Microschools and pandemic-era reorganizations

· 12 min read

Defining the category

The most useful working definition is from the National Microschooling Center: a microschool is a small, intentionally designed learning environment, typically serving fewer than thirty students, often with mixed ages, usually with a small number of consistent adults, frequently meeting in non-traditional spaces (homes, churches, commercial storefronts, community centers). The definition is functional rather than legal. Some microschools are licensed private schools, some are legal homeschools with shared instruction, some are unincorporated pods, some are franchises. The category is held together by scale and intent, not by regulatory status. This breadth is part of why estimates of the movement's size vary so widely — different researchers count different subsets.

The pre-pandemic precursors

The microschool idea was not invented in 2020. Acton Academy, founded by Jeff and Laura Sandefer in Austin in 2009, was one of the early modern templates: small, mixed-age, project-based, deliberately countercultural, designed to be replicable. Prenda, founded in Arizona in 2018, built infrastructure for parents to start microschools as small businesses, with curriculum, training, and back-office support. KaiPod Learning, founded just before the pandemic, prototyped a hybrid model. These early entrants had limited reach in 2019. The pandemic gave them — and dozens of imitators and competitors — an order-of-magnitude expansion in addressable market within eighteen months.

Mason and the National Microschooling Center

Don Mason, who founded the National Microschooling Center in 2022, has been the most visible advocate and chronicler of the movement. His annual reports are the closest thing the sector has to a census, and his framing — that microschools are a "third sector" alongside public and private schools — has shaped how policymakers and journalists discuss the phenomenon. Mason's bet, articulated repeatedly, is that the microschool wave is not a niche but a structural shift in how families think about schooling, comparable in scale to the charter school movement of the 1990s. The next ten years will test that claim.

Why scale failure produces small schools

The structural argument for microschools draws on a long literature documenting the diseconomies of scale in K–12 education. Large schools, the research has generally shown, produce worse outcomes per dollar than small ones, particularly for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. The Gates Foundation's small-schools initiative in the 2000s tried to act on this finding and largely failed, in part because the foundations did not understand that the small-school benefit comes not from small numbers but from small relationships, which a 400-student school subdivided into "small learning communities" does not actually produce. Microschools, at thirty students or fewer, force the relational scale to be small at the root, not subdivided after the fact.

The ESA pivot

Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) — state programs that allow families to direct a per-pupil allotment to qualifying education expenses — are the regulatory innovation that made microschools financially accessible beyond affluent families. Arizona's universal ESA (2022) was the breakthrough. Within two years, fifteen or so states had passed some version. The programs are politically contested, with critics (largely teacher unions and public school advocates) arguing they drain public school funding and lack accountability, and supporters arguing they restore parental choice and force public schools to compete. The political fight will continue for years. The practical effect, in states with ESAs, is that microschool tuition has become affordable for a much wider range of families.

The teacher-founder pattern

A common microschool origin story is a public school teacher, often with ten to twenty years of experience, who has become disillusioned with the constraints of the system and starts a microschool to teach the way she always wanted to teach. The pattern is replicated thousands of times. These teacher-founders are the spine of the movement. They bring real pedagogical expertise, real classroom management, and credibility with parents. They also bring the limits of their own training, which is usually in a single grade band and a single curriculum tradition. Microschools founded by these teachers tend to be solid but conservative; the more radical experiments come from non-teacher founders, often parents of children who didn't fit anywhere.

The Acton model and franchising

Acton Academy and its affiliated network grew through a franchise model. A family wanting to start an Acton pays a fee, agrees to the curriculum and approach, gets training and ongoing support, and runs the school locally. The model has produced hundreds of Acton-affiliated schools globally. Critics call it a McDonaldization of pedagogy; supporters note that the franchise structure provides the continuity unattached microschools lack. The Acton example matters because it demonstrates one viable answer to the durability problem — attach to a larger structure for back-office and curriculum, run independently on pedagogy and community. Other networks (Prenda, KaiPod, Wildflower for Montessori microschools) use variants of the same approach.

The hybrid model

A growing portion of microschools meet only some days per week, with families homeschooling the other days. Two- and three-day-per-week hybrids have become the dominant form in some markets. The model spreads parental labor more sustainably, makes the program affordable, and gives children both small-group learning and home learning. It works well when both parents and the microschool understand what each is responsible for, and it collapses when either side assumes the other is covering math. The hybrid is also a useful bridge for families who would not commit to full homeschooling but want more flexibility than full traditional school.

