We hosted the first Western Hybrid and Microschools Forum in San Diego earlier this March with Prenda and Kaipod. Incredible event.
We invited people we knew to come and speak as panelists, but it is still amazing (and encouraging) to me to meet people doing really interesting projects who I have never met, and who I have not even heard of through other connections. There is so much happening out around the country, and there are so many people doing truly interesting things. Things that I would not have thought to do, and that’s kind of the point of all of this – for local communities to figure out what they want, and then to just go do it.
Feeling California
I often note that much of the hybrid and microschool movement is built on state homeschool laws. And I still think that’s right. Some nonzero and maybe large percentage of the new students who are counted as “homeschoolers” are actually students in hybrid and microschools, not conventional homeschoolers. But even in places where there is not a ton of homeschooling, relatively speaking (Utah), or even a homeschool law, really (California), people are figuring out how to set up hybrid and microschooling arrangements in the ways that they think will best help their students and communities. This field is happening even in places where the environment is inhospitable. In other words:
There are 25 year old charter hybrid schools in California. Some are pretty large. In Utah, there are farm-style hybrid schools. In blue Colorado, there are hybrid schools that are difficult to categorize. California, though, still really surprises me, and school reformers should not write it off. New private hybrid schools are opening there even this coming fall. This movement should not abandon any territory; it’s possible to serve families even in southern California, even in New England, or anywhere else one thinks of as hostile. It’s possible to win everywhere. A big part of that is showing up. Exactly none of the people who started hybrid schools in the 1990s and 2000s waited around for the perfect statewide ESA to show up. They just did their work.
On the other hand we also have multiple new places where the environment is potentially *very* hospitable (West Virginia, for example, but there are more), but where there is no history of robust school choice, or else a pretty limited history. Having good laws but no schools to serve them is not the best long term outcome.
What we need to get things going is not necessarily, or not only, better information for parents. That’s great, and definitely helpful in places where there are new programs that families might not necessarily know about.
The bigger need in many places is: new schools!
What I do not mean is that we need to toss up as many Potemkin schools as we can just to grab market share. Just starting up schools completely unprepared will lead to schools opening and closing at rates that will be bad for families in the short term and bad for the sector in the long term.* This is something I am a little concerned about long term, but I am glad to know that some school startups like Colossal Academy are already thinking about this.
There is a pool of people that might seem like a really likely place to find future startup school leaders: the teaching profession. And lots of them do start hybrid and microschools. Unfortunately very few of them are actually systematically prepared for this ahead of time. Read why here. What if there was a program that prepared people who were interested in education not only to teach, but to think entrepreneurially? That trains them to teach in a particular kind of school, but then eventually to start one too? The field is extraordinarily ripe for the institution of higher education that wants to give this a shot (may I suggest a good candidate?).
Always Be Closing
None of this is meant to downplay the importance of the school choice laws passing all over the country. They are helpful, if uneven in their potential. But: Sometimes states that get great ratings of their laws, even by supporters, don’t actually produce many schools for kids to attend. This could potentially end up being true of the environment for hybrid and microschools too, and we should be aware of it.
A couple of years ago, my colleague Ben Scafidi and I wrote about the difference between well-written/well-regarded state charter school laws, and the charter school laws and state ecosystems that actually produce quality schools for families for the Educational Freedom Institute:
“Policies or laws that experts deem as ‘good’ are not the goal of charter school movement. The goal of the charter school movement is to have high performing charter schools available to every family who wants one for their children.”
Groups like Yes Every Kid and the Herzog Foundation are helping facilitate startups. Our own Hybrid Schools Society provides online training regularly over the course of the year too (among other benefits!). Kaipod and Prenda and others help their own startups. The point of any education reforms should end in actual schools, not in state codebooks. Pocket the policy wins, for sure. But don’t stop there. Let’s push to get more real life schools started too. But even if you can’t get any policy wins (hi, California), people should just plow ahead anyway, in whatever small ways they can.
*What’s the “right” amount of turnover in schools? I don’t know! The number is necessarily higher than zero, whatever it is. It will be higher than conventional public school closures – because those typically don’t close for reasons of performance or popularity. And that might make people uncomfortable. But we’ll know the real, “right” number when people start throwing up their hands and staying in conventional schools because there are too many school failures. I do know we are not even close to that point now.