Open enrollment in public schools is a form of school choice that allows students to attend schools other than the one assigned to them by their school district. Though often less visible than policies such as charter schools, vouchers, and education savings accounts, K–12 open enrollment is rising in popularity across the nation, and 73 percent of school parents support it. As of 2023, 43 states permit or mandate some degree of open enrollment, but only 16 states have strong open-enrollment laws. Since 2021, 10 states have significantly improved their open-enrollment laws. For example, Idaho’s new law requires all school districts to participate in open enrollment and also establishes better program transparency.

When it comes to open-enrollment data, however, researchers and policymakers are often left in the dark. Only 13 states are required by law to collect data on open enrollment, and only three states publish these figures regularly. As a result, little is known about a key policy that affects students and public schools nationwide.

There are two types of open enrollment: cross-district open enrollment allows students to attend schools outside their school district, while within-district open enrollment lets students attend schools outside their assigned zone but within their own school district. To understand the role these programs play in the school choice landscape, we obtained data from three states—Arizona, Florida, and Wisconsin—that host some of the most robust open-enrollment programs in the nation. Participation is strong; more than 450,000 students in these three states used open enrollment to attend public schools other than their assigned ones during the 2021–22 school year.

Both Arizona and Florida require all school districts to participate in both types of open enrollment if seats are available. Wisconsin only requires its school districts to participate in cross-district open enrollment. Taken together, the latest data from these states provide four key takeaways about open enrollment:

• Open enrollment is one of the most common forms of school choice. On average, about one in 10 students in these states is using open enrollment to attend a school other than the one originally assigned to them.
• Families tend to use cross-district open enrollment to transfer to higher-rated school districts when possible. In fact, 76 percent of students, on average, transferred to a school district rated as A or B in Florida and Arizona.
• School districts routinely reject transfer applicants with disabilities.
• Open enrollment is important to families in rural school districts, not only in cities. Wisconsin’s open-enrollment data showed that more than 52 percent of students using cross-district open enrollment used it to access school districts in rural areas or towns outside the state’s metropolitan areas.

Many students choose schools other than their residentially assigned one. Across the three states, nearly 177,000 students used cross-district open enrollment, while almost 273,000 used the within-district option to choose a different school (see Table 1).

Open enrollment also makes up an important component of these states’ education marketplaces and is one of the most common methods of school selection. When compared with other school choice options in these states—such as charter schools or private school scholarships—open enrollment holds its own, accounting for approximately 36 percent of the 1.3 million students who used public funds to participate in school choice during the 2021–22 school year (see Figure 1).

And these numbers are increasing. According to the Florida Department of Education and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, open-enrollment participation increased by 4 percent and 3 percent respectively during the 2022–23 school year. (As of this writing, 2022–23 data from Arizona are not yet available.) Open-enrollment participation grew in these states even as more families used publicly funded scholarships to pay for private school tuition.

Students tend to transfer to more highly rated school districts. Earlier research in other states indicates that families turn to open enrollment for a variety of reasons. For example, studies published by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office in 2016 and 2021 found that students in that state used cross-district open enrollment to access specialized programming (such as Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate courses), to escape bullying, to shorten commutes, or to find a school that was a better fit. One consistent research finding is that students tend to transfer to higher-rated school districts when possible. For instance, in Texas, students were more likely to transfer to districts rated as A or B by state accountability rating systems and less likely to transfer to school districts labeled C, D, or F. Other research from Minnesota, Colorado, and Florida found that academic quality was an important factor in families’ decisions to use open enrollment.

The latest data show that these open-enrollment trends are also evident in Florida and Arizona (see Figure 2).

As Figure 2 shows, 80 percent of Arizona’s transfer students and 72 percent of Florida’s chose school districts rated as A or B. Overall, 67 percent of Arizona’s students and 91 percent of Florida’s attend A- or B-rated school districts. Open-enrollment transfers in these states generally avoided school districts rated lower than B.

Wisconsin doesn’t use a letter-grade system to rate its school districts. Instead, the Badger State rates them on a 100-point scale and assigns them to one of four categories: “significantly exceeds expectations,” “exceeds expectations,” “meets expectations,” and “meets few expectations.”

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction also reports more detailed and nuanced open-enrollment data than Florida and Arizona. Those two states show only how many students transfer into each district. Wisconsin, though, shows the number of students who transfer into and out of each school district, as well as the number who apply to transfer into and out of them. Districts with better ratings experienced net transfer gains, while lower-rated districts lost students on net, as shown in Figure 3.

Despite receiving the lion’s share of transfers, Wisconsin school districts rated as “meets expectations” or lower experienced a net loss of more than 54,000 students. Higher-ranked districts, on the other hand, gained more students than they lost. School districts rated as “significantly exceeds expectations” or “exceeds expectations” increased their enrollments by more than 13,000 students during the 2022–23 school year.

In Wisconsin, the smaller number of transfers to the highest-rated school districts does not necessarily reflect a lack of applications. Not every transfer application is approved, because Wisconsin school districts can reject transfer applications for such reasons as insufficient capacity, a student’s disciplinary record, and insufficient special-education program capacity.

In fact, 43 percent of Wisconsin school districts rejected at least one out of five transfer applicants. The most common reason for rejection, cited more than 6,300 times, was insufficient capacity. However, definitions of maximum capacity can be capricious and vary by school district. This means that even if school districts have the physical space to accommodate transfer applicants, they can reject them, citing an arbitrary definition of capacity.

Transfer applicants with disabilities are often rejected. Similarly, more than 2,000 Wisconsin students were rejected because they had disabilities. Although federal law prohibits school districts from denying services to students with disabilities who live within their boundaries, they routinely reject transfer applications from students with disabilities at a higher rate than their peers without disabilities.

Wisconsin Watch reported in 2023 that “schools rejected about 40 percent of applications” from students with disabilities, “with lack of special education space as the most common reason for the denials. By comparison, school districts rejected only 14 percent of applications from students without disabilities.” This scenario is not unique to Wisconsin. Reports from Arizona, Oklahoma, and Colorado indicate that similar disparities are common in other states.

Open enrollment is important to rural students and school districts. Students living in more densely populated areas are more likely to benefit from open enrollment than their peers living in small towns or rural areas. However, that does not mean that open enrollment isn’t important to rural school districts. A 2021 report by the California Legislative Analyst’s Office found that some small and rural school districts relied on open-enrollment transfer students to remain fiscally solvent. In other words, open enrollment can be a lifeline to school districts whose enrollments are declining.

By combining open-enrollment data provided by state education agencies with data from the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) that classify school districts by location (city, suburb, town, and rural), it’s possible to examine open-enrollment participation by school-district locale. Together, these data provide insight into how different regions in these states are impacted by open enrollment (see Figure 4).

Overall, these data showed that, in Arizona and Florida, most students used open enrollment to transfer to urban and suburban school districts. However, in Wisconsin, rural school districts attracted the second-largest share of transfer students when compared to other locales in the state. This is partly because Wisconsin’s school districts are generally smaller and more numerous, making them more accessible to out-of-district students than is the case in Arizona or Florida. Despite the state’s smaller size, Wisconsin has about twice as many school districts as Arizona and six times as many as Florida.

Across all three states, rural school districts bolstered their enrollments with more than 29,000 transfer students (see Figure 5). Rural school districts are further broken into three categories: Rural fringe districts are those nearest to both urbanized areas and towns; rural distant districts are farther from urbanized areas but are closer to towns; and rural remote districts are those farthest from both towns and urbanized areas.

Overall, rural fringe districts benefited more from open enrollment than other types of rural school districts. This makes sense because rural fringe school districts are the nearest non-urban transfer options for many suburban families.

Policy Implications

Policymakers have three key issues to consider as more students take advantage of open-enrollment opportunities.

First, traditional methods of school transportation, such as the large yellow school bus, are no longer efficient because many transfer students, especially rural ones, don’t live along designated bus routes. Getting to school is often a challenge for students using open enrollment because 44 states, including those discussed here, do not require the receiving school districts to provide transportation to cross-district transfer students. In some states, school districts can even stop other districts from transporting transfer students across district boundaries, often disproportionately affecting students from low-income families. While families and receiving school districts can establish designated bus pick-up locations just over district boundaries, this option is only available to students whose families can drive them to those locations.

These transportation challenges combined with long commutes mean that open-enrollment participation in rural areas or small towns will generally be lower than in urban and suburban districts. However, state policymakers can modify regulations that needlessly impede students from transferring. For instance, they can stop allowing school districts to prevent other districts from transporting transfer students across district boundaries.

State policymakers could also take note of Arizona’s recent transportation reforms, which let school districts use passenger vans that seat 11 to 15 people instead of the traditional yellow school bus. This sort of innovation can lower the costs of transporting small groups of transfer students. Such policies can be key to helping students access schooling options that are the right fit, even if they don’t live nearby.

Policymakers might also do well to reconsider how to fund capital projects. While local levies often paid for these projects in the past, school districts will have a harder time convincing local taxpayers to approve new bonds when their children don’t attend their residentially assigned school.

For instance, Arizona’s Queen Creek Unified School District has failed to gain voter approval for bond funding for three years in a row. In fact, only 40 percent of voters supported the bond in November 2023. Part of the reason the bond has failed is that many of the students living inside the district’s boundaries don’t attend the district’s schools, opting instead for charter schools or schools in other districts. In fact, nearly 20 percent of Queen Creek’s students came from other districts during the 2021–22 school year. This district’s situation isn’t atypical; 30 percent of Arizona students don’t attend public schools in their assigned district. This illustrates that policymakers in states with robust school choice policies need to rethink how capital projects are funded.

Finally, policymakers can hold school districts’ admissions practices to a higher standard by stopping them from rejecting transfer applicants with disabilities. Many school districts are quick to cap the number of transfer applicants with disabilities based on the program capacity of their special education courses, often citing insufficient staffing. However, this practice unfairly limits schooling options for students with disabilities. It also means that traditional public schools’ admittance procedures operate at a lower bar than public charter schools’ admittance procedures, which require that all applicants be admitted, assuming seats are available. Accordingly, policymakers could take a closer look at school districts’ admissions processes to ensure that district schools are open to all students.

In a Nutshell

Open enrollment is the most common form of school choice in Wisconsin and the second-most common in Arizona and Florida. Students tend to transfer to school districts with higher rankings. While open-enrollment participation is often concentrated in urban and suburban regions, it is also beneficial to students in rural areas or smaller towns. However, the playing field isn’t level for all students, because those with disabilities tend to be rejected at higher rates, and districts can and do reject applicants for dubious capacity reasons.

Wisconsin is currently the only state that fully shows how open-enrollment transfers affect school districts. If more states were to emulate that state’s transparent reporting practices, families could learn which districts are in high demand, gain more understanding of open-enrollment programs, and make informed decisions about this choice option.

Jude Schwalbach is a senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court on June 25 delivered its eagerly anticipated decision on whether the state could authorize an explicitly religious charter school. The court said no, resolving for now the issue in Oklahoma. But its inscrutable reasoning on the First Amendment’s establishment and free exercise clauses indicate that the U.S. Supreme Court will have to take up the issue—in either this case or one that will inevitably arise in another state.

Following the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in Carson v. Makin that excluding religious schools from Maine’s voucher program was unconstitutional, the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City and Diocese of Tulsa applied to Oklahoma’s Charter School Board to establish St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. The board approved in a decision backed by state Attorney General John O’Connor, who cited the Supreme Court’s reasoning in the trilogy of Makin, Espinoza v. Montana (2020), and Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017) to justify his support. Oklahoma’s charter school law allowed other private organizations to operate charter schools, so preventing religious ones from doing so would violate the free exercise clause’s requirement that religious entities not be excluded from an “otherwise generally available public benefit.”

