Homeschooling, charter schools, boarding schools, traditional schools, private schools, and more are all familiar modes of schooling. But the fastest growing segment of K–12 education is also one of the newest and least familiar: microschools. What's behind the microschooling movement? What might it enable? What should we watch out for as it emerges? Don Soifer, the CEO of the National Microschooling Center, joined me to share more. Don has been advocating for microschools well before the pandemic, and prior to his role in that movement served on the DC Public Charter School Board from 2008 to 2018. As always, you can listen to the conversation above (or in your favorite podcast player), watch it on YouTube below, or read the transcript.
Michael Horn: Don, it is good to see you. Thanks for joining.
Don Soifer: Great to talk, Michael. Always a pleasure and I've learned so much from your work and our work together. This is the most exciting opportunity to put it to good work, I've had to enjoy and in my career hopefully innovating.
Horn: Well, that says a lot because you've been in a lot of movements at the forefront of education innovation. You see things early, you get on them, you do things with them. I want to start there by framing the conversation for folks.
Let's just do it around your entry point right now. What is the National Microschooling Center itself, and why are you excited about this microschooling movement that is burgeoning?
Soifer: The National Microschooling Center is an empowering hub for pioneering small learning environments. In the course of doing this, and we've launched the center over the summer. We have both met and gotten to know some people that have been doing incredible microschooling work for a long time. We've gotten to feel like we've inspired some fantastic educators and leaders to do new and innovative things, and just as likely to do some old and innovative things. Microschooling is to me, in so many ways, the most exciting storyline we've come across in American education in a long time.
I think that way because the incredibly transformative potential that we see, it's all about designing learning and teaching learning around the needs of the particular learning that you're serving, and the relationship that you've built with those. There's just so much need and space for that everywhere we look in education, everywhere we've been in education. It's just exciting everywhere we look and the people doing it are the reason why.
Horn: When you say you're helping all these entrepreneurs, all these microschools that are popping up, empowering them, what does that support look like on the ground?
Soifer: Well, we've got one of the fastest growing movements and storylines in education. The researchers say there's between 1.1 and 2.1 million learners, who are relying on microschooling as their primary and first source of teaching and learning. It looks so different in so many different ways, in so many different types of settings, and in just about every different jurisdiction in the country. Depending on those jurisdictions, the National Microschooling Center loves to provide resources and learning tools.
Sometimes we do bulk purchase of learning tool licenses, so that we can take learning tools that we like working with and make them available to our microschooling leaders, along with some training and some background, and some help tracking them. In some cases, it's helping them navigate the often complex framework for operating that they're working in. In the school choice friendly states, that can be as simple as connecting in a seamless fashion with the school choice vehicle in their states.
Where there's other states that we have those incredibly life-changing educators that we're fortunate enough to have maybe one of in our lives, who are basically running microschools in some outlaw ethos. Because these are early adopters and the government and the regulators haven't quite caught up with what microschooling is, and how to work within in their setting and everything in between. Sometimes we help them connect with each other, sometimes we help them learn from each other.
Sometimes with the incredible leaders that we have, we're able to share insights and innovations in a real community way, and it's got a feeling to it. Maybe we saw in those early days of the charter school movement, when these brilliant educators were meeting together in church basements trying to navigate how to bring this to the learners in their lives. It's got a feeling a lot like that, but in so many ways, microschooling is just such a different movement than those were.
Horn: I want to get into the compare and contrast in a little bit but first, I want to stay one more beat on this because you founded this center in 2022. But my recollection, is you got interested in microschooling well before that and frankly, well before the pandemic. It was something that I was certainly writing about before the pandemic.
But my sense and my recollection at least, is that several years before it maybe, you said this could be a really important set of innovations or enabling innovations in the education sector. Tell me, is my recollection correct? Why was it that it sparked it for you, even before it became part of the popular lexicon?
Soifer: Yeah. I really fell in love with the ideas of microschooling around the time, Michael, that your co-author, Heather Staker, was getting involved with building the first acting academy in Austin, Texas. Really understanding the ways that knowing a learner and their individual needs, can make this whole process better. I come from the charter school world and school choice broadly, but particularly within the whole charter school world, lots has been written.
