Homeschooling

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Teacher loved her classroom but has no regrets about new role as homeschool coach

Lisa Buie
Lisa Buie

Many parents, including Lian Chikako Chang and her husband, Drew Harry, who live in San Francisco, have turned to education options such as micro-schools, homeschooling and learning pods during the coronavirus pandemic.

Emily Brigham is a homeschool success story. Her mother, a former teacher who left the classroom to educate her daughters herself, was such an inspiring role model that Brigham and her two sisters grew up to become teachers.

She was so gung-ho that she began tutoring and offering music lessons at age 14 and continued through high school and college. She interned in a classroom every semester of college.

Emily Brigham

“I just wanted to help kids however I could, seeing what a vulnerable place they’re in,” said the 23-year-old. “I want to be a friend to them; I want to help guide them. I want to help them learn to love learning and to love discovery.”

Last year, Brigham landed her first full-time teaching job on the San Jose campus of Seaside Charter School in Jacksonville. It was a dream come true for the University of North Florida graduate. But when schools prepared to reopen this year amid the continued threat of the coronavirus pandemic, Brigham made a tough decision. Like countless other teachers, she resigned her traditional teaching job to join the growing number of educators interested in assisting families who are exploring other educational choices such as homeschooling and learning pods.

A USA Today/Ipsos poll conducted in May showed that one in five teachers said they were unlikely to return to the classroom in the fall. Hillsborough County Public Schools, which typically sees about 150 requests for leave each year, scrambled to fill more than 500 teacher vacancies.

Teachers weren’t the only ones fleeing. Six in 10 parents with at least one child in grades K-12 who participated in the survey said they likely would pursue at-home learning options instead of sending their children back for in-person instruction. Nearly a third of parents, 30%, said they would be “very likely” to do that. 

Brigham disagreed with one finding of the USA Today poll that showed two-thirds of teacher respondents said the pandemic made them unable to properly do their jobs. On the contrary, she said, she felt confident and supported at Seaside Charter despite the challenges of a quick transition to virtual learning last spring.

“It was an amazing school for my first teaching experience,” she said. “I learned so much, not just about how to handle classroom discipline and how to grade papers but how to teach the whole child following the Waldorf tradition. I can’t imagine having a better first-year experience.”

That tradition, which brings a holistic approach to developing students’ intellectual, artistic and practical skills, allowed Brigham to be creative, she said. She was looking forward in May to “looping” with her 19 first graders by becoming a second-grade teacher. But as summer began, parents who were dissatisfied with distance learning or who feared sending their kids back to campus due to COVID-related safety concerns reached out to her for homeschooling guidance.

She turned them down at first. But then she realized the new venture would allow her to return to her “homeschool roots.” She explained her decision in a farewell letter to Seaside families, none of whom had asked her for homeschooling help, stating that it took a great deal of time to make up her mind.

Just six weeks into the new school year, Brigham’s new path already has begun to widen. In addition to assisting three homeschool families online and two in person, she also is teaching online classes for a Christian school in Pennsylvania.

While she enjoys the freedom and variety of what she’s doing, she acknowledges that not everyone has the luxury of taking a drastic pay cut to pursue a dream. She lives at home with her parents and can afford to work for less money, unlike some of her peers who have children and mortgages that necessitate a higher salary and benefits.

But for Brigham, a devout Christian who likes to bring her faith into her lessons, the trade-off is worth it.

“I’m able to live my faith and educate the whole child,” she said

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AnalysisCharter SchoolsCoronavirus / COVID-19CustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityEducation SpendingFeaturedHomeschoolingMicroschoolsParental ChoicePrivate SchoolsSchool Choice

‘Emergency mindset’ needed to address education inequities

redefinED staff
redefinED staff

As the first full year of schooling during the coronavirus pandemic launches, a national education advocacy network is sounding the alarm in a research brief that America’s K-12 education system is in crisis.

To ensure a more flexible, equitable and student-centered system of education both now and post-pandemic, the independent non-profit organization 50CAN is calling for a national response to that crisis, starting with a greater level of federal support for new learning modes to extend greater choice for families, including distance learning, homeschooling, and micro-schools and learning pods.

While schooling traditionally has been funded through a mix of local property taxes and state revenue with the federal government paying only about 10% of total costs, 50CAN observes, a greater level of federal support across these three modes of learning is needed. 

