagues have documented a finding that should stop every administrator cold: children’s psychiatric emergency visits and youth suicides drop sharply every summer and rise when school resumes, a seasonal pattern that tracks the school calendar itself (Gray, 2018; Plemmons et al., 2018).

Families are responding with their feet. Chronic absenteeism has roughly doubled since before the pandemic, reaching about one in four American students (U.S. Department of Education, 2024). Homeschooling has grown by more than half in many states since 2017, making it among the fastest-growing forms of education in the country (Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy / Washington Post analysis, 2023). In England, well over one hundred thousand children are now classified as severely absent, missing more than half of their schooling (UK Department for Education, 2024).

Your teachers are telling you the same story in a different dialect. RAND found that teachers report job-related stress at roughly twice the rate of other working adults (RAND, 2022). The majority of educators surveyed by the National Education Association said they were considering leaving the profession earlier than planned (NEA, 2022). The philosopher Doris Santoro has shown that what we casually call burnout is often demoralization, the moral injury of being unable to do good work inside a system that prevents it (Santoro, 2018). Nearly four in ten principals expect to leave within three years (NASSP, 2021). If that includes you, if you are exhausted and privately wondering why nothing works, the data suggests your exhaustion and your students’ disengagement share a single root.

Every one of these numbers is a mouse the eagles never heard.

Three Things Principals and Superintendents Can Do Before the New School Year

Awareness without action curdles into guilt, and guilt helps no one. Here are three things you can do between now and September, each drawn from the principles of Self-Directed Education, the growing movement built on the science of self-determination showing that human beings learn best when their needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are met (Deci and Ryan, 2000). Each one is fully within your existing authority.

First, conduct a listening tour of the people who left. This summer, personally call five families who withdrew their children and five teachers who resigned. Ask one question: what would have had to be different for you to stay? Then say nothing and take notes. Do not defend, explain, or offer solutions. You are not there to win them back. You are there to hear the testimony that never reaches your office, the flight data from the planes that went down. Every leader who has done this describes the same experience, a pattern snapping into focus within the first three conversations.

Second, protect one day to shadow a student. In 2014, a veteran educator named Alexis Wiggins shadowed two students for two full days and wrote an account that spread through faculty lounges across the country. She sat where they sat, moved when they moved, and asked for nothing the students could not ask for. “I could not believe how tired I was after the first day,” she wrote, and she found herself planning sweeping changes to her own teaching by nightfall (Wiggins, 2014). A principal or superintendent who blocks out one full day in the first week of the new year to shadow a single student, and who protects that day on the calendar now, before the September avalanche buries it, will discover what six hours in those chairs actually costs. One day will teach you more than a decade of walkthroughs.

Third, restore one genuine act of autonomy. Choose a single compliance structure in your building that exists for institutional convenience rather than for children, and remove it before opening day. Restore the recess that testing prep consumed. End the silent lunch. Let one hour a week belong entirely to students’ own questions. Democratic and sociocratic schools, including the Spokane Learning Co-op, run entirely on the consent of the people in them, and the research behind them shows that even small restorations of autonomy produce visible changes in engagement almost immediately (Gray, 2013; Deci and Ryan, 2000). Pick something you can announce in August, defend in October, and stand beside in June, when a parent stops you in the hallway to say their child talks about school at the dinner table again.

The Educator You Meant to Become

You went into education because school was where you were seen, and you wanted to give that feeling to children. The system rewarded your success by promoting you into positions where the experience of everyone it failed becomes quietly invisible from the leader’s chair. The disengagement cliff, the absenteeism surge, the resignations, and the quiet exodus of families are all testimony from people whose experience differed from yours, and your position makes their testimony the hardest evidence for you to see and the most important evidence for you to seek.

The good news is larger than the bad. You hold real power, You hold real power, and once you see how school hurts people, you already know how to help them. Children and teachers are not broken; they are responding rationally to an environment that denies them autonomy, and environments can be changed by the people who run them. By using the principles of Self-Directed Education, you turn school into a place people genuinely want to attend and to work in, the kind of school you thought you were building all along.

The girl with the gold stars became an educator because she loved learning and loved children. She is still in there, and she is the right person for what comes next. The system does not need another defender. The system has plenty of defenders. It needs a leader brave enough to believe the people it harmed.

Share This Letter

If you know a principal, a superintendent, or a teacher who loved school, send this to them. The people who most need this letter are the ones least likely to find it on their own, because everything in their experience tells them it cannot be true. If school harmed you, or someone you love, sending this letter may be the most direct way to finally be heard.

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If you lead a school and want help designing your listening tour, your shadow day, or your first restoration of autonomy, I consult with educators and administrators who are ready to lead differently. Reach out, and we will build it together.

Bibliography

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2023). Youth Risk Behavior Survey Data Summary & Trends Report.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4).

Ellenberg, J. (2014). How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking. Penguin.

Gallup. (2016). Gallup Student Poll: Engaged Today, Ready for Tomorrow.

Gray, P. (2013). Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. Basic Books.

Gray, P. (2018). Children’s and teens’ suicides related to the school calendar. Psychology Today, Freedom to Learn.

Jost, J. T. (2020). A Theory of System Justification. Harvard University Press.

Kahan, D. M. (2017). Misconceptions, misinformation, and the logic of identity-protective cognition. Yale Law School, Cultural Cognition Project.

Lortie, D. C. (1975). Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study. University of Chicago Press.

National Association of Secondary School Principals. (2021). NASSP Survey of Principals and Students.

National Education Association. (2022). Poll Results: Stress and Burnout Pose Threat of Educator Shortages.

Plemmons, G., et al. (2018). Hospitalization for suicide ideation or attempt: 2008–2015. Pediatrics, 141(6).

RAND Corporation. (2022). State of the American Teacher Survey.

Santoro, D. A. (2018). Demoralized: Why Teachers Leave the Profession They Love and How They Can Stay. Harvard Education Press.

UK Department for Education. (2024). Pupil Absence in Schools in England.

U.S. Department of Education. (2024). Chronic Absenteeism Data.

Wald, A. (1943). A Method of Estimating Plane Vulnerability Based on Damage of Survivors. Statistical Research Group, Columbia University.

Wiggins, A. (2014). A veteran teacher turned coach shadows 2 students for 2 days. Granted, and… (Grant Wiggins’ blog).

Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy. (2023). Homeschool Research Lab / Washington Post analysis of homeschool enrollment growth.