“Finally, from so little sleeping and so much reading, his brain dried up and he went completely out of his mind.” — Don Quixote
This description of Don Quixote partially applies to me right now. It’s not only because of reading and gearing up for a couple of written projects on hybrid schools, but I have been busier than usual already in 2024. The momentum in the hybrid and microschooling space only continues to pick up. So here are some updates on what’s happening.
Changes over time at the International School Choice and Reform Conference
First, the annual International School Choice and Reform Conference happened again in January, this time in Madrid. I wrote about last year’s event and some panels here. This has long been one of my favorite events to attend. I learn a lot, meet great people, and I find it to be the best combination of academic research and practical conversation around school choice there is. It’s changed a little bit over time, and that’s ok! Here are a few ways it has:
Homeschooling
Not very many years ago, there might be one or two sessions devoted to homeschooling at the conference. Lately there have been multiple research and policy related sessions. Just this year, I heard about:
-The new Homeschool Hub from Johns Hopkins University. This is a data project which “provides users with easy access to current homeschool information and downloadable data for all fifty states plus the District of Columbia.”
-The new report from the National Microschooling Center, which estimates the microschool population size and surveys microschools about various things.
-Of course the National Hybrid Schools Project had a session. We talked about our facilities report. We also previewed some of the findings of our 2024 National Survey, which includes for the first time some experimental results and a really interesting way to quantify what hybrid school leaders value in terms of outcomes for these schools. (Stay tuned and I will say more about this once we’ve finished writing it up).
Again, this is the pre-eminent school choice and reform conference, and the representation of people interested in homeschooling has really exploded the past few years.
Race
I don’t know that this has changed, exactly, but: the first session I attended this year was on black homeschoolers. I reviewed Cheryl Fields-Smith’s book Exploring Single Black Mothers’ Resistance Through Homeschooling for the Journal of School Choice last year. She was on the panel, and the other panelists echoed themes from that book. Here is a bit from that review:
“The bulk of the book’s content includes four chapters, each of which focuses on the author’s deep interviews with a different family. Though the families are quite different from each other, Fields-Smith argues that they can all be considered to be using homeschooling as a form of “resistance” in one way or another. She writes, “Black parents’ decisions to homeschool today could be conceived as a form of resistance to destructive institutional and individual policies and practices their children either experienced, or parents thought they might experience in conventional schools” (p. viii)
There is actually a lot of overlap among these families and what one might see as “traditional” homeschoolers. But not complete overlap, and panels like this are very helpful in expanding the discussion about homeschooling in the U.S. Maybe the discussion has changed a bit, as we’ve gone from asking questions like “How do we create more schools for vulnerable populations?” to questions like “What do the schools and experiences vulnerable populations are creating for themselves look like?”
I was also on a panel framed around the 70th anniversary of Brown v Board (this year), and Gerard Robinson’s distinction between “fear-based” and “freedom-based” choice in his chapter, “Freedom of Choice: Brown, Vouchers, and the Philosophy of Language” from this book.
The Past, Present, Future, and International Issues in the School Choice Movement
I mostly think COVID revealed issues in schools, rather than drove changes. Still, closed schools and classroom issues did a lot to spark things that were already in the air.
On that same panel, there was some discussion about how arguments for school choice have moved from a “liberal” frame (“We need choice to provide opportunities for the vulnerable”) to a “libertarian” frame (“Choice best supports individual freedom”) to a “conservative” frame (“School choice is the best way to protect families and cultures from authoritarian state control”). I am much, much more of a policy guy than a politics guy, but this does seem to be an interesting development.
I was also able to be on one last panel, with Mike Donnelly from the yes. every kid. foundation, and James Tooley from the University of Buckingham, on where this frontier of hybrid and microschools may be heading. It’s hard to reproduce conversations like this, so…we will be in Ft. Lauderdale next January. You should be there too!
Other things:
-Registration is open for the 3rd annual National Hybrid Schools Conference.
-We have also had a lot of requests for regional events. We’re trying something out and will host the first Western Hybrid and Microschools Forum in San Diego next month, where we’ll focus on issues faced by these schools in Western states. We have some great panelists lined up there. Register for that one here.
-The CiRCE Institute hosted an event on academic papers related to classical schools, the FORMA Symposium, and I spoke about classical hybrid schools there.
-I also got a good callout in a piece on hybrid and microschools in Education Next by Mike McShane.
Sorry for the shameless promotion, but as Don Quixote also says,
“Thou hast seen nothing yet.”