It was announced by sweeping statements.

When the New York City Public Schools chancellor, David Banks, caused the largest district in the country to change how it taught students to read last year, it was with a sense of alarm. Statistics showed that many of the city’s students in third through eighth grades couldn’t read proficiently, which Banks blamed on the city embracing a “fundamentally flawed” approach to reading instruction. Per reporting from The New York Times, he told parents: “It’s not your fault. It’s not your child’s fault. It was our fault.” Reforming, Banks said, was “the beginning of a massive turnaround.”

The sentiment wasn’t isolated to New York, with almost all states having passed some legislation in the last few years to correct course on how reading is taught. These changes, called a “decisive victory” in the long-standing “reading wars,” have pitted education research favoring phonics-based instruction against other ways of teaching students to read, including word recognition. In the wake of the shift, a prominent curriculum group dissolved and the educational publisher Heinemann reportedly experienced sagging curriculum sales. Meanwhile, students still struggle to read.

But these recent education scraps in reading have also caused fresh uneasiness, as some observers begin hunting for the next education reform effort to go bust — perhaps in math next time.

There’s an unvoiced assumption behind this — that education is prone to “fads.” So where does this perception come from? And is it accurate?

The Reform Merry-Go-Round

Fad is the wrong word, says Larry Cuban, an emeritus professor at Stanford University who writes a blog about school reforms.

For Cuban, reform movements appear to be caught in a loop, attempting similar changes “again and again.” But it’s not that schools are constantly being burned by the latest craze. It’s that they’re suffering from deep structural problems, and they seem not to learn from the long history of school reforms.

The lesson? Public schools are particularly vulnerable to pressure, Cuban said on a call with EdSurge. That’s because national problems tend to become school ones, Cuban says. Schools have to walk a “tightrope,” striking a balance that is both stable for students and able to adapt to changes in the broader society, he says.

Pressure on schools to respond to new issues often ends up altering curricula or introducing new courses, because that’s the easiest part of the public education system to change, Cuban argues. But classrooms are isolated from the superintendent’s office, the school board and other “policy elites” who push change, he says.

For example, he adds, when it became known that teenage driving was causing road deaths, driving became part of public school curricula. When drugs became a national concern, schools added anti-drug curricula. “When the nation has a cold, schools sneeze,” Cuban says, adding that it’s an old cliche that turns out to be true.

That focus — the classroom, where abstract ideas about school meet real students — is a common sticking point, according to other observers as well.

It's not that specific reform ideas are fads, argues James Stigler, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. It's that schools seem susceptible to fads because people don't understand what it means to take an idea seriously, he says.

In reality, many ideas out there haven’t been properly tried out, because that would mean focusing largely on how they are put into practice in classrooms, he adds. There are probably a lot of ideas out there that are effective, he says — but nobody knows what they are.

To Ronald Gallimore, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, these efforts are sincere. Reform advocates believe they are on the cusp of something that will really work this time, he says. But they may not be aware of the history of instruction. It also doesn’t help that the U.S. has a highly decentralized school system, with schools being locally controlled, making it hard to make uniform sweeping changes to how students learn, he adds.

So how would teachers know if a proposed reform is effective?

Can You Prove It?

Evidence is the magic word, says Adrian Simpson, principal of St. Mary's College at Durham University in England and professor of mathematics education.

It’s also the source of part of the problem.

Those questing for evidence-based education approaches tend to rely on randomized controlled trials, a robust form of study widely used in medicine to establish causation, Simpson notes. In education, that can mean field experiments that show a practice worked in a particular context or laboratory experiments in cognitive science, he says.

“But what [these] tell you is very powerful, but very narrow,” Simpson says.

These studies are taken to show that certain approaches work. But, Simpson says, they only really establish that the sum of all the differences in interventions caused learning for some participants. Which specific intervention worked, and whether it would work for other students, is hard to determine, Simpson says.

That also puts pressure on how changes are carried out in the classroom.

Imagine the best teacher. How much time goes into designing his or her lessons, refining them, and adjusting to individual differences? asks Gallimore, the retired professor. That's what makes implementation of any reform effort so difficult, he says: to go from a general idea down into the details of making it work for a specific group of students, often across a range of different learning contexts.

