For the first time last week, I flew home from an education conference with a feeling that recalled Hunter S. Thompson’s wistful remembrance of San Francisco in the mid-’60s.
You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.
Eight years ago, we saw a swirl of sparks in Florida. More families, including those with the most profound needs, were taking learning into their own hands. Educators were trying things I’d never seen before, like schools that used a whole downtown as an extended classroom, or small learning environments that challenged definitions of what school could be.
I could feel a high and beautiful wave building but couldn’t quite make out its shape.
Now, its shape is becoming clearer.
All of the country, families, communities and entrepreneurs are devising new ways to educate themselves and each other. Some of the things they’re doing could be called homeschooling. Some of the things they’re building could be called microschools. Most of it defies tidy labels. But much of it was on display in the nation’s capital during the first-ever gathering convened by the Vela Education Fund, a grantmaking effort designed to supercharge this trend.
It was clear this is where the energy is. In most rooms full of people thinking about education these days, there’s a lot of doom and gloom. Learning loss, fiscal cliffs, political turmoil, teacher strife. Talk of depressed and distracted students and whether technology might be to blame. Not here.
The British academic James Tooley told the assembled entrepreneurs he’d been stunned to learn the topic of his life’s work—The Beautiful Tree, a catalogue of privately created learning environments educating the world’s poor—was blooming in the United States. Paraphrasing Abraham Lincoln, he heralded a new birth of freedom, buoyed by the idea of education of the people, for the people, by the people.
Derrell Bradford of 50CAN called them the heroes of Act III of education reform. The movement had emerged after A Nation at Risk, gotten lost in the wilderness during the Obama Administration, fallen into crisis during Covid, and now, thanks to this rebel alliance, stood poised to rise anew.
And Todd Rose, the oracle of individuality, said that each effort to break free of educational conventions lowered “the cost of courage” for everyone who might follow.
I met Floridians who teach science through surfing and skating, a Mississippian offering free-of-charge college counseling, a Texan helping families of color start their homeschooling journeys, and more founders of small schools and school-like learning communities than I could name.
It’s hard not to spend a few days among these people and not succumb to the sense that what they are doing must be right. And they are winning. They’re winning in the 19 states (and counting) that allow parents to direct public education funding to providers of their choice. They’re also winning in the 31 states and District of Columbia that don’t.
It puts our work in perspective. There is a movement all over the country, of educators looking to unleash their passion and creativity to help students, of families looking to control their own child’s education.
The question, now, is how we build systems capable of supporting them.
