Sometimes, it takes an unlikely friendship to change the world.

For American education, one of those alliances started in the early 20th century. That’s when a ludicrously successful retailer-turned-philanthropist, Julius Rosenwald, met the prominent educator Booker T. Washington. The pair decided to work together, hoping to improve education for Black students in the segregated South. Their collaboration created nearly 5,000 “Rosenwald Schools” — across 15 Southern and border states — between 1917 and 1937.

By some accounts, this was a massive success.

These schools caused a “sharp narrowing” of the difference in educational achievement of white and Black students in the South.

But it was a “watershed moment,” according to a recent book published about the schools, “A Better Life for Their Children,” for another reason, too: Those who attended the schools would later actively participate in the Civil Rights Movement, overturning segregation as an official American policy. The list of notable alumni includes longtime U.S. Rep. John Lewis and Medgar Evers, a field secretary for the NAACP who was assassinated in 1963.

Today, most of those schools have dissolved into history, and only around 500 still exist, in varying states of upkeep.

Andrew Feiler, a Georgia-born photographer, visited and photographed 105 of the extant schools and spoke with those connected to the schools and their legacy to publish “A Better Life for Their Children.” His book, released in 2021, is currently the basis of a traveling exhibition.

These days, race and educational opportunity still seem troublingly linked. NAEP data shows a consistent, three-decade-long gap in student performance in categories like 12th grade math and reading for Black students when compared to white ones. These gaps are often blamed on racial and economic segregation.

Perhaps that’s why some observers have connected Feiler’s exhibition about the past to the racial-educational gap of today, particularly noting the contemporary lack of adequate resources for public schools and the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

So EdSurge pulled Feiler aside to ask him what, if any, lesson he thinks the Rosenwald Schools might have for educators today.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

EdSurge: When and why did you decide to take on the project?

Andrew Feiler: I've been a serious photographer most of my life, and about a dozen years ago, I started down this path of taking my work more seriously and, mercifully, being taken more seriously, and I had to figure out what my voice was as a photographer.

I've been very involved in the civic life of my community — I've been very involved in the nonprofit world and the political world — and when I thought about my voice as a photographer, I found myself drawn to topics that were of interest in the course of my civic life.

And so I had done my first photography book, which came out in 2015 — just a portrait of an abandoned college campus. And it uses this emotional disconnect between these familiar education spaces, classrooms and hallways and locker rooms, but they have this veneer of abandonment…

That body of work ended up being about the importance of historically Black colleges and the importance of education as the on-ramp to the American middle class.

And I was thinking about what I was going to do next, and I found myself at lunch with an African American preservationist, and she was the first person to tell me about Rosenwald Schools. And the story shocked me.

I'm a fifth-generation, Jewish Georgian. I've been a civic activist my entire life. The pillars of the Rosenwald Schools’ story — Southern, education, civic, progressive — these are the pillars of my life. How could I have never heard of Rosenwald Schools?

And so I came home and I Googled it, and I found that while there were a number of more academic books on the subject, there was not a comprehensive photographic account of the program, and so I set out to do exactly that. Over the next three and a half years, I drove 25,000 miles across all 15 of the program states. Of the original 4,978 schools, only about 500 survive. Only half of those have been restored, about 105 schools, and the result is this book and this traveling exhibition.

Can I introduce the characters?

Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, Quilt Celebrating Restoration. Photo by Andrew Feiler.

Sure. Introduce away.

At the heart of the story are two men.

Julius Rosenwald was born to Jewish immigrants who had fled religious persecution in Germany. He grows up in Springfield, Illinois, across the street from Abraham Lincoln's home. And he rises to become president of Sears, Roebuck & Company, and with innovations like “satisfaction guaranteed or your money back,” he turns Sears into the world's largest retailer in its era, and he becomes one of the earliest and greatest philanthropists in American history.

And his cause is what only later becomes known as “civil rights.”

Booker T. Washington was born into slavery in Virginia, attends Hampton College and becomes an educator. He is the founder of the historically Black college Tuskegee Institute, originally in Alabama.

These two men met in 1911.

And you have to remember, 1911 was before the Great Migration [the period between the 1910s and the 1970s when millions of Black people poured out of the South and moved to the North, Midwest and West fleeing racial violence and seeking opportunity].

Ninety percent of African Americans live in the South. And public schools for African Americans are mostly shacks, with a fraction of the funding that was afforded public schools for white children.

And that is the need, that's the environment that they find. And these two men like each other, form partnerships, work together, and in 1912 they create this program that becomes known as “Rosenwald Schools.” And over the next 25 years, from 1912 to 1937, they built 4,978 schools across 15 Southern and border states, and the results are transformative.

