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microschools

Micro-schools, rigorous distance learning never gonna give your innovative spirit up

Matthew Ladner August 10, 2020

Matthew Ladner

Science writer Matthew Ridley has described the innovation process as one of trial and error in which individuals combine pre-existing techniques and/or technologies.

One example: Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing were around for many years before innovators figured out how to put them together to revolutionize the energy market.

Another example: Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” were around for decades before some unknown innovator combined them to create the greatest song in the English language.

Likewise, a new policy brief posted to the Arizona Charter Schools Association website suggests that combining project-based micro-schools with rigorous live distance learning can create a new path, to scale, for high-demand schools and can unleash new opportunities for teachers while addressing equity concerns with pandemic pods.

A Phoenix radio host interviewed a 44-year (!) classroom veteran teacher last year. The teacher observed that the main problem with education today isn’t a lack of funding, which he said has “always been tough.” The real problem, he said, is that “the joy of teaching has been strangled out of the profession.”

This can and must change, and combining small education communities with rigorous distance learning just might do the trick.

If you’ve ever visited a project-based learning micro-school, you quickly see the joy so sorely lacking in most education settings. With Sal Khan, founder of a free educational video library that allows blending learning, as your scout-troop/school leader, you’re watching an excited group of kids engaging in 3-D print design. An education guide leads students through some daily academic work on computers, but then the students tackle group projects.

I watched students engaged in 3-D print design at a Prenda micro-school on the Apache Nation in San Carlos Arizona. These kids were not just learning, they were learning and loving it. These types of schools have great potential because they do not require educators to raise funds for multi-million facilities.

This style of education, which took an early hold prior to the pandemic, has been thrust into the limelight now through the advent of pandemic pods. Educators can address equity concerns, such as a low-income family’s ability to pay teachers and gain access to computers, with enlightened public policy.

Success Academy of New York developed another innovation to pair with micro-schools. Success Academy changed the roles of instructional staff for distance learning, with teachers variously tackling the roles of lecturers and small group facilitator/student problem solvers.

The most skilled math instructor in the network gave a live internet broadcast lecture via the internet. Students divided into small groups to interact with teachers to discuss the material and work out issues. Teachers then graded and monitored student achievement and scheduled individual online tutoring sessions with struggling students.

The Success Academy distance learning model is itself potentially revolutionary. In theory, the network could offer this version of itself to both enrollment lottery winners and enrollment lottery losers. Many parents on the waitlist might very much prefer this option over a spot in a district that numbers rather than names schools.

Education, however, is very much a social enterprise for many, as most of us want and need access to instructors and classmates. We need community. The Arizona Center for Student Opportunity brief referenced above calls for educators to combine Prenda-style micro-schools with Success Academy-style distance learning programs.

This proposal could take a variety of forms. Education service providers could reach agreements with pandemic pod providers to “adopt” them into their distance learning programs. Alternatively, high-demand schools could gauge interest in creating pods among their current students and their waitlisted families.

Equity-related concerns connected to pandemic pods could be addressed through funding students. Private choice programs focusing on disadvantaged student populations, such as Florida’s scholarship programs, could be used to help low-income students and those with disabilities afford micro-schools. Alternatively, public school distance-learning statues could defer costs.

In Arizona, Prenda operates schools through district, charter and private choice mechanisms. All Prenda students take the state’s AZMerit exam, and students whose education is funded through district and charter mechanisms have their results factored into school ratings.

In partnering with a Success Academy-style distance learning provider, the “mothership” would provide the live lecture, while the small group facilitation function would be conducted by in-person by guides. Different flavors of micro-schools can be created through affiliation with different mothership institutions. Teachers can run the show rather than being part of all-too-often hugely indifferent bureaucracies. All we need are some trailblazing educators and enlightened policy.

To paraphrase the Gen-X bard:

“With the schools out, it’s less dangerous! Here we are now, liberate us! Don’t feel stupid or contagious! Here we are now, educate us!”

August 10, 2020 1 comment

Customization Education Choice Education Equity Featured Homeschooling Microschools News School Choice Technology and Innovation Virtual Education

The rise of altschool and other micro-schools

Special to redefinED July 28, 2020

Special to redefinED

Acton Academy opened in 2009 with 12 students, teaching content through online game-based tools, Socratic discussion and face-to-face projects the school calls “quests.” Today, Acton offers kits to entrepreneurs and parents interested in opening their own schools following its model.