Among 50CAN’s overall policy recommendations:

 ·       All district, charter and private schools should receive emergency funding to support safely running in-person schooling this school year if they are able to do so and to provide a flexible, high-quality online schooling option for all students.

 ·       Families should be able to easily move into or out of these in-person and online options as their health circumstances and risk factors change throughout the year.

 ·       Families should have the option to enroll their student in an online district school program outside of their neighborhood boundaries or in an online charter school or private school program anywhere in the country with no restrictions to these online transfers, such as state enrollment caps.

 ·       Families should receive funding to enroll their child in an in-person school in a neighboring district or in a charter school or private school if their district school does not offer an in-person option.

 ·       Families up to 200% of the poverty line should receive a direct payment of $2,000 per child to pay for supplemental educational materials, tutoring, technology and other learning expenses, building upon payments — $1,200 per adult and $500 per child – in the CARES Act.

 The independent non-profit organization, launched in 2011, has a presence in eight states with affiliates in additional cities including Miami.

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Commentary and OpinionCustomizationEducation ChoiceEducation ResearchFeaturedHomeschoolingParental ChoicePodcastSchool ChoiceTechnology and Innovation

podcastED: SUFS president Doug Tuthill interviews educator, researcher and author Gina Riley

redefinED staff
redefinED staff

On this episode, Tuthill talks with Riley, clinical professor of adolescent special education at Hunter College, about “learning through living.” Author of “Unschooling: Exploring Learning Beyond the Classroom,” Riley has direct experience with the topic, having been a 20-year-old self-determined mother who raised her son using this discipline.

Since then, she has become internationally known for her work in the fields of homeschooling, unschooling and self-directed learning, conducting extensive research on these topics. (See here, here and here.)

 Tuthill and Riley discuss how interest in self-directed learning and intrinsic motivation is growing during the pandemic. Both believe the trend will continue as more families find value in a different approach to education, especially as technology continues to alter the way education works and looks.

 “Unschoolers are so good at learning how to learn. If they don’t know something or haven’t come across something … they know how to learn it, they learn how to do it.”

 EPISODE DETAILS:

·       The history of unschooling and how it differs from homeschooling

·       Research on unschooling outcomes and opinions on the model from parents and children who have participated

·       Criticism of children “not knowing” what they need to learn and the non-linear nature of learning

·       The possibility of making the benefits of unschooling available in a top-down model like a school district

 LINKS MENTIONED:

Unschooling: Exploring Learning Beyond the Classroom

Research – The challenges and benefits of unschooling

Research – Grown unschoolers’ evaluation of their unschooling experience

Research – Grown unschoolers’ experience with higher education and employment

Living by Learning Podcast

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Blog GuestCommentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19Education and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceFeaturedHomeschoolingJonathan ButcherParental ChoiceSchool Choice

With lawmakers not in session, bureaucrats should not regulate pods

Jonathan Butcher
Jonathan Butcher

Policymakers have a knack for finding private endeavors they presume still need fixing. The latest example? Learning pods.

With many schools closed to in-person instruction this fall, many parents have quickly adapted, developing the pods to continue their children’s education. Now policymakers are catching up with rules and regulations.

Learning pods are loosely defined as small groups of children who gather in a parent’s home for K-12 instruction. If this sounds like homeschooling, that’s because homeschool co-op arrangements like this have existed for decades, allowing parents to hire teachers or share their own subject matter expertise with groups of children who are not attending a public or private school full time.

In the pandemic, these pods are attracting families that had not considered educating their child at home before but are doing so now because of dissatisfaction with district online learning platforms. Parents have reason to be skeptical of district offerings this fall: District e-learning systems crashed or otherwise malfunctioned at the beginning of the new school year in Hartford, Houston, Virginia Beach, Philadelphia, across North Carolina, and during a practice session for families in Seattle.

At a Detroit school, a teacher expecting 14 students to attend online only had one student login, and his headphones were not working.

Carrie Limpert-Bostrom, a Minnesota parent, said in an interview, “You are able to fit it [a pod] to your specific needs. In our case, we wanted somebody who could speak French and speak to our children.”

She says she does not blame her school district because information regarding the pandemic is changing all the time. But, she says, “I knew I wanted something as stable as possible for my child,” adding, “I’m taking control of my daughter’s education during this time.”