Having visited so many of the remaining schools, what impression did they leave on you?

... These places, are the locus of history and memory in a community, [and when] we lose places and spaces like this, we lose a piece of the American soul.

— Andrew Feiler

Well, the structures have an austere beauty. Their architecture is very vernacular and very local to the region in which they arise. Whether they are restored — or even having a veneer of abandonment — I find them beautiful.

But I think there's another important component.

I knew this was an extraordinary story. It was not clear to me from the beginning, how do you tell it visually? And I started out shooting exteriors of these buildings: One-teacher schools, two-teacher schools, three-teacher schools. These small structures. By the end of the program, they're building one-, two- and three-story red brick buildings.

There's an interesting architectural narrative, but when I found out that only 10 percent of the schools survive — only half of those have been restored — I realized that the historic preservation imperative is a huge, important part of the story, because these spaces, these places, are the locus of history and memory in a community, [and when] we lose places and spaces like this, we lose a piece of the American soul.

And once I realized that the preservation narrative was important, then I had to get inside, and suddenly I needed permission. And that's when I meet all of these extraordinary people — former students, former teachers, preservationists, civic leaders — and I bring their connections to this broader Rosenwald School story into this narrative with portraits.

How much of your project’s timing relies on a recently intensified desire to place greater emphasis on preserving Black history? How much of that explains why it’s resonating now?

Let me say a couple things about Rosenwald Schools as a program. First of all, the Rosenwald Schools are one of the most transformative developments in the first half of the 20th century in America. They dramatically reshaped the African American experience, and that dramatically reshapes the American experience.

There are two economists from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago who have done five studies of Rosenwald Schools, and what their data shows is that prior to Rosenwald Schools, there was a large and persistent Black-white education gap in the South. That gap closes precipitously between World War I and World War II, and the single greatest driver of that achievement is growth from all schools. In addition, many of the leaders and foot soldiers in the Civil Rights Movement come through these schools: Medgar Evers, Maya Angelou, multiple members of the Little Rock Nine who integrate Little Rock Central High, Congressman John Lewis who wrote this extraordinary introduction to my book, all went to Rosenwald Schools, and so the results of this program are transformative.

But to go back to the heart of your question, I think what resonates about this story today is that we live in a divided America, and we often feel that our problems are so intractable, especially those related to race.

Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, in 1912, in deeply segregated, deeply Jim Crow America, were reaching across divides, of race, of religion, of region, and they fundamentally transformed this country for the better. And I think the heart of this story speaks to everybody today, driving for social change in America. And individual actions still matter, and that individual actions change the world.

Bay Springs School, Forrest County, Mississippi, 1925-1958. Photo by Andrew Feiler.

So if we take the sweep of your recent projects — I’m thinking of this one and the other book you mentioned, “Without Regard to Sex, Race, or Color,” which looked at Morris Brown College — has how you think about education changed in any tangible ways?

I have come out of this work with appreciation for the role that education has played throughout the sweep of American history.

The first taxpayer-funded school was created in America — done in Massachusetts in 1644; that is, 380 years ago. And there's a direct connection between that early commitment to education; the Land Grant College Act, which passed in 1862 and funds colleges all across America; HBCUs, predominantly created in the decades after the Civil War; Rosenwald Schools in the early decades of the 20th century; the educational provisions of the GI Bill, which transform America from relatively poor to relatively prosperous; [and] Brown v. Board of Education, one of the high watermarks of the Civil Rights Movement.

What are we talking about today? College affordability, banning books, circumscribing curriculum.

We have a 380-year tradition in which education has been the backbone of the American Dream, the on-ramp to the American middle class. And then today, that is a tradition at risk, and I think we need to understand and protect the importance of this tradition in our country.

Any parting lessons that educators can learn from this work?

I think what I said earlier is really in the spirit of what you're asking about, which is that the levels of division currently across our country are troubling. And I think it's important for us as Americans to reflect on our history and how we have come together to make America a better place. And the relationship between Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington, this is one of the earliest collaborations between Blacks and Jews and a cause that only later becomes known as “civil rights.” Their collaboration, their work together, their friendship is a model for how we as individuals can make a difference in our culture. They are reaching across divides of race. They are reaching across divides of religion. They are reaching across divides into a greater region, all of which remain divides in our culture today.

They're reaching across those divides, and they're creating a transformative impact on the country. And I think this is a model for all of us to remember, that we are the change that we seek. We have the capacity to make a difference, and we need to follow in the footsteps of this story to reshape this country for all of us.