After 2022, however, a new attorney general, Gentner Drummond, assumed office. He promptly rejected his predecessor’s opinion and asked the board to rescind its approval. When it did not, Drummond asked the state Supreme Court to intervene. He argued that, among a parade of horribles that would result from the charter board’s action, allowing a Catholic charter school would require Oklahoma to fund a Muslim school or even “the blasphemous tenets of the Church of Satan.” In Drummond v. Oklahoma Statewide Virtual Charter School Board, a 6–2 majority of the court agreed.

Their reasoning had an inauspicious start. It held that the charter school violated Article II Section 5 of Oklahoma’s state constitution, which reads: “No public money or property shall ever be appropriated, applied, donated, or used, directly or indirectly, for the use, benefit, or support of any sect, church, denomination, or system of religion, or for the use, benefit, or support of any priest, preacher, minister, or other religious teacher or dignitary, or sectarian institution as such.” This is also known as the state’s Blaine Amendment. But the U.S. Supreme Court effectively ruled Blaine Amendments unconstitutional in Comer and Espinoza.

The court then pointed out that the state’s charter school law also requires that charter schools be nonsectarian. But no one disagreed with that. The issue was whether that requirement violates the U.S. Constitution. The court also held that the school would be a “state actor” and therefore subject to the same requirements as traditional public schools. Whether that matters though hinges on whether the First Amendment is implicated. It is on this topic that the opinion becomes difficult to reconcile with recent Supreme Court decisions.

On the establishment clause, the court cited the Supreme Court’s 1947 ruling in Everson v. Board of Education that the government cannot pass laws “which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another.” This citation was peculiar since it is this “no aid” line of reasoning that led to the infamous “Lemon test” the Supreme Court killed and buried in Kennedy v. Bremerton (2022). The court held in that case that the establishment clause must instead “be interpreted by ‘reference to historical practices and understandings’.” This “history and tradition test” emphasizes how those closest to a clause’s enactment understood its meaning.

It is not at all clear from the famously strained opinion in Everson—the court cited Thomas Jefferson as an authority on the clause’s meaning when he had nothing to do with its writing or ratification—that the decision could fit with the history and tradition test. It is possible that it could, but the Oklahoma Supreme Court did not even reference the new test. Instead, it briefly mentioned Bremerton and then cited an earlier series of cases involving school prayer that could well end up being circumscribed. Even if the prayer cases end up not being curtailed, they raise completely different questions because charter schools are, by definition, schools of choice. No one would ever be compelled to participate in a charter school’s religious activities.

Even more puzzling was the court’s free exercise clause analysis. The majority argued that the Makin, Espinoza, and Comer trilogy did not apply because they involved private entities, and this case involved the “State’s creation and funding of a new religious institution.” Their reasoning, however, ignored the fact that most charter schools are operated by private corporations. That these corporations, and indeed any corporation, cannot exist without a state charter does not mean that they are state actors. Simply being authorized to operate by the state is not the same thing as being created by the state.

One could imagine, and certainly would have hoped for, a more clearly reasoned decision, but the Oklahoma court did not provide it. Even if no appeal is made in this case or if the Supreme Court declines to hear one, the thorny issues that the majority elided will come up again and need to be resolved.

In short, this decision represents at most the opening salvo on religious charter schools, not the final word.

Joshua Dunn is executive director of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Institute of American Civics at the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs.

Calls to transform U.S. K–12 schools grow more pressing each day. Yet the complex web of relationships and expectations that shape most schools—referred to in innovation theory as their value networks—create formidable barriers to change. These networks, which for public schools typically include families, unions, higher education, and state and federal agencies, dictate what schools must prioritize to keep seats filled, funds flowing, and doors open. But those priorities simultaneously make innovation a challenge. The schools of the future that our society needs won’t come from transforming our existing schools. They’ll have to come through launching new versions of schooling from new value networks.

 

The mechanisms of value network resistance

The most innovative approaches to schooling aren’t compatible with the processes and priorities of conventional schooling. At the frontier of innovation, new models are pioneering practices such as mastery-based learning, self-paced blended learning, learning through projects and real-world experiences rather than coursework, and modular learning ecosystems. These practices challenge many of the basic assumptions of conventional schooling: that grade levels should be based on age, that schools should be open 180 days a year, that credit for learning should accrue on a semester-based calendar, that learning happens primarily in classrooms through teacher-directed instruction, and that test scores determine potential. In short, the most transformative new models of schooling entail a massive reevaluation of how schools operate, how teachers teach, and the priorities schools pursue.

Unfortunately, efforts to rethink the basic assumptions of conventional education consistently fail in established schools because strong forces within those schools’ value networks generate pushback.

Most parents made it through conventional schooling themselves—so when they consider what’s best for their kids, the devil they know is better than the one they don’t. Most kids have learned to “get by” in conventional schools—so they don’t want the rules changed on them mid-game. Most teachers, administrators, and staff have spent years to decades honing their expertise within the conventional system—so, for very rational reasons, they favor efforts to improve that system over efforts to reinvent it. Teacher preparation programs see most of their graduates taking jobs at conventional schools—so their programs center on preparation for conventional settings. Most policymakers and education reformers have spent significant political capital trying to improve conventional schools—so they aren’t ready to call their efforts a loss.

All of these groups will voice support for K–12 innovation. But when innovation means upending conventional practices and rethinking core priorities, nominal supporters become sources of resistance.

 

The role of value networks in fostering innovation

When education thought leaders talk about new models of schooling, they often focus on the influence of visionary leaders, engaging programs, or a guiding philosophy. But look deeper and you’ll find that successful new models of schooling emerge from distinctive value networks.

In 2010, Nathan Gorsch was an assistant principal at a conventional high school in Northeast Colorado Springs. By most standard metrics—academics, graduation rates, athletics, etc.—the school where he worked was successful. But he’d noticed that many learners were significantly disengaged as they went through the day-to-day of school. Eager for an opportunity to create something different, Gorsch became convinced that he couldn’t effect change from within the conventional school where he worked. Instead, in 2014 he became the principal of the district’s online school—a program serving students and families who wanted or needed something unconventional.

Gorsch then pitched to his superintendent the idea of growing that school into a blended-learning program focused on learner engagement. With the district’s support, he and a small team of teachers took advantage of the flexibility afforded to an online school and launched a pilot in 2015. That program evolved and grew over time, honing its ability to support students’ success with its flexible online curriculum while expanding its interest-based in-person electives. Today, Village High School has approximately as many students on its waiting list as it has on its roster.

Around the same time that Gorsch was launching his pilot in Colorado, educators in Massachusetts were on the verge of creating another unconventional program. At that time, Rachel Babcock and Josh Charpentier led alternative education within Plymouth Public Schools. After a careful look at their track record at getting students on a path to academic and life success, they faced a stark reality. A large proportion of their students were slipping through the cracks. While wrestling with this problem, they concluded, as Babcock notes, that rethinking their approach to meeting the needs of their students “was really hard to do in a district where they’re always trying to apply the same policies to every student.”

With the support of their district, Babcock and Charpentier went on to create Map Academy, a charter school that leverages competency-based progression, asynchronous instruction, and blended learning to tailor education to students’ individual needs. The model is a lifeline for students whose lives don’t conform to the rigid schedules, calendars, and due dates of conventional schools. It’s also a model that creates more bandwidth for educators to build relationships with their students. Today, Map operates at maximum capacity, with many students on a waiting list.

The shape of new value networks

As we’ve studied programs like Village High School and Map Academy at the Clayton Christensen Institute, we’ve identified key value network features that give rise to unconventional models of schooling.

First, new models of schooling need to start with a clean slate. Realistically, established schools don’t change their value networks because a school’s value network is the lifeblood of that school: the families who volunteer and vote, the teachers who keep classrooms humming, and the state agencies that set the rules and provide the funding. No rational leader of a conventional school is going to dismiss the existing value network and try to build a new one. Doing so will either cripple the school or get the leader fired. It’s only in very rare instances—often in small school systems facing poignant failure—that a whole value network shifts on its own. Hence, you need to create a new school that can assemble a new value network from the ground up.

Second, new models need to start off serving what I refer to as “frontier” students and families. In some cases, these are students who have dropped out of conventional schooling because their lives don’t conform to its norms, rules, and expectations. They may need flexibility in scheduling or pacing—such as students with major medical challenges, students who struggle with school social dynamics, or students pursuing intensive interests outside of school. Some are in families that have a very different notion of what schooling should be—often valuing small learning communities, self-directed projects, family-centered education, entrepreneurship, or travel over conventional coursework. In all cases, these students are looking for something different, not something better. They willingly give up sports programs, honors and AP tracks, traditional electives and extracurriculars, and the campus social scene to get an education they want or need.

Third, new school models need autonomy from the policies, administrative hierarchies, and metrics that state agencies and districts set up for conventional schools. This is why many innovative new school models today—such as Acton Academies, Wildflower Schools, KaiPod Learning, and Colossal Academy—operate in the private microschooling space, where most policies created for conventional schools don’t apply.

Within public education, charter schooling can be an avenue to gain autonomy from district policies and administrative structures. Realistically, though, any charter school that must prove to its state and its authorizer that it offers a high-quality version of conventional schooling is still locked into a conventional value network. But some charter schools can find exemptions from the state policies created for conventional schools by being classified as alternative schools or virtual schools.

Similarly, school districts can often secure degrees of autonomy from conventional value networks by creating virtual schools, hybrid homeschools, alternative schools, or career and technical education (CTE) programs. States often give these categories of schools different rules to follow, waiving conventional seat time and attendance requirements and allowing alternative metrics of success. Nonetheless, these schools and programs must also have district-level autonomy over decisions about budgeting, curriculum, scheduling, staffing, and success metrics.

 

Stakeholder roles in building new value networks

Our research on innovative schools also brings to light the roles that various education stakeholders can play in creating the value networks where new models of schooling will emerge and expand.

At districts, efforts to transform education should center on launching skunkworks programs. These will not be shiny new magnet schools. Rather, they will be virtual schools, alternative schools, hybrid homeschooling programs, or CTE programs. Their aim will be to develop new approaches for serving frontier students. Unfortunately, effective district leaders who are highly attuned to the priorities of their district’s overall value networks tend to focus their time and energy on conventional schools and treat their virtual, alternative, and CTE programs as mere stop-gaps. For districts to become vehicles for reinventing schooling, more leaders will need to adopt a dual transformation approach—maintaining and improving their conventional schools while simultaneously putting resources and energy into launching and evolving unconventional models of schooling. Additionally, they will need to allow these models to scale as they attract more students and educators—potentially taking over wings of their conventional campuses—rather than capping their growth or trying to fold them into conventional schools.

State leaders can create favorable funding and policy contexts to support new value networks. As mentioned earlier, new models of schooling spring up in many states under the policies created for virtual schooling, alternative education, independent study, and career and technical education. Yet far too often, these policies still keep unconventional schools tied to conventional practices—for example, by mandating on-site instructional minutes or requiring credit hours as the currency for gauging learning. Instead of dictating the resources schools must use and the processes they must follow, states should work with these new models of schooling to set quality standards aligned with the outcomes they aim to deliver for frontier students. The freedoms afforded by education savings accounts (ESAs) present an another way to encourage new value networks. To be clear, not all students using ESA dollars will be “frontier” learners, and not all schools accepting ESA funding will break the conventional mold. But ESAs do create conditions where new models of schooling such as private microschools can emerge.

Private philanthropies could become a major catalyst for the value networks that support new models of schooling. First, they could make more grants to schools and programs created specifically for serving frontier students. Second, they can rethink their metrics for success to give more weight to the alternative value propositions that unconventional schools offer. Third, they could spur the growth of new models of schooling by incentivizing them to evolve into attractive options for mainstream students.

