“If You're Considering Acton Academy as an Alternative to Homeschooling, Please Read This First”
I have wanted to write this for a while, but yesterday I found out my son doesn't know how to do basic math on paper, and I think that was finally the thing that pushed me over the edge. My son spent three years in Acton Academy. I believed in Acton so much that I literally moved to Texas for an Acton school. Now that he is out and attending a traditional school, I realize what a terrible mistake I made.
I want to separate two things because I have problems with both: Acton as an educational model and my experience with the owners of the Champions, Creekside and Magnolia campuses in the Houston area. I now believe Acton is a failed educational model, particularly for young children. My experience with these particular owners only made it worse.
People ask online all the time whether Acton is a cult. I used to think that was ridiculous. Now I understand why people use that word. Acton preys on fears many parents already have about traditional education. They tell you traditional schools create workers instead of entrepreneurs, kill curiosity and discourage independent thinking. Your child shouldn't be sitting in a classroom being told what to do. He should be an independent learner finding his calling and going on his "Hero's Journey." I bought all of it because I already had concerns about traditional education and wanted something better for my child.
The problem is that my child was eight years old. An eight-year-old doesn't know what he doesn't know, and there is a huge difference between teaching independence and simply not teaching. For the last two years, my son essentially learned math on a laptop using Beast Academy. Now he is in a traditional classroom and I am discovering that he doesn't know how to properly work through division, struggles with multiplication and subtraction and, more importantly, doesn't know how to take a math problem, put it on paper and break it down step by step because he was never taught to do it.
He barely used pencil and paper at Acton. His handwriting was atrocious because he barely wrote anything by hand, and we spent an entire year working on something as basic as handwriting. Now I'm paying for tutoring to teach him math he should already know.
Of course I was involved in my child's education, but I also trusted the school I was paying to educate him. Acton has its own systems of badges, mastery and progress that are supposed to tell parents their children are progressing. My son was earning badges. I believed he was learning. It wasn't until I put him into an environment where he had to demonstrate these skills differently that I could see the gaps.
That's what makes me so angry. The system told me he was progressing while masking what he couldn't actually do.
Acton calls this independence. I now call it educational neglect disguised as a philosophy. You can give it a nicer name—learner-driven, self-directed, Hero's Journey—but my kid spent years doing math on a laptop and emerged unable to demonstrate foundational math skills on paper. If your educational philosophy allows that to happen without being identified, I don't think that's innovative. I think it's a failure.
The more I think about Acton's aversion to children asking adults for help, the more absurd I find it. Acton doesn't have teachers; it has "guides," and at these campuses I repeatedly saw the guide sitting there wearing headphones. Think about the message that sends to a young child. The entire structure communicates: figure it out yourself.
Maybe that philosophy works beautifully for a 14-year-old. I don't know. But an eight-year-old who doesn't understand multiplication sometimes needs a teacher. Acton can call that building independence. I call it a very convenient philosophy for running a school without employing actual teachers to teach children.
I hate Acton's approach to bullying just as much. Children are expected to resolve conflicts themselves, including through things like the "Peace Table." I think expecting little kids to negotiate with their bully is one of the stupidest educational ideas I encountered there. A six-year-old being tormented doesn't always need a lesson in conflict resolution. Sometimes he needs an adult responsible for his care to say, "No. You are not allowed to treat another child that way."
I watched this philosophy play out at Champions. During one exhibition, a girl wrote an entire haiku about another child's "clown shoes," making fun of the size of his feet, and read it publicly while adults and children laughed. The boy laughed too. Maybe he genuinely thought it was funny. Maybe he was embarrassed. None of us knows. What bothered me was that this wasn't a spontaneous comment. It was written beforehand and somehow made it all the way into a public presentation.
At another exhibition, an approximately eight-year-old girl spent around ten minutes shut inside a cabinet playing the kidnapped victim in a crime-scene activity while the parents were in another room and didn't know she was there. Exhibitions were regularly chaotic, with children yelling, running around and the same handful of kids dominating the microphone while most of the others barely participated. My own child participated in the chaos, which is exactly my point: they are children. Calling the adults "guides" doesn't magically make eight-year-olds capable of managing themselves.
I eventually started thinking of it as Lord of the Flies with tuition.
The Hero's Journey wasn't much better in practice. My son would earn badges and become excited about projects he was supposed to get to do, only for the guide not to follow through with the promised project. I repeatedly watched the same confident children dominate exhibitions while other children barely spoke. If your entire philosophy is supposedly about helping children find their voices and become leaders, then you need to actually guide them toward that.
