Happy Friday, and welcome to our weekly roundup of national education news.
Our colleague Ron Matus recently joined Michael Horn to discuss Florida’s evolution from school choice to education choice. Their conversation builds on this report outlining the rise of a la carte learning in Florida.
Teachers are finding more freedom to create new educational organizations that focus on doing one thing well—offering lessons in just one subject, for example. Two shifts in Florida’s education ecosystem help make this possible.
- More families are customizing their children’s education from diverse providers. This year, some 100,000 Florida students are using scholarships that allow their families to customize learning programs without sending them to a conventional school full-time.
- Entrepreneurial educators are creating new schools and school alternatives that are smaller, more flexible, and as a result, more compatible with other specialized providers like Surf Skate Science or Eye of a Scientist — organizations run by educators who focus on a specific niche.
In communities like South Florida, each education entrepreneur makes the path for the next one a little easier.
If an English teacher wants to start her own microschool, she may not have to figure out a science program. She can partner with science specialists who fill that role. If she wants to start a small teaching and learning business rather than a whole school, she can sell her services to families directly, to some of the new flexible schools started by others, or both.
We’re beginning to see a virtuous cycle. Public policy gives families control over their public education funding. Educators create new options to serve those families. Other educators take notice and create other options to co-exist alongside them. More families start taking advantage of the new options. Political leaders respond, enacting more policies to help them.
Over time, this feedback loop has the potential to create a new value network. To borrow a chemistry term, the activation energy required for any educator looking to start their own thing or any family looking to take control of their child’s education is falling. Customized education is becoming more mainstream.
Culture change
The rise of a la carte learning and new bottom-up education approaches is happening everywhere. But by many accounts, it’s happening faster in states like Florida, Utah and Arizona that combine robust education choice policies with strong traditions protecting parent rights and private education.
Kerry McDonald says the overlap between states enacting new scholarship programs and states that respect parents’ educational freedom should help quell fears among some homeschoolers that the growth of scholarship programs that support education alternatives could lead to creeping regulation or government overreach. This year, Wyoming enacted new laws deregulating homeschooling and expanding education savings accounts just days apart.
A key quote from McDonald’s conversation with Hannah Frankman:
“We have to be on the lookout for regulation. But the reality is that we shouldn’t fear [school choice programs], and in fact, homeschoolers and others who care about education freedom should welcome school choice because it leads to a culture in these states of expecting parental choice in education, of shifting control of education from the state to the family — which serves families, learners, educators really well.”
In Brief
An apt umbrella term for new learning options created and run by educators: “Indie Education.”
News of the rise of a la carte learning has yet to reach Texas, where debates about education savings accounts still focus almost exclusively on students attending conventional private schools.
Texas’s ESA legislation could allow multiple organizations to help administer the program and restrict any of the administrators from charging transaction fees to families or providers.
Alabama is the only state where math scores are higher now than before the pandemic. This is not an accident. Its improvement has been driven by new state policy and improved teaching practice.
A new survey analysis finds teacher morale fell during the pandemic and has plummeted further since.
Dubious claims from publishers, laid bare by the science of reading, are headed to court.
Ditching textbooks for digital learning, or worse, “anything goes,” is often a grave mistake.
The U.S. Department of Education is cutting its staff nearly in half.
Nearly 26 years after the Columbine massacre, the death toll has risen by one.