Yet in some states, the question of who, in reality, is in control is one for the bureaucrats.

In Pennsylvania, state officials issued regulations stating that families involved in pods with six or more children must “notify” a state agency. While the groups do not need to be licensed, pod families must have evacuation plans in case of an emergency, as first reported by Reason, as well as create their own “health and safety plans.”

South Carolina officials are requiring that pod families serving more than six children apply for a family childcare home license. According to Charleston media, “local zoning regulations could limit that number further.” These reports also say at-home visits will be required. By the end of August, Connecticut companies helping parents form pods area ware of the potential for regulations (with the state department of education having released guidance for at-home learning) and have already scheduled “inspections” for homes hosting pods in West Hartford and Ellington (located north of Hartford).

 In Oregon, where lawmakers blocked virtual charter school enrollment at the beginning of the pandemic, officials said they may regulate pod families in the same way as childcare providers. Such restrictions would include requiring background checks, CPR training and safe sleep training.

Governors in Colorado and Massachusetts have announced waivers for traditional childcare regulations to allow the formation of pods, but these executive orders still limit the size of each pod. The Massachusetts waiver will help organizations offering after-school programs, but parents are prohibited from paying each other for either their time or the use of a home.

Many state legislators will not return to session until the beginning of next year. This fall, state agencies should not be allowed to apply restrictions on learning pods — including in-home visits. Governors should look for ways to waive regulations and licensure requirements that would limit parent attempts to provide an education for their children. Public and private school educators can determine ways of measuring student progress if students choose to return to schools, but policymakers should not regulate pods like daycare centers in the meantime.

Next year, state lawmakers can align state policies on homeschooling, private schools, and other private learning options such as education savings accounts or K-12 private school scholarships with pods and micro-schools so that parents can make informed choices about the best learning option for their child.

Until then, parents should be encouraged to customize their child’s learning experience while district plans remain in flux.

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Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19CustomizationEducation and Public PolicyEducation ChoiceEducation EquityEducation LegislationEducation Savings AccountsFeaturedHomeschoolingParental ChoiceSchool ChoiceUnionism

If schools can’t — or don’t — reopen, help families pay for at-home teaching with CARES Act, education savings accounts

Special to redefinED
Special to redefinED

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster announced in July the allocation of $32 million from the Governor’s Emergency Education Relief (GEER) fund to create one-time grants to help parents pay tuition for their children at the state’s private schools.

Editor’s note: This commentary from Katherine Kellett Bathgate, a senior policy adviser for State Policy Network and CEO and co-founder of SchoolForward, first appeared on The 74.

The American Federation of Teachers recently made headlines when it passed a resolution expressing support for any chapter that wishes to strike over schools reopening. Since then, there have been increased rumblings about possible strikes in several states.

I sympathize with teachers who are afraid to return to work, especially those who are not using the threat of strikes to achieve political goals, as some unions have done. I feel for school administrators having to make tough decisions about student and staff safety.

But if schools don’t reopen, whether because of a strike or a state or district decision, the taxpayer money that funds those schools should go to the impacted students and families.

A recent nationwide poll of 1,000 parents of K-12 children commissioned by State Policy Network showed that in the spring, during school shutdowns, families spent on average $200 total and 10 hours a week supporting their children’s education. It also revealed that 40% of parents believe their children are behind academically because of those school closures.

America cannot afford to have children fall further behind as we ride out this pandemic, and families can’t afford to continue subsidizing their children’s education like they did this spring.

Districts are announcing new closures and delayed starts every day, and parents are still grappling with whether they feel safe sending their kids back to their schools (the same poll showed only one-third to be comfortable under current conditions). As a result, some parents have turned to ideas like learning pods, where a handful of families team up to hire a teacher together or share the responsibility of homeschooling.

As this entrepreneurial idea has taken hold, and as mom Facebook groups are exploding with ideas about pods and requests to join, some have rightly questioned how equitable this is. What happens to students whose parents don’t have the financial means to hire a teacher? Or who have working parents who can’t help homeschool?

The answer has been around for nearly 10 years. It’s been tested and implemented, and all we need to do is act.

Education savings accounts, first passed in Arizona in 2011, allow families to spend a portion of their child’s state education funding on qualifying education expenses. This could be used for homeschooling, online tutoring or even chipping in to hire a teacher for a neighborhood learning pod.