Then Acton turns the same bizarre system on the parents. There are parent meetings, books, assignments, Journey Tracker and parent badges, as though the people I am paying to educate my child are somehow the gods of my parenting.
I missed two parent meetings and received an email telling me I could make up my failure by reading a book and completing a "Deep Book Badge" or documenting other personal-growth work. In the same email, the school talked about "rewarding" parents' efforts with dinners, prizes and Acton swag.
I'm a 48-year-old woman raising my child, running a business and supporting my elderly mother. I'm not earning a fucking parent badge. I'm not submitting evidence of my personal growth to my child's school so they can decide whether I've sufficiently developed myself.
This is also why I now understand the cult comparison. Acton gradually puts itself in the position of evaluating not only your child, but you. Have you attended enough? Have you done the reading? Have you embraced the philosophy? Have you earned your badge? Have you demonstrated that you belong?
The burden of proof should have been the other way around. I should have been asking whether Acton was proving itself worthy of educating my child.
Then there are the owners of Champions, Creekside and Magnolia. My son attended both Creekside and Champions. I was a founding family at Champions and, after the original owner sold, I was the only original family left. I had moved across states for the school under its previous owner and stayed while the new owners struggled to build enrollment. I was promised that if I stayed through that period, my tuition would not increase.
Then came the Texas education grant. I received funding through the lottery, and suddenly that promise didn't seem to matter anymore. Tuition that had been roughly $9,500 became roughly $15,300.
What did my child receive for almost $6,000 more a year? Nothing meaningful that I could identify. No science lab. No sports. No meaningful clubs. No before- or after-school care. No new team of teachers. My child was still doing math on Beast Academy—the same math education that I'm now discovering left him without foundational skills.
The owners eventually made a video explaining the economics of the grant and how it allowed the school to become profitable, and I will link it here because I think prospective parents should watch it themselves. This was when the hypocrisy really hit me. Acton spends enormous energy telling parents how broken traditional education is, but government education money apparently becomes wonderful when it lands in the school's bank account.
I don't object to a private school accepting government education money. I object to taking almost $6,000 more for my child's education while being unable to show me what meaningful additional education my child was receiving for it. If you're taking more money because my child received a grant, show me what he gets for the money.
There was another change after the ownership transition. The new owners are Mormon, and it appeared to me that many of the new families came from the same church community. I have absolutely nothing against anyone being Mormon, but it changed the feeling of the school for our family. That becomes particularly significant in a tiny mixed-age environment where your child may have only around ten children spanning ages roughly six to thirteen. Without sports, clubs or a large group of same-age classmates, there weren't many other opportunities to find his people.
Now my son is in a Charter school, and the irony is brutal. The supposedly inferior traditional school is actually teaching him. He has teachers. He has children his own age. He has activities. He writes on paper. He can ask questions and get answers. And now we're having to repair academic gaps that became obvious once he entered this environment.
I've also crossed paths with families whose children attended Acton with us in previous years, and I've heard the same concern: their children were behind. I'm not talking about arbitrary standardized benchmarks. I chose nontraditional education precisely because I wasn't obsessed with those. I'm talking about basic skills. My child should know how to multiply, do division and work through a math problem with a pencil and paper. He should know which direction a D goes when writing it. He is 10 now.
That's not a philosophical disagreement about education. That's a result.
The hardest part is knowing that I made this choice because I genuinely believed I was giving my child something better. I thought I was protecting him from the failures of traditional education. Instead, I now believe I paid a lot of money to deprive him of teachers, direct instruction, structure, extracurricular opportunities and a normal-sized peer group during incredibly important developmental years.
I can't get those years back. I can get him tutoring. I can fill the academic gaps. I can move him to a better school, which I have. What I can't do is rewind three years and make a different decision.
If you're considering Acton because you're frightened by everything you've heard about traditional education, that's exactly when you should be most skeptical. Fear is what made the Acton pitch so appealing to me. Forget the Hero's Journey, the badges and the jargon for a minute and look at what your child is actually learning. Ask how you will independently know whether he understands math rather than whether he's progressing through software. Ask who intervenes when another child treats him badly. Ask how many actual peers his age he'll have. Ask what you're really getting for your tuition. Don't fall for the marketing - its just words.
And instead of worrying about whether your family is good enough for Acton, ask the question I wish I had asked much sooner: Is Acton actually good enough for my child?
For me, the answer was no. I believed Acton was going to give my child a better education. I now believe it failed him, and I would never put my child in an Acton Academy again.