If you are, well, upright, there is kind of a lot to be bothered about in the country at the moment. Several years go, Jonah Goldberg recalled this story:
“According to legend, when George Will signed up to become a syndicated columnist in the 1970s, he asked his friend William F. Buckley, Jr. — the founder of National Review and a columnist himself — “How will I ever write two columns a week?” Buckley responded (I’m paraphrasing), “Oh it will be easy. At least two things a week will annoy you, and you’ll write about them.”
Buckley was right. Annoyance is an inspiration, aggravation a muse.”
That is probably excellent advice for maintaining the pace of a twice-weekly column (or a Substack). And education policy is definitely a place where you *could* be annoyed all the time, but school choice advocates and families have posted some good wins lately. So here I want to do something different. We don’t actually need annoyance for inspiration right now. Contra this scene here, I want to note how much school choice supporters are the ones “winning all the things.”
There Art Thou Happy
Recall that in Romeo and Juliet, Romeo is kind of emo, and after (spoiler) Romeo kills Tybalt, he starts falling apart about his situation to Friar Laurence. Friar Laurence doesn’t want to hear it because actually Romeo is lucky and the priest counts the ways: Tybalt didn’t kill Romeo; he’s exiled, not banished, Juliet still likes him:
A pack of blessings light upon thy back;
Happiness courts thee in her best array;
But, like a misbehaved and sullen wench,
Thou pout'st upon thy fortune and thy love.
Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.
(Also maybe related, recall too that a big part of the reason for everything going bad at the end is caused by…a plague + a quarantine. Act V Scene ii….).
Let’s count three places school choice advocates/families/community crafted schools should be happy at the moment: Policy Wins, Network Growth, and New Research.
Policy Wins
First, policy wins. These are important in part because they enable more people to access more schools/experiences. All of the homeschooling legal battles of the 70s/80s/90s that led to its being legal in state policies (and which have enabled hybrid schools, etc) were big wins. But also, new policies are often signs that something has just become more socially acceptable, and legislative bodies are recognizing it.
Here’s a classic example:
A legislative body passes a compulsory school attendance law. Is this evidence that:
The community valued schooling and wished to express this view in legislation?
OR
The community didn’t value schooling, and community leaders felt the need to adopt coercive efforts?
It can work both ways — people can ratify existing behaviors, and also the law can teach. In this case policies are helping to ratify and foster something that doesn’t need to be pushed onto people. Here are a few specific examples of policy wins:
West Virginia is still the surprise that keeps giving:
“State Treasurer Riley Moore today announced the Hope Scholarship Program has met state law requirements for opening up eligibility to all West Virginia school-age children beginning in the 2026-2027 academic year.”
Louisiana had a big recent win too.
EdChoice has a good and up to date listing of other wins on their website, and their President Robert Enlow gives a good podcast roundup of the current state of things on The Federalist Radio Hour.
Network Growth
These school are very community crafted locally. But as time passes, founders are more and more able to find and learn from each other, so another, geographically bigger community is also forming. I’m not sure it’s quite right to say this is its own profession, exactly, but a community of people is definitely starting to cohere nationally. And events are popping up to support it. The first Velacon, our own Western Hybrid and Microschools Forum (coming again in 2025), the return of the Heartland Hybrid and Microschools Summit this fall, and of course the Granddaddy of Them All, this year’s annual National Hybrid Schools Conference.
But also the field is evolving in other interesting ways. This sector of community crafted schools isn’t just about replicating schools. Support companies are starting to emerge too. Publications, yes, but also things like providers who *only* do field trips for particular students:
Would this kind of thing be possible in a conventional public school? Yes, it definitely would, but there is just so much more incentive and opportunity for unique providers to emerge and try to make it when there are more kinds of schools looking to create more kinds of experiences. (And it’s much easier for small experience providers to connect with small local schools than to find their way into a public school system contract).
New Research
That StepUp example above comes as part of a new white paper on the topic of a la carte learning experiences.
I have been working on researching these schools since 2015 or so, and there is still a lot of territory to cover. The bad news is that because these schools vary so much in their arrangements – as private schools, as collections of homeschoolers, as charter schools, even as programs of conventional public schools – no place does or really can collect totally comparable data on everything that is happening. This makes conducting research harder, but that is a problem for researchers, not for schools. The good news is that the National Hybrid Schools Project has a lot of work coming out the second half of this year, using a few different techniques. Soon our third annual national survey will post; stay tuned for news on that. And more. And places like the Homeschool Research Lab at Johns Hopkins are doing more systematic work too. We don’t need research to validate everything that people are doing, but having good work done can help inform policy decisions, and also inform how we might generally think about this landscape that is constantly changing.
Education policy is not a complete dumpster fire at the moment. Yes higher ed has severe problems, yes the current pool of classroom teachers has severe problems, yes the entire architecture around K12 education has severe problems. Granted. These things all annoy many people, including me, multiple times per week.
My first experience with school choice was at a charter school in Tallahassee in the 90s. Good experience but it would have been unthinkable for me then that we would have the ability to create educational options the way we can today. Between policy changes (including some trial and error), technological advances (“advances”), and a general societal acceptance of people trying out new and different-looking schooling arrangements, there has maybe literally never been a better time to go out and start up a school or other kind of educational venture.