Support for this idea is high, with 63% of parents in the poll saying they support passing “emergency” or “pandemic” ESAs and 35% saying they would be very or extremely likely to use a program like this if available in their state.

The challenge will be how to make ESAs a reality fast enough for families. Historically, states have taken a year or more to implement these programs once they’re passed into law. Families don’t have that kind of time right now.

But there are other ways. One example is using CARES Act funding. In South Carolina, Gov. Henry McMaster recently announced a $32 million SAFE Grants program to give low-income families up to $6,500 to fund their child’s education. As every governor has discretion to use education funds under the CARES Act, there’s no reason other states could not follow suit and direct this money to families as an ESA instead of a grant program.

States could also use special sessions to pass one-time emergency or pandemic ESAs to give a portion of each student’s funding back to the families.

Every parent of school-age children in the country has tough decisions to make as we head into the fall. As a working mom with two kids and another on the way, I empathize greatly with what parents are going through right now. We must adjust public policy to meet these needs and lighten the burden families are facing.

Now is the time to be bold and act quickly, lest we lose another year of education for millions of students.

And as someone who works in education policy, I know that we cannot afford to lose another year — or even a half year — with our children’s learning. Achievement gaps will widen further and too many kids will fall behind, especially in low-income and underserved areas. Every family, regardless of their means, should have the ability to choose the education path that is right for their child, especially this year.

So, teachers unions: Go ahead and strike. School districts: Go ahead and decide not to open. You may have legitimate health reasons for doing so. But don’t be surprised when there’s a groundswell of parents asking for their money back.

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Commentary and OpinionCourse ChoiceCustomizationEducation ChoiceFeaturedHomeschoolingMicroschoolsParental ChoiceSchool Choice

The 1960s leftist rationale for education choice is rising from the dead

Doug Tuthill
Doug Tuthill

As I talk with parents and educators who are struggling to create safe and effective learning options for their students, I’m taken with how many are revisiting the left-wing education reformers of the 1960s. Names like John Holt, Ivan Illich, A.S. Neill, and Paulo Freire are coming up so often that it feels like I’m back in graduate school.

It appears the 1960s leftist rationale for education choice is making a comeback.

A student columnist at my high school newspaper in 1971 introduced me to the radical ideas of educator John Holt.  Holt inspired me to make improving public education my life’s work.

After working as an elementary and middle school teacher in the 1950s, Holt concluded that schools undermined children’s natural desires to learn, so he began promoting a form of homeschooling he called unschooling. Holt described the relationship between unschooling and student learning in his two most famous books, “How Children Fail” (1964), and “How Children Learn” (1967).

Unschooling aims to tap into children’s natural curiosity and desire to learn through authentic life experiences. Holt saw schools as artificial environments that undermine children’s natural desires to learn through exploration and play. Some of the current surge in homeschooling and micro-schools reflects Holt’s idea that learning should occur in more natural environments.

A recent New York Times column on educating children during this pandemic referred to the recent growing popularity of Ivan Illich’s concept of deschooling. Like Holt, Illich also felt that schools were artificial environments that stifled children’s innate desires to explore and learn. As the Times columnist observed:

“Deschooling’s core principles — that education should be self-directed rather than compulsory, that human growth and curiosity cannot be quantified and that children learn best in natural environments and mixed-age groups — have gained some recognition in recent years. But the idea of truly communitarian, noncompulsory, family-centered approaches to education were largely limited to the radical fringe of pedagogy. A lot has changed in six months.”

A.S. Neill’s 1960 book, “Summerhill,” is enjoying renewed popularity with families creating learning pods, micro-schools, and homeschool cooperatives. Consistent with Holt and Illich, Neill believed education should be centered on each child’s innate internal motivation to explore and learn. He created the Summerhill School in England to implement his beliefs that schooling should be less coercive and more democratic and child centered. Neill believe that schooling should be customized to fit the child instead of molding the child to fit the school.

Many education reformers today were directly or indirectly influenced by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire. His 1968 book, “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” was, and continues to be, must reading for anyone wanting to understand the politics of government-mandated education. While Holt, Illich, and Neill wrote about how the coercive and stressful nature of schooling negatively impacts students, Freire built on this analysis to explain how governments often use schools as instruments of social control and political oppression.

