In West Philadelphia

The Northeastern Hybrid and Microschools Forum

Northeastern Hybrid and Microschools Forum

Continuing in our series of local events* – the Western Forum, the Heartland Summit, we held our first event in the northeast, in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia just before the election. (Yes we went to the Philadelphia suburbs the weekend before the election and managed to not really talk about it at all).

We had an amazing group of school people, founders and potential founders, support organization leaders, and other types.  Pennsylvanians dominated of course, but we had people from all over the northeast.  One thing the day really highlighted was just how extreme the different environments states are facing can be.  California has (sort of secretly) huge numbers of students in hybrid style charter schools.  (I think it might be possible to do this in other states as well, with some different wrinkles.  People should look up Julian or Springs or Core Butte and try it!).  In the South, the homeschooling environment makes things feel pretty wide open – if you can think of an interesting school design, you can pretty much do it.  ESAs, tuition tax credits…lots of ideas can be put on the table and have decent shots at becoming reality.  The northeast has its challenges here.  But as we saw in Philadelphia, plenty of people are still able to go out and spin up amazing new kinds of schools anyway. 

“Success”

Defining accountability remains a challenge.  Every school can define how their own students are better off, and could do so for hours at a time.  But a succinct answer for the field is elusive.  Statewide standardized test requirements are a hard no for many schools who want to see ESAs.  So are curriculum requirements.  Is some form of accreditation? Many Georgia hybrid schools, for example, have a very light touch accreditation which provides them access to a major state college scholarship program. This is a question I would love to hear more people’s thoughts about.

Entrepreneurship

Finally, we talked about many entrepreneurship issues.  Should a new founder, who likely has little if any business management in their background, prioritize affordability and access, or financial sustainability as they get started?  (It seems most founders seem to lean toward making their schools more affordable in the early days, with low tuition, many discounts, a reliance on grants and donations, etc.  But if you’re not financially sustainable…then you’re not financially sustainable). Thanks to Carolyn Byer from KaiPod for running a great discussion to end the day.

Charter Echoes

Another item worth mentioning from this Philadelphia event came from a side conversation I had, about something I’ve thought about a lot – how so much of what is happening today really sounds a lot like the world of charter schools in, say, 2004.  Charter schools have been around for decades and are highly regulated now, but I have had many cases of déjà vu in conversations around hybrid and microschools that I could swear I already had in the 2000s.  For example:

Leaders. Schools and organizations were constantly on the lookout for hard charging, Ivy/TFA grad leaders for charters in the 2000s.  We got a lot of really talented people, but there is a limited number of these.  As charter regulations became more complex and more bureaucratic over time, the idea of becoming a charter school leader, able to build a really interesting, creative school, became less attractive, and frankly less attainable.  The hybrid and microschool space attracts a somewhat different sort of person – often someone who has been a teacher or a parent for a minute, and has a much more detailed and specific concept of the school they want to start and run.  And they are typically not covered in regulations, so their actual vision for a school has a better chance of becoming a reality.  There are fewer necessary compromises.  But still: as with charters, no one really has had the preparation to create and run a hybrid or microschool yet.  There isn’t a leadership pipeline.  So the talent supply is something the sector needs to keep thinking about.

Governance. Just as was the case with charter schools, we’re bringing in new people as board members, which is great.  But they don’t always have experience as board members of a nonprofit organization (or of a for profit business).  Or, if they’re founders, they don’t always have experience even using a board, and why board/management collisions can cause real problems.  We will certainly see more attrition in this group of schools than we do in conventional schools (which functionally never close down).  But to the extent we want them to persist past the time of the founder, we have to talk about how to do that more.  Founder’s Disease has not been eradicated.

Mom and Pop vs Corporate Startup.  I have been expecting more franchising to happen.  The good news is the way it’s happening today leaves a lot more control in the hands of the local school leaders.  I do not see hybrid/microschools management organizations running the show to the extent we started to see that in charter school world.  “Franchisees” to be more independent.  But as the ESA landscape grows, we should remain vigilant and beware the desire to screen for “high quality.”  Sounds mostly harmless, but in the history of charter school approvals, those two words put pressure on risk averse authorizers/funders/legislators to mostly back “sure” things.  Overcorrecting for weirdness/not being able to handle ambiguity among startups took a lot of the creativity out of the charter sector for a while.  The big orgs could pass these screens, while the hyperlocal startups could not.

Policy and Philanthropy and Government Encouragement.  Along with moving away from mom and pops, eventually the charter school sector was more often pushed/led by policy groups/philanthropy/large government startup funds, not the field itself.  The sector became so technocratic it was not really feasible for individuals to start up a charter school as a one-off, local project.  You had to be part of a much larger ecosystem to have a real shot, or to get real respect.  All of these groups – policy researchers, philanthropy, government can get things off the ground and can be helpful to teach schools how to grow as a sector.  Supporters of the sector among those groups should just be careful here.  The creative energy is with the local founders, not in white papers and the dollars they suggest.  When higher level groups start to take too much of the lead, it changes the sector.  Schools start chasing dollars instead of innovating the way they want to/the way their constituencies want them to. 

I can think of a few other analogies as well.  Maybe a lot of this is inevitable, but we can at least see it coming.  It feels like that we have learned from the past, so far.   

On the other hand, whether we learn doesn’t matter at a certain level.  If every ESA required state test scores or some other poison pill, plenty of these schools, new and old, would just walk but keep operating.  We had a hybrid and microschool sector before ESAs, before COVID.  It might shrink, but it has definitely levelled up in a permanent way from 5 years ago.  We saw it in Philadelphia – the fact that these kinds of schools are starting up and growing even in “hostile” territory shows how much staying power community crafted education has.  People want school choice everywhere, and are willing to put in the work to will new schools into existence.

*We’ll be back in California this spring – coming to Los Angeles February 22!  And of course the granddaddy of them all is returning in April, bigger than ever.