If entrepreneurs want to help transform education, they need to be judicious about where they get their investment dollars and their sources of revenue. Many entrepreneurs sell their investors on a story of how their cutting-edge products or services will disrupt conventional schooling. Yet when those investors then expect a clear and rapid path to growth, they steer the startups they fund toward the known and measurable market—selling turnkey products and services to conventional schools. Inevitably, choosing to play in the conventional value network shapes the company more than the company reshapes schooling. Only companies with funders that can patiently and enthusiastically serve the small and nascent value networks of nonconventional schools have the potential to help transform education.

For educators and parents frustrated with conventional schooling, it might be time to push your district to launch the kind of program described above. If that path proves untenable, you might be able to find what you’re looking for in a virtual charter school or regional alternative school. If neither of these paths offer worthwhile options, it might be time to join the private microschooling movement and appeal to your state to create an education savings account program to fund the private options you’re looking for.

 

Inventing the future of K–12 schooling

Reform and innovation within existing schools is important. But in the end, that work can only lead to marginal improvements in those schools, not the dramatic transformation of schooling needed for our rapidly changing world. If we really want to reimagine or reinvent education, we need a parallel approach. We need to build new schools and programs with their own distinct value networks. With the right support, these unconventional options will evolve over time to become attractive alternatives to conventional schooling for a growing number of students, families, and educators.

The schools of the future that American society has long sought are here today. They just live in niches and pockets at the edges of the K–12 landscape. For these schooling options to grow, evolve, and become compelling mainstream alternatives to conventional schooling, we need more administrators, policymakers, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, educators, and parents to escape the gravitational pull of conventional education and its value network. It’s time to establish the value networks that can foster new models of education.

Thomas Arnett is a senior research fellow at the Clayton Christensen Institute.

What should we call the growing number of learning environments that lie between traditional homeschooling and conventional, five-days-a-week, brick-and-mortar public and private schooling?

So-called “microschools” and “hybrid schools” have gained enormous popularity in the past few years. The first Prenda microschool opened in Arizona in 2018, and Prenda has since served nearly 10,000 students. The King’s Academy, a hybrid school in Georgia, started with just over 100 students and currently serves more than 1,000.

Yet these increasingly common terms do not capture the breadth of this burgeoning K–12 movement. Teachers, families, communities, and education entrepreneurs are creating many variations on the micro and hybrid themes. And still more new arrangements have been made possible by a combination of homeschool laws, education savings account programs, and a general societal desire for more-bespoke education. Often these schools are given catchall descriptors such as “unconventional,” “nontraditional,” or “alternative.” Yet none of these terms fully describe the schools in this sector.

Few parents or students are likely to care what the schools are called. Parents send their children to a particular school, not a category. But in a broader sense, what we call these schools does matter. For one thing, some states have passed “learning pod” laws in an attempt to protect the type of school that emerged spontaneously amid Covid-ara school closures, but it is not always clear which environments qualify as learning pods. So, the protections that states have extended to learning pods may not apply to hybrid and microschool operations.

Second, most of the new school models that have emerged of late are made possible by their respective state homeschool laws. Many of the students included in the spike in homeschool data over the past few years are likely attending hybrid or microschools. How these students in fact qualify as homeschoolers could matter in terms of protecting their right to exist, funding, students’ eligibility to participate in public-school athletics, testing requirements, college admissions, and eligibility for merit-based college scholarships, or other state-level policies. For example, the state of Georgia, like many others, funds a college scholarship program for in-state high school graduates. A few years ago, a question arose over whether graduates from hybrid school should be considered “school” graduates (and so be automatically eligible for the scholarship), or whether they should be considered “homeschoolers” (and therefore have to fund their freshman year up-front and be reimbursed by the state at the end of the year).

These points illustrate the value of having an overarching term for hybrid schools and microschools as institutions. We know “homeschooling” is fully parent-directed and primarily home-based education. “Conventional” schooling is where students attend school five days per week in a brick-and-mortar school with many other students. But what do we call the sector that lies between homeschooling and conventional schooling?

 

Hybrid Schools

A decade ago, the term “hybrid school” usually referred to some kind of online school. Covid complicated things, as the word “hybrid” came to mean having students attend school for part of the week while learning remotely the rest. Alternatively, it referred to a learning situation where some students in a class were in a physical classroom, while other students simultaneously watched the same lesson online from home. Post-pandemic, the terms “hybrid schools” or “hybrid homeschools” made intuitive sense to most people as schools in which the students attended classes fewer than five days per week and participated in homeschooling on the other days. The 2023 National Hybrid Schools Survey defined hybrid schools as those in which “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.” These schools still go by many names: hybrid schools, hybrid homeschools, collaborative schools, collegiate model schools, and others. The point is not to replace these terms but to find another, higher-level label that could encompass all kinds of hybrid schools as well as microschools.

 

Microschools

“Microschool” is even more intuitive: it just means a very small school. Yet what happens if a microschool is very successful, and it grows? It is no longer a microschool, unless it grows by expanding into a network of small schools. Greatness in Smallness, published by the National Catholic Education Association, uses 150 students as the upper limit, though many microschool leaders would consider a school of 150 students gigantic.

There is also some overlap of the categories; a school could be both micro and hybrid—though a hybrid school could also be very large. Similarly, a microschool might meet fully in person and not be “hybrid” at all.

Still, hybrid schools and microschools have many commonalities. For one, they often start as small collaborations among parents or teachers, as a small group that comes together to serve a local community, or as a group of homeschoolers who share resources, including perhaps instruction.

 

Structure and Limits

One can consider the universe of more-established school types as existing on a continuum or spectrum. On one end is the typical comprehensive public school. On the opposite end are full-time homeschoolers, including “unschoolers.” In between, the permutations abound (see Figure 1).

The Spectrum of School Types (Figure 1)

Educational settings form a continuum, from conventional, five-days-a-week schools to fully parent-directed home-based schooling.

Microschools and hybrid schools (and fully virtual schools) don’t fit easily into a single slot on the spectrum, because they are more flexible and identity-based than conventional public and private schools, yet they have more institutional aspects than full-time homeschools. These schools diverge from the norm either in terms of time (hybrid schools), size (microschools), or both. They span a gamut of school types and may feature a variety of school characteristics.

Consider a school that started as a group of homeschoolers meeting in someone’s home. More local families decide they are interested and want to join in. Eventually this group decides to become more formal and open its doors to more local residents. Or consider a church that wants to develop a school that can charge substantially lower tuition than others in the area. The program is intended as a ministry of the church that serves the community.

Here are three examples of schools that started through demand in their local communities and whose programs feature innovations in time, size, or both. These schools are identity-based and focused on a specific purpose, and their missions differ from those of conventional schools:

Veritas Academy. Community members in Austin, Texas, came together to craft a school that provided academics but also valued family leadership and togetherness. A group of families worked to develop a “collaborative” hybrid school that opened with more than 100 students in 2005 and has grown consistently since.

Colossal Academy. During the pandemic, a teacher recognized her frustrations with the existing system, believed she could do more for her students and her community, and opened a microschool that remains small. The academy has inspired other education entrepreneurs to start similar schools in their communities.

Julian Charter School, near San Diego, started as a way to “meet the needs of students underserved by traditional delivery systems of education or for families with a strong desire to home school.” This public charter now delivers its hybrid-style programs to more than 2,000 students through homeschooling and small academies located in southern California.

 

What to Call Them?

In the April 1971 issue of Stanford Law Review, Jack Coons makes a distinction between two definitions of “community.” Often, the word refers to a defined geographic area—what Coons calls “communities of territory.” But when school-choice models draw students from multiple school districts, as many microschools and hybrid schools do, another meaning is called for. Coons describes this kind of community as

an interacting group of people with shared values and/or a willingness to cooperate to attain long range objectives. This definition has no geographic content; indeed, the congruence of any such community and a defined locale may be relatively rare with the obvious exception of the traditional family. One hesitates to call such communities ideological, since the informing values may be cultural, social, or simply practical. A preferable term is “community of interest.” In speaking about the structure of educational institutions, however, it is a fact that the relevant communities will often be ideological in some respect.

The term “community of interest schools” does fit hybrid and microschools, but that label would be a mouthful. Perhaps “community schools” would work? No, because that already applies to other concepts. The National Education Association, among others, uses “community schools” to mean those that offer not just education but also wrap-around services such as health and social services, community engagement, and economic development. Public school districts also often use “community education” to describe their evening course offerings.

An unlikely but apt analog can be found in the craft beer industry, which of course includes microbrews. In the 1970s, the 10 largest beer companies sold more than 90 percent of the beer consumed in the nation, according to the Economic History Association. But when the American beer industry was deregulated in 1979, craft brewing took off. Today’s stores offer a tremendous array of craft beers in countless styles and flavors—yet the mass-market options such as Budweiser and Miller remain popular.

Similarly, for well over a century, most Americans had little choice but to attend the public school assigned to them by virtue of where they lived. The affluent could choose where they lived—or choose private schools. Some families homeschooled their children, providing the foundation on which this new school sector is being built. Individuals, small groups of families, and education entrepreneurs today are crafting all kinds of microschools and hybrid schools. Yet the “mass market” options—conventional public and private schools—remain popular among many.

Despite the neat analogy to the craft beer industry, we can’t very well call these new schools “craft schools,” because again, that term already applies to something else: schools that teach particular vocational skills. Microschools and hybrid schools are (usually) not craft schools, though they are built by their founders for particular purposes, such as focusing on Montessori education, trying out new methods of science and technology education, or for a church or other place of worship to serve its local community. One reason these new-model schools have been so successful is that they are specialized, unlike large-scale conventional schools that are supposed to be everything to everyone.

And so I would like to propose a new term that captures the unifying features of the diverse options that exist between pure homeschooling and conventional schools: “community crafted schools,” or perhaps “community crafted education.” Here’s why:

• Like microbreweries and home-brewing, these schools are usually hyper-local, and can even be done at home.
• The term is ideologically neutral and indeed has positive connotations for most everyone.
• These schools between homeschools and conventional schools fit perfectly with Coons’s conception of “communities of interest.” He predicted that a system of schools that supported an “organic community of interest” would “provide a broad enough spectrum of educational styles and content to satisfy every significant parental interest.” The hybrid and microschool sector organically strives to craft such schools.
• The term “crafted” implies some smallness, which is usually but not invariably true. (Wooden sailing ships, for example, require significant craftsmanship, but they aren’t all small.)
• “Crafted” also implies that a thing has been created by someone (or some group). It is through careful and thoughtful craftsmanship by particular, dedicated people that these schools come to be. The hybrid-schools and microschools sector did not spring up because a school district’s board voted for it to. These schools have evolved from homeschool communities, and the do-it-yourself aspect is integral.
• Large brewers sometimes buy “craft partners,” but once this happens, it is clear that the brewery has become a different kind of thing—much larger and more corporate. While conventional charter and private schools may share some similarities with hybrid and microschools, there are meaningful differences between a local operation and a franchise of a large corporation. Thus, some microschools that expand regionally or nationally may eventually become a network of conventional private schools.

Again, an umbrella term may matter little to parents, students, teachers, and school leaders. But it may provide a unifying identity and focus to schools in this growing sector that helps them retain their original mission: to serve a purpose-driven community of interest. And that might increasingly matter as state legislators and local regulators become more aware of these schools. The value of an overarching name is that it can unify the families and schools in this sector—and unity will be important if government regulators come looking for them. Unity will also allow these schools to learn from each other.

“Community crafted schools” is just one possible name for schools that fall between fully parent-directed home-based schooling, and conventional five-day-a-week schools. I, for one, think it aptly describes this phenomenon that is emerging across the United States. But unlike France, with its Académie Française, America does not have a ruling body that dictates grammar, spelling, and vocabulary. Words and terms come in and out of the common parlance because people use them—or don’t. Whether my suggested label will catch on, no one can foretell. It may be that people will latch on to a term such as “next generation schools” or “alternative learning models” or something else entirely. Or maybe they won’t see these schools as forming a “sector” at all and will stick with more specific descriptors such as microschools, hybrid schools, and homeschools. For all the reasons I’ve enumerated here, I think that would be a lost opportunity to unify the disparate strands in an emerging confederation of new school models.

