Emerging School Models
This is the third year that Harvard has held this event and this one was themed “Maintaining the Momentum” and was more focused on homeschooling. Videos of all the sessions can be viewed here. I couldn’t attend all the sessions, so I’m just writing about the one’s I attended. I thank the Harvard Program on Education Policy and Governance for bringing attention to these issues and making its sessions publicly available.
The conference opened with a panel discussion, “What’s the growth potential of emerging models?” There was a lot of talk about the economics of these models—tuition, staffing, and class size—but the bottom line is the growth potential is strong, especially from the growing number of parents and educators seeking alternatives to conventional schooling, with the recent strong rise in the number of homeschoolers leading the list of “education consumers” these schools and businesses seek.
Are micro schools sustainable? was a session I was particularly interested in because I’ve been cautiously watching their development for a long time. Many years ago I remember Larry Kaseman writing in the Wisconsin Parent’s Association newsletter that homeschoolers need to be wary of micro schools as they are a potential way to make homeschoolers more accepting of regulation and school instruction in their homes. This is proving to be true in some states: the panel in this session was clear that to receive funding some micro schools must enroll the homeschoolers in their programs as regular students. Many old timers in the homeschooling/unschooling movement, such as myself, have been skeptical of taking public funds for homeschooling because of how those funds must be used to only achieve goals determined by the funder, not by the needs, interests, and creativity of the actual learners. I understand how times have changed and how expensive and intensive raising children and schooling and have become in American society and that parents want help and new ideas. So while I welcome the turn to smaller class size and individual attention that micro schools can provide, micro schools can also be a way to turn the communal, organic activities of learning at home into credentialed, commercial ones.
Other states allow micro schools to be used only by homeschooling families without any public funding—what I would call a homeschooling co-operative, which have been around since the homeschooling movement started. An interesting point was made by James Tooley, author of The Beautiful Tree: A personal journey into how the world’s poorest people are educating themselves. Tooley noted that in his research many of these schools originated as homeschooling cooperatives and morphed into small private schools over time. His research is now focused on the United States and he described two small (20–30 students), private, parent-funded schools that charge $3500 per year per student.
The issue of school funding was noted by keynote speaker Alberto Carvalho, the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest school district. In discussing why alternative metrics or assessments are not being implemented more he gave an honest reply: Since federal and state funds are tied to conventional testing as the primary way to assure accountability he must focus his efforts there.
Despite their efforts to attract us, homeschoolers, and unschoolers in particular, are not fully understood by a lot of school folks. One attendee, who identified himself as a well-credentialed educator who is a dean at a private boarding school, claimed homeschoolers are hurting their children because they won’t get into college or do well on school exams. Superintendent Carvalho noted that homeschoolers should emulate schools: “That’s why the word ‘schooling’ is part of homeschooling,” he said. These attitudes about learning are why John Holt created the word “unschooling” to describe learning we do naturally or voluntarily.
With public and private schools vying to capture as much as they can from school-funding mechanisms, homeschoolers are now a prime growth sector for them. The session The varieties of hybrid homeschooling showed this. The panelists were three mothers: one whose child goes to a private school four days a week, another whose children go to public school once a week, and another is a member of a Catholic School that supports homeschooling and asks parents to teach and participate in the school on a daily basis. It’s good for families to have options like this, but much more could be done if we stop thinking of school as the best, or only, way children can be educated.
A session called Will universal choice programs be captured by the affluent or will they open up opportunities for all? brought to my attention a problematic aspect of school choice. Michael Petrilli, one of the session’s panelists, wrote:
“When choice programs allow students to move from public to private schools, they generally save taxpayers money because the publicly funded scholarships cost the public less (per pupil) than district-operated schools do. But when the government starts to subsidize students already enrolled in private schools, it incurs a brand-new public expense. Those kids weren’t already attending school with taxpayer assistance. And with about 9 percent of students attending private schools—and those children coming disproportionately from wealthy families—adding them to the public rolls can add up fast. Maybe bringing these families into the school choice coalition has some political benefit—but surely it also exacts a political cost as taxpayers watch millions of dollars flow to prosperous elites who don’t need the money.”
The session How is homeschooling changing? What are the legal barriers to innovation? provided much food for thought. I particularly appreciated Dr. Angela Watkins presentation. She is the director of the Homeschool Hub and Research Lab at Johns Hopkins School of Education. She noted around 3,500,000 children, or 4.5 to 6 percent of the total K–12 population are homeschooling now. This compares to 9% for private and 7% for charter schools. Dr. Watson noted the numbers of homeschoolers may actually be under-reported by some states due to how they collect the data. For instance, the decline in homeschoolers in New Hampshire since 2021 “is likely related to the state’s Education Freedom Account (EFA) and how homeschool students who receive public funding are no longer counted as part of the state’s total homeschooling number. So, this decline may not truly reflect a decrease in actual homeschool participation, but may be just a change in how students are counted in this state. Indeed, the EFA program was launched in 2021 and reported homeschool participation in the state has been declining since then.”
Dr. Watson handed out a useful one-page document, Homeschool 50 State-At-A-Glance, that summarizes state regulations for homeschooling in a single chart. This data, and much more, is shared at the Homeschool Hub. Towards the end of this session I asked why public schools don’t cooperate more with homeschoolers and Dr. Watson said that actually only about 8 states “offer nothing” to homeschoolers (MA being one of them). Schools and homeschoolers might be slowly forming a fruitful partnership after all (to use the title of John Holt’s essay in Phi Delta Kappan decades ago). As the emerging school market beckons new entrants, those who seek alternatives to school, not just alternative schools, will need to find more partners.
Children don’t only learn when they are being instructed by teachers on a daily basis. Children also learn from doing things alone and in groups; children learn from observation, from being around adults and listening to their conversations, from helping family and friends get tasks done, enjoying quiet time, reading or watching videos, doing sports or playing. It’s a sad commentary on adults that we keep trying to contain all this energy and curiosity in a classroom, to make simulations of real life in school (token economies, etc.) instead of figuring out how to involve children directly in the flow of real-life communities rather than siloed in special, age-segregated learning places.