The neurodivergent fit

One of the largest single drivers of microschool enrollment is the inability of standard schools to serve neurodivergent children — children with ADHD, autism spectrum profiles, dyslexia, anxiety, sensory processing differences, twice-exceptional patterns. A school with twenty children and two adults can accommodate a child who needs to walk during lessons, take frequent breaks, or work at an idiosyncratic pace. A school with 800 cannot. Families with neurodivergent children have been disproportionately represented in microschool enrollment from the start, and many microschools have built explicit programs around this population. The pedagogical accommodations are not always sophisticated, but the structural accommodation — being small enough to bend — is the load-bearing piece.

What goes wrong

Microschool failure modes are well-documented after five years. Founder burnout is the most common: one or two adults running a school is unsustainable past a few years without infrastructure. Financial strain follows from low enrollment or rising rent. Family conflict is the silent killer; a small community of eight families cannot afford a single bitter dispute, and many microschools have ended over a single fight between two parents. Regulatory issues — zoning, fire code, accreditation pressure — bite at unexpected moments. The microschools that survive past three years are usually the ones with a sustaining structure beyond a single founder: a church, a co-op, a franchise network, a non-profit board.

The quality variance problem

Because microschools are largely unregulated and self-organized, quality varies enormously. A great microschool, run by a thoughtful experienced teacher with a coherent pedagogy and a well-matched group of families, is one of the best educational settings a child can be in. A bad microschool, run by an under-qualified founder with a weak curriculum and a transient student body, can be worse than a mediocre public school. The variance is wider than in public schools, where regulation enforces a floor. Parents shopping the microschool market are doing the regulator's job themselves, evaluating not just curriculum but teacher quality, financial viability, peer group, and culture. Most parents do not have the bandwidth or expertise for this evaluation, and many are surprised by what they end up with.

The accountability question

The public-policy critics of microschools, particularly when ESA funding is involved, focus on accountability. Public schools are required to test, report, and disclose; microschools generally are not. A child whose microschool fails to teach reading by age ten is harder to identify than a child whose public school fails the same task. ESA programs have begun to add testing or progress requirements in some states, with mixed success. The accountability problem is real but not unique to microschools — homeschool has the same issue, and private schools have a softer version. The movement's defenders argue that parental engagement is itself an accountability mechanism, which is true on average but not in every household. The compromise positions, requiring minimal standardized assessment without dictating curriculum, are probably where most states will land within a decade.

The next ten years

The microschool wave is at the end of its first wave and the beginning of its second. The first wave was the pandemic-era founding rush, driven by emergency conditions and a small number of advocates. The second wave will be tested by normalization — public schools have reopened, remote work is consolidating, the political fights around ESAs are intensifying, and many first-generation microschools are reaching the founder-burnout cliff. The schools and networks that survive into the 2030s will likely be the ones that figured out durability — attached to larger structures, professionalized in ways that the original founders may resist, and integrated into the regulatory environment rather than operating in its gaps. The collective bet is that even a partial survival rate — say, a third of current microschools enduring — would represent a permanent structural addition to American education, and would change what a "school" can mean for the families using one. The other two-thirds will close, and their children will return to whatever the surrounding system offers, having had a few years of something different. Whether that is enough to matter, only those children will know, twenty years from now.

Citations

1. Mason, Don. The State of the American Microschool. Phoenix: National Microschooling Center, 2023. 2. Mason, Don. American Microschools: A Sector Analysis. Phoenix: National Microschooling Center, 2024. 3. Gaither, Milton. Homeschool: An American History. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 4. Stevens, Mitchell L. Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 5. Gray, Peter. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. New York: Basic Books, 2013. 6. Holt, John, and Patrick Farenga. Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003. 7. Bello, Akil. "Why More Black Families Are Homeschooling." Forbes, August 22, 2020. 8. Taylor, Astra. "Unschooling." n+1 no. 13 (Winter 2012). 9. Edwards, Carolyn, Lella Gandini, and George Forman, eds. The Hundred Languages of Children: The Reggio Emilia Experience in Transformation. 3rd ed. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2012. 10. Lillard, Angeline Stoll. Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius. 3rd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. 11. McGurk, Linda Akeson. There's No Such Thing as Bad Weather: A Scandinavian Mom's Secrets for Raising Healthy, Resilient, and Confident Kids. New York: Touchstone, 2017. 12. U.S. Census Bureau. Household Pulse Survey: Homeschooling and Educational Choice Data, 2020–2023. Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau, 2023.

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