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One of my favorite theses comes from Chris Dixon — “What the smartest people do on the weekend is what everyone else will do during the week in ten years”. Of course, he was applying this to technology, but I think it is true for any big change in the way things work. I’ve witnessed this phenomenon several times in my life. Since I live in both the worlds of technology and education, I’m attuned to these hobbyist-led revolutions in both. I think we are undergoing one of these changes in education right now with microschools, more in a bit.
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The first and most vivid hobbyist revolution for me happened when I was 12 and got an Apple II computer. My dad helped me to find all of the interesting things going on with hobbyists who had Apple computers. We went to the West Coast Computer Faire, the monthly Apple II users group meetings, the Byte Shop, and anywhere else that people were trying to figure out what to do with these new “personal computers.” The collective energy was unbelievable, because for so many of these hobbyists, it was like a gift had been bestowed upon them, and they were rushing to figure out its limits.
In the early 1980’s, almost all of the compute was locked away in rooms with huge minicomputers and mainframes. It was really hard to get access to them. Hobbyists had to sneak in on weekends if they knew someone (like Bill Gates and Paul Allen). All of the sudden, this gift of compute was given to anyone with a couple hundred dollars.The term hackers has often been applied to this revolution, I think mostly because the things we were building didn’t really fit any computer science curriculum or best practices. There were plenty of engineers in the movement, but in general, because it was so cheap to just build stuff, lots of people contributed, degree or not.
The same thing happened around 1994, when Marc Andreessen released the Mosaic browser, unlocking the Internet for the public. People were just throwing up websites around whatever their passions were. There were these cool sites like Internet Underground Music Archive, surf cam sites, and even a couple of sites selling things. Most importantly, everyone doing this was doing it for fun. There was absolutely no expectation that it would result in anything. We were all just amazed that anyone anywhere could enjoy a website anywhere else.
After I sold my first company in 1999, I got into education. My first foray was helping a friend, Peter Pabst, start Sacred Heart Nativity school in San Jose. Soon I heard about charter schools, and connected with people like Don Shalvey, a pioneer in the charter world. He was superintendent of a school district during the day, but on the weekends he was working on these new independent schools called charter schools. Those early days of charter schools were incredible. New Schools Venture Fund had a big event every year, and pretty much every school founder I met had that same passion for doing something different than the public school system.
I became a teacher in 2002, but I was still a geek. So when the National Reading Panel came out with research on phonemic awareness, phonics, and fluency instruction for reading, I dove in and spent far too much time building out my classroom to execute all of these best practices. Online there were hundreds of other teachers doing the same. It was great. Education is a little different than technology, though. Instead of a big change in reading instruction within five to ten years, it actually took 20 years for the Science of Reading to finally replace “Balanced Literacy” as the way that teachers teach.
When I started Rocketship Public Schools with Preston Smith, the next big change was upon us in education. It was finally possible for schools to use technology for instruction without being technical experts. Two things happened almost at the same time — laptops started to get very cheap (i.e. disposable) and software companies started to allow access to their services in the cloud, instead of having to download software and run it yourself. For most of the world, this was great. For schools, which don’t have technical capacity onsite, it was a massive unlock. We were the uber geeks at Rocketship, making many of the first cloud versions of edtech work, and becoming the laboratory for many more. Again, the energy of people who were just excited that kids could use their software outweighed any monetary goal.
Education right now is similar to the 1970’s in technology. You can go to free public schools, expensive private schools, or opt out completely as a home schooler. The problem with the public schools is that they have to operate at scale, whether they are district or charter schools, so everything feels very institutional, similar to the mainframe computer rooms of the 1960’s with acolytes wearing white lab coats ensuring that only approved users could benefit from the technology of computing. Students in public schools have to show up at a certain time, eat lunch at a certain time, get on the bus home at a certain time, etc. As a mass means of education, the public schools have served us well, but at the price of the individual student. In the same way that mainframes were locked away until the PC came along, the means of education is locked away in these big institutions for almost every student.
Private schools are wonderful, and wealthy families often send their kids to these schools, because parents can pick exactly the kind of school they want. This was similar to the mini-computer movement in computing, where if you could afford the cost per user, a big computer could be shared among a smaller group with fewer restrictions than mainframes.