What do you think?

Eric Wearne is associate professor in the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University. He can be reached at ewearne@kennesaw.edu.

Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, who died last week at age 82, was, for much of the 1990s, one of the most articulate and persistent legislative advocates for school choice.

Lieberman’s death prompted admiring statements from political figures across the spectrum who noted his contributions across a wide range of issues, from civil rights to the environment to national security. It also offers an opportunity to reflect on and celebrate his school-choice-related achievements, some of which are still benefiting millions of American families. Lieberman’s experience as Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, and his subsequent late-career path as a “No Labels” advocate and political independent, also point to the constraints that school choice advocates face within the Democratic Party, where teachers unions have formidable clout.

After initially winning election to the Senate in 1988, Lieberman backed a series of efforts to expand school choice to include private schools. Typically they were means-tested or experimental programs, rather than sweeping universal ones.

For example, in March 1995, Lieberman joined Senator Dan Coats, an Indiana Republican, to introduce the “Low-Income School Choice Demonstration Act of 1995,” which would have appropriated $30 million for between ten and 20 “demonstration projects” to “determine the effects on parents and schools of providing financial assistance to low-income parents to enable such parents to select the public or private schools their children will attend.”

The bill didn’t pass, but Lieberman’s remarks on the Senate floor on introducing the legislation encapsulated the way he saw and communicated about the issue—linked to religious faith, and as a way of helping poor children. “It is clear that the public schools are not working for all students, particularly in our poorest communities. We have a responsibility to seek more effective ways to address the needs of these children,” the senator said.

He went on: “Private school choice opens doors for children in our poorest neighborhoods, where religious schools—particularly Catholic schools—often have had better results than public schools. I have long believed what some research has shown—that the success of parochial schools is in part due to their students’ and teachers’ shared beliefs and strong moral values.”

 

D.C. Scholarships

In 1997, again working with Coats, Lieberman introduced the District of Columbia Student Opportunity Scholarship Act of 1997. Congress approved it, but President Clinton vetoed it. Eventually, in 2003, the vouchers became law.

There have been ongoing battles over renewing the funding for it, but the program remains in existence today, offering individual scholarship awards of up to $16,070 for high school and up to $10,713  for elementary and middle school. In the 2022–23 school year, 1,707 students used the scholarships. Of those students, 79.8 percent had an “African-American/Black” racial background, and their average family income was $20,572, according to a “fact sheet” available at the program website.

About 12,000 students have been awarded the scholarships over two decades, and survey data show high-school graduation rates, college acceptance rates, and parental satisfaction rates above 90 percent. The Washington Post editorial board has embraced the program as “worthy” and describes the federal funding for it as “well-spent.”

Arguably, the small voucher program has had a positive effect even on the many more students in the traditional DC public schools and charter schools, which, spurred by the threat of the private school scholarship program, upped their game in ways that translated into gains on standardized tests of reading and math. The DC school improvement story has a lot of protagonists—Mayor Adrian Fenty, Chancellors Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson—but in a way it’s also a little-noticed legacy of Lieberman.

 

Federal Education Savings Accounts

In April 1998, Lieberman took to the Senate floor again, this time to speak in favor of a federal education savings account that would have let parents earning less than $160,000 save $2,000 a year in after-tax money tax-free for K–12 expenses, including private school tuition. “At a time when many parents are seeking more choices for their kids, especially for the students who are trapped in failing and unresponsive local schools, this bill would help make private or parochial school a more affordable option for those families who decide that is the best choice for their child, or in some cases, the only chance to get a decent education,” Lieberman said.

Explaining the fierce opposition to the plan, he said, “I fear that our critics are so committed to the noble mission of public education that they have shut their eyes to the egregious failures in some of our public schools and insisted on defending the indefensible. And they are so conditioned to believing that any departure from the one-size-fits-all approach is the beginning of the end for public schools that they refuse to even concede the possibility that offering children a choice could give them a chance at a better life while we are working to repair and reform all of our public schools.”

“Parents increasingly are demanding more choices for their children—be it in the form of public school choice, charter schools, or scholarships for low-income kids to attend a quality private or parochial school. And they are seeking more of a focus on results rather than a defense of the system and all who function in it,” Lieberman said then. “Hopefully we can begin to change the dynamic of what for too long has been a disappointingly dogmatic and unproductive debate on education policy in this country and lay the groundwork for a new bipartisan commitment to putting children first.”

That particular upward adjustment to the contribution limits for Coverdell accounts, named after Senator Paul Coverdell, Republican of Georgia, eventually was enacted in 2001 and took effect in 2002. And the overall concept of tax-advantaged savings for private school expenses was expanded further by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which allowed Section 529 college savings accounts to be used for K–12 education expenses.

 

The Vice Presidential Nominee

The paradox of Lieberman’s political career is that his biggest win—the Gore-Lieberman ticket won the popular vote in the 2000 presidential election—was also his biggest loss, as a litigated recount in Florida that went to the Supreme Court concluded in the loss of the state for Gore and Lieberman, and the presidency of George W. Bush. Lieberman’s stint as vice presidential nominee can also be seen as something of a simultaneous high and low for his school choice advocacy.

The policy position was a sign of the independence, bipartisanship, integrity, and swing-voter appeal that helped Lieberman get chosen by Gore to begin with. Lieberman attracted a lot of attention for being a Democratic vice presidential nominee who was a longtime, enthusiastic school choice advocate.

In August 2000, when Gore announced Lieberman as his running mate, there was a burst of attention around the question of whether the ticket would back private school choice. “School voucher foes find Lieberman a vexing choice,” was a Los Angeles Times headline. A spokesman tied the senator’s support for vouchers to Connecticut Catholic schools, not the senator’s own observant Jewish faith. A New York Times opinion piece by Nina Rees, then at the conservative Heritage Foundation, reported Lieberman “has supported at least seven bills to promote school choice since 1992.”

The apparent conflict was resolved, more or less, by Lieberman saying that he’d provide discreet counsel to Gore, but that President Gore would call the shots. That’s typical for a vice presidential nominee, so it’s hard to fault Lieberman too much. Yet in the presidential campaign, the Democrats let Republicans take the advantage on the issue. Private school choice wasn’t among the Democratic policy proposals on education in the 2000 campaign. As the GOP candidate, George W. Bush did propose vouchers as an accountability mechanism for failing public schools. As president, however, Bush abandoned it eventually in negotiations with congressional Democrats over what became the No Child Left Behind Act.

 

Democrats and Independents

That becoming the Democratic Party’s vice presidential nominee involved Lieberman’s downplaying one of his key domestic policy positions was an indicator of a broader tension between the politician and the party that also involved other issues, such as national security policy. In 2006, when Senator Lieberman faced a primary challenge from Ned Lamont, an antiwar heir to a J.P. Morgan fortune, the state AFL-CIO backed Lieberman, but the teachers unions backed Lamont. Lieberman lost the Democratic primary but won reelection to the Senate as an “independent Democrat.” He kept sponsoring school choice bills but without a lot of Democratic company. For example, on March 16, 2010, a Lieberman amendment to reauthorize the DC opportunity scholarship program failed, 42 to 55. The only Democrats who voted for it were Senators Dianne Feinstein of California, Bill Nelson of Florida, and Mark Warner of Virginia. Of those, only Warner remains in the Senate.

At the time of his death, Lieberman was co-chairing a “No Labels” effort to find a presidential ticket to run against Biden and Trump. Biden, like Lieberman, backed some private school choice legislation as a senator but has shelved it as president. Trump has expressed support for it but didn’t get it done in term one.

Yet perhaps the story of school choice and the Democrats won’t have ended entirely with the passing of Joe Lieberman.

Lieberman had told interviewers repeatedly that he was attracted to politics initially by the promise of John F. Kennedy’s presidency. He wrote his Yale senior thesis about a Connecticut political boss, John Bailey, who helped to deliver the Nutmeg State to Kennedy, and he also worked, early in his career, for Abe Ribicoff, another Connecticut Democrat who served as JFK’s secretary of Health, Education and Welfare.

Some Kennedy family members ardently disavow Robert Kennedy Jr.’s 2024 presidential campaign, but it’s worth noting that RFK Jr. told Bari Weiss last year, “I had a choice of where I was going to send my kids to school, just because I have resources and it, and, you know, all Americans should have that choice.” Kennedy hasn’t made choice a signature issue, but there’s still plenty of time before Election Day.

In its equal-opportunity, unifying way, Kennedy’s comment was an echo of Lieberman’s vision that, as he once said in the Senate, “Lower-income parents who want their kids to learn in a religious environment should have that chance, just as wealthier parents do.” Lieberman did not live to see that vision fully realized, but he helped to bring it closer to reality.

Ira Stoll, a former managing editor of Education Next, writes regularly at The Editors.

Over the past 12 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has significantly buttressed the rights of religious organizations to control how they govern themselves and to not be excluded from public programs simply because they are religious. The court’s Free Exercise Clause decisions have declared that religious institutions have substantial autonomy in deciding whom to hire (and fire) under the “ministerial exception,” that they cannot be barred from participating in adoption programs because of government nondiscrimination policies, and that they cannot be deprived of otherwise available benefits because of their religious beliefs and practices. Considering these doctrinal developments, one would think that states would be careful about religiously based discrimination. But as two recent lawsuits from Colorado show, one would be wrong.

In 2022, the Colorado legislature passed one of Governor Jared Polis’s signature initiatives: a universal preschool program. The program, which went into effect in 2023, provides up to 15 hours of state-funded tuition at participating preschools, including private providers. However, the Colorado Department of Early Childhood required all preschools wishing to participate in the program to sign a “program service agreement” forbidding discrimination based on “gender, race, ethnicity, religion, national origin, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, citizenship status, education, disability, socio-economic status, or any other identity” and prohibiting “deliberately misusing an individual’s preferred name, form of address, or gender-related pronoun.” This led a coalition of Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish organizations to request an exemption from the nondiscrimination requirements, since the rules would compel these organizations to abandon their religiously based policies regarding sexual orientation and gender identity. Lisa Roy, the agency’s executive director, denied their request, contending that the anti-discrimination provisions were mandated by state law.

Two lawsuits immediately followed. The Darren Patterson Christian Academy in Buena Vista sued in June 2023, followed in August by the St. Mary Catholic Parish, the St. Bernadette Catholic Parish, the Archdiocese of Denver, and two Catholic parents. Both suits are likely to succeed.

Darren Patterson was granted a preliminary injunction in October 2023 by federal Judge Daniel Domenico, a Trump appointee, based on several constitutional claims. The school first argued that the state’s policy would interfere with its right to hire only teachers who share its Christian faith. Under the Supreme Court’s ministerial exception doctrine, outlined in Hosanna Tabor v. EEOC (2012) and Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru (2020), the school is entitled to hire only teachers who agree with their statement of faith. The school also argued that, under Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000) and Hurley v. Irish-American Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Group of Boston (1995), the First Amendment protects its right as an expressive association not to be forced to associate with those who disagree with their views. What’s more, the school claimed that the program was not neutral toward religion, since it allowed exemptions for other reasons in order to insure a “mixed delivery system”—that is, one that includes a variety of preschool providers. Moreover, the school contended, the state policy would violate 303 Creative, LLC v. Ennis from the Supreme Court’s last term, which held that “the government may not compel a person to speak its own preferred messages.”