Lots of really smart people have observed that it's increasingly difficult for charter school authorizers, to be able to approve and work with truly innovative learning environments that really live up to their potential. A lot of that has to do with the whole charter school approach has become about compliance and standardization. Even the best authorizers and some really, really smart people working in that space, find it really difficult to be nimble enough that they can bring in and attract, and support the diversified.
Everything that microschools need to be, to really live up to their best potential. I lost a fight I felt early on in my involvement in charter schooling, where the idea of school specific and mission specific measures. So that if you've got a charter school with an approach that's maybe tied to social and emotional learning or performance art. That the charter schools could be evaluated on what's most important to the learners and the families that choose those charter schools.
Whereas as the charter school world is turned into one of looking for a model and replicating it, and evaluating it based strictly on performance on standardized testing. Microschooling is such a diversified movement that brings together educators. As many hard left educators, as hard right, that really bring to this diversified approaches that we don't see very much of in the charter sector. It's an exciting movement.
I think that the nature of permissionless education. In microschooling, the only permission that you really need is the permission of the learners and the families that you serve. That raises some really exciting potential and it makes this a space that has an excitement to it that we haven't seen in American education very often in a long time.
Horn: I want to double-click on a bunch of these things. This is where I want to spend the bulk of our conversation because I think these tensions are really interesting and you're calling it out. I've thought of it similarly. You ought to say the intent of the school in the public domain, is to produce these outcomes. Let's measure it in a way reflective of the school mission itself.
As you noted, it just hasn't gone that way. What has that taught you, I guess, about when you start to take public dollars and you're asking for innovation at the same time, and maybe the tension there in it? Is this an inevitable thing that happened in the charter movement? Or do you think there's more nuance or subtlety there that it could have been done differently?
Soifer: Charter sector, and there are some brilliant educators working in the space, and some really exciting charter schools doing some really life-changing work. But the charter sector, in particularly the way that charter authorizers have evolved, has become increasingly compliance-based and standardized in a lot of ways. That it's just difficult for a charter school authorizer operating within the legal frameworks, in which they have to work. Charter school authorizing isn't easy, but it's relatively simple.
A charter authorizer enforces the law by working with its community and with the schools that it serves, to satisfy the laws and the requirements, and the regulations that govern charter schooling. In ways that often put the most forward leaning and the most inspiring and inspirational charter school authorizers in a bit of a box, where they need to have a compliance mindset.
Where a charter school needs to have a full-time staff person dedicated to nothing else but complying with the rules and requirements of the charter authorizer. It just becomes more and more difficult to do something truly innovative in it.
Horn: Stay on that for a moment, Don, just because is that the inevitable rise or creep? Because the ethos of charters originally, was free us up from the inputs because that's like the burdensome of the traditional district schools. We account for every single minute, how they use staff, all that stuff. It constrains innovation. The original ethos was free us up on the input side, and hold us to account on the outcome side. It sounds like charters in your view, have drifted considerably away from that in terms of how they operate.
That's consistent with what I've heard from a lot of folks in the field as well. Is that the inevitable result of like, "Hey, we've got public dollars here"? More and more regulation is just going to creep in and mandate how we do the work, not just what the work itself is. Is that inevitable or could there have been another turn in the charter movement in your judgment?
Soifer: Well, I think that there's still plenty of opportunity for charter school leaders to be more nimble and to find ways to be truly innovative. It's not just the charter sector. I think that's something that we've seen broadly within the American school choice experiment. That when it comes to the use of public dollars, the deals that have to get made to bring people on board to the plan, or to bring an accountability regime.
Because so many stewards of the taxpayer dollars and of students during the day, are rightfully so focused on making sure that they can police and protect against the bad actors in the space. But we've gone so far in that direction, that as innovative a charter school as you want to put forward, and there are absolutely some innovative charter schools out there. They're pretty much all at this point in every state that I can think of, measured really strictly on their performance on the state test.
While I have always been an evangelist when it comes to the longitudinal growth of individual learners over time being the most important measure of accountability in a public education space. We have microschooling leaders that sit and that work with families, and the families themselves choose them because maybe they care more about the social and emotional growth of a child. Or because they simply have considered and reject their state's academic content standards, as being relevant to their child's future.