Editor’s note: This commentary from Michael B. Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, is included in the Summer 2020 edition of Education Next.

From San Francisco to Austin, Texas, to New York, new forms of schooling termed micro-schools are popping up.

As of yet, there is no common definition that covers all these schools, which vary not only by size and cost but also in their education philosophies and operating models. Think one-room schoolhouse meets blended learning and home schooling meets private schooling.

As Matt Candler, founder of 4.0 Schools, writes:

“What makes a modern micro-school different from a 19th century, one-room schoolhouse is that old-school schools only had a few ways to teach — certainly no software, no tutors, and probably less structure around student to student learning. In a modern micro-school, there are ways to get good data from each of these venues. And the great micro-school of the future will lean on well-designed software to help adults evaluate where each kid is learning.”

Several factors are driving their emergence. Micro-schools are gaining traction among families who are dissatisfied with the quality of public schooling options and cannot afford or do not want to pay for a traditional private-school education. These families want an option other than home schooling that will personalize instruction for their child’s needs. A school in which students attend a couple days a week or a small school with like-minded parents can fit the bill.

Some trace the micro-school’s origins to the United Kingdom, where over the past decade people began applying the term micro-schools to small independent and privately funded schools that met at most two days a week. As in the United States, the impetus for their formation was dissatisfaction with local schooling options. Although home-schooling families have for some time created cooperatives to gain some flexibility for the adults and socialization for the children, the micro-schooling phenomenon is more formal.

One of the early U.S. micro-schools, QuantumCamp, was founded in the winter of 2009 in Berkeley, California, out of a dare that one couldn’t teach quantum physics in a simple way. The result was the development of a course that would be accessible to children as young as 12.

The school now offers a complete hands-on math and science curriculum for students in first through eighth grades and serves about 150 home schoolers during the school year; double that number attend the summer program. Tuition ranges from $600 to $2,400 depending on the program and enrollment period.

In 2013, QuantumCamp introduced language arts courses. Each academic class meets once a week for an activity-based exploration of big ideas and then offers out-of-class content that includes videos, readings, problem sets, podcasts, and other activities to enable students to continue exploring concepts at their own pace.

At roughly the same time as QuantumCamp’s founding, in Austin, Texas, Jeff Sandefer, founder of the nationally acclaimed Acton School of Business and his wife, Laura, who has a master’s degree in education, launched Acton Academy. In creating the five-day-a-week, all-day school, the couple sought to ensure that their own children wouldn’t be “talked at all day long” in a traditional classroom. The Acton Academy’s mission is “to inspire each child and parent who enters [its] doors to find a calling that will change the world.” The school promises that students will embark on a “hero’s journey” to discover the unique contributions that they can make toward living a life of meaning and purpose.

With tuition of $9,515 per year, Acton Academy initially enrolled 12 students and has since 2009 grown to serve 75 students in grades 1 to 9. The school has learning guides—they aren’t called teachers—whose role is to push students to own their learning. The model enables the academy to have far fewer on-site adults per student than a traditional independent school and to operate at a cost of roughly $4,000 per student per year.

Acton compresses students’ core learning into a two-and-a-half-hour personalized-learning period each day during which students learn mostly online. This affords time for three two-hour project-based learning blocks each week, a Socratic seminar each day, game play on Fridays, ample art and physical education offerings, and many social experiences.

The Socratic discussions teach students to talk, listen, and challenge ideas in a face-to-face circle of peers and guides. The projects require the students to work in teams to apply the knowledge they have learned. They also foster a ‘‘need to know’’ mind-set to motivate the online learning and provide a public, portfolio-based means for students to demonstrate achievement.

Early results appear impressive, as the first group of students gained 2.5 grade levels of learning in their first 10 months. Now the school is spreading. There are currently eight Acton Academies operating—seven of them in the United States. Twenty-five are slated to be open by 2015. The Sandefers are not operating them, however; they provide communities that want to open an Acton clone a do-it-yourself kit plus limited consulting and access to wiki discussion groups. They are developing a game-based learning tool to help prepare Acton Academy owners and the learning guides in the schools. Tuition at the academies ranges from $4,000 per year to $9,900.

