When Mysa School was founded about eight years ago, the microschool movement was still new.
Mysa, which has about 40 students in Washington, D.C., and a second school in Vermont, emphasizes proficiency-based learning, in which students can’t advance unless they demonstrate understanding. Siri Fiske, founder of Mysa School, said the idea is that a smaller school allows students to develop deeper relationships at school.
Tuition at Mysa would cost an unaided parent about $20,000 a year, the same as the government pays for tuition. Educating students in public schoolsFisk said Maisa’s curriculum is based on the Common Core, the same national standards as public schools, “but we just do it in a really different way,” she added.
The focus on “mastery” means grouping students by ability, so a student might be in a different group for reading level and writing level. Students tend to be grouped into at least three different levels at a time, Fisk said.
The ultimate goal, Fisk says, is personalized learning. The school doesn’t have grades and tries to give students a way to really pursue their educational interests. For example, after poet Amanda Gorman recited a poem at President Joe Biden’s inauguration, many of Mysa’s fifth and sixth graders wanted to learn poetry. They spent the better part of a year working on it. In the end, the students understood the poems pretty well, but they were falling behind in other English standards, like grammar, Fisk says. But the school recorded it and reviewed it later, and parents followed suit because they could see the students were learning, she added. This is the kind of flexibility she hopes to eventually bring back to public schools, so students have more control over their education.
Fisk said that when Mysa was founded, it was the first school to call itself a microschool, but today a microschool is loosely defined as a school with a relatively small number of students that serves as a learning center for private or homeschooled students. wherever.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to a significant increase in homeschool students, Johns Hopkins University Homeschool Huba collection of research and resources on homeschooling. After that, people expected it to go back to pre-pandemic levels, but it appears to be increasing in many states, says Angela Watson, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education.
But for Mytha’s Fisk, the popularity of alternatives to public schools is actually raising concerns: She fears her approach to microschools will be overshadowed by clashing politics and culture wars.
And she’s not alone in her worries. At a time when public schools are beset by political infighting and declining enrollment, these alternatives would go a long way in opening up the educational experience to more students and families. But for thoughtful advocates, the politics could undermine the promise that attracted them to the first place.
Small is the new big
Public school enrollment has been declining since the pandemic began. Data from the National Center for Education StatisticsAnd it is predicted to decline slowly but steadily over the next few years.
In contrast, many alternatives to public schools have emerged.
From homeschooling to charter schools to microschools, these are becoming more common learning methods for American students. For example, a Washington Post analysis found that the number of homeschooled students has increased by more than 50% since the pandemic began. The types of schools experiencing the most explosive growthThis was a time when public school enrollment was estimated to have declined by about 4 percent.
According to Johns Hopkins’ Watson, there is no reliable data tracking the differences between homeschooling, microschooling, and other options. But Watson adds that these days, the model has received less attention than charter schools, given that about 5 to 6 percent of all K-12 students are homeschooled and about 7 percent attend charter schools. She says that students are actually attending private-school-like schools, or “microschools,” that often label themselves as “homeschools.” Either way, microschools are increasingly accessing public funding through education savings accounts and vouchers, which Watson thinks will bring more attention to microschools.
To some observers, these are part of the same trend.
Fisk believes the growth of homeschooling and microschools may be related: She speculates that the reason there are so many homeschooled students today is because many of the microschools across the country register their students as “homeschooled,” which is because they are often located outside school districts and taught by uncertified teachers.
Perhaps that reflects a change in thinking about these kinds of schools.
For Fisk, the goal of microschools was to add “small tweaks” to education. Microschools were an experiment in applying her insights to public schools. Fisk previously worked in private schools in California and studied how people learn in a PhD in educational psychology. She also worked in public schools before starting Mysa.
But just before the pandemic hit, she says, she was approached by FreedomWorks, an advocacy group funded by the mega-political donors Koch brothers and with ties to the libertarian Tea Party movement. They were interested in building an “alternative school chain,” Fisk says. To them, diverting students out of public schools seemed more important than running an experiment and reintroducing lessons into public schools that would ultimately benefit others.
Fisk said he feels his commitment to public schools has put him in the minority among other microschool leaders these days. Many are doing this not out of any interest in, say, personalized learning, but rather because they don’t want to send their kids to public school, he said.