© Photo by Andrew Feiler

When Mysa School started about eight years ago, the microschool movement was new.

A school with about 40 students in Washington, D.C., and with a second location in Vermont, Mysa stresses mastery-based learning, where students have to show comprehension before advancing. The idea is that having smaller school sizes enables students to develop much deeper relationships at school, says Siri Fiske, founder of Mysa School.

Mysa’s tuition costs parents who don’t receive aid around $20,000 a year, comparable to what it costs the government to educate a student in a public school. Mysa’s curriculum relies on Common Core, the same national standards as public schools, Fiske says. “But we're just doing it in really, really different ways,” she adds.

The “mastery” focus means that students are grouped by ability, and so a single student can be in one group for reading level and a different group for writing level. Students tend to get grouped in at least three different levels at once, Fiske says.

Ultimately, Fiske says, the goal is personalized learning. The school doesn’t have grades, and it tries to give students a way to really pursue their educational interests. After the poet Amanda Gorman read a poem during President Joe Biden’s inauguration, for instance, lots of Mysa’s fifth and sixth grade students wanted to learn poetry. They spent much of the year on it. In the end it meant that the students had an advanced grasp of poetry, but lagged in other English standards like grammar, Fiske says. But the school kept track of it and circled back later, and the parents went along because they could see the students were learning, she adds. It’s the sort of flexibility she hopes will eventually be taken back to public schools, allowing students more control of their education.

When it started, Fiske claims Mysa was the first school to call itself a microschool. But these days, microschools — loosely defined as schools with relatively few students that function as private schools or learning centers for homeschool students — seem to be everywhere.

The COVID-19 pandemic drove a big increase in homeschooled students, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Homeschool Hub, a collection of homeschooling research and resources. Afterward, people expected it to return to pre-pandemic levels, but it seems to be growing in many states, says Angela Watson, an assistant research professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education.

But for Fiske, of Mysa, the popularity of alternatives to public school actually raises a concern: She fears that her approach to microschooling could be eclipsed by politics and cultural war clashes.

And she isn’t the only one with that worry. As public schools are burdened by nasty political scraps and enrollment declines, these alternative options will play a larger role in offering educational experiences for more students and families. But for thoughtful proponents, the politics of it all can threaten to undermine the promise that attracted them to these alternatives in the first place.

Small Is the New Big

Public school enrollments have dipped since the pandemic, according to data from the National Center for Education Statistics. And projections show a slow but steady decline in the next few years.

In contrast, many alternatives to public school are blossoming.

From homeschooling to charters to microschools, they are becoming more common ways for American students to learn. For example: Analysis from The Washington Post suggests that homeschools have seen a more than 50 percent increase in students since the pandemic, making it the type of school with the most explosive growth, during a time when it is estimated that public schools lost about 4 percent of their enrollment.

There isn’t reliable data that tracks distinctions between some of these alternatives, such as homeschools and microschools, says Watson, of Johns Hopkins. But these days, about 5 to 6 percent of all K-12 students are homeschooled, which means that model has received very little attention compared to charter schools, considering that about 7 percent of students attend those, she adds. Often, she says, students are really attending something that looks like a private school, or a “microschool,” and those schools are classifying themselves as “homeschools.” Regardless, microschools are increasingly accessing public dollars through education savings accounts and vouchers, which Watson thinks will focus attention on them.

To some observers, these are part of the same trend.

Fiske says she suspects homeschool and microschool growth is related. The reason there are so many homeschoolers now, she speculates, is that many microschools around the country register their students as “homeschooled,” often because these schools are in places that aren’t zoned for school and are being taught by unlicensed instructors.

It’s perhaps reflective of an ideological change regarding these sorts of schools.

Always, for Fiske, the point of microschools was to find “small tweaks” to education. Microschooling was an experiment whose insights she meant to transpose into public schools. Fiske had been previously employed by an independent school in California, while in a doctoral program for education psychology, researching how people learn, she says. She had also worked in public schools before launching Mysa.

But just before the pandemic, she says she was approached by FreedomWorks, an advocacy group funded by the Koch brothers, big political donors, and associated with the “tea party” movement in favor of libertarian ideas. They were interested in building “alternative chains of schools,” Fiske says. For them, it seemed more crucial to divert students from public schools than to experiment and eventually reimport lessons back to public schools that would benefit others.

These days, it seems to Fiske like her commitment to public school puts her in the minority among fellow leaders of microschools. A lot of people are doing this less out of interest in, say, personalized learning and more because they want to get children away from public school, Fiske says.