Or just don't ever want to subject their kid, their children to norm referenced or criterion referenced assessments. There's space for them in the microschooling movement, so that you have microschools that really wouldn't have a space in the charter school sector. Or even in other school choice programs that get locked into certain ways of doing things. That truly hybrid approaches can't even operate in some of the more innovative education savings accounts models that we have, that are often held up as the state of the art in school choice today.
Horn: Well, so that's where I want to go next actually, which is you're seeing right now a growing movement across the country around education savings accounts, other forms of financing school choice. A lot of choice advocates are super bullish about this because they talk about the equity piece of this. That more and more families are going to be able to afford these innovative schooling options that are emerging. Which we should note, are generally lower cost than a traditional, independent or private school, but they still cost something.
We're seeing more and more ESA programs start to give families the dollars themselves, so that they can choose these microschool options in many cases or other school options as well. I guess I'm just curious from your perspective, are you nervous about that movement because the public financing could lead us down the same road that you've seen with charters? Or is there something different here with the microschools? Once they start getting paid for from ESA money specifically or micro grants, whatever it might be, that makes them in your judgment, more immune to these pressures?
Soifer: I just don't know if I can confidently say I understand what the future of public school accountability is in this country. Everywhere you look, you see more and more hesitation to accept standardized testing regimes. And public education systems where you need to be so focused on compliance and adherence, and see time requirements, and 30 square feet per kid, and 180 days in a school year. Lawmakers that just can't resist getting involved in the academic content that we're teaching our kids.
There have been really smart people, John Bailey comes to mind, who have really been advocates of the education savings account approach. Because it really allows for a more learned everywhere way of thinking about our schooling, so that a family and a learner can be savvy consumers and draw their learning from multiple, diversified sources. In this environment, they can choose to get their math learning from this space, or they can get their career training from this exciting internship or apprenticeship.
That they can be truly hybrid in the ways that they pull together their education. The reality of this though, is that the reasons that education savings accounts are supposed to be better than school vouchers. Is that you should be able to use an approach where you're drawing your learning from a learn everywhere universe of different ways of learning. So often, our private schools and there are some really talented educators, who are really doing inspiring things in non-public education.
But so often, private schools are so heavily regulated. They're so heavily reliant on systems like the accreditation system, that in some places it can work quite well. But when we are relying on these sorts of structures all in the name of protecting our learners against bad actors, it really limits the transformational opportunity to give learners what they feel in this day and age, in this economy. At first, I think microschooling was largely jump-started by the pandemic and the pandemic circumstances.
I think since then, it's moved to a place where it's more motivated by the new economy. I think families at the more fragile ends of the income spectrum, are more likely to be willing to look critically and thoughtfully at the education system and think, "Is this where I want the learner that's important to me in my life to get all of their preparation to succeed in this new economy, or can we do better?" I think all of those reasons are contributing to an environment where families are just reconsidering their historic relationships with the institutions that they've relied upon to meet their education needs.
And looking to be much more active consumers of their learning. When you have an active learner, Michael, as you know from all of the incredible work that you've done exploring the personalized learning models that are really making the biggest difference in this country. When you can shift from a passive to an active learner paradigm, the sky's the limit on the growth that you can witness, and the potential to really make an impactful difference. I think that's what's driving microschooling as much as anything else right now.
Horn: Super interesting on a number of levels there. I agree, by the way, that the shift from passive to active is maybe the most important part of this equation in my judgment as well. I've increasingly come to believe that. I want to stay on this outcomes or conversation just for one more beat. Which is there's some sense in the argument that I suspect some people will hear, which is pitting, if you will, private progress versus a public accountability or a public minimum progress. I don't know exactly the right way to frame it.
I guess I'm just curious to hear, I'm not going to make you education secretary. But if you were education czar for a school year, how would you think about that tension between the private goals of individuals and families making those choices for themselves versus the public interest? When there's public dollars at stake of some let's even just say minimum accountability, how do you think about those trade-offs? Or do you think it's a false trade-off in your view?
Soifer: That's a great question on any number of levels, Michael. First of all, microschooling is about what you can create, not what you're leaving. When we look at establishing microschools in an environment like many states and many communities that I've worked in. Where for instance, more than half of Black boys are scoring at below basic skills in math in eighth grade, to cite one example. It's hard for me to look at the monopolist approach and think that this is a fail safe way to ensure that we're delivering a quality set of opportunities to the learners that we're being entrusted to serve.