And then there are the home schoolers. I’ve been paying attention to the homeschool world for the last decade, because parents who make the commitment to educate their children are superhuman. About six percent of children in the U.S. are home schooled. They do it for lots of reasons, but for all home schoolers one thing is ultimately true. They are there with their child in a room as the teacher of record, often with no training, and have to figure out what to do.
This is so similar to the hackers of the personal computer revolution. No one gave us any training to be able to use the new technology, but we learned from each other. The result was thousands of people trying new things and learning as they went. Home schooling is very similar. No one gave anyone a homeschool certification, but there are hundreds of forums online to learn from each other and figure out how to educate your own children. Homeschoolers are the hackers of education.
For a few decades now, homeschoolers have been learning and experimenting, but the movement has largely been like the small Apple II user’s group meetings I used to attend as a kid. The genie has been kept in the bottle. Now it is about to be released. Here is how.
For a very long time, home schoolers had co-ops where parents would get their kids together to play and socialize. Socialization is a big deal when you are homeschooling because even if the parent gets to spend quality time with their children every day, they don’t get near the socialization of their public school peers. Co-ops solved this problem. Parents would often meet in each others’ homes, give their time to the co-op, and make it good for all of the students. It was very informal.
Then came microschools. These were more structured environments than co-ops, often with a parent taking charge for the enterprise. These microschools like Acton Academy (the first microschool network) cost parents money, not as much as private schools, but enough that it kept the movement relatively small.
Then came Education Savings Accounts (ESAs). The fundamental idea with ESAs is that education dollars should follow the child, and it should be up to the parent to figure out how to spend them. Parents can spend that money on any approved educational product or service. In 2011, Arizona passed the first ESA law, focused on special education children initially but expanding it to all students in 2021. Florida went next in 2014, making the two states the OGs of the ESA movement. A few more states passed small ESA laws before 2020.
Then came COVID. As you will remember, the whole world got forced to home school for a couple of years. And everyone had to figure out how to make sure their kids got enough socialization, something homeschoolers had been doing for decades in their co-ops. At the same time, everyone figured out that the public schools their children were attending weren’t actually all that great. When COVID ended, people sent their kids back to public schools, because they couldn’t afford private schools and they didn’t have the will to be home schoolers, but the seed had been planted that their kids deserved something better.
Consequently, the political will to fund alternatives increased dramatically. Politicians looked around and found the ESA laws that Arizona, Florida and a couple of other states had passed and it fit the need. In just a few years, a dozen more states passed ESA laws, bringing the total to 18 and likely we will have all of the red states in the movement over the next couple of years.
ESA’s are like venture capital for microschools. What was previously mostly small schools in people’s houses were now able to receive state reimbursement for educating children. The people starting these schools are often the educators that have been hacking away on weekends, longing to make their own school that expresses their own values in education. And all of a sudden, just like the PC, they were given this gift. Now any family in these ESA states can decide to send their children to that teacher’s school.
I was at a conference at Harvard last week on new school models. I was confronted with hundreds of tinkerers, in the form mostly of home- school parents who had opened microschools. Don Soifer, head of the National Microschooling Center said it well “You don’t really know if any one school is going to last, or for how long, but as a collective, they are like a freight train.” At the Harvard conference, I kept feeling deja vu. The pattern-matching with the way that parents were talking about the schools they had created, what they were trying to achieve for their students, were so similar to the early hackers in the PC revolution trying to express their values with the machines and software they were creating. And really, no one cares if it makes money, they are just thrilled to get to do this.
Personally, I’m super excited to try and grow this student-first approach to schooling, and tap into the parental tsunami demanding better options for their kids. It’s why Adam Nadeau and I started Flourish Schools. Flourish, along with Acton, Primer, Alpha, Prenda and a few others, are among the first microschool networks in the country. The challenge when you build more than one microschool is maintaining the culture of your first school in every school you run. It’s a skill that Adam and I built when we were at Rocketship.
The difference is that Rocketship was from the mainframe era, with lots of students and lots of rules. And a big focus on standardized tests and college for all. Flourish is really the opposite. We want to build small, safe schools where every child feels comfortable and cared for. We want their time with us to be a tremendous time to grow as humans, preparing for a very different world than any of us grew up in. Behind the scenes, we are innovating like mad with curriculum, AI, and everything else we can, in service of building a wonderful alternative to the mainframes of public schools. I couldn’t be more excited to join this movement and help it to move from small online forums, to a computer on every desk. If every child can be educated at schools which truly care about them, we will be on a much better path as a country.