In states where the “school choice” movement has made strides, there may soon be more public cash available for these alternatives. Some lawmakers in Indiana, for instance, want to expand the use of Education Scholarship Accounts to divert public funds toward microschools, and the state already has private school vouchers that directly provide money to parents. This has raised the thorny issue of whether alternative options want to accept government funding and the oversight that comes with it, or whether that might spoil the reason parents are flocking toward these alternatives.

But, for Fiske, the issue with these ideological interests is primarily a lack of transparency. Without accreditation or licensing, it’s all very murky. Moreover, political connections at a particular institution aren’t always obvious, she says. It’s not necessarily clear that groups like the National Microschooling Center, a popular source of information on these schools, receive funding from groups like Stand Together Trust, a Koch-funded organization, Fiske says.

And Fiske isn’t alone in wondering whether her vision for her educational experiment might be swept away amid larger political shifts.

Value-Add

There are other criticisms of public school, of course.

One is that schools don’t really do enough to intentionally instill good “character” into students, says Brandon McCoy, a former researcher for the right-leaning think tank Manhattan Institute. Our institutions tend to take the view that it’s the parents’ responsibility to do that, he says. But because schools play such a huge role in a child's development, when students are outside of parents’ supervision, schools should make it their responsibility to promote character development as well, McCoy says.

That’s partly why he’s interested in classical learning, a form of education that often emphasizes the “classics” of Western heritage. McCoy published a survey of classical learning schools in 2021 for Manhattan Institute, which painted it as an “attractive option for parents.”

McCoy says he prizes them primarily for instilling moral and civic virtues in students. But McCoy’s argument for classical learning also includes a “practical case,” which points to these institutions providing better outcomes for racial minority students who live in cities, a kind of subtle equity argument. In looking at a few classical learning schools, McCoy pointed to higher results — especially for Black students at one school, South Bronx Classical, a free public charter for K-8 students in New York. Its students are mostly Black and Hispanic, coming from around the South Bronx, a poor area, McCoy notes. “South Bronx Classical probably just has my heart,” he says, adding that its students’ scores in math and reading assessments showed it to be a “diamond in the rough.”

For McCoy, the school’s rigorous focus on debate and confronting texts that have “stood the test of time” accounts for some of this improved academic performance.

While popular in some conservative circles, classical learning isn’t traditionally a byword for culture war politics.

Nevertheless, classical learning does periodically pop up in reactionary contexts. Most recently, Florida turned to it as an “anti-woke” alternative. The state started to permit the “Classical Learning Test” as a substitute for the SAT. In place of the usual subjects, the test was developed to probe knowledge of timeless ideas. However, its developer has complained of being drawn in by culture war fights. Perhaps surprisingly, Florida's adoption won some sparse support from the other side of the political spectrum, including from the progressive scholar and presidential candidate Cornel West, who wrote in 2023 that it’s wrong to construe Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ elevation of classical learning as conservative. DeSantis’ move “transcends partisanship,” West wrote, because seminal ideas are always “revolutionary.”

But those aligned with DeSantis, including networks of classical schools like Hillsdale College’s, have looked to grow classical charters.

Nowadays, one of the biggest criticisms of the classical education movement is that it’s been co-opted by “hyperpartisan” right-wing groups, McCoy says. Some of these movements have been accused of amounting to a conservative “Trojan horse” attempting to sneak in ideology under the guise of liberal arts. That’s potentially unsettling because McCoy thinks that the movement can be beneficial regardless of political leanings. He doesn’t want to see the movement taken over by partisanship, he says. It’s not a problem that’s unique to classical learning models, he adds.

In the end, he can’t dwell too much on that, he says, adding that all he can do is defend his positions. Civic learning is just too important an issue to abandon because of “bad actors,” McCoy says.

Rebranding

The changing agenda of alternative schools has left Fiske, the founder of Mysa School, wondering whether to even use the term “microschool,” she says.

She’s concerned that big, politically motivated funders and polarization could lead more thoughtful expressions of microschools to be drowned out or falsely branded as conservative, rather than just educational.

It’s confusing. Many parents are clearly feeling a need for smaller, more personalized and more flexible schools, Fiske says. But right now, the term doesn’t distinguish much between what she considers to be legitimate, fully licensed schools like hers and “kids in a basement in Kentucky,” she says.

There are going to need to be new labels, Fiske argues. For now, she says, what philosophies these schools truly promote may not be clear.

© Photo By cybermagician/ Shutterstock