Over the weekend the National Hybrid Schools project co-hosted an even with the Vela Education Fund and the Kansas Policy Institute: The Heartland Hybrid and Microschools Summit, in Kansas City. Great event! There were lots of schools represented. I spoke at one session. This piece is a small (edited) bit of my remarks. I talked about the relationship between entrepreneurship and institution-building (and the question: what *is* an “institution,” anyway?). This part is a bit on what I think the medium-term outlook is for the hybrid and microschool landscape.
I want to talk about what things might look like on the other side of all of this. You all are really setting up not just new bureaucratic organizations, but new institutions.
People like you are starting schools all over because existing schools have stopped serving kids the ways they need to be served, or else they can’t serve them, and we need new, entrepreneurial ventures to start up and serve those kids. A lot of times, existing schools and systems are just zombie bureaucratic organizations that still have formal power, but they’ve given away their institutional authority, so people feel less emotionally tied to them.
So what does this look like in a few years? What’s the equilibrium? We are in kind of a chaotic environment now, but chaos is not natural to human nature. The college football landscape is chaotic right now with conference realignment and expansion, and NIL, and Coach Prime, but it will settle down in a few years, and I think the K12 school landscape will too. But what will that look like?
First: individual schools. In the early days of charter schools, we saw a lot of one-off mom and pop schools. There are fewer of those as a percentage now. It’s become harder for mom and pop charter schools to start up. I think the single serving/boutique, local hybrid and microschool is a thing that is going to stick. Manyof them already have. They watched NCLB come and go and ignored it. Some have been around since the 1990s. They’re not following fads and they’re not going to close. The plateau has shifted permanently higher. So we’ll see lots of individual schools, serving particular locations and communities and types of students. That’s very hard on university researchers to follow, but good for kids.
Second, I think there will be a few more networks that start up. I’m actually a little surprised we haven’t seen more of this yet. Prenda and Acton Academies were started a little before COVID so they had a head start. University-Model Schools have been around for a while. KaiPod is a new one. But there is room for more. There are some groups that are helping startup founders like Vela and like the Herzog Foundation, but it seems like there will be a few networks that spring up the way they did for charter schools, like KIPP, and that will be a good thing too. I think there is value in not reinventing the wheel every time, and networks can help with that.
So the growth will be good. We also will have some threats, or tensions. One is that while these schools have a higher profile with families, they also have a higher profile with regulators. It’s not as easy even now as it was five years ago for a school to just do whatever they want to. I know my own school is located in a county with two or three other hybrid schools. It’s a respected public school system. We’ve always had at the high school level, kids transfer in and transfer out for different reasons. It used to be the case that the public schools would take our kids no questions asked and just give them credit for our classes. These days, they’re a lot stricter about going over our syllabi, or making kids take state end of course tests for classes they had had with us two years before. The regime isn’t just going to roll over as more kids leave it.
The last thing I want to mention is that old school homeschooling is going to stay around too. That’s not a threat but it is a potential source of tension. I think it’s very important to recognize that all of these schools are possible because of the flexibility enabled by the various state homeschool laws. It’s important not to mess up the people who are going to continue full time homeschooling. That’s for Political Science 101 reasons – you don’t make unnecessary enemies, you try to grow the number of allies you have in your constituency – but also because that creative space is how all of the schools we are talking about today emerged. I don’t know what that looks like exactly – different policy segments for homeschoolers versus others. Ben DeGrow with ExcelinEd put out a good paper about this just this week. But the homeschoolers fought hard for the freedoms that enable all of these microschools and hybrid schools. In the past, most hybrid school families had been full time homeschoolers at some point in their past. Now, the audience is much more mixed, with people coming straight from public schools, or younger parents who have only ever used a hybrid school. Lots of new people are coming to these schools — which is great; that’s what we all want! — but it’s important to be careful not to just give those hard-fought freedoms away.
Right now, we need new institutions to replace the ones that have reconfigured themselves for their own interests and against the interests of kids and families. Everyone involved in starting up and leading these hybrid and microschools are involved both in entrepreneurship and in standing up new institutions. We distrust institutions but we value them. We need them, or something like them, for various purposes. And we all, even just the people in this room, distrust them for various reasons and value them for various reasons. The distrust and the values go in a lot of different directions. Which is fine. It’s all for the purpose of doing better for our kids. This is probably the most exciting time to be involved in school choice because so many great things are happening in so many places. I am just glad to be a part of it all.
The end. It was a really encouraging event. A few other notes:
-Given that homeschooling heritage, anybody involved with hybrid schools and microschools should be very concerned about the new poor treatment the Romeike family is facing.
-I’ll be at the Emerging School Models: Moving from Alternative to Mainstream conference at Harvard this week, and at the Encouraging Education Entrepreneurship and Innovation event in New Hampshire this weekend. Hope to see some of you there!