McDonald predicted that even a few weeks of displacement from school for millions of kids could fundamentally change education. 

And while most kids would eventually return to school once the epidemic faded, she wrote, “some parents may discover that learning outside of schooling benefited their children and strengthened their family.” They might begin to consider homeschooling or other alternatives as a longer-term option. “They may realize that education without schooling is not a crisis but an opportunity.”

Five years later, it seems, something fundamental has changed: As many as 125,000 microschools now operate nationwide, according to the National Microschooling Center, and several states now support homeschooling and microschooling with public funds.

McDonald, a Massachusetts mother of four, frequent contributor to The 74, host of the and the author of a about self-directed education and alternatives to traditional schooling, set out to capture what the movement looks like now in her new book, . It’s out Tuesday.

She charts an ideologically diverse group of parents and teachers who are striking out on their own to essentially start small education businesses. The common thread, she finds, is a “desire to bring to education the level of personalization that we increasingly enjoy in all other parts of our lives.”

McDonald talked to The 74’s Greg Toppo recently about the book and the microschooling movement.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The 74: I wanted to start with this quote in your book from a Kansas mom who launched a microschool. She says, “The fringe is becoming the cloth.” That’s quite a statement, quite a realignment, if true. Do you agree that that’s what’s happening?

I’ve been covering unconventional education — homeschooling and microschooling — for over a decade now. This movement really began prior to 2020, and at the time I thought that we would continue to see slow but steady growth in homeschooling and alternative education more generally. But I always thought it would stay in the margins.

When COVID hit in 2020 and there was that massive educational upheaval, it enabled families to start to think more creatively about education options, to maybe look more openly at homeschooling and microschools and other ways of approaching teaching and learning. And many families liked what they saw. Some families even built these new alternatives. Since 2020, we’re really seeing a much more mainstream push towards alternative education.

I think it’s fair to call these folks disruptors. 

Peaceful disruptors. 

But I wonder if we’re getting ahead of ourselves to start calling it mainstream. I mean, there are still in public schools.

If you look at some of the data in Arizona, for example, so many families are of traditional district schools. Obviously, charter schools would be their primary alternative at the moment, but certainly with the expansion of school choice programs and universal programs in places like Arizona, you’re seeing more and more families realize that they have other options, and they’re able to find schools and spaces that are aligned with their values and viewpoints in ways that they haven’t before.

We have to give it a little bit of time, because we need to let these entrepreneurs do their work. As more and more entrepreneurship takes hold, we’ll see more options for families, and families will be able to find just what they’re looking for.

I want to define just who you write about in this book, because it’s a really specific kind of person. As you say, they’re people who “built what they couldn’t find.” You’ve got folks who start religious microschools, Montessori microschools …

LGBTQ+ microschools, Afrocentric microschools …

You talk to folks like , who opens this in Massachusetts, and it’s interesting that he’s in the mix because he blanches at the “coercive qualities” of traditional schooling, even the compulsion to attend at all. That’s a pretty broad coalition. And I wonder: What do these folks have in common?

It is a broad coalition. What’s so exciting about this current decentralized, entrepreneur-driven educational moment, is that it’s extremely diverse. There are founders of every demographic and ideological persuasion, and different motivations for creating programs, whether it’s that they can’t find what they’re looking for for their own children and they want to create something better, or they just think that there’s a different way of approaching education. 

I think about Tamara Becker, the founder of in Arizona. Her microschool, which now has 73 students across several locations — she didn’t build that for her children. She doesn’t have children, but was a long-time public school teacher and administrator, and just felt that COVID provided this moment to individualize education and move away from a one-size-fits-all learning model into something more relevant and personalized for the 21st century. That’s the common thread among these entrepreneurial parents and teachers, that desire to bring to education the level of personalization that we increasingly enjoy in all other parts of our lives.

The other common thread, and why the book is titled Joyful Learning, is that despite the tremendous diversity of these models — from secular, progressive microschools to conservative, faith-based, microschools, and different educational philosophies and approaches, from classical to Montessori to unschooling and everything in between — these programs are places where children are happy to be learning. I saw that as I crisscrossed the country and interviewed the founders and families on my podcast and interviews related to the book. That was a very apparent characteristic of all of these spaces: Children are happy to be there. They are often sad when snow days hit or when summer vacation approaches. 