While Domenico said Darren Patterson was likely to succeed on all these claims, the school’s strongest argument was clearly grounded in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer (2017), Espinoza v. Montana (2020), and Carson v. Makin (2022). Collectively, this trilogy forbids the government from excluding religious believers from otherwise available benefits solely because of their beliefs. The state, as Espinoza held, does not have to “subsidize private education,” but once it does, “it cannot disqualify some private schools solely because they are religious.” To do otherwise constitutes unconstitutional discrimination under the Free Exercise Clause. Whatever happens with the other claims as the case makes its way through the courts, it is difficult to see how the state’s policy can overcome this one.

The lawsuit by the Catholic plaintiffs largely mirrors the free-exercise claims made by Darren Patterson. In particular, they point out that “the Archdiocese’s consistent position has been that those who teach in its schools and participate in its faith communities must be open to and supportive of the Catholic Church’s teachings,” including those on “the human person and sexual identity.” Under the state’s policy, it is clear that the Catholic schools’ participation is forbidden, but their exclusion, once again, would appear to contradict the court’s reasoning in Comer, Espinoza, and Makin. Before the case went to trial in January 2024, district-court Judge John Kane ruled that the schools were separate legal entities and that they, along with the parents, could allege harm as plaintiffs—though he dismissed the Archdiocese for lack of standing. Kane is a Carter appointee with a politically eclectic record who is likely less inclined to agree with the plaintiffs’ claims. During the trial, for instance, he referenced Pope Francis’s allegedly evolving positions on sexual ethics but then acknowledged that it was inappropriate for him to question the “authenticity” of the plaintiffs’ beliefs, an equivocation the plaintiffs probably did not find reassuring.

These cases likely foreshadow future conflicts over school choice in Colorado and nationally and will give some indication of how the Supreme Court’s decisions related to religious practice and speech will be applied by lower courts. Colorado has long been a leader in the charter-school movement. The outcomes of these cases could inspire charter-school advocates to test whether the court’s decisions require the state to allow the creation of religious charter schools as Oklahoma has now done. Following the court’s decision in Makin, it was obvious that blue states would try to use nondiscrimination policy to justify excluding religious providers. If Colorado is told it cannot forbid religious preschools on grounds of nondiscrimination, then one can certainly expect religious groups to challenge Colorado’s current law, which requires that charter schools be “nonsectarian” and “nonreligious.” Discrimination cuts both ways.

Joshua Dunn is executive director of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Institute of American Civics at the Baker School of Public Policy and Public Affairs.

This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Dunn, J. (2024). School Choice for Me but Not for Thee. Education Next, 24(2), 6-7.

Since the release of A Nation at Risk in 1983, the school reform movement has generated significant insights and promising practices for improving schools for children in poverty and students of color. The work of trying to radically improve student outcomes also produced glaring missteps and tough lessons. Few efforts demonstrate the complexity of attempting to provide a bold citywide plan to ensure educational excellence for all children better than the experiences in Newark, New Jersey. Much has been written about the political drama during my tenure as superintendent from 2011 to 2014. However, very little has been written about the actual playbook, results, and implications for educational policymakers and leaders.

I was appointed superintendent of Newark Public Schools (NPS) in 2011 by then governor Chris Christie and the state’s education commissioner at the time, Chris Cerf. While most school districts have a local board charged with hiring a superintendent, NPS had lost that authority back in 1995, when the state took control of the district.

As I arrived in Newark, 39 percent of students who entered the system failed to graduate, and only 40 percent of third-graders could read and write at grade level. Enrollment was plummeting. The district’s nearly forty thousand students and one hundred schools still made it the largest in the state, with the majority of students living below the poverty level.

Local politicians and families had grown impatient. For the five years prior to my arrival as superintendent, many elected leaders had become early adopters of a growing national charter school movement that aimed to free schools from government red tape and allow them autonomy to innovate. These supporters included Cory Booker (then a young councilman), school board member Shavar Jeffries (who now heads the charter school behemoth KIPP Foundation), and state senator Teresa Ruiz, among other notable local leaders. Charters weren’t the only new option—other school models, such as magnet high schools (often with entrance requirements) and partner-run small high schools, had gained momentum too.

Some of these schools had notable evidence of improving achievement for Newark students, and it was understandable that they were gaining strong support from local leaders, influential funders, and certainly the families of the nearly 5,500 students who attended them.

But it was clear that the most impactful efforts at improving schools in Newark were working around the very system they were trying to improve. And in New Jersey, these new schools were funded on a per-pupil basis; in other words, the money followed the child out of the traditional system and into the public charter system. Logically, this made sense. But in practice, this proliferation of competitors to district-run schools was creating unintended consequences that few wanted to discuss.

Building a “System of Great Schools”

Given the perilous state of the city’s schools, the unrealistic expectations around quick achievement gains, and the pressure from ideologues on all sides, many speculated that the superintendent role wasn’t doable. But I was inspired by the scale of the challenge and the ferocious commitment of many leaders in the community.

We started with the theory that the unit of change was the school itself and embraced the idea that what we were building was what my former boss, then New York City Schools chancellor Joel Klein, called “a system of great schools,” not a “great school system.” This was a subtle but profound distinction, because it meant we were seeking to ensure that there were one hundred excellent schools serving every child in every neighborhood—regardless of governance structure.

First, we needed to set a unifying goal for the district: every child would be college ready. That’s right, college, not just career—because we believed that choice of higher education should be up to the student, not simply determined by the inadequacy of their preparation, and because Newark families were demanding this.

In poll after poll, focus group after focus group, they told us very clearly: they wanted their children to graduate college ready. Moreover, they believed that “career ready” was a euphemism for low expectations. Families felt that academic excellence was a passport out of poverty.

Most parents were with us from day one. The challenge was the well-meaning funders and other influencers who wanted to muddy the waters and talk about everything except whether students could read, write, and do math at grade level.

When we started sharing actual data about proficiency rates and the number of young people earning diplomas indicative of their mastery of hard content, we started to encounter real pushback, both within and outside the school system. This was a theme I became increasingly familiar with: often what families say they want can be quite different from what those who speak for them are willing to stand for.

Ensuring “Four-Ingredient” Schools

With our North Star established, we rolled up our sleeves to improve the district, school by school. There was a large and growing body of research and evidence about high-performing schools in high-poverty neighborhoods. Combined with our team’s years of on-the-ground school transformation experience, we zeroed in on four basic ingredients that every high-quality school possessed: people, content, culture, and conditions.

Our aim: ensure that every NPS school was a four-ingredient school so that we could make steady progress toward college readiness for all. Our philosophy: focus on what works regardless of ideology, which often led to “third-way” solutions—combining the best of seemingly disparate views or forging a new path to transcend old, binary thinking. Our mantra: implementation matters.

People. It’s critical to have the right people in the right seats, from the leadership team to the teachers to mental health professionals to custodial staff.

We know intuitively the power that a great teacher has, and a growing body of research reinforced this belief, showing us that teachers are the most significant in-school factor determining a child’s level of achievement. Further, the most significant factor in getting great teachers in every classroom is the quality of the principal.

We focused on leadership from day one in Newark. I’ve never been to a great school with a mediocre principal, and I have never been to a failing school with a terrific principal (except perhaps at the very beginning of a turnaround). Within two years, we had replaced nearly one-quarter of our principals through aggressive recruiting and selection, giving preference to Newarkers and leaders who not only knew instruction but thought of themselves as community organizers and change agents.

Many states at this time were starting to use quantitative test score data in teacher evaluations, and New Jersey was eager to follow suit. However, my team and I felt that the science for such “value-added” approaches didn’t hold up when it came to determining the effectiveness of individual teachers. Not only did we feel that using the value-added approach in teacher evaluations would be unfair to teachers, we also knew that including such a poison pill in our new evaluation plan would create a backlash that could sabotage the entire effort. We took a lot of flak from hardline education reformers, who had become fixated on using test scores as a shortcut to accountability and who worried that our questioning the use of test scores in teacher evaluations would water down reform.

To help non-charter schools accelerate the “people” ingredient, we negotiated what was widely considered an ambitious contract with Newark teachers. Despite agreeing to key labor reforms after more than two hundred hours at the bargaining table, some in the Newark Teachers Union and their national affiliate, the American Federation of Teachers, vociferously advocated against them within weeks of the contract being ratified by an overwhelming majority of teachers. Both groups had a long track record of preserving some of the sacred cows of teacher labor negotiations: seniority-based placement, infallibility of teachers with tenure (regardless of what they do), and resistance to any form of accountability—no matter how nuanced. Meanwhile, we found many of our own ideas to be popular among everyday teachers, who told us the quality of the teacher in the classroom next door is a factor in whether or not they want to stay at a school. I was pushing largely because I believed then—and still believe now—that teachers unions need to evolve to become part of the solution or they will become obsolete.

We also had to completely restructure and reimagine the central office to be in service to schools and families. This required breaking senior leaders into new teams and inviting them to clearly articulate how they would enable the four school-level ingredients. It also meant crafting clear plans with goals aligned with good management and coaching—not simply doing what had always been done.

Content. A high-quality school needs high-quality and culturally competent curricula. It also needs frameworks, protocols, and data that drive great instruction and continuous improvement.

I started in Newark about a year after the Common Core State Standards had become a force nationally and the same month that New Jersey adopted a version of them. Common Core gave us an unambiguous and evidence-based target. It also served as a catalyst to scrutinize our curricula with a more rigorous lens.

The research here is undeniable; high-quality, culturally competent instructional materials are critical to ensuring that students are truly internalizing difficult content. Historically, though, we had all underinvested in this area in the early reforms after A Nation at Risk.

High-quality instructional materials are an ingredient that is hard to get right when you are working only at the school or small-network level. Scale is your friend. These decisions are better made at a system level, where content experts can dedicate the necessary time to addressing academic needs and cultural contexts, as well as coherence and alignment between the plethora of different curricula and assessments. It is also the area that, at the time in Newark, brought the most consensus. We did “teach-ins” for administrators, educators, influencers, and families who all really seemed to get and support the mandate for good, rigorous content that was consistent across the city.

Culture. Schools with intentionally curated environments characterized by high standards alongside high support produce better student outcomes.

From day one in Newark, we focused on the seminal research work and promising practices that had emerged, connecting how kids feel, how adults feel, and student outcomes. Years after comparing student achievement results to staff, student, and family survey responses, researchers Tony Bryk and Barbara Schneider found that the schools with high levels of trust were far more likely to get beat-the-odds results than their counterparts. Economists like Ron Ferguson and social policy experts like Christopher Jencks found a direct correlation between adult expectations, student surveys, and student outcomes.

Relatedly, an area where I have seen some of the greatest challenges for adults in establishing and preserving culture is in response to conflict and disruptive incidents. How we handle student discipline, struggle, and conflict is where adult biases show up the most. This is a problem not only from an equity and justice lens but also from a student achievement standpoint. Often students who need the most support and time on task are being excluded the most. Students can’t learn when they feel shame and helplessness. So it is no surprise to me that data shows that the relationship between the discipline gap and achievement is more than correlative—it is also causal.

For these reasons, we hired administrators who showed skill in building culture and partnering with families. We created an entire central-office team focused on student well-being and discipline.

We made progress, but admittedly, the playbook on culture is harder to run for many reasons. Too often, discussions about what student culture should feel like are preachy, ideological, or theoretical—devoid of practical, research-based, promising practices. Building culture is far from a paint-by-numbers task. Effective cultures don’t feel the same in every school, but they do share key components. This is nuanced and hard to teach to administrators. The culture work requires us to surface and address adult biases about what kids can accomplish and what is considered “dangerous” behavior, and this can cause real discomfort and resistance.

Conditions. This ingredient is all about strong operations and infrastructure.

It is important to address the physical environment and the day-to-day operations. None of the other ingredients of a strong school or system can succeed if we don’t address the conditions in which our children learn and our teachers teach. In Newark, we had a lot of work to do on this ingredient.