So it’s tricky to translate the lessons of these experiments into learning.

Researchers also understand less about the mechanisms of how people think about, say, fractions than how kidneys function, according to Simpson, of St. Mary's College. So the evidence provided by experiments about specific practices in education is weaker than in other areas like medicine where it tends to be similar from person to person: “You can’t establish laws of the classroom that will apply everywhere,” Simpson says.

Ultimately, there’s no quick fix for the reform cycle, Simpson says. But he thinks teachers could learn from public health medicine, which is striving to make its interventions more attuned to personal peculiarities. Teachers should bring together insights from a number of sources — from research about memory capacity to tips from the teacher next door — to inform how they unlock learning for their students, he suggests. Rather than asking what they can do to make a student better with fractions, a teacher might ask: “What’s causing this child to handle fractions poorly?” That could provide an insight that isn’t solely focused on teacher interventions which could, nonetheless, help the student learn, Simpson says.

To Stigler, of UCLA, it’s hard to know what works in education right now.

Reform movements need to focus more on getting disciplined plans for moving from the idea phase to the implementation phase, he says. Teachers also need the time to make sure ideas have been effectively put in place, he adds.

Without that, Stigler says, nobody knows what’s truly effective.

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When Sheresa Boone Blanchard, a mother of three in North Carolina, started homeschooling her son during the pandemic, it might actually have saved her time.

Isaiah, her middle child, had finished fifth grade in June 2020. With the health crisis going on, Blanchard switched him to virtual lessons when he started sixth grade. But he has ADHD and just couldn't focus without someone with him, she says. So Blanchard, who was working remotely as a college professor, and her mother, Loretta Boone, who was retired, were spending a lot of time every day trying to help Isaiah with his virtual school assignments.

Blanchard felt like the school wasn’t able to accommodate her son, despite his 504 plan. After he fell behind on some assignments, it felt like he’d dug a hole from which he couldn’t get out: While the school would let him turn in the assignments, he would only get partial credit for them, and all the while new assignments kept coming. The school was unwilling to really compromise to help him catch up, Blanchard says. “It was an almost overly punitive environment,” she reflects.

Since they were spending so much time with him anyway, the family figured that homeschool would give them control over curriculum and the style of teaching. So they decided to withdraw him. The homeschool curriculum — BookShark, a four-day-per-week literature-focused package — arrived near Isaiah’s birthday. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, like, that's amazing that everything's aligning. Like, this is the way we're supposed to do things,’” she recalls.

Sheresa Boone Blanchard and her family. Photo courtesy of Blanchard.

A professor, Blanchard says she “triaged” her schedule. That meant devoting several hours in the mornings to homeschooling her son and then teaching courses and taking meetings online.

While it took energy and time, it wasn’t more than she was already devoting to “trying to make the system work.” The curriculum also let Blanchard tailor the lessons to Isaiah, focusing on the subjects where he needed extra help and zipping through the ones where he didn’t. “And it ended up being a really positive experience overall, for him and for our family,” says Blanchard, who currently works as an associate professor at East Carolina University.

Blanchard isn’t alone. During the pandemic, the number of students struggling climbed, increasing the interest in alternatives to public school. Now, homeschools and microschools — two categories that overlap — are booming. About 5 to 6 percent of all K-12 students are homeschooled, according to Johns Hopkins University’s Homeschool Hub, a collection of homeschooling research and resources. Blanchard’s state, North Carolina, has the second highest percentage of homeschooled students in the country: at about 9 percent, according to the Homeschool Hub.

The lack of oversight for these alternatives means that curricula and rigor vary widely, and that students don’t experience some of the protections of public school. But recent attention and federal dollars have also spurred attempts to increase regulations. Still, there’s a tendency for people to remove some of the nuance when talking about the uptick in homeschooling and microschools, Angela Watson, an assistant research professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, told EdSurge in May. But in reality, there’s a sweep of reasons parents are attracted to these types of schools. Even within a state, she added, the level of interest in non-public schools can vary, perhaps due to the available options.

