Florida has passed a historic milestone. The majority of all students now attend a learning option chosen by their parents.
The future of education is here. It’s just not evenly distributed. And it’s concentrated in Florida.
School districts are a big part of this story. Between open enrollment, magnet schools, career academies, and more, school districts educate more than 700,000 of Florida’s choice students. As charter schools and scholarship programs heightened competition over the past 30 years, districts have chosen, as one former superintendent put it, ride the tsunami of choice rather than fight it.
They’re on their own
Tyton Partners released their latest look at the shifting market for education services.
It finds that as choice becomes more common in education, families still rely heavily on Googling and playground conversations to find options for their children.
A broad view of homeschooling
A new Harvard working paper looks at how homeschoolers measure success, but just as interesting are its statistics about who homeschoolers are. Two useful nuggets:
- Homeschool families are less likely to live in urban settings and more likely to live in rural settings. This is crucial context for debates about the impact of scholarship programs on rural communities. They may not have as many conventional private schools as big cities, but they do have families looking for more education options outside the public school system.
- Homeschool families aren’t rigid about their choice of learning environment. Fully one-fifth of homeschool families had a child enrolled in some sort of public school.
In Brief
Students with disabilities don’t always have equal access to public schools under open enrollment policies.
A look at how school systems are sustaining tutoring programs after federal funding for pandemic recovery dries up.
AI may soon be able to conjure custom curricula, diagnose gaps in students’ learning, and provide one-on-one tutoring at scale. But it can’t motivate students to use these tools to support learning.
A new loan fund will help microschools start and grow.
Former district leaders highlight the potential of public microschools.
The leader of one of America’s largest and most innovative colleges of education issues a call to arms: It’s time to fundamentally rethink teacher training.
For too long, educator preparation has centered on a singular role: the one-teacher, one-classroom model. But today’s challenges—chronic staffing shortages, increased complexity in student needs, and declining educator satisfaction—require a broader view. We need to move from preparing individuals for fixed roles to building a dynamic education workforce development system.
Parent corner
An underplayed fact, reported by Pew and recently resurfaced by Matt Yglesias: the typical father today spends almost as much time on childcare as a mother did in ‘60s.
The face of fatherhood is changing. The inexorable trend appears to be parents having fewer children, but pouring more time, attention, and resources into the children they have.