When I started, Malcolm X Shabazz High School had a river running through its fourth floor on rainy days. Many schools didn’t have air conditioning, in a city where average temperatures reach above a humid ninety degrees for months. Some schools weren’t even wired for internet access, and only a few had laptops to check out to students for the day.

Local leaders openly talked about a “rolling start” at the beginning of the school year, which referred to the fact that it took weeks to sort out the basics: enrollment, special education schedules and services, buses, and even books. Honestly, I had never heard of a system where instruction didn’t start on day one.

Some of these intolerable conditions were due to bad public policy and some were because of poor management. My team and I would say we could tell if a school was getting results by how visitors were greeted at the door (if at all) and how quickly families could get the answer to whatever they were asking. We created school operations managers to attend to the operational needs of the school. At the time, this got me in trouble with the administrators’ union (because I was seen as encroaching on district administrator roles and jobs). Even today our approach to operations is considered innovative, which just shows how little we prioritize the conditions in our schools.

The One Newark Plan

While establishing a focus on college readiness and building four-ingredient schools was our primary focus right out of the gate, we knew we had to make progress on a citywide plan that addressed the schools beyond our purview. Looking at the full picture in Newark, you saw that everyone was doing their own thing, and the unintended consequences of this lack of coordination were becoming more evident and unsustainable every day.

From our earliest school visits, we could see that the poorest neighborhood schools were emptying out and becoming concentrated with the highest-need students and the lowest-quality staff. The diversity and variety of school models wasn’t materializing; with all the new schools, we weren’t actually providing a lot of choice, just more flavors of “no excuses” ice cream at the elementary level and a bunch of run-of-the-mill high schools.

Meanwhile, every year, including my first, our district had to cut about $50 million. While there was certainly a lot of bloated bureaucracy to streamline, more than 80 percent of that money was wrapped up in people. Newark Public Schools employs many Newarkers in a city with double the national poverty rate.

As a city, we had to ask ourselves: “Is it even possible for every child in Newark to have access to a school that meets their needs? Even those children facing the longest odds?”

Our team had no choice but to stare down these questions, which led us to some unconventional and controversial answers. The first thing we had to do: try to rise above political arguments rooted in ideology and self-interest about what type of school models should exist. There were about a hundred schools in Newark. We knew we would get to excellence more quickly if we had a variety of governance structures: traditional, charter, magnet, partner run, and hybrid. But we also knew we couldn’t simply let a thousand flowers bloom and allow others to die, especially when those vulnerable schools were serving our students with the highest need. We also knew that the community deserved excellence citywide.

We pored over our own data: student enrollment trends across governance models, overall city population trends, facilities assessments, and (of course) student outcomes. We fanned out and hosted more than a hundred community-based meetings with faith-based leaders, nonprofit executives, families in struggling schools, families in high-performing schools, charter advocates, charter operators, private schools, local funders, elected officials, union leaders, and early childhood providers. We began to socialize the idea that we needed one citywide plan across governance structures, as well as the harsh reality that the district’s footprint had to shrink. We wanted to find a way to preserve the best of the new-schools movement while also addressing some of the unacceptable consequences of its uncoordinated growth.

This process—over the course of about a year—led to a comprehensive plan we called One Newark. The plan opened with three core values to drive our collective decision-making: equity, excellence, and efficiency:

• Excellence: We must ensure that every child in every neighborhood has access to a “four-ingredient” school as quickly as possible and that no kid is in a failing school.
• Equity: We must ensure that all students—including those who are facing the longest odds—are on the pathway to college and a twenty-first-century career.
• Efficiency: We must ensure that every possible dollar is invested in staff and priorities that make a positive difference for all students.

We launched headlong into implementation in the winter of 2013–14.

We started publishing “family-friendly” snapshots—across both district and charter schools— so that community members could see how their schools were doing in comparison to schools with similar populations. We looked at overall proficiency but also at growth, critical in a city like Newark with low proficiency rates across the board. We also compared schools with similar student populations to one another.

We created a simple red, yellow, and green system so that the community could see the landscape clearly. “Red schools” were low-proficiency, low-growth schools. Green were high proficiency and high growth. Yellow schools were “on the move” (low proficiency, high growth) or “to watch” (high proficiency, low growth). The color-coding was clear and intuitive, and many in the community started talking about “no red schools.”

We placed an emphasis on transparent data about how schools were doing with students in poverty, students with disabilities, and English learners. We created standard measures—across district and charter schools—to report on student retention. People from all sides fought us on this level of transparency—the unions, some charter schools (which weren’t obligated to share their data with us), and some funders who worried we were reducing children to numbers. But many families and policymakers embraced the information. There’s no perfect system, but there was no way to make a citywide plan without a decent measure of school quality.

We performed detailed enrollment analysis and defined the need for a common definition of a “minimum viable school.” From a funding standpoint, schools with fewer than 500 students are hard to sustain with a staffing model that ensures things like appropriate class size, electives, teacher preparation times, and staff to attend to running operations. Newark had a lot of “red” schools that were also not financially viable, and many of them were in the poorest neighborhoods.

We also looked at demand data—who was applying to charters and from what neighborhoods, who was seeking new small high schools and from what neighborhoods, and which neighborhoods were growing and which were shrinking.

The picture was becoming increasingly clear: the need for a course correction was long overdue. We had traditional schools where 80 percent of families were on charter school waiting lists, but the district’s resistance to collaboration and the charters’ insistence on growing only one grade level each year meant large-scale closures and consolidations were inevitable.

The district had too many elementary schools overall, due to a population decrease, neighborhood shifts, and charter growth. We didn’t have enough early learning centers to meet the increased demand. We had too many selective high schools. Most of the new small high schools being incubated downtown were serving families from other wards, while iconic and historic high schools were emptying out. The picture was bleak. We had to make some hard decisions.

We decided to be radically transparent about our findings and the implications in a proposed ward-by-ward plan. Some charters should take over existing schools with high demand, keep families who opted in, and keep the buildings and the school name, instead of simply continuing to build new schools one grade at a time. Some elementary schools needed to convert to early learning centers. Some small high schools that were performing well needed to move into our comprehensive high schools, and some underperforming partner-run high schools needed to close. Magnets had to change their enrollment process. And some buildings had to be shut—some condemned, some repurposed, and some sold, potentially to charters.

Another anchor of the One Newark plan was ensuring that every family had equal access to choice. Both psychologically and practically, it didn’t make sense for one-third of families to get what they wanted and the rest to get what was left over. For starters, this dynamic was creating an almost civil war–like atmosphere, with charter and non-charter families pitted against each other and magnet and nonmagnet families screaming at each other in meetings. Also, one goal of establishing high-performing schools in high-poverty neighborhoods is to feed the groundswell of belief that kids can achieve. Newark’s choice system was helping create a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure in the non-charter schools.

This is where universal enrollment came into play. All families could access the system and apply to all schools. An algorithm gave preference to kids in the neighborhood, followed by kids in poverty, then kids with disabilities, and then everyone else at random.

It was a game changer. Now all schools were required to think about how to market themselves and own their quality, or lack thereof. By year two, more than three-quarters of the families of kindergartners and ninth-graders were using the system. At one point, we opened a family support center to help families exercise choice. We had planned for a soft launch, but word got out and more than a thousand families showed up on the first day, and the situation almost devolved into chaos. While our critics crowed about our operational failure—and it was indeed a failure—it also showed how much family demand there was for choice and quality. This is one of the hundreds of examples I’ve had throughout my career that defies the ridiculous stereotype that poor families don’t care about education.

The universal enrollment system may have been hardest on some members of Newark’s political elite who were used to the benefits afforded to them in an unfair, transactional system. I recall one meeting in which a prominent official—previously a supporter of mine—yelled, “You made a liar out of me! I told my cousin I could get her kid into this school!”

Our team knew that the tenets of the plan were bold, unconventional, and controversial and that the politics were going to be tough to navigate. Choice, charters, labor reforms, and teacher excellence polled well. Laying off Newarkers and teachers and “closing” traditional schools or turning them over to highly successful charters were wildly unpopular. But to have the plan succeed citywide, you couldn’t have one without the other.

To add a deeper degree of difficulty, while the plan was emerging and leading up to the official launch, we suffered a series of seismic political blows. In September 2013, the Bridgegate scandal broke and increasingly sidelined Governor Christie. Shortly thereafter, then senator Frank Lautenberg tragically passed away. Mayor Booker, who had also been an active and strong supporter of the plan and was working hard to build momentum around it, announced he was running for that U.S. Senate seat. His announcement also spurred the need for an earlier-than-expected mayoral election where the leading candidates spent considerable time spewing hatred about charters and about me personally (although backstage and publicly, they had previously supported both). Shortly thereafter, Commissioner Cerf resigned. To use a sports analogy: the entire offensive line left the field.

The overall approach was comprehensive, and it had to be to ensure that none of our kids were trapped in failing schools, the district didn’t go bankrupt, communities weren’t living with vacant buildings, and the city was on a path to success. I described the plan to author Dale Russakoff as “three-dimensional chess” in an effort to convey why all the pieces had to happen at one time and couldn’t be phased. There were too many interdependent parts to a very complex system, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. Unfortunately, in her 2015 book about Newark, The Prize, which went on to become a bestseller, this quote fed an inaccurate portrayal of me as a top-down, cold technocrat—a narrative that was taking shape across much of the media coverage about our work in Newark. It couldn’t have been further from the truth—the emotional pieces of what needed to happen were not lost on me or the team. I lived with my husband and baby son in Newark and had conversations with neighbors in grocery stores and local watering holes on a daily basis. It all felt so heavy, but also necessary.

Results and Lessons

During my tenure and the subsequent years under Cerf, our district teams improved outcomes for students in every neighborhood and every age group—from early childhood to high school.

In early childhood, we secured a $7 million Head Start grant (becoming only the second district in the country to do so) to add more than one thousand early childhood seats. We brought early childhood standards to life and sounded the alarm to focus on the importance of high-quality early learning. Newark went from having fewer than half of our residents eligible for free early childhood programs (which was most families) in those programs to enrolling nearly 90 percent.

In 2015, the Center on Reinventing Public Education named Newark as the top district in the country based on its share of high-poverty, high-performance elementary schools. By 2019, more than one-third of Black students attended schools that exceeded the state average, compared with 10 percent in 2011. The number of good schools and schools “on the move” grew every year due to our district-run turnaround approach, charter conversion schools, and some outright closures and consolidations. Newark was among the top four cities in the country for student outcomes of Black students living in poverty.

The citywide graduation rate rose 14 points, closing the gap with the state average by 7 percentage points—with almost double the percentage of students graduating having passed the state exit exam. About 87 percent of Newark graduates who enrolled in college returned for a second term, far exceeding national averages despite high poverty rates.

And we saw signs that the overall community—despite the political rancor we encountered— was starting to believe in the “system of great schools.” For the first time in decades, student enrollment was increasing overall in Newark, as was the population of the city.

Because we felt responsible for every child in Newark, we engaged all families, charter and district, with equal vigor. This was a good and mission-aligned approach, but it was almost impossible to execute, given the tensions (both perceived and very real) inherent in growing the charter footprint. The conundrum is perfectly exemplified by the mother who called in to ask me a question on-air during a local NPR show. She had just dropped off her kids at North Star Academy Charter School, she said, because she needed them to have access to excellence. At the same time, she was on her way to my office to picket against me on behalf of her nephew, who had lost his job as a school aide due to the smaller footprint of the district.