Freire promoted a liberation or critical pedagogy that empowers students and families to take control of their education and use it to attain greater political and economic freedom. While most parents exercising education choice today have not read Freire’s work, their motivations for asserting greater control over their child’s education increasingly reflect Freire’s ideas on the dangers of centralized, command and control public education systems.

Like many education choice advocates, I support the more democratic, child-centered approach to education that Holt, Illich, Neill, Freire, and others were promoting in the 1960s. But scaling up an education system capable of meeting the unique needs of each child is a daunting task, which is why most schools today still employ a one-size-fits-all, assembly line approach to teaching and learning.

This horrific pandemic has given families and micro-communities a unique opportunity to assume more control over how their children are educated. We need to give these families and their communities the support they need to be successful. Perhaps the hopes of the 1960s idealists will be realized and a more natural, child-centered way of educating our children will soon become the new norm.

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Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19CustomizationEducation ChoiceFeaturedHomeschoolingParental ChoiceSchool Choice

A message of hope for parents navigating rough waters as a new school year begins

Special to redefinED
Special to redefinED

Editor’s note: Kevin Currie-Knight, who authored this commentary, is a teaching assistant professor at East Carolina University’s College of Education. Currie-Knight’s research focuses on history, philosophy, and the politics of education.

These are strange and hard times. Across the world, schools are moving away from their temporary summer hiatus with no end in sight to COVID-19.

As a professor in a college of education who is quite familiar with research on how kids learn outside of conventional schools, I can offer six bits of advice to parents struggling with how to deal with children learning from home in either 100% virtual or hybrid settings. Before I give that advice, I have to carefully stress my awareness of how different this situation is from homeschooling (let alone unschooling or homeschooling without formal curriculum).

Most parents navigated the summer, and are now entering the new academic year, dealing with kids who are home from school not by choice but by necessity. For the past six months, schools and districts have fully expected their children to be learning and completing schoolwork. But this has not been, nor is it now, in any proper way been homeschooling.

Now that I’ve said that as carefully as I can, here are six points the literature on homeschooling and unschooling can nevertheless offer to families struggling with this new learn-at-home situation.

First, as tempting as it is, you might not need to stress as much as you think.

I know this one will be hard to hear, especially for families whose schools are expecting students to maintain a rigorous school schedule at home. Families are experiencing great pressure to replicate school at home and to make sure their kids are learning everything they can lest those kids fall behind.

Yet, there are four studies I know of that show that despite not learning in any “schooled” way, kids turn out fine in life. (Here, here, here, and a study summarized here.)

They get into college when they apply. They find decent jobs. All without the benefits of a traditional school education.

This is an admittedly small number of studies, and the studies themselves are small, but the results are quite consistent. Kids who don’t attend traditional schools tend to grow into adults who aren’t very distinguishable from their peers who learned in brick-and-mortar settings – and they certainly are not deficient.

It’s clear that families in this current crisis can’t treat it as a “just let them learn what they want” experience. But my message is more humble: For all of your anxiety about your kids’ sudden hiatus from in-person school, try not to stress about what will happen if you can’t replicate school at home, or what will happen if your child doesn’t learn everything your district expects to the standard children would have at brick-and-mortar school.

If these studies are to be believed – and I think we should believe them – your kids will almost certainly turn out fine. They will go on to be able to learn or relearn what they need when they need it.

Second, your job should be to ensure your children are learning, not necessarily to teach them.

A second source of stress for parents appears to be the idea that, without any warning, they now are supposed to be teachers. I would suggest that their job instead is to make sure their children can learn things. These two are (deceptively) different ideas.

To teach someone math means you become an expert in math and then convey your math expertise to learners. But to facilitate learning means to help the learner learn – to help them find resources and to ask them questions that might help them learn: “Well, what do you think went wrong? How can we figure out what went wrong? What resources can we use to figure that out?”.

In fact, this unfortunate hiatus from in-person school might be an interesting opportunity to empower kids to take more charge of their learning. Instead of having to learn things from and at the pace the teacher sets, parents can help their children find resources – books, friends or relatives who could help, online resources, anything – children can use to take more ownership of their own learning.

Yes, you can teach your kids too, if there are subjects you feel you know quite well that you can share with your children. But your main job is to help them learn in whatever ways you can, not necessarily to teach outright.

Third, kids don’t have to be learning all the time.