For some Black families, she said, interest shot up due to the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement. Some families, particularly ones whose children need learning accommodations, also feel like those students are being pushed out, she said.

For some of these families, the need for these types of alternative schools seems urgent.

Dismantling the ‘School-to-Prison Pipeline’

Black families are turning to microschools for “safety,” says Janelle Wood, founder of Black Mothers Forum, a network of nine microschools in Arizona, a state considered friendly to the “school choice” movement.

These families are perhaps drawn to alternative schooling for different reasons than conservative, white families, she adds.

In 2016, Wood and other Black mothers were looking for a place to voice their rage and sadness over police killings, including of Michael Brown and Freddie Gray. So she called a meeting to discuss how to safeguard their children from systemic racism. “I’m a reverend,” Wood says, adding, she felt a religious calling to “be a voice for those without a voice.” Her platform, she elaborates, put her in a position to articulate the needs of her community.

But before long, the group had focused its attention on the “school-to-prison pipeline.” They had identified education as the beginning of a chain of events that fed into poor life outcomes. In education, Black students are over-disciplined, “criminalizing” normal behavior from an early age, Wood says. Around the same time, Wood also noticed that classrooms seem crowded with too many students, so that teachers can’t give adequate attention to those who are struggling, especially across racial divides, which she believes reinforces the problem.

The result? These families don’t feel supported by schools, Wood says.

Black Mothers Forum opened a microschool four years ago. Wood argues that keeping schools small and rooted in the community enables deeper relationships between the teachers and students. It means that when students make a mistake or need correction because they are acting out, Wood says, they know it’s coming from a place of support. “And so the milestones provide a space for them to grow, a space for them to be seen as human, as validated,” she says.

These days, Black Mothers Forum microschools are educating about 60 students spread over nine schools, ranging from five to 10 students each. The less established of those schools have two adults overseeing the classes. More established ones are overseen by one adult, often a former teacher or a parent with an advanced degree related to education, and students and parents play an active role in setting school culture, according to Wood. Almost all of the students and teachers are Black.

In part, Wood views the schools as an answer to the continued fallout of the pandemic. For her, microschools allow students to have social lives — in a less intimidating learning environment than large schools — hopefully speeding their recovery from the negative effects of school closures. “Some children need a smaller environment, and microschools seem to be doing the job for a lot of these kids,” Wood says.

Initially, a lot of parents were interested in microschools as a way to build up their students’ capacity to go back to public school, she says. But increasingly, she claims, there’s interest in staying in microschools. Recently, the network expanded to include high school options.

A Potential Lifeline

For Blanchard, the homeschool experiment was useful. Her son’s academic performance improved.

Still, when Blanchard’s job became less flexible — in addition to her worries about what limited interactions with other students might mean for Isaiah’s social development — it felt like time to change again. Local homeschool groups weren’t very diverse, she says. They tried a private school, but found that Isaiah struggled there. He felt alienated, she says, because he was being singled out for punishment. So now, Isaiah is back in public school for ninth grade.

Although they never quite found the perfect situation for Isaiah, Blanchard says, the homeschool trial served as a “reset year.” She and most of the other families she knows who are homeschooling are reacting to an ecosystem that they don’t feel is nurturing or supporting their kids, she says. His home proved a more affirming environment, and that let his family build Isaiah up to prepare him to re-enter public school.

Other advocates of education alternatives believe that microschools are a chance to assist public schools, either by trying out new methods for learning — which could then be reimported back into public schools if they work — or, in some cases, by providing community assistance.

For Wood, of the Black Mothers Forum, microschools could represent a way to relieve pressure from public schools. Public schools should bring microschools onto their campuses, Wood argues. That way, they don’t lose students and can bring in assistance for overworked teachers, she says. It’s a way of bringing the community further into schools, Wood adds.

“Let someone who actually understands [the students who are struggling] and looks like them be the ones that work with them, and watch the difference in these children. Now you don't lose children, you're now helping children,” Wood says.

She says she’s been looking for a public school to partner with her own organization. But so far she hasn’t found one.

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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.

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