Our strategy all along was to be up front about failure and embrace accountability. Again, while our radical transparency seemed like a good idea on its face, it turned out that a lot of people don’t want to hear their school is failing—no matter how carefully crafted the message. We prioritized students who were at the back of the line. Our universal enrollment system gave preference to students from the poorest neighborhoods and those with disabilities. We revamped the magnet school admissions process to look at multiple factors for student admissions at the central office. These were good decisions for children, families, and equity, but it also put us in the crosshairs of power brokers who were used to getting what they wanted and considered coveted seats theirs to give out. They also had access to the biggest microphones and would use them to mobilize the community against our efforts.

Some charter school operators and their supporters mobilized their constituents in opposition to these citywide efforts as well. They wanted to grow where they wanted to grow, not necessarily in alignment with supply-and-demand patterns or the overall plan.

Charters weren’t the only group stuck in their own goals and plans—and at least most of their concerns were in service of building quality schools. School-based partners and vendors, local nonprofits, funders, and other leaders all had their individual projects, schools, and pet issues. The incentives to keep doing one’s own thing were profound. I was stuck in a daily loop of explicit and often threatening demands to support individual agendas—many of them having nothing to do with what was best for individual neighborhoods and schools, let alone the collective.

We had to find a way for the idea of choice to lift all boats, but it wasn’t happening—and it can’t happen without good public policy and collective action. I’ve had many school choice advocates dispute this. Some will have you believe that the mere presence of competition somehow magically raises everyone’s game. It certainly didn’t happen that way in Newark, nor in the dozens of systems I have worked in since. The One Newark plan should have been envisioned before the unintended consequences were at our doorstep. Maybe that would have given us more time.

I also made mistakes. My messages were not straightforward and sticky enough. This work, as you can see, is complex and multifaceted, and I could have paid more attention to how to ensure good, proactive, community-friendly communication.

More critically, I needed to develop a more sophisticated understanding of how to see the community in relation to the system of schools. In Figure 1, the center is the school, and the next level out is the families and students. The next ring is influencers—folks connected to the school who have direct influence on that specific school. The next ring is community-wide partners—community-based agencies and other city agencies like police and child welfare. And the outermost ring is elected officials and power brokers—for instance, pastors of large congregations, thought leaders, and community-based organizations serving the city.

Figure 1: The community in relation to the system of schools

We knew it was critical to focus on our families and students, and we knew it was a tremendous amount of our work to build collective action focused on them. I give us high marks for our dogged and strategic work on the red ring. But in retrospect, we spent far too much time with folks in the outermost ring—the political and power class—and not enough with those in the orange. It wasn’t until nearer the end of my tenure that we started to create a database for each individual school’s orange ring. I came to realize a hard lesson—that while the politicians and power brokers confidently spoke for the community, they were often after a political win: a contract, a coveted spot in a school, a policy, or a job for a family member or friend. I wish I could take precious minutes I spent with those in the green ring and reinvest them in the orange ring.

The painful but informative experiences I had in Newark, along with a long career since then of working with systems leaders across the country, have convinced me that collective action is the missing link for change at the systems and community levels. Too often, we interchange concepts of true grassroots organizing and community engagement and sidestep the obvious truth that power brokers and special interest groups have an organized, well-resourced, and often outsized influence on speaking for the community.

Conclusion

The insights I’ve shared above are not based on any specific ideology. They were developed out of necessity and refined through years of application and practice across a wide variety of settings—from New York to California and many places in between, in both districts and charter networks, in small school communities, and in the largest cities and states.

It may seem like a lot to tackle, and indeed it is. But if we are to truly transform our systems at scale, we can’t simply cling to one specific ingredient or hew to a single governance ideology. The surest way to avoid bias and ensure a holistic strategy is to zoom out to the community-level goal. Make the community—not just one school, network, neighborhood, or district—the unit of change.

The story of Newark should push all of us to define the role of the “system” and why it is so critical and yet so difficult to fulfill that mandate for an entire community. In short: the system should manage the incentives, policies, guardrails, and resources to ensure that every child has access to a high-quality school by doing four things.

Enable “Four-Ingredient schools. As discussed above, we the value of a game-changing principal in every school and an excellent educator in every classroom; the impact of high-quality instructional materials that are culturally competent; the research on school culture and handling discipline; and what conditions have to be in place to enable achievement. Systems leaders should set direction and advocate; procure best-in-class materials; set policy to incentivize districts, schools, and charter management organizations to implement what we know works; and sanction practices antithetical to student progress.

Ensure quality and equity. The paradigm of districts versus charters sadly guarantees that many kids—particularly those with the most challenges—are left behind. Policymakers and community leaders should be held accountable when they allow kids and families to fall through the cracks. Leaders need to be accountable for ensuring all kids access high-quality schools. Our new accountability systems should correct for mistakes we made before, from focusing only on proficiency and meaningless graduation rates to treating growth, college-readiness, and retention as critical outcome measures.

Break bureaucracy. A fundamental way to clear a runway for accelerated school improvement is to actively tear down past practices and federal, state, and local policies that block individual schools from innovating. We need more of a “whiteboard” approach than one that tweaks decades of dysfunction. Policymakers and community leaders need to wake up every day wondering what they can do to ensure that people running schools have the time to do the right thing as opposed to managing byzantine policies and procedures from competing departments.

Create cross-system and community-based solutions. The students who face the most challenges have generally been failed by multiple systems. Statistically, they are likely to be students of color. Too often they are labeled “special populations” and further marginalized out of classrooms and into separate and unequal programs. To truly reverse patterns for students that systems have failed the most, we need cross-agency and community-based solutions with school success at the core: more out-of-the-box ideas to aggregate services and help students who are the most vulnerable succeed.

I share these ideas and epiphanies humbly and with tremendous gratitude to the countless friends, colleagues, and mentors in this sector who helped shape my beliefs about this work. It’s been more than a decade since I arrived in Newark and forty years since A Nation at Risk. My hope is that we’ve all gained a bit of useful perspective and are ready to roll up our sleeves and put the lessons we’ve learned into action.

Cami Anderson was superintendent of Newark Public schools from 2011 to 2014. She is the Founder and CEO of ThirdWay Solutions.

Excerpted from a chapter of A Nation At Risk +40: A Review of Progress in US Public Education, a collection of essays published by the Hoover Institution that reflects on education reform in the four decades since the landmark 1983 report.

New school models are having a moment. They are receiving favorable media coverage in outlets from the Washington Post to the Wall Street Journal to Good Morning America and tens of millions of dollars in venture capital investments. Parents are telling pollsters that they are open to the idea of educating their children in new ways. Teachers are expressing frustration with the traditional public school system.

But those with even a cursory knowledge of the American education system have seen this pattern before. A splashy new solution to a problem is hyped, money (philanthropic or otherwise) flows to it, the media fawns, and then within four or five years, it’s “Hey, whatever happened to that?”

Will this new generation of school models have a different fate? Before we get there, let’s take a look at what’s on offer.

Growing out of the “pandemic pods” that emerged during the rolling school closures of 2020 and 2021, microschools are intentionally small schools, often serving 15 students or fewer. Small schools, of course, are not new. American educational history is dotted with one-room schoolhouses in frontier communities that educated small numbers of mixed-age children under one roof. The important difference today is that these schools are intentionally small, and while the best technology that the frontier schoolmarm had was a new McGuffey Reader, many of today’s microschools leverage computer-adaptive learning-management software to provide a personalized education for each student.

Another trending model is the hybrid homeschool, where students attend formal classes for part of the week and work from home for the rest. Again, this kind of arrangement is not new. In the pre-industrial era when teachers, textbooks, and school seats were scarce, students attended part time out of necessity. Hybrid homeschooling’s modern incarnation predates the pandemic as well. Grace Prep, the first University-Model hybrid school, was founded in Arlington, Texas, in 1992. The Aurora Public Schools in suburban Denver started the Homeschool Options Program of Education, a hybrid homeschool program, in 1999.

There are also schools working to provide a high-quality online education. The for-profit company Sora Schools, for example, is attempting to produce an independent-school style of education via online instruction. The school year consists of a series of six-week blocks in which students either participate in synchronous online courses called “expeditions” or complete independent-study projects aligned to state graduation standards. Sora takes all of the student’s work and repackages it into a transcript with credits earned and a GPA. Classes are small, and Sora advertises hiring only 1 percent of the teachers who apply to work there. Full tuition sits at $12,900 per student per year, though the school offers reduced tuition to more than half of its students based on family financial need.

Families are also mixing and matching different educational providers and modalities to craft their children’s education. Research by Albert Cheng and Daniel Hamlin analyzed multiple waves of the National Household Education Survey and found that in 2019, 52 percent of respondents who identified as homeschoolers said they used a private tutor or belonged to a homeschool cooperative. Forty percent said they made use of online instruction, and 28 percent said they were enrolled in a brick-and-mortar school. Only 22 percent of respondents did not fall into any of those categories. The system is in flux, and it is unclear exactly how it is all going to shake out.

Since predicting the future is a fool’s errand, it is perhaps more helpful to identify the tailwinds that are pushing these alternative school models forward as well as the headwinds buffeting against their advancement.

Tailwinds

There are reasons to be bullish on the future of alternative models. The first and largest reason is that substantial numbers of parents appear to want them. For over two years, more than 40 percent of parents surveyed by the EdChoice/Morning Consult monthly tracker poll have said they would like their child to learn from home between one and four days per week. Almost two-thirds of parents have said they are more favorable to homeschooling as a result of the pandemic. Consistently, more than 40 percent of parents say they would like their child to attend a private school, and around 10 percent say they would like to homeschool if money and logistics were no barrier.

Looking at homeschooling in particular, enrollment has grown substantially post-pandemic. According to the National Home Education Research Institute, 3.1 million children were attending homeschool in the 2021–22 school year, up from 2.5 million in the spring of 2019. NHERI estimates a growth in homeschooling of between 2 and 8 percent per annum. Given the research cited above, a majority of these families are likely taking advantage of some kind of alternative education model, whether that is participating in a hybrid program, using online learning, or working together in some kind of co-op.

States that have expanded school-choice programs have also seen growth in family applications. According to the Miami Herald, about 123,000 new students have enrolled in a Florida choice program for the 2023–24 school year. In Iowa, 29,025 students applied for the state’s new education savings account program during its application period in June 2023. In Arkansas, 5,031 students applied.

Alternative education models are also tapping into teacher discontent. A recent EdChoice poll calculated a Net Promoter Score for teaching, asking the question made popular by marketing research, “How likely is it that you would recommend teaching to a friend or family member?” The Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the “detractors,” who give a score of zero to six, from the “promoters,” who give a score of nine or ten. For all teachers in the sample, the overall score was –5, as 41 percent of teachers were detractors and only 36 percent were promoters.

Interestingly though, these scores were driven entirely by teachers in traditional public schools. Private school teachers had a net promoter score of +34 and charter school teachers produced a score of +42. It was traditional public school teachers, whose Net Promoter Score was –21, who dragged the overall average down.

The organizers of alternative-model schools want to find great but frustrated teachers and put them in a better environment. Teachers in these settings might have fewer students, more control over what is taught, more flexibility in their schedule, or some combination of the three. While it is only one data point, the for-profit microschool network Primer saw 1,400 teachers apply to teach in its 23 schools, according to a recent podcast interview with its founder.

Clearly, both parents and teachers are looking for options outside of the traditional system. The question becomes, what about supply?

Amar Kumar, founder of the for-profit KaiPod Learning network of microschools, believes that alternative learning models are “where the pressure valve will be released.” He argues that the traditional public sector is underdelivering, but the established alternatives don’t completely fill the gap. Not everyone can homeschool. Charter schools are wrapped up in some challenging politics and barriers (such as onerous authorizing processes) that make it hard to start up enough schools to meet demand. Full-bore private schooling is out of reach for many as well, with high tuition and heavy start-up costs for would-be school founders. He believes that smaller, more agile environments that can operate without needing permission from a government authority will rise to meet parent and teacher needs.