Inspired in part by micro-schools like Acton Academy that use his software, the prince of online and personalized learning himself, Sal Khan, launched his own micro-school in the fall of 2014 in Mountain View, California. The Khan Lab School, which charges $22,000, opened with roughly 35 students and intends “to research blended learning and education innovation by creating a working model of Khan Academy’s philosophy of learning in a physical school environment and sharing the learnings garnered with schools and networks around the world.”

As Isabella, an 11-year-old student who previously attended a nearby public school, said, “Here it’s different from my old school because you’re doing your own playlist and you have more projects.”

Mandeep Dhillon, a parent with two children enrolled at Khan Lab School, amplified the differences.

“After a while, we realized public, private school didn’t matter. Kids were being programmed in chunks,” he said. “I hate the term home schooling because it’s based on location. It’s not really about having them at home. What we’re trying to do is build an independent path. It’s not about the schooling, it’s about experiences.”

As these small schools proliferate, their impact on the wider world of schooling—public and private—is potentially large, but still anything but certain.

July 28, 2020 0 comment

Coronavirus / COVID-19 Customization Education Choice Featured Grassroots Microschools News Parent Empowerment School Choice

Parents looking for safer education solutions turn to ‘pandemic pods’

Lisa Buie July 23, 2020

Lisa Buie

Lian Chikako Chang, right, pictured with her husband, Drew Harry, and their 3-year-old son, Jay, created the private Facebook page Pandemic Pods and Microschools to help like-minded families connect.

Christy Kian’s phone rang in early March when the number of COVID-19 cases had just started climbing.

The parent of two students whom Kian had taught at a Broward County private school wasn’t satisfied with distance learning. Anticipating that brick-and-mortar schools might not be able to reopen safely in the fall, the parent was curious: Would Kian consider teaching the family’s two elementary-age children at their home?

“I was sort of shocked,” said Kian. “I happened to love the family and happened to love the children. I said okay, let’s think about this and how we should move forward.”

A month later, another family whose children Kian had taught called with the same request. And so, in August, Kian will begin spending three hours a day teaching four children from the two families – for pay.

A phenomenon the veteran educator had never heard of when she got those calls – pandemic pods – suddenly has blossomed into a trend that is reshaping public education on a national scale. As uncertainty about reopening school campuses continues to rise, these pods are arrangements where families or groups of families band together to provide education and socialization for their children.

The trend started in California in response to that state’s reopening guidelines that restrict schools in about 80% of counties to online education only this fall. Some are looking to form microschools, which typically serve fewer than 10 students.

The Washington Post called pandemic pods “the 2020 version of the one-room schoolhouse, privately funded.” Experts say they’re a fascinating example of a grassroots response to a crisis.

“Parents are saying no matter what the options are that are offered, that they are going to be the final decisionmakers in all of this,” said Annette Anderson, deputy director of the Center for Safe and Healthy Schools at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Education. “Parents are not being swayed by mandates about who and how students should go back. Parents have put themselves in the driver’s seat.”

Lian Chikako Chang, who runs a data-focused parenting blog, Littldata, created the private Facebook page Pandemic Pods and Microschools after noticing behavioral changes in her 3-year-old during the pandemic and began seeking ways to form a bond with other families.

The group now has 13,600 members and helps connect families from nearby areas who want to form a pod. It also helps match families with teachers who are seeking to work with pods. Details such as pay rates, schedules and rules for those in the pods are left to the individual groups to work out.

Some families want teachers to handle the job like they would in a traditional class. (Kian will be taking attendance, choosing curriculum and providing all instruction and assessments.) Others just want an in-person teacher to supplement their school’s virtual instruction.

Chapters are forming across the United States, though no Florida Facebook pages exist on the national page. Still, a few Floridians have expressed interest in forming a pod or teaching for one.

One woman from Pensacola said she was looking for a teacher to homeschool one third-grader and up to three sixth-graders. A Florida teacher said she was exploring the option and planned to charge at least $20 per hour for tutoring. Others were charging $50 per hour per child or higher, with some looking to equal the salaries they made at their schools.

Kian, the Broward County teacher, said she will earn more to teach four children than she did at her former teaching job.

“Ideally, I’d like to see children back in school,” Kian said. “I don’t think of this as my long-term career; this is something that fell in my lap, where I can help a couple of families get by until it’s abated.”

Critics point out that pandemic pods exacerbate inequities already exposed by distance learning necessitated by the pandemic. Meanwhile, public policy experts have observed that “podding” is reinforcing the adage that the market always finds a way.