The important thing is simply that they learn, not the amount of time they spend learning. I’ve been reading a book called Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, by business writer Alex Soojung-Kim Pang. The author surveys literature that indicates contrary to what we often think, people tend to perform better when allowed time for rest.

And by rest, Pang means not only the type of passive rest most of us think of (watching television, sleeping) but active rest (pursuing hobbies and activities just for fun). As he puts it, “measuring time is literally the easiest way to assess someone’s dedication and productivity, but it’s also very unreliable.”

I see no reason why the research Pang cites wouldn’t also hold true for kids doing schoolwork. In fact, it is in line with what I’ve heard from both homeschoolers and unschoolers. Homeschoolers often start out thinking they will replicate school (and its daily schedule) at home but gradually find they get the best results by doing a few hours of academic work in the morning and allowing kids the rest of the day to pursue what interests them.

Unschoolers tend to report that a good amount of their (or their kids’) time is spent “doing nothing” before the learner finds something that really interests them. And once that happens, learning often will be quite rapid. A lot of learning is compressed into a small amount of time with ample opportunity to do things besides learning.

Again, parents are encouraged to take this advice only to the extent that it fits with the expectations of their district. But the lesson should be that you care more that they are learning, not how much time they spend learning, or that the time be equivalent to how much time they spend in school.

Fourth, more choice is better than less choice.

Obviously, most parents can’t let their kids have unlimited choice over what they learn, because schools and districts expect children to learn specific things. But a lot of research (here and here) shows that choice (autonomy) is a huge motivating factor in learning.

Try to give your kids as much choice as possible given the expectations of your school district and your own comfort level. Even if your district is giving your children large packets of work to complete each day or week, you can give them choice over the order in which they do it, the resources they use to complete it (maybe instead of using the textbooks or teacher’s slides, they can use YouTube or the Internet), and what times they do their work.

Fifth, learning doesn’t just happen in school-like ways.

School inadvertently gives us all the impression that learning is something that generally happens in school. (I’ve written about this before, cautioning that we think of math, science and history less as school subjects and more as ways of thinking.)

In traditional school settings, students learn math and history in math and history class, using math and history textbooks. But homeschoolers and unschoolers learn from a host of other sources. They can learn mathematical concepts while cooking, playing video games that use point systems and such, or playing with LEGOs. They can learn history by finding interesting documentaries or historical dramas to stream, calling relatives who have interesting stories to tell, or listening to podcasts.

And sometimes, learning even the most school-related stuff will just be a byproduct of unplanned activity, where children stumble across something that is interesting to them.

Most important, try to enjoy the time with your children.

Having kids unexpectedly home all day can surely be stressful. But it is also a great opportunity to develop connections with them that are less possible when they are in school (and we are at work) all day. And just as parents are stressed during times like these, so are kids. Now is a time where parents get to have conversations with kids, share their interests and allow them to share theirs.

This study of parents who don’t send their kids to traditional schools shows that a whopping 57% of those parents felt in retrospect like “family closeness” was a highly valuable part of having their kids home with them. Of course, those are families who chose (parents and kids) to not send the kids to school. Nevertheless, these families can teach us how parents and children can learn to see each other as allies and resources rather than adversaries.

So, we can take these strange times to get to know our kids in ways we couldn’t before, allow those of us who are working from home to see what their parents do all day and play (and learn) together.

It is true that we are not all homeschoolers and unschoolers now. To claim that we are would be like saying those displaced by natural disasters have become campers and outdoors enthusiasts. But just as veteran campers might have some words of wisdom for people navigating displacement, the literature on homeschooling and unschooling could have something to offer parents struggling in this difficult environment.

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Commentary and OpinionCoronavirus / COVID-19CustomizationEducation ChoiceEducation EquityEducation Savings AccountsFeaturedHomeschoolingMicroschoolsParental ChoiceSchool ChoiceTechnology and Innovation

Education transformation, micro-schools and the question of equity

Special to redefinED
Special to redefinED

Among the remote learning options offered by Wonderschool, a company that matches families to child-care and micro-schools near them, is Base One, a space where students can focus on schoolwork and stay up to speed during the pandemic while receiving access to premium coding education and state-of-the art video gaming equipment they can use after school.

Editor’s note: This commentary from Michael B. Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute and executive director of its education program, first appeared on Substack.