That said, this should be about what we're creating and not about what we're leaving, because that's really where the potential for microschooling lies. When the pandemic started and you would read in particularly the New York press about pandemic pods. To me, those stories raised more questions than they answered about are these things effective? Are these things equitable? That's why when we launched our own microschooling, we wanted to make sure that what we were doing is measurable and is equitable. In doing that, we were focused on pandemic learning loss. Certainly, there are microschools that do a terrific job measuring the academic growth of kids over time, because that's the way that you set them up.
Microschools don't have to be set up with those goals in mind. One of the important areas that, I think, we've made good progress in the last three years, is that if you really want to show academic growth in a meaningful way, that we no longer are in a place where you need to rely upon the state standardized testing regime to do that. We did a fantastic case study with the Rand Corporation that validated the opportunity that if you want to use learning tools that are able to use their embedded assessments to measure the academic growth over time. And it can be aligned with state academic content standards or common core, or there's lots of choices that you can choose.
That these are also ways that hold validity when they're done with integrity. And are able to be used in a meaningful way to help families stay informed about the learning progress that their child is making. That you really can use tools that everybody has access to that are not incredibly expensive. That if you do them in the right and thoughtful way, that you can use these to measure the academic growth of kids over time. Which has always to me, been the most important measure of being a good steward of the taxpayer's dollar and the child's time. Because growth over time, it tells you more about the value added that you're bringing to this as a provider.
And less about the household that the child woke up in the morning, which is what proficiency ratings to me are so often about. That there's lots of ways to get this done. And that education technology, this is the golden age of digital content in so many ways. That what this creates is a flat earth environment where everybody has access to these incredible tools, that in the past only large government monopoly providers were able to access. That's a game changer to me in so many ways. And to bring this back to your question, it provides an opportunity that we just haven't had before that's enabled by technology, by everything we know about teaching and learning.
Some microschools or Montessori microschools that don't even rely on technology very much at all. But everything that we've learned about everything that has to go into how we learn. And how teaching and learning can really live up to its potential, has a real place in microschooling that it's really hard to find in a much more traditional, institutional government school space.
Horn: So many good insights there, Don. I like it just because these are the questions that, I think, are so important to be wrestling with and asking right now, so I appreciate your insights and wisdom. As we wrap up here, I'll just offer a reflection of my side and then a question for you. Which is, I think, one of the mitigating things that should make people less concerned goes to what you were saying, which is that these point in time assessments that while you're learning they don't distract from learning, can show me the growth of my child.
Are incredibly powerful and they answer the question that almost all parents I talk to ultimately want to know, when they choose these options or any school. They want to know, "How's my kid doing?" They want the answers themselves and they can see that sadly, the existing system or whatever it is, is often not working. You alluded to it there, which is that you have a microschool in Las Vegas as well, that you're part of that community. I'm curious, what have you learned from the parents through all this, that maybe you didn't expect when you got started down this path, as we wrap up here?
Soifer: Families that really experience a rich microschooling environment never want to go back. Something that really got jump-started during the pandemic, is now much more about what's possible in schooling. If a family within a robust, diversified, dynamic microschooling ecosystem wants to move from one microschool to another for a period of time, they can absolutely do that. They can have a microschool that fits their schedule, so that they can see their kids more often if they work shifts.
Or they can really adopt a learning model that works well for their learner, and change that model in December rather than wait until the end of the school year to make those changes. When families understand what's truly possible and that they really can build an education around their own learner's needs, they don't ever want to go back to a system where they give that up. There are some families that might be happy in a large public school, where they can play football or play tuba.
Maybe that's the best choice for them, and that's often the case. But as microschooling is gaining a bigger and bigger and more diversified market share, we're really seeing the innovative ways that it can live up to its potential. I think it's exciting.
Horn: Incredibly exciting. I love the work that you're doing, Don. I'm hoping when I'm out in Vegas, that I get to see you and see some of the work that you're doing.
Just really appreciate you shining a light on this working to support so many educators, as they trailblaze this path. Then in turn, the parents and the students who are taking advantage of it. Appreciate your leadership so much.
Soifer: Thanks, Michael. Likewise.
Inside the Microschool Movement