In the words of Lindsey Burke, director for the Center for Education Policy at the Heritage Foundation: “It’s time for policy to catch up with families.”

July 23, 2020 2 comments

Commentary and Opinion Coronavirus / COVID-19 Course Choice Customization Education Choice Education Equity Featured Homeschooling Microschools Parental Choice School Choice

You better start swimmin’ for the times they are a-changin’

Matthew Ladner July 20, 2020

Matthew Ladner

Come gather ’round people

Wherever you roam

And admit that the waters

Around you have grown

And accept it that soon

You’ll be drenched to the bone

If your time to you

Is worth savin’

Then you better start swimmin’

Or you’ll sink like a stone

For the times they are a-changin’

— Bob Dylan

We at redefinED and others have been writing for years about the rise of the micro-school movement. Five years ago, an article in Wired magazine, titled The Techies Who Are Hacking Education by Homeschooling Their Kids, discussed the rise of homeschooling in Silicon Valley, quoting Jens Peter de Pedro, an app designer from Brooklyn:

“There is a way of thinking within the tech and startup community where you look at the world and go, ‘Is the way we do things now really the best way to do it?’ If you look at schools with this mentality, really the only possible conclusion is ‘Heck, I could do this better myself out of my garage!’”

Matt Kramer, CEO of the Wildflower Foundation, which supports a network of micro-schools, told Education Next in 2017:

“We’ve seen a 30-year decline in teacher satisfaction to an epically low level. Micro-schools offer a creative new way of thinking about teachers acting like social entrepreneurs.”

You didn’t need to be a soothsayer to see this was going to get much bigger.

“It wouldn’t surprise me if, 5 to 10 years from now, everyone looks at this and thinks, ‘That grew a whole lot faster than I thought it could,’” observed Andy Calkins, deputy director of the Next Generation Learning Challenges, in the same article. “There is a slice of the market that is not being served by public education. They’re saying, ‘The public schools don’t work, [and] I can’t get into the charter schools.’”

Simply visiting a few of these schools is enough to convince you that they would grow. They’re fun, but their approach to the education equity issue is just as obvious.

Step Up For Students’ director for policy and public affairs Ron Matus gave us multiple examples of how Florida micro-schools are leveraging scholarship programs to allow disadvantaged students to access teacher-led micro-schools (see here and here). These education innovators have created a path for the micro-school movement to proceed in an inclusive and diverse fashion.

And then the pandemic struck, slamming the pedal to the metal.

The Washington Post reported last week in an article titled, For parents who can afford it, a solution for fall: Bring the teachers to them:

Fed up with remote education, parents who can pay have a new plan for fall: import teachers to their homes. This goes beyond tutoring. In some cases, families are teaming up to form “pandemic pods,” where clusters of students receive professional instruction for several hours each day. It’s a 2020 version of the one-room schoolhouse, privately funded. Weeks before the new school year will start, the trend is a stark sign of how the pandemic will continue to drive inequity in the nation’s education system. But the parents planning or considering this say it’s an extreme answer to an extreme situation.

And this weekend, education writer JoAnne Jacobs shared a post from a Berkeley, California, mom that read in part:

If you are not a parent/in a mom’s group, you may not be aware that a kind of historic thing is going on right now. This week, there has been a tipping point in Bay Area families looking to form homeschooling pods. Or maybe ‘boiling point’ might be a better term.

Sound niche? It’s actually insanely involved and completely transformational on a lot of levels. Essentially, within the span of the last 48 hrs. or so, thousands of parents (far and away mostly moms because that’s how these things work) are scrambling through an absolute explosion of Facebook groups, matchups, spreadsheets, etc. to scramble to form homeschooling pods.

These are clusters of 3-6 families with similar aged (and sometimes same-school) children co-quarantined with each other, who hire one tutor for in-person support for their kids. Sometimes the tutor in question is full time and sometimes part time/outdoor classes, depending on the age of kids and individual circumstances … Suddenly teachers who are able to co-quarantine with a pod are in incredible demand.

This is maybe the fastest and most intense PURELY GRASSROOTS economic hard pivot I’ve seen, including the rise of the masking industry a few months ago. Startups have nothing compared to thousands of moms on Facebook trying to arrange for their kids’ education in a crisis with zero school district support.

I swear that in a decade they are going to study this because I have never seen an industry crop up and adapt so fast. Trends that would typically take months or years to form are developing on the literal scale of hours.