Venture capital is investing big in alternative school models. Primer has raised $18.7 million in venture funding, including a Series A round led by Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, known for his work with PayPal, LinkedIn, and Square and his early investments in YouTube, Palantir, Lyft, Airbnb, Eventbrite, and Wish. Prenda, another prominent microschooling network, has raised $45.9 million over eight rounds of venture finance. Sora has raised $23.5 million. KaiPod Learning was selected for the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator.

Headwinds

The most pressing concern for the fledgling alternative-education community is the basic unit economics that anyone with a pencil, a sheet of paper, and a calculator can compute.

Let’s put together a fictional microschool. First, we need a location. In my old neighborhood in Kansas City, rent for a simple storefront will run between $15 and $20 per square foot per year, so a 1,500 square foot space will cost between $22,500 and $30,000. You want a great teacher or guide? The starting salary for Kansas City Public School teachers is $43,100. Public school teachers get tens of thousands more in healthcare and retirement benefits, but even assuming just a 15 percent benefits cost brings the teacher’s compensation to just under $50,000. School operators also need insurance, utilities, furniture, and other incidentals that could easily crack another $1,000 to $1,500 per month.

For instructional materials, there are some free or low-cost resources. Zearn Math, a popular online provider, has a free subscription for up to 35 students and one teacher. Khan Academy is free as well. Lexia, a popular ELA program, costs $175 for the first student and $110 for each after that, but other ELA resources like Read Not Guess are free. But are students going to supply their own laptops or tablets? Either way, someone is going to have to pay for them.

So, let’s say, with some pretty conservative assumptions, you’re in the range of $85,000 to $100,000 per year in operating costs. Divide that by the student population. If you have 12 students, costs are $7,083 to $8,333 per student per year. At 15 students, it is $5,667 to $6,667. With local Catholic elementary schools running in the $6,000–$7,000 range, the cost of your hypothetical microschool is certainly competitive. But there isn’t much room for upward revision before the model becomes markedly more expensive than its more established neighbors.

Donated time or discounted space can drive costs down. School founders who might serve as the guide or teacher themselves can discount their own time or educate their own children as a way to bring down the cost. But partnerships are tricky. Educational entrepreneurs are replete with stories of getting space donated or offered at a discounted rate only to have the rent increased when the landlord discovers that they are making money. Teacher-founders with their own children in the school bring a host of troublesome relational, personal, and financial entanglements. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Getting great teachers could be a challenge as well. In the hypothetical above, we budgeted for the starting salary of a teacher, but those with more experience will expect more money, and great teachers will also want to be paid a premium. In many of the new school models, teachers are hourly employees without the same security and benefits of traditional employment. While many appreciate the flexibility and want to work part time, it is a much tougher sell for someone trying to make teaching a career. There are lots of frustrated or former teachers who are attracted to these models, not to mention parents who are interested in part-time work. The question is whether or not there are enough of them.

And finally, there are political challenges to go along with political opportunities. In 2020, the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union, produced an “opposition report” on pandemic pods and the for-profit Prenda microschools network. The report, which was covered by the Wall Street Journal in an opinion piece, conceded that microschooling had “widespread support” and offered the backhanded compliment that such schools might expand opportunity gaps by outperforming public schools. But troublingly, the report included a photograph of Prenda founder Kelly Smith’s house and his address, along with a strategy to stop Prenda’s growth. As new models expand and grow, so do the targets on their backs. The teachers unions’ strategies against charter schools—smearing all schools with the scandals of one school or network, claiming that charters are “draining” funds from traditional district schools or aren’t fully accountable—can be aimed just as easily at newer school models.

Another political risk is that school-choice policies are subject to change in any given environment. While it is unlikely in the near term that states will repeal the programs they have created in recent years, it is possible that they will draft regulations that could limit the kinds of learning environments that are allowed to participate. Some states, like Iowa, have required schools to be accredited in order to participate in the ESA program, and most one-off microschools or hybrid schools will shun the rigamarole of accreditation—assuming an accreditor would even agree to do it. Even without a massive reversal of fortune for school-choice policy in a state, alternative learning models could be victims of seemingly inconsequential alterations to rules, regulations, and requirements.

Clearly, venture capitalists see an opportunity to turn a profit, but it’s not clear where the profits lie. Making money might be particularly challenging for ventures that look to recruit top teacher talent, offer innovative learning spaces, or use the latest technology to supplement instruction. Maybe they can purchase materials in bulk, use tech for some efficiencies, or find other ways to economize, but some of the costliest line items, such as facilities and personnel, are the most inflexible.

The simplest way toward profitability may be to enroll more students. Going from 10 to 20 students doubles revenue, and if providers can hold personnel constant and lean on technology to shoulder some of the burden of growth, there’s the profit. Still, messing too much with school size in this market seems a dangerous game. If the selling point is a small, personalized learning environment with a tightknit community and adults who know students and their families well, entrepreneurs will have to take care not to upset that delicate environment.

The Policy Environment

In his 1974 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, the economist Frederich Hayek famously said that the wise policymaker should “use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants.”

What does the garden look like? Is the soil fertile or fallow?

As mentioned before, states are making historic investments in school-choice programs, and particularly education savings accounts, which allow for a level of customization not possible with past voucher or tax-credit-funded scholarship programs. For parents who want to mix in-person with at-home instruction or combine formal schooling with more informal tutoring or group classes, these state programs now give them financial support to do so.

These supports are emerging at the same time a new wave of parents is encountering alternative education models. Eric Wearne, director of the National Hybrid Schools Project at Kennesaw State University, argues that hybrid homeschool operators by and large have not cared about the broader policy environment in which their schools operate. As Wearne put it, “They saw NCLB come and go, they saw the Common Core come and go, and ignored it.” He went on to say, “The motivations they had in 1999 or 2009 have not changed.”

But he qualifies his point by saying that, post-pandemic, the people starting these schools and the students enrolling in them are different. While many hybrid homeschoolers of the past came from the homeschooling movement and shared its skepticism of government entanglement, new families see hybrid schools as one option among many. They are not as ideologically wedded to the project as some of those who came before. They are more willing to put up with strings from the government as a tradeoff for its financial support.

The charter sector is getting on board with new models as well. Arizona’s ASU Preparatory Academy educates more than 7,000 students across a network of charter schools that take quite different forms and approaches. One end of the spectrum is anchored by the more traditional ASU Prep Academies that operate in-person classes all week. At the other end of the spectrum is ASU Prep Digital, where students work online full time. In between are schools like ASU Prep Casa Grande, where students are in class four days a week and work from home for one; ASU Prep Hybrid, with three days in school and two at home; ASU Prep Local, with two days per week in school and three at home; and ASU Prep Experience, with one day in school and four at home­. ASU Prep also operates microschools that they call ASU Prep Learning Pods.

Within the public sector, a 2021 policy brief from ExcelinED identified 12 states where students are able to enroll in public schools part time. In Washington state, for example, the state’s administrative code stipulates that “an eligible part-time public school student shall be entitled to take any course, receive any ancillary service, and take or receive any combination of courses and ancillary services which is made available by a public school to full-time students.” Alaska, Idaho, and Iowa will fund students proportionally to their participation in classes. Alaska, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, New Hampshire, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin allow homeschool students to enroll part time, while Alaska, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Maine, Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Washington allow private school students to do so. Traditional public schools can (and have) used this flexibility to create hybrid programs under their auspices.

Across the traditional public, public charter, and private school sectors, there appears to be strong support for alternative learning environments.

Rethinking Sustainability

Given the increasing public investment in alternative school models, critics have raised reasonable concerns about the sustainability of these new models. School founders are experimenting, taking chances, and trying new things that may not work out. What then? A fair question.

Perhaps we are looking at these new schools through yesterday’s lens. Historically, starting a school has been a capital-intensive project that has involved dozens of adults and hundreds of children. A charter granted for a new school, for instance, can set off an outlay of tens of millions of dollars in loans or bonds for facilities and contractual obligations for staff. Founders must get teachers to commit to teach at the school and students to promise to enroll. If a charter school fails in its first three or four years, it may leave another two decades’ worth of debt obligations that someone has to sort out. Starting a new charter school involves massive risk and drives more cautious authorizing.

Starting a microschool involves a very different calculus. Most experts I spoke with estimated start-up costs in the $10,000 to $25,000 range, with the remaining costs mentioned above rolling in during the first year of operation, offset by revenue from enrolled students. Spaces are rented, not owned, and are much smaller in scale than traditional school buildings. There might be only one or two people on the payroll, and, of course, the number of students is far smaller as well.

In short, there is much less on the line, and therefore much lower risk.

New school models also benefit from a different definition of organizational “sustainability.” Because traditional schools take on massive obligations when they open, a baseline definition of sustainability is the ability to continue operating until their debts are paid off. New-model schools have little to no debt, so the time horizon for sustainability shrinks massively, or disappears altogether.

Some of these alternative models could also exist for a set period of time and then close, without necessarily disrupting the lives of students, parents, or teachers. If, for example, a group of families starts a microschool or a co-op learning environment to educate their children, it could operate for the 5 to 10 years needed for their students to progress through it and then disband. The parents would give up their rental space, and the students would move on to middle school or high school or whatever learning environment came next. Because the school would not enroll a new class of students each year and thus incur an obligation to see those children’s education through, no student would be adversely affected. Especially if the school were designed to operate that way from the outset, no one would suffer.

The only challenge to sustainability would be the loss of teacher jobs. But ideally, in a community with a vibrant microschool or hybrid school community, these schools would be constantly spinning up and winding down, so new teaching jobs would arise as others were lost.

As Don Soifer, CEO of the National Microschooling Center, put it, “Our definition of sustainability needs to change, because the business model is different.”

There are, though, some macro-level effects to consider. The risk may be low for individual schools, students, families, and teachers, but on the sector scale, potential problems arise. It is quite possible that some families might look at the sector as a whole and say, “This is too chaotic for me.” They might be receptive to the idea of an alternative learning model but want to see one with some track record. They are open to innovation—to an extent. Could a constant need to refresh the supply of schools over time drive families back to more stable options? Possibly.

What Dreams May Come

The future of alternative learning models will most likely be shaped more by the practical and picayune than by the philosophical and political. Can entrepreneurial educators find workable spaces to convert into learning environments, teachers who are willing and able to lead those environments, and parents willing to work together with them? In places where there is public funding available, will entrepreneurs consent to whatever administrative hurdles come with it? In places that lack robust K–12 choice programs, can they provide services at a price point families can afford? In short, how will supply meet demand in any of these scenarios?

Venture capital does not provide an unlimited runway. Parents willing to enroll their child in a new environment do not have limitless patience. Policymakers may cut and run if constituents are not satisfied with the options available from newly passed private-school-choice programs. And that is more likely to happen before programs grow very large.

In sum, we will probably know sooner rather than later if this new world of alternative education environments is truly different from the panoply of promising innovations that have come before. There are reasons to believe microschools, online schools, and hybrid homeschools represent innovative ways of organizing education environments. Many passionate educators and parents are highly motivated to make them work for students. It’s hard to think of a better first step.

Michael Q. McShane is the director of national research at EdChoice. His latest book is Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College, co-authored by Frederick M. Hess.

This article appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

McShane, M.Q. (2024). A New Crop of School Models Expands Choice: Families find more-personal alternatives in microschools, hybrid homeschools. Education Next, 24(2), 8-13.

This article appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Wallace, J. (2024). The Charter-School Movement Just Keeps on Keepin’ On: Its momentum catalyzed by shifting politics, new strength, better advocacy, and simple staying power. Education Next, 24(1), 8-15.

This article appeared in the Fall 2023 issue of Education Next. Suggested citation format:

Education Next. (2023). 2023 Is the Year of Universal Choice in Education Savings Accounts: “We better get doing our job of implementing well,” says EdChoice’s Enlow. Education Next, 23(4), 75-76.