The theme for the 2023 National Hybrid Schools Conference was “Education Entrepreneurship,” and it was interesting to hear speakers suggest to the audience how many of them (in the audience) really are forms of entrepreneurs, even though they may not think of themselves that way. But it’s a unique kind of entrepreneurship, and there is a logical reason why these founders don’t primarily think of themselves as “entrepreneurs.” Many don’t think of themselves as entrepreneurs first, but as parents, or teachers, or as some other kind of community member. One thing I think is underdiscussed among hybrid and microschools is why people set them up. A lot of the talk about them has to do with “innovation.” I submit that most founders do not care about that sort of concept. Many, many founders are in it for either religious reasons (they want to create a school that can most freely reflect their religious beliefs), or else they have some other kind of cultural identity that they want to be able to maximize through their schools. I give a couple of historical examples of this kind of motivation in my book, including one from James Tooley, our keynote speaker at the 2023 National Hybrid Schools Conference, and I think they both illustrate the different between someone setting up a hybrid school for social reasons vs someone experimenting with policy:
The idea of families and communities coming together to set up schools in tiny local contexts occurs throughout American history. Homeschooling and homeschool cooperatives (co-ops) are two examples. Another less appreciated but relevant example is that of “freedmen’s schools” after the Civil War. Ex-slaves in the American South, according to James Anderson, “emerged from slavery with a strong belief in the desirability of learning to read and write.” John W. Alvord was made inspector of schools for the U.S. Freedmen’s Bureau in 1865, and he and his agents traveled through the former Confederate states to learn about the region’s educational status. The common expectation was that he would find very little going on. Instead, he found hundreds of these schools, in all of the large population centers and even in places the bureau had not visited before. He reported that “throughout the entire South an effort is being made by the colored people to educate themselves.” In North Carolina, he found “two colored young men, who but a little time before commenced to learn themselves, had gathered 150 pupils, all quite orderly and hard at study.” The U.S. government and philanthropic aid societies began sending teachers south, but very often when they got there found that the former slaves had already established schools to educate themselves. Though they might have been seen somewhat as postwar emergency measure, Alvord reported that “this educational movement among the freedmen has in it a self-sustaining effort.” Anderson finds that in 1867 “free schooling was sustained in Louisiana largely as a result of ex-slaves’ collective efforts,” and that in Georgia a mutual aid society “sustained in full or in part the operation of more than two-thirds of [the black population’s] schools.” While these schools were quite different in structure from hybrid homeschools—in some cases more formal, in others more like one-day schools—they do have some resemblance in spirit to today’s hybrid homeschools. Anderson notes that “ex-slaves, in general, initiated and supported education for themselves and their children and also resisted external control of their educational institutions.” When these U.S. government and other northern educators arrived, they often took over, undid, and/or replaced much of the work these ex-slaves had done to stand up educational institutions. These founders had some reason to “resist external control,” and had done significant work to build local schools, for their local communities, on their own. Hybrid homeschool groups are building their own local schools, and often surprising modern-day Alvords by simply going around them.
International examples of people taking schooling into their own hands exist as well:
James Tooley’s The Beautiful Tree, in which the author traveled the world, finding low-cost private schools for the poorest students in Ghana, in India, in China, and elsewhere, is another stark example of parents coming up with creative solutions to educate their children. These tend to be no-frills schools set up by local communities, or, in many cases, by local entrepreneurs who see an unserved market—parents who want a schooling experience qualitatively different from the other schools on offer, whether more expensive private schools, or nominally free public schools. In fact, hybrid homeschools have some similarities to the low-cost international schools Tooley writes about. They are also low cost compared to other private options in many places. They are often regarded as somewhat second rate by outsiders and experts, as were the ex-slave schools (though not so by the families who select them over other, often free, options). And like these international low-cost schools, and like the southern freedmen’s schools John Alvord found during Reconstruction, they often are not easy to find, but the more one looks for them, the more of them one finds, in a variety of locales….
On that last point, in fact, I was just in Tulsa for a different conference this past weekend, and found two more hybrid schools I had never heard of, one set up by a Catholic diocese, and another being created by a small group of young parents. A large institution and a group of friends both acting as education entrepreneurs, and neither really thinking of themselves in quite that way. Now one last bit from Little Platoons:
Hybrid homeschoolers today are neither as heroic as those who founded and ran “freedmen’s schools,” nor as desperate socioeconomically as those who use Tooley’s international low-cost private schools. But they do share the willingness to take on the task of starting up and/or patronizing small institutions to educate their children well outside of societal expectations, and outside of the typical formal policy battles that tend to occur over schools.
It is becoming more difficult over time for founders to avoid “formal policy battles” as hybrid schooling becomes more popular, but this movement by its nature is not about the next evolutionary stage of technocracy. It’s not about policy entrepreneurship. It’s driven a bit and helped along by policy entrepreneurship, but the actual founders’ motivations, on the ground, are much more deep-seated and personal.
(Note: All of the photos and session videos from the Hybrid Schools Conference are being processed and will go up on our website here over the coming weeks.)