The writer goes on to acknowledge the equity elephant in the room: Only families with means are going to participate in this trend, absent programs to assist disadvantaged students:

The race and class considerations are COMPLETELY BONKERS. In fact, yesterday everything was about people organizing groups and finding matches; today the social justice discussion is already tearing these groups apart. For one thing, we’re looking at a breathtakingly fast acceleration toward a circumstance where educational access and stratification is many times more polarized even than it already is.

Distance learning is hell on all children. Suddenly high-income families are going to all supplement it with quarantine pods and private tutoring, and low-income families will be stuck with no assistance for 8 yos who are supposed to be on zoom for 5 hrs. a day. This is on top of already not having a way to work with children stuck at home, and being more exposed with “essential” jobs.

For another, the most obvious solution to this, i.e. individual family clusters scholarshipping disadvantaged kids into their pods, doesn’t even work at scale because there is a high correlation between kids who can’t afford tutors and kids in families where strict distancing rules just aren’t an option. None of us have any idea where this is going to go. All possible actual solutions require government-level intervention beyond what school districts can do, and that’s clearly not going to happen. I don’t even have a kid the right age, but I’m volunteering in some places around this and the situation is just … a really major story.

A major story indeed.

What can be done? Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt included scholarships in the use of federal emergency aid. More governors should follow suit. Moreover, states need to allow K-12 funding to follow children now more than ever.

In the meantime, you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone. The age of K-12 self-reliance is here. Forced by harsh circumstances, it has arrived while our ability to include equity remains tragically limited.

July 20, 2020 1 comment

Customization School Choice School spotlight Tax Credit Scholarships Teacher Empowerment

Mother-son team collaborate to offer education choice

Jeff Barlis May 7, 2019

Jeff Barlis

POMPANO BEACH, Fla. – When Julia Musella enrolled her son Luciano in preschool in Italy, her understanding of education underwent a sea change.

“People were talking to children as if they were adults,” she said. “They were respecting their intelligence. They were really fostering community, working collaboratively, cooperatively, giving them experiences that made them think rather than just teach at them or ask them to memorize.”

A couple of decades later, Julia and Luciano work side by side as administrators who deliver a similar style of education at BB International School, where nary a conversation occurs without mention of collaboration. It’s a central tenet that unites students, teachers and parents.

Julia started BBI as a PreK and kindergarten in New Jersey in 1980, and then opened a campus in the Fort Lauderdale area in 1986. BBI expanded to fifth grade here in 2014 and now serves 44 K-5 students, including 10 who use a Florida Tax Credit Scholarship administered by Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.

Annual tuition is $11,300, and Julia credits the scholarship with helping bring diversity to BBI’s student body.

“The beauty of school choice is that it supports a school like ours – the microschools, the innovative schools, the progressive schools for alternative learners,” she said. “But you know what? All children are alternative learners when you respect that everybody learns differently.

“So the idea that they can use this scholarship in a school like this where they will all be successful has been monumental. It’s a life-changer.”

To learn more about BBI, read Lessons from the Renaissance school, which appeared on redefinED in October 2018.

May 7, 2019 0 comment

Customization Education Reporting Private Schools School Choice Tax Credit Scholarships Vouchers

Ron Clark Academy: We have to give teachers more freedom

Matthew Ladner April 8, 2019

Matthew Ladner

I recently had the opportunity to visit Ron Clark Academy, where I got “slide certified” and my mind was blown. I’ve been to many outstanding schools over the last two decades, but I’ve never seen a school with the energy to match RCA.

RCA is a micro-school in Atlanta where 75 percent of the students receive aid from Georgia’s tax credit scholarship program. A private school covering grades 5-8, RCA plans to include fourth-graders next year. The enthusiasm of the kids and the staff is off the charts, as you can see in this video. Two young ladies in sixth grade showed me around the school, and I would be happy to bet on them against the field to be elected president of the United States by 2044.

RCA takes a lot of cues from Hogwarts of Harry Potter fame, and not just in terms of art and décor. The students join houses reminiscent of Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff. If you want to see a respectful but spirited debate break out during your RCA tour, ask your student guides which house is best. If you are feeling especially mischievous, ask them which house is second best.

