School Choice is Shallow Choice When Microschools are Left Out of the Plan

Educational freedom continues to make major gains around the United States. Yet families, even those in many of the states where school choice programs are underway, are blocked by outdated policies from using these programs to participate in today’s microschooling movement, perhaps the most exciting narrative in American education in a generation.

In fact, most of the laws enacting these programs are largely recycled language from older laws, which did not anticipate the growing popularity of today’s nontraditional, innovative small learning environments. They contain outdated requirements designed for yesterday’s larger, traditional schools of choice models, not today’s highly diversified microschooling models, whose many popular attributes include that they can be created and operated around the specific educational needs of the specific children they serve.

The father of school choice, Nobel Prize Laureate economist Milton Friedman, described the ideal state of American education as “an open market where there would be a wide variety of schools.” Dr. Friedman once told an interviewer, “Neither you nor I are imaginative enough to dream of what real competition, a real free market, could produce, what kind of educational innovations would emerge.”

Compelling microschools across America are embodying this spirit today. And they are the schooling of choice for families of more than a million children across the country who choose microschools as the primary provider of their education.

Florida’s Education Savings Accounts program, along with Arizona’s, are the nation’s most welcoming for allowing families to use them to attend microschools. As a result, some of the most excitingly innovative schooling models you’ll see serve lucky families as part of the program every day – Colossal Academy, Spark Community Schools, Surf, Skate Science represent just a few.

Even in Florida where school choice programs welcome microschools, local regulators often force these small microschools to meet the same zoning ordinances, and purchase the same industrial sprinkler systems as 500-student charter schools. It is common in many states for microschools to be required to overcome cumbersome zoning requirements, and sometimes to obtain the same pricy architect renderings and traffic studies.

But it is the outdated, overly rigid school choice program requirements themselves that often exclude microschools from participating.

In other states celebrated by the school choice movement as success stories, microschools are regularly blocked from being a part of school choice programs.

Perhaps the biggest barrier standing in their way is accreditation requirements written for the traditional large private schools of 50 years ago, not for today’s nimble forest schools, child-centered learning environments or Montessori learning environments. Iowa, Ohio and Tennessee represent prominent examples of states celebrated as school choice victories where the list of state-approved accreditation bodies offer no microschool-friendly paths to approval.

Microschools must often navigate difficult state regulatory frameworks to operate as private schools, even in states without school choice programs. Recently, North Dakota lawmakers rejected a proposal from Representative Desiree Morton that would have granted microschools important flexibilities including allowing microschools exceptions from state administrator licensing requirements and certain zoning and facilities latitude that can be vital in rural communities like those she serves.

Families love microschools for many different reasons. Their small size, unique missions and programs including personalized learning experience, and the broad range of life experiences microschool leaders bring to their work each contribute to the reasons children can thrive there as they had not in their prior schooling experiences.

As new states, like Texas, consider creating new school choice programs, it will be vital that the details of these policies allow for the flexibilities that make possible the exiting innovations driving the growing popularity of today’s microschools.