As you were going through this list of different kinds of schools and all these founders, I wondered, “How did you find all these folks?” Obviously, you have this podcast. Were they coming to you? Were you going to them?

Great question. I’ve been in the alternative education movement for a long time. I wrote my 2019 book, Unschooled, which is where I first connected with people like Ken Danford. So I have, thankfully, a rich network of folks in the alternative education world and in homeschooling that crosses political and ideological lines. In many cases, folks have come to me. 

Then, of course, COVID hit, and there was more and more interest in alternative education. In early 2022 I decided to launch my LiberatED podcast, because I wanted a multimedia approach to storytelling beyond the articles I was writing, and was able to connect with many of these founders there. For the most part, founders have come to me. I’ve been able to visit many of these founders, either by reaching out to them because they’ve been on my podcast or featured in articles, or by them inviting me to come. I also have done a lot of collaboration with the [a group of entrepreneurs supporting alternative learning models] that’s now supporting over 4,000 of these innovative educators across the country.

My work now is just sort of an extension of the work that I’ve been doing in alternative education for over a decade.

As much as anything, this book is an instruction manual for future founders and, I guess, for policymakers as well.

And parents.

What are you hoping readers come away with in terms of real instruction?

The book is primarily geared towards founders and families. Obviously, I’d love it if policymakers read it as well, and members of the media like yourself who are curious about this movement. But it’s primarily a book for parents and founders of programs. And there’s often a lot of overlap between those two groups. A lot of the founders that I talked to had no intention of becoming education entrepreneurs, or opening a school or a microschool or learning pod, and either because of COVID and the disruption caused by that, or just being unable to find exactly what they were looking for for their own children, ended up making that leap into entrepreneurship. In most cases, they found the experience to be incredibly rewarding. 

The majority of the founders are former public school teachers who were disillusioned with the standardization and test-driven learning environment that they found in conventional schools. Many of these teachers found their own creativity and autonomy stifled within a conventional classroom and wanted somewhere where they could be free to educate the way they felt was most effective and beneficial to the students they’re serving.

There’s got to be a very steep learning curve for the parents who are not trained teachers, and I wonder if you saw that in your reporting. Did you see parents struggling to make school come alive?

Most of the founders in the book are former teachers. Some of them became homeschooling moms after being public school teachers and then opened homeschooling collaboratives. I think about Alicia Wright in Richmond, Va., who runs . She was a longtime public school teacher-turned-homeschooling-mom-turned-founder. So there’s also that trajectory. A lot of these founders who are parents and who launch programs are highly successful in their own right.

I think about Sharon Massinelli, who runs in Georgia, a physician associate as well as a long-time homeschooling mom who has balanced work and homeschooling for years. She was really attracted to a hybrid homeschool model that enables part-time enrollment off-site with trained educators working through a curriculum for half the week, and then the other half students are at home working through that same curriculum with their parents. That has been a model that’s been around since the 1990s and continues to gain popularity, especially over the last five years. She was able to create her own hybrid school after her children had been attending another hybrid school program that was far away and not quite what she wanted. She was able to use that model and create something new. 

That’s what we see with many of the entrepreneurial parents who may not have a background in education but are incredibly successful in their own professions. Now, they have so many resources to help them launch and grow their programs, largely because of the network effects from more and more of these programs existing. You have these microschool startup programs like or that really work with these everyday entrepreneurs to create successful, sustainable programs.

I want to be sure to address this issue, which a lot of people coming to your book might be wondering about: This idea that the choice movement itself is not as simple as just joy and entrepreneurialism. There are a lot of people who feel like it’s a play to undermine public schools, and I wonder how you approach that.