States where the “school choice” movement is thriving may soon see more public funding for these options. Some Indiana lawmakers, for example, Expanding the use of educational scholarship accounts There is a plan to redirect public funds to microschools, and the state is already Private School Vouchers Alternatives that provide funding directly to parents. This raises the thorny question of whether alternatives are willing to accept government funding and the oversight that comes with it, or whether that undermines the reasons parents flock to these alternatives.
But for Fisk, the main problem with these ideological interests is the lack of transparency. Without accreditation and licensing, everything becomes very opaque. What’s more, she says, the political affiliations at certain educational institutions aren’t always clear. Organizations like the National Microschool Center, a popular source of information on these schools, say: Receive funds Fisk says he has support from groups like the Stand Together Trust, which is funded by the Koch Foundation.
And Fisk is not alone in worrying that her vision of an educational experiment could be swept away amid larger political shifts.
Added value
Of course, there are other criticisms of public schools.
One is that schools don’t make enough of an effort to intentionally instill good “character” in their students, says Brandon McCoy, a former fellow at the right-leaning Manhattan Institute think tank. Our educational institutions tend to see it as the responsibility of parents to do so, he says. But because schools play such a large role in children’s development, McCoy says, it should also be their responsibility to foster character development when students aren’t under parental supervision.
That is one of the reasons why he is interested in classical learning, a form of education that emphasizes the “classics” of the Western tradition. Survey of Classical Learning Schools The Manhattan Institute positioned the school as an “attractive option for parents” in 2021.
McCoy says he values these schools primarily for instilling moral and civic virtues in students. But McCoy’s argument for classical learning also includes a “practical case” that these schools produce better outcomes for racial minority students living in cities, a sort of nuanced equity argument. Looking at several classical learning schools, McCoy noted: Higher Results That’s especially true for black students at South Bronx Classical, a free public charter school for K-8 students in New York City. Most of the students are black and Hispanic and come from the poor South Bronx neighborhood, McCoy noted. “Maybe South Bronx Classical has a thing for me,” he said, referring to the school’s students. Mathematics and reading assessment It proved to be a “diamond in the rough.”
For McCoy, part of the reason for this improved academic performance is the school’s rigorous focus on discussion and engagement with texts that have “stood the test of time.”
Classical scholarship, while popular in some conservative circles, has not traditionally been synonymous with culture war politics.
Still, classical learning pops up regularly in reactionary contexts. More recently, the state of Florida has turned to classical learning as an alternative to “counter-wokeness.” The state began allowing the “Classical Learning Test” as a replacement for the SAT. Instead of the usual subjects, the test was developed to probe knowledge of timeless ideas. But its creators He complained that he was drawn into Perhaps surprisingly, Florida’s adoption drew a sliver of support from the other side of the political spectrum, including progressive scholar and presidential candidate Cornel West, who is running in 2023 for the White House. Misinterpretation Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has positioned classical scholarship as conservative, a move West writes that is “bipartisan,” because groundbreaking ideas are always “revolutionary.”
but, Aligned DeSantis and a network of classic schools, including Hillsdale Collegehas been looking to grow classic charters.
According to McCoy, one of the biggest criticisms of the classical education movement today is that it has been co-opted by “highly partisan” right-wing groups. Some of these movements are: The conservative equivalent of a “Trojan horse” They’re trying to sneak in ideology under the guise of liberal arts. That can be unsettling, McCoy says, because he believes the movement is beneficial regardless of political leaning. He says he doesn’t want to see the movement hijacked by partisanship. This isn’t a problem unique to the classical model of learning, he adds.
Ultimately, he said, he can’t think too much about it, adding that all he can do is defend his position. Civics education is too important an issue to abandon because of “bad actors,” McCoy said.
Rebranding
As the alternative school agenda shifts, Fisk, the founder of Mysa School, said he’s questioning whether the term “microschool” should even be used.
She worries that politically motivated big donors and polarization could drown out more thoughtful expressions of microschools or lead to them being wrongly labeled as conservative rather than educational.
Confused. Many parents clearly feel the need Smaller, more individualized, more flexible schoolsBut for now, she said, the term doesn’t really distinguish what she considers to be legitimate, fully accredited schools from “kids living in basements in Kentucky.”
Fisk argues that new labels will be needed. At this point, she says, it may not be clear what ideals these schools are truly promoting.