As pandemic pods have spread around the country and reporters and families are trying to make sense of this moment in the sun for micro-schools, I’ve been talking to the different entrepreneurs supporting these experiences for students, families, and educators.

A central question on reporters’ and educators’ minds has been equity. With over 50% of school districts planning on remote learning in the fall, there’s concern that those with the most resources can find or create good solutions, whereas those with the least will be stuck without any suitable schooling and child-care options.

Given the existing opportunity gaps for students from low-income and minority backgrounds before the pandemic, and the assumption that many have suffered deep learning losses since March while those from relatively well-off families likely found learning opportunities through their home environment if not their school, there is heightened sensitivity around the question.

This feels right on the surface.

But a recent conversation I had with Chris Bennett, the founder and CEO of Wonderschool—a company that matches families to child-care and micro-schools near them, gave me pause (you can watch the interview here on YouTube).

Think of Wonderschool like an Airbnb for launching education programs. The company has been operating since 2016. Before the pandemic it was growing fast, as it helped people start infant and toddler programs and preschools out of their homes.

When I asked Chris about the equity question, he urged caution around making presumptions.

“It’s really hard to get visibility into what’s happening for families all over the country that are coming through this,” he said. “But my guess is [that low-income and middle-income families], they’re figuring this out, just along with, you know, very wealthy families that are out there doing this.”

The son of immigrants from Honduras who grew up in Miami in a large family of 31 first cousins where he was the first to graduate from college, it’s a question Chris takes seriously. He credits his own success with having been enrolled in a great preschool program.

As he said, “It’s something I think deeply about. You know, the mission of Wonderschool is to ensure every child gets access to the education they need to fulfill their potential. And so, we are very, very committed to every child getting access, especially when I share my story.”

That’s where the second point comes in. Low-income and minority parents are far more likely to prefer that their children do not return to school buildings until the pandemic has passed than their counterparts. For example, according to one survey, 64% of black parents want remote learning versus 32% of white parents. Most families making less than $50,000 want remote learning, whereas 27% of families making more than $150,000 feel the same way.

As Morgan Polikoff, co-director of the study, hypothesized, “These communities may have already been harder hit by the virus, and they have seen more of what the actual impact is on people’s health.”

The findings, which have appeared in survey after survey, also suggest that these families do have child-care options in place.

The final thought also goes back to something Chris shared with me.

“What’s really exciting about this movement is this could potentially lead to funding for micro-schools from our school districts, from our state governments, from our from the federal government,” he said. “And if there’s funding for micro-schools, just like there’s funding for public school or funding for charter schools. Then, suddenly, you know, everyone gets access to a micro-school.”

As Chris observed there’s already a vehicle in some states to do just this: Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), which are funded with public dollars that allow families to spend the money on micro-schools and other education services. In Arizona, for example, ESAs allow students to attend micro-schools from Prenda, a hot startup in the micro-school arena.

 “All I keep thinking is why isn’t that available nationwide? If that’s available nationwide, then the equity component is solved for,” Chris said. “Now the quality component is the next level, that’s something that we’re going to have to solve for, but that’s an issue about every type of micro-school, no matter how wealthy the parent is.”

Most public schools haven’t eagerly jumped in to support this trend Chris acknowledged, but given the funding exists, he’s bullish about the greater opportunity. And to be fair, there are some districts that have seized the moment to create learning pods themselves and ensure all their students have adequate options, such as the Adams 12 district north of Denver and others featured in this Chalkbeat article.

That resonates because although I’ve argued that disruptive innovation of schooling is unlikely in the United States, I’ve also long hypothesized that if it were to occur, it would come about in the form of an Airbnb platform making home-schooling and micro-schooling far more accessible to many more families who were over-served by the existing schools and just wanted a customized schooling option that fit their needs.

Stay tuned to what happens to Wonderschool. It was one of the hot startups before the pandemic hit, but in supporting micro-schools, it appears they are remaining relevant and will continue to grow. And in so doing, another part of the Wonderschool story is that they are enabling educators to earn significantly more money by pricing their services in the market. As Chris shared, one preschool teacher on their platform was able to earn the same salary that she earned in a year in just a month and a half by starting her own school.

To attract the talent in the teaching profession that children need to develop, that could also be a game-changer.

To continue reading this article and to learn why Horn believes community colleges shouldn’t be the answer to upskilling in America, click here.

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