What we’re seeing now is the expansion of choice, variety and abundance in education that we enjoy in so many other parts of our lives, but that we haven’t had much of in education because it’s been largely dominated by traditional public schools. It’s a good thing that we see more options for families, more ways of approaching education beyond a conventional classroom. It’s no surprise that more families are gravitating to and and outdoor learning environments, because they want something that’s much more play-based, that’s much more learner-centered, and that’s much less restrictive and standardized than a conventional classroom. That’s a key piece of this: We see so much innovation in the 21st century in so many other segments of society, while K-12 education has largely been standardized and stagnant.

For folks who might not know about you, it’s fair to say you lived this. During the pandemic, your oldest set off on her own to do distance learning, and you enrolled your younger three in the private . Talk a little bit about your experience — right in the middle, by the way, of doing the reporting for all this.

My kids were unschooled, homeschooled since birth — never attended a conventional classroom. They were attending a microschool a couple of days a week when COVID hit and the microschool shut down. All of the classes that they were taking throughout the city were shut down for months in many cases, more than a year in some.

I write in Joyful Learning about how at one point I realized that all of this education disruption that I was documenting among other families was hitting my family as well, and we were making education changes as a result, including, as you say, my older daughter, Molly, who had always been homeschooled. She began taking online classes and then ended up enrolling in a full suite of high school online classes through while remaining legally a homeschooler in Massachusetts. She’s since graduated and is off to college. Next Saturday she moves in. And then the younger three enrolled in the Sudbury Valley School, which I had written about extensively in my Unschooled book and always really adored, but it’s far away from us, and also is a state-recognized private school. We were comfortable with homeschooling, but changes among our education ecosystem during that time of disruption led us to pursue other options, and they were thrilled to join Sudbury Valley.

Do you envision us ever going back to the way things were before COVID? And how do you think this movement is going to change the system itself?

Do I think we’re going to go back to the way it was before COVID? No, and my answer is related to your second question. What we’re seeing is a much greater focus around decentralized, choice-enabled, entrepreneur-driven education that’s responsive to the needs and wants of parents in local communities. One of the things I talk about in the book is the contrast between the education disruption and reform that happened in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, which, of course, we’re coming up to the 20th anniversary later this month and what we’ve seen in terms of education reform and change in the wake of COVID. 

After Hurricane Katrina, the change largely came from the top. It was the state of Louisiana that took over the New Orleans Public School district to orchestrate change from the top, albeit with the goal of eventually returning New Orleans schools to local control, which would take more than a decade to accomplish. By contrast, the educational change that we’ve seen since COVID is the opposite. It’s an entirely bottom-up, decentralized movement of entrepreneurial parents and teachers creating the kinds of schools and spaces that enable young people to flourish and be happy. 

While Duslak told school officials that her son wasn’t emotionally ready, even though he was academically advanced, the school wasn’t able to offer an alternative.

So Duslak, who spent nearly a decade teaching in central Florida public schools, decided that she was going to start her own school, just for Avery, and other children like him who needed alternative ways of learning a rigorous curriculum.

“This journey literally started with a bottle of wine and the book Nonprofit [Kit] for Dummies — it’s a real thing — and I just started reading,” Duslak said. “And I thought, I don’t know how, I don’t know how I’m going to do this, but I’m going to do it.”

After a long, arduous process of creating a 501(c)(3) that was further complicated by a government shutdown at the end of 2018 into early 2019, Duslak’s nonprofit became official by the end of that year. She opened the doors to CREATE Conservatory in the spring of 2020 — with seven students and at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While CREATE was already in the works before the pandemic, the global crisis steered numerous states to create or expand school choice programs that gave families more flexibility to decide how their children are educated. Florida currently has a bill that seeks to further extend its already diverse school choice programs. 

CREATE, which offers “flexible and unique learning programs designed to reach children who do not thrive in a traditional format,” and focuses on teaching science, technology, engineering and mathematics “through arts integration,” has since grown to enroll 27 students across grades K-6. Of those, 26 — or 96% — attend the school at no cost, thanks to private donations and corporate sponsorships, as well as state-funded scholarships, administered by . Step Up For Students primarily works with that makes nontraditional schooling possible for families who may not otherwise be able to afford it.

