Starting a charter school can be daunting. In Florida, the founders of a new school would need to pull together educational and organizational plans, submit an application to the local school board, convince the board to support the new school, find a building to house scores or even hundreds of students (not to mention a way to pay for it), and hire a teacher for every classroom.
After clearing all those hurdles, their model would still be untested. There would still be a risk they would fail. And while the school might offer a STEM theme or an arts focus or longer school days, how different would its approach really be from the traditional school up the street?
Those limitations have sapped charter schools of what Matt Candler, the founder of 4.0 Schools, calls their “prototyping or piloting power” — their ability to test approaches that are dramatically different from what’s happening in most classrooms.
In New Orleans, his organization aims to solve that problem by starting small.
Rather than convincing a teacher to launch an entire new school, it encourages them to test their model in a single classroom, operating inside a school that already exists. The surrounding infrastructure — the building, the buses, the cafeteria — is already be there, allowing teachers to focus on 10 or 20 students, honing a vision that could eventually grow into a school of its own.
Candler’s nonprofit organization supports startup enterprises that want to rethink different aspects of school. They pitch themselves with “what if” questions, like, “What if low-income students had the support that it takes to complete college?”
Some of the most interesting organizations are prototypical schools, which are part of the Tiny Schools Project. They include a charter school focused on students’ emotional needs, which will be housed inside an traditional school run by the Orleans Parish School Board, an engineering academy focused on hands-on learning and linked with Tuskegee University, and a new breed of low-cost private schools set to open this summer.
The approach can help startup schools save money. It can give district schools a way to promote innovation, or charter schools a way to enliven their own sector. And it gives the new schools more freedom to push harder on one of the selling points behind the earliest charter schools: The ability to try running schools in new ways, using technology and staffing arrangements that wouldn’t be feasible in traditional schools.
“I think it can get us back to the original vision of what charter schools were all about,” Candler said during a session at a national charter school conference in New Orleans.
Around the country, a new class of technology-powered private schools is offering personalized learning to students whose parents can afford five-figure tuition. The education system, he said, needs to develop similarly high-tech schools that serve disadvantaged kids.
“My belief is that we need people investing in how to use technology, especially for children who have vocabulary and opportunity gaps,” he said.
In Florida, we’ve already seen teachers strike out on their own to launch what could be described as a low-cost private microschool with unique staffing models (two teachers, no full-time administrators) and a focus on serving high-needs students. But it took a heroic effort just to get their venture off the ground. What would it take to make similar ventures widespread, and widely supported?