The RCA kids are amazing and are having a blast, and so are the teachers. The CNN video referenced above notes the school decided to be private so it could innovate. Clark’s quote is key: “You can talk about the state government, you talk about principals and superintendents, it all comes down to finding passionate people who want to teach. We have to give teachers more freedom, trust them more, and allow them to use their own creativity to fire up their own students in the way they know they need to do.”

Teachers travel from all over the world to learn RCA’s methods. Those methods are fun, and the kids who benefit from them are crushing the ball on scores and gains.

Here is what RCA is not doing:

If Florida thinks it will attract the tens of thousands of new teachers it needs by having them drone through a curriculum script like Ben Stein’s, good luck with that. If you want to set these people free to spend their careers reveling in the joy of learning like Ron Clark, the line will form to the left.

What does the state need to do? Start by giving more teachers the opportunity to run their own schools and more families the opportunity to select from among them. Let parents rate the schools, require light-touch academic transparency, and stay out of the way.

April 8, 2019 0 comment

Course Choice Customization Education Reporting Education Savings Accounts Featured Gardiner Scholarship Grassroots Homeschooling School Choice Special Education Teacher Empowerment

Miss Ana and her mighty home school micro cluster

Ron Matus February 22, 2019

Ron Matus

Ana Garcia’s home education cluster includes a total of seven students, including five with autism who use the Gardiner Scholarship, an education savings account in Florida for students with special needs. Joining Garcia (at front left) on a field trip to Zoo Miami last month was, from left to right, her husband Daniel; her son Kevin, 9; her daughter Khloe, 7; Angelo, 6; and Briana, a paraprofessional.

MIAMI – “Guys! Choo-choo formation!” At Ana Garcia’s command, a loose knot of people near the turnstiles at Zoo Miami – three adults, five kids – lined up, put their hands on the back shoulders of the person in front of them, and merged into something less locomotive than caterpillar. Sixteen feet proceeded on a motley ramble. Crocodiles awaited in the Everglades section, along with plenty of carefully guided learning.

So it goes on the education frontier.

Over the next few hours, Garcia, a public-school teacher turned pioneer, subtly steered her students toward goals in their personalized education plans. Project-based learning for one. Ecology for another. Speech therapy for another. She put special focus on the three with autism, including her 9-year-old son, Kevin.

Those students, and two others not in attendance, benefit from a learning option that is revolutionary but under the radar: a state-funded education savings account. It’s ESAs that make Garcia’s home education cluster – and perhaps, someday, a never-ending array of other clusters – possible. Without them, the landscapers, Uber drivers and Dollar Tree clerks who’ve entrusted Garcia with the education of their children would be limited to schools that don’t work for their children.

Garcia knows what that’s like. She endured a nightmare school experience with Kevin before getting an ESA for students with special needs. She says it changed his life – and hers.

“Parents don’t have to fear any more that they only have one choice,” Garcia said.

Neither do teachers.

* * *

Ana Garcia has a little Mary Poppins about her, no-nonsense but upbeat, with a drive to stoke curiosity that borders on fantastic. Walt Disney is her hero. Some saw swamp; he saw magic kingdom. Garcia feels that about the landscape in education. Her great-grandmother was a teacher in Cuba. Her aunts were teachers. As a kid, her playroom was furnished with a blackboard and old textbooks, and her dolls were her class. Now when she switches into teacher mode, she decelerates her … rapid … fire … speech … until she’s sure her student is catching on.

“My favorite thing to hear,” she said, “is, ‘Wow miss, no one has ever taught me the way you have, or explained things the way you do.’ “

Garcia loved teaching in district schools. But over the course of a decade, the passion ebbed. Too many mandates. Too much violence. Too little help, in her view, for students with disabilities.

Frustrations began to mount for Garcia the mom, too.

In Pre-K, Kevin was happy and learning in his neighborhood school, in a class with five kids and two teachers. But for kindergarten, he was assigned to an inclusion class with 25 kids, one teacher and one “floating” teacher who toggled between multiple classrooms. Garcia said Kevin’s clothes weren’t being changed when he soiled himself. He wasn’t being fed.

Then Kevin began escaping from class and, somehow, running all the way to a parking lot before being stopped. The first time, Garcia was frightened. The second time, shocked. The third time, angry.

In 2014, after 12 years as a middle school English teacher, curriculum specialist and school-level director for accountability and instruction, Garcia called it quits.

* * *

But this is a story about education in Florida. So that’s not where it ends.