For Duslak, those contributions are the lifeline that allows CREATE to reach and teach students who have the potential to succeed — but need to be able to learn in a way that isn’t necessarily provided to them in traditional classrooms, said Kim Levine, a corporate donor to the school and CREATE board member.

“What [CREATE] offers to our community is a place where, basically just kids that are kind of different in some way, can come and just be themselves,” she said.

In October 2020, for instance, a found that parents whose kids attended school in-person were far more likely to say they were “very satisfied” with the way school was handling instruction: 54% vs. just 30% whose kids received online instruction only.

But Patricia Brantley, who leads the 15-school network of Friendship Charter Schools in Washington, D.C., said developing and maintaining virtual learning systems will be critical to public schools going forward. Friendship began investing in virtual learning before the pandemic and has actually expanded its virtual offerings since 2021. 

The move is largely driven by parents, she said, who see the value of virtual learning for their kids. She noted one parent who wrote that her child requires a wheelchair to attend “a fair amount of medical appointments.” Online learning works in large part because classes are recorded for later viewing. The woman’s son, once an average student, is “now above grade” level, she wrote. Brantley also said the move has fostered “incredibly strong connections between families and with the faculty.”

Three years after the first pandemic closures, Brantley said virtual learning will also be key to attracting young teachers to the profession as other white-collar industries offer the option to work remotely. She’ll be talking about her experiences this week at South by Southwest Edu, part of a panel that . 

The 74’s Greg Toppo, who will be moderating the session, caught up with Brantley by email in advance of the session. 

The interview was edited for length and clarity.

The 74: The panel at South by Southwest Edu asks “Is Virtual Learning the Disruptor Teaching Needs?” What’s your short answer to this question?

Patricia Brantley: Virtual learning is the solution teaching needs. There’s an age-old question: How do we best educate our young and prepare them for the world? Assuming that we can do it in the same way that it’s been done for 100 years or more, when the world has changed, is worse than naive. It is failing generations of students in ways that we may not recover. 

In my opinion, the true disruptor isn’t the availability of virtual learning, it’s the convergence of factors illuminated by the pandemic. Those factors include the rise of parent-driven schooling through pods and micro schools that often rely partially on online delivery; the decline of traditional enrollment and rise in private, homeschool, online and charter options, and the flexibility now being given in other professions that make them more attractive to young college graduates than teaching. I see these factors converging in a way that is ultimately forcing changes in the way we historically have approached schooling, especially in traditional settings. Virtual learning isn’t the disruptor. It is a critical tool to support the way education must adapt to a changing world. 

Friendship is D.C.’s first public, tuition-free online education provider. Can you talk a little about what you’ve built and what your enrollment trends are?

We began investing in online education years before the pandemic, opening in 2015 for grades K to 8 and expanding to high school in 2019. Our original families knew that traditional settings weren’t serving their children well. The truth is we followed them to online learning as the solution. We were proud of our very specialized, small virtual community that featured incredibly strong connections between families and with the faculty.

Then, as many families were hesitant or unable to return to in-person schooling during the 2021-2022 academic year, our enrollment exploded. We went from barely 200 students to 700. Our staff grew from four full-time teachers to a staff of 40, with a faculty that includes master teachers, guidance counselors, social workers, parent liaisons and resident artists that are leading students through deep experiences in the fine arts. Our growth is an indication of the effectiveness and appeal of online learning environments.

Part of our success here is likely due to our intentional approach to design. Since 2015, our priority has been to design an online program with the learner at the center. Interestingly, by centering the learner, we also designed a new experience for the teacher, one that creates flexibility and evolves the profession. By doing this, we saw significant interest from teachers to take on this role and high satisfaction rates from those who did. This experience gives us reason to question the prevailing idea that there is a shortage of people who want to teach. Rather, what we see is that many teachers want the freedom and flexibility to evolve. In that way, virtual learning can be as attractive and impactful for educators as it is for students and families.

What have some of your early successes been?

