What is a “Hybrid School”?
There is a lot of interest among researchers, policymakers, school leaders, journalists, and others on the various kinds of school models that have become popular over the last few years and how they work. As I cross into several of those categories in my work with hybrid schools, this conversation is important to me. A definition of “hybrid schools” I have settled on lately is what we wrote in the 2022 National Hybrid Schools Survey: 1. most or all of the curriculum is decided by the school (though varying levels of instruction and grading may be done by parents), and 2. students attend live classes fewer than 5 days per week in a physical building, and are “homeschooled” the rest of the week.
As we write in the report, hybrid schools in our definition may offer a la carte classes, but we excluded groups that seemed to only offer a la carte classes. We also exclude 5-day schools, but in some cases 5-day schools operate hybrid-style programs to subsets of students, maybe to pull in nearby homeschoolers, and we did include some examples of those arrangements in our survey. Last, we obviously do not include full-time five-day schools as “hybrid schools,” nor do we include full-time homeschoolers. We also do not include full-time schools which allow homeschoolers to take a few classes and so construct a functionally hybrid sort of schedule, or homeschool co-ops which operate too loosely to meet most people’s common conception of a “school.”
This exercise is really just for research purposes. We need an operational definition to be consistent, and in our surveys we are trying to curate a set of schools that fit it, and include/exclude them in our lists as well as we can. So we need definitions, but if someone at a school considers themselves “hybrid” and doesn’t quite match these parameters, it doesn’t bother me much (though we wouldn’t include them in our work). And: we also do include some schools that we would absolutely consider to be “hybrid schools” who insist that they are NOT hybrids. Some object to the word “hybrid,” and others object to the word “school.”
Here is a story from my book that I have told in many places, about two neighboring hybrid schools:
“…both hold classes two days per week, with three days at home, and they both operate in the same state (and so have the same basic sets of laws and regulations applying to them). Yet administrators from the two schools disagree completely on whether they could be considered “homeschoolers.”
School A’s administrator described the nature of that school this way: “We try to avoid the homeschool label…we really are a structured private school. We have grades, we do dual enrollment for college classes…We lean more towards the structured environment with more time at home.”
School B, which, again, operates in the same regulatory environment as School A, and follows the same weekly structure, had a participant who described School B this way: “I think [our families] would describe themselves as homeschooling families that enroll with [the school] to be assisted. I think we consider ourselves primarily homeschoolers, but [the school] provides a means for us to be successful in homeschooling.”
This is not to say that these definitions are meaningless. In fact, they are very important in terms of whether these students must register with the state as homeschoolers or not, how they qualify for state-sponsored college scholarships, how they must be tested, and other issues. In this example, School B has its students register with the state education agency as homeschoolers; School A does not. Legally, there is likely a correct answer as to which school is operating properly, but because they are so thin on the ground, these schools often go unnoticed by state regulators. Whatever the correct legal answer is in these schools’ state, the fact is they are defining for themselves how they want to operate and how they want to be regulated. As one of the school leaders put it, “State regulators just don’t know what to do with us.”
What is Not a Hybrid School?
We need definitions for research and for policy discussion purposes, but otherwise having loads of schools operating in a gray area is fine with me. Still, to continue working on the definition side, it might be useful to keep exploring the question: “What is NOT a hybrid school?,” in the sense I mean.
If you said you attended or worked at a “hybrid school” in, say 2010, you probably meant some kind of online school. I would not consider that “hybrid” at this point.
COVID complicated the picture even more, as schools and colleges went to what they called “hybrid learning” in response to the pandemic. By “hybrid learning,” many institutions meant that classes would split, and some students would attend physical class, while others watched the class live online, and maybe interacted in some way. That is also not something I would classify as “hybrid” in the sense I have been using it; it’s just a really unfortunate complication in terms.
This Vox article from fall 2020 is a little bit closer. It is pretty harsh toward hybrid models, though the author seems to conflate several kinds, and does not anywhere address the fact that hybrid schools existed well before COVID and are not some kind of panic-emergency invention. This Wired piece from about the same time is even worse about this, arguing that “The hybrid schedule exists solely as a kludge and back-formation from the standard 6-foot guideline for social distancing.” That may have been true for a lot of the public school districts that tried some version of “hybrid” instruction, but again there is not much evidence that this author knows about pre-existing hybrid schools either. Neither piece recognizes that many of those pre-existing hybrid schools were open and operated pretty normally in fall 2020. (And this paper from Georgia Tech in spring of 2022 argues that, contra some panic in the Vox and Wired pieces, hybrid schedules seem to have actually reduced COVID transmission, and by an amount similar to fully closing schools down).
This 2022 analysis finds a lot of damage to academic achievement due to “remote and hybrid instruction” during the 2020-21 school year, but unless I missed it, I do not see a clear definition of what the authors mean by “hybrid” schooling. I do not see a clear differentiation between “hybrid” and “remote” here either. I get the sense that it means, ultimately, something like “schools that reported they were doing hybrid learning,” or “were on a list of schools doing hybrid learning,” but without much more of an operational definition than that. If “hybrid” learning in many of these schools meant “some kids online watching others who were in class,” or if it meant “some kids came a few days per week and did fully remote learning the other days,” that is not exactly much of an indictment of the model many actual hybrid schools have been using for years, and used to get themselves through COVID. In fact, I suspect many hybrid school kids may be better off than many of their peers because their schools operated normally rather than shutting them out for a year or more.
This post was not supposed to turn into an Airing of Grievances, and it’s not quite Festivus yet anyway. With this newly-growing landscape of hybrid schools, microschools, and many, many more homeschoolers though, making sense of who’s doing what will be important if research and our understanding and decisionmaking are going to be clear.