Each of Ana Garcia’s home education students has a personalized education plan, which she’s aligned with the state of Florida’s education standards. Garcia worked in public schools for 12 years as a middle school English teacher, curriculum specialist and school-level director for accountability and instruction.

At the zoo, Garcia’s 11-year-old, Gabriella, took photos of black bears and gopher tortoises so she could create a brochure. Her 7-year-old, Khloe, immersed herself in geography. Kevin collected data from exhibit signs, focusing on adaptive traits like bioluminescence.

Garcia knows where each student stands with their learning plans, which she has aligned with Florida education standards. She nudged each towards their targets.

At the Gator Hole, she shifted attention to Angelo, who is 6 and mostly non-verbal. She pointed to a blue crayfish. “What is that Angelo?” she said.

“A crab,” he said.

Not quite, but close enough. And another step for a boy whose gentle face belies a kid once prone to fighting and biting.

Garcia left the district, but she didn’t leave teaching. She just joined the mutiny.

Her cluster isn’t quite sustainable yet, but education savings accounts gives her hope it can be. The main one in Florida (and biggest in the country) is the Gardiner Scholarship. Created by the Florida Legislature in 2014, it now serves 11,276 students with special needs such as autism and Down syndrome, with nearly 1,900 more on a waiting list. (It’s administered by nonprofits like Step Up For Students, which hosts this blog.) Each scholarship is worth about $10,000 a year, and parents can use it for a wide variety of programs and services, including tuition, therapies, tutors, technology, curriculum – whatever a la carte combination they think best.

Angelo’s mom, Vilma Moran, considered several schools. But all wanted to place him in self-contained special education classes where she didn’t think he’d learn. When Angelo started with Miss Ana, he wasn’t talking, didn’t seem to recognize his mom and dad, and showed no emotion.

Now, Angelo loves dinosaurs and laughs at funny videos. Now he greets people by name.

“When we go somewhere, like the zoo, he’ll say, ‘Let’s go see the elephants,’ ” said Moran, who installs fences for a living. “He wasn’t like that two years ago.”

* * *

Kevin is terrified of thunder.

But as Garcia described in The 74, she used the ESA to ease his anxiety – and learn science in the process.

She worked with Kevin’s therapists and tutor to develop lesson plans around the subject of thunder and lightning. The therapists showed him pictures and videos of lightning, taught him calming techniques, and worked with him on articulating why he was scared. The tutor taught him how clouds form and what causes thunder. Knowledge reduced his fear.

“Sometimes, things need to be micro,” Garcia said. In a school district, “you can’t possibly tailor everything to every child. There needs to be a middle ground somewhere. There needs to be a hybrid.”

Or lots of hybrids.

Off the grid, homeschoolers are DIYing into increasingly sophisticated co-ops and enrichment programs. Micro-schools, whether mini-chains or one-offs, are pushing the limits of what’s possible. In Florida, choice scholarships are giving a more diverse mix of parents the opportunity to go small or go home.

Garcia envisions a micro-school that can also serve home education students who want part-time services, combined with a center for Applied Behavioral Analysis. In the meantime, she’s the mutineer at the heart of her cluster, connected to a blooming constellation of other clusters.

For example, a paraprofessional, training to becoming a registered behavioral therapist, joined Garcia and Garcia’s husband on the zoo trip. The five autistic students in Garcia’s orbit all go to the same ABA center, but each is served by different speech, occupational and physical therapists. Kevin has his own tutor, a certified teacher who executes a plan Garcia designed. But the tutor also works with other students in other settings. Once education is de-coupled from school, the potential matches of students and teachers becomes infinite.

Garcia arranged swimming lessons at the Y for some of her students, biscuit-making at Red Lobster for others. Music and martial arts classes are on tap, along with lessons in table manners at Cracker Barrel.

So it goes on the frontier.

* * *

The Miami-Dade school district has 350,456 students, counting 68,487 in charter schools. Throw in private schools, and Miami-Dade has 425,000 students. Competition between sectors may be the most intense in America. And if test scores and grad rates are any indication, students are benefitting.

But none of those schools, so good for so many, were good for Kevin and Angelo. Garcia’s micro-cluster is.

Will it last? Garcia thinks it can work financially with a few more students. But it’s complicated on the edge, and there is no trail. She said she’ll keep pressing to figure it out, and more pioneers every day will do the same.

“If it’s not me,” she said, “it’ll be somebody else.”

February 22, 2019 2 comments