While our enrollment trends are strong indicators of our program’s success, I’m even more pleased with the academic results we continue to achieve. Ensuring access to effective small learning environments and robust online options for students and families are absolute priorities for us. That’s why we are so proud to see results like those from the from (educational consultants) EmpowerK12, which found that Friendship Online students previously deemed “at-risk” for academic failure outpaced citywide growth in both English and Math during the pandemic.

I also consider it a success that we haven’t gotten locked into one way to meet families’ needs. As we’ve continued to grow and learn, we’re piloting other learning environments that push the limits on traditional school. Our microschools and hubs, which also emerged as part of the need created by the pandemic, were a game changer for many of our families. When we looked at the data, kids who were in those pods achieved larger academic gains than their peers who were not. Some even progressed faster than they did before the pandemic.  

I understand you’re using an AI system that listens to kids’ reading and reports back to teachers. What other innovations are you able to bring to the table?

We are constantly driven by the question: “What do families, students, and teachers need right now, today?” We are always asking ourselves this question and we push ourselves to remain open-minded about where the answers might lead us. Over the course of the past few years, this has certainly included expanding our online options and microschools, but it’s also included innovations that aren’t necessarily connected to technology.

For example, since the pandemic taught us that learning can happen anywhere, we’ve made investments in more experiential learning for our students. Partnering with at Friendship Blow Pierce Academy has made the entire city part of our students’ learning journey. We’ve also developed a career coaching program for students to help them prepare for the future and discover career paths they never knew existed. In addition to their teachers and peers, our students are also learning from members of their community.

During the pandemic, we heard so much about how online learning was problematic. Yet your work suggests there’s huge interest from families. What does the conventional wisdom miss about online learning in 2023?

The first thing that’s missed is the idea that you can paint family and student needs with a broad brush. Does online learning work for everyone? Certainly not. But for those families and students who gravitate towards online learning, it can be a game changer. The pandemic forced all of us to adopt online learning, so of course there were going to be plenty of situations where that wasn’t the ideal learning environment. Now that we can integrate choice into the equation, you start to see that those families and students who opt in to this kind of learning are usually the ones who have great success with it. The idea here is that families need to be empowered to choose the best learning environment for them and we need to be prepared with diverse options to meet their needs.

The other thing that was missed in the urgency created by the pandemic is that you can’t lose human relationships in the shift to online learning. Despite what some may think, a high-quality online learning environment is still centered on people and relationships, not technology. If you leverage technology — and the flexibility it affords — to allow the student-teacher relationship to thrive, that’s when you see the kind of success we’ve been able to achieve over time.

Now, some teachers are seeing career opportunities there, too. 

This week The 74 partnered with VELA Education Fund to present a special livestream: “Into the Unknown: Why Teachers Leave the Classroom to Launch Nontraditional Education Programs,” featuring several educators who made that leap. 

Education reporter Linda Jacobson moderated the conversation, which you can watch below. The panelists included Iman Alleyne, Ian Bravo and Heather Long, who all recently left traditional school settings to launch their own nontraditional education program. Mike McShane, Director of National Research at , shared trends and insights from a national point of view.

Here’s some recent coverage from our archive about microschools and learning pods: 

—Career Pivot: Teachers leaving jobs during pandemic find ‘fertile’ ground in new school models (Read the full story) 

—New Type of Hybrid School: Great Hearts sees the potential in pairing online teaching with in-person pods (Read the full story) 

—Personalized Learning: As COVID closed Arizona’s classrooms, Black mothers launched their own microschools (Read the full story) 

—Learning Pods: In year two, pandemic pods ‘find their legs’ and face their limitations. Will they endure beyond COVID-19? (Read the full story) 

Frustrated with what they say is their public schools’ failure to provide quality education and nurturing environments for Black children and fearing the persistent , a group of mothers, many public school teachers, have created a network of their own schools.

Launched mid-pandemic just one year ago, the mothers’ goal is to grow the seven into 50.

“We could be advocating 24/7, and still not make the impact that we wanted to see. So, what do you do, do you go charter? Do you try to keep working in the public school system? Nope, nope, not us. We said, well, ,” said Debora Colbert, executive director of the Black Mothers Forum, a Phoenix-based parent advocacy group. 

