MEASURING THE MICROSCHOOL EXPERIENCE:
A National Analysis of Student Experiences, Family Perspectives, and Learning Outcomes
Prepared by Daniel Hamlin
September 2026
The number of students attending microschools has dramatically increased since the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent estimates now place the microschool student population between 1 and 1.5 million students nationwide. Microschools have also arguably become one of most innovative and diverse education sectors in American education. As microschools may have started to fortify their place in the American education landscape, with some observers expecting continued growth for the sector, it is critical to understand how they are performing and whether they are meeting their stated missions.
To open a line of empirical inquiry into microschools, this report presents data from student surveys, parent/caregiver surveys, and student assessments collected during the 2025-2026 school year. In total, 43 microschools participated in the study, operating in 20 states around the country.
Report excerpts:
To generate empirical evidence on the performance of microschools, this study collected data from three sources: student surveys, parent/caregiver surveys, and student assessments in math and English language arts (ELA).
RAND researcher Lauren Covelli and her colleagues (2025) note that microschools are “by design, deinstitutionalized and, therefore, harder to regulate.” As such, characterizing microschools can be challenging. Microschools serve both part-time and full-time students in small private schools, charter school arrangements, homeschool cooperatives, hybrid schools, blended learning schools, and other non-traditional school models.
The National Microschooling Center offers a definition that helps to illuminate the key characteristics of the sector by stating that microschools are intentionally small learning environments that tend to be organized around flexibility, personalization, strong relationships, family involvement, and special areas of focus (e.g., outdoor learning, project-based learning, or socioemotional learning).
Findings:
Student assessments. Microschool students in this analysis exhibited average academic growth that was generally consistent with expected trajectories, but overall student performance was somewhat stronger in ELA than in mathematics. Although this study’s assessment data suggest that microschool students largely perform no better or worse than expected on standardized tests in ELA and math, both students and parent/caregivers report extraordinarily positive experiences in microschools across a range of non-academic and academic indicators.
Parent/Caregiver Survey. Families report choosing microschools primarily because of their small class sizes, individualized attention, levels of safety, and positive school culture, with individualized attention being the most important factor for parent/caregivers. Parent/caregivers also hold strong positive perceptions of their child’s microschool across academic, social-emotional, and life skills domains. In the survey, a striking 97% of respondents say that they are satisfied/very satisfied with their child’s microschool overall. When families compare their child’s current microschool to their child’s previous public school, parent/caregivers report stronger relationships, increased home-school communication, and enhanced safety in their child’s current microschools.
Student Survey. More than 90% of microschool students report strong relationships with teachers across a range of measures while 95% say that they feel safe at school. Ninety-three percent say that they participate in class most of the time. Additionally, students who are new to their current microschool are more likely to report that their current school experience was better than the previous year and that they are currently learning more. Among students who completed both fall and spring surveys, they report enhanced perceptions of their problem-solving ability, communication skills, and respect for others improved from fall to spring.
More than 95% of students report being treated with respect by their teachers, and 97% indicate that their teachers care about them, want what is best for them, and care about their learning.
Sample characteristics. The schools in this study served substantial numbers of students with unique learning needs. Approximately 40% to 47% of students across the study samples had an identified disability, special learning need, or chronic medical condition, and roughly one in five participating schools explicitly focused on serving students with disabilities.
It should be noted that this study offers preliminary results from a self-selected sample that may not be representative of the microschool population. Nevertheless, it presents important initial insights on microschools that warrant future investigation.
Future studies should recruit larger samples of microschools. Expanding the number of participating schools would improve the representativeness and statistical precision of the findings while allowing researchers to examine variation across subgroups with more reliability. Moreover, future work should compare microschool students with similar students attending public and private schools. The positive experiences reported by students and parent/caregivers in this study seem to be impressive, but without an appropriate comparison group, uncertainty remains.
This report, Measuring the Microschool Experience, can be downloaded here.