In mixed-grade classes, students learn at their own pace and are guided by two teachers. Restorative discipline techniques, not punitive strategies, are the norm.

The Forum’s approach to learning has in a state where high school graduation rates hover about 8 percent below national averages and . 

With little to keep them there, students who do go onto higher education often leave the state and don’t look back, Colbert said.

In Phoenix-area churches, nonprofits and shared school buildings, 42 students comprise the first microschools launched last January with preliminary guidance from national microschool giant Prenda. The Forum’s sites have since made the transition to public charter schools within local network EdKey Sequoia Choice. (Arizona’s attorney general with a separate, online EdKey school. Prenda lawyers say the investigation has since closed. The Attorney General’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Many of the Forum’s teachers, dubbed “learning guides” per the Prenda model, are religious leaders and parents from the community — many of whom left their placements in traditional schools for the opportunity. 

Founders of the schools hope to change perceptions of the community they’ve so often heard from young people: “There’s nothing to keep me in Arizona, or Phoenix, to realize my dreams and my goals,” said Colbert.

“That’s not okay. We’re on a mission to kind of track where our children are, where they’re going, whether they are successful, and how to keep them connected to their communities,” she said.

Gov. Ducey has committed nearly $4 million in the last year .

The forum has advocated for school reform since 2016, after nationwide violence against Black children and a series of high-profile police brutality cases involving Black Americans. Their mission became eliminating low for Black children and school discipline policies that often end with Black children funneled into prison. 

While the learning pod movement swept across the country’s white, affluent areas during the pandemic, outrage grew as the pandemic and academic gaps grew along racial lines.

The moment became an opportunity for the Black Mothers Forum to formally launch and recruit for their own schools in January 2021.

Forum teacher and mother Tiffany Dudley believes having teachers who “looked like” her children at the microschools have made all the difference for her sons, Xavier, 7, and Jeremiah, 10.

“I kind of underestimated how much of a difference my child, being in an environment where he had people with the same skin color… how much of an impact mentally that had on him,” said Dudley.

Dudley often got calls from Xavier’s previous schools’ teachers about the “little things,” like how he played with his shoe laces instead of participating in a group activity. Mornings used to bring protests because he hated going to school. 

After four months of microschooling, Xavier calls his out-of-state grandparents to recap school projects.  

“Just literally being there in that environment changed how he perceived learning, and changed how he saw himself,” Dudley said. 

Now a learning guide for a third through eighth grade cohort, Dudley said the student to teacher ratio, 10:2, is critical to help students transition from traditional schools. 

There’s no hiding behind a dozen other peers who may be more vocal in the classroom, for example. Instead students are asked to problem solve, with support from teachers like Dudley:  

“‘Okay, did you try this? How about we ask a friend?’ We’re just giving them strategies to teach them how to think critically to be able to solve problems because they are very used to being spoon fed answers,” she said.

The smaller classes allow their “connect, redirect” model, a complete departure from the many other charters adopted, to be the norm. When a student disrupts class or has trouble with an assignment, one guide talks with the child to uncover what might be affecting them. They then connect them to time, space, a venting session, food, counseling. 

“They’re not going to be punished — this is an opportunity to figure out what’s going on … giving them that sense of ownership in that redirection, they are part of this process, that takes time,” Black Mother’s Forum Founder Janelle Wood said. “That’s why we need two learning guides in the space. If one child is having a problem, all of them may not be having the same problem. They can continue on with what they’re doing, but this one child may need some extra attention.”

In crafting schools with Black families at its center, the Forum also reimagined their physical locations. Instead of operating out of a family living room or garage, schools and community organizations were more realistic because their families didn’t have the extra space to host classes.

Renting church and nonprofit space provides added benefits, too: kids stay connected to Phoenix, and community groups that lost revenue during the pandemic are supported financially.

And since last school year, they’ve added an hour of instruction to each school day. The extra time preserved their morning wellness circles — students start each day by talking through their emotions — and independent reading, with which many struggle.

In perhaps the starkest intentional departure from traditional schools, students learn via the mastery approach in blended classrooms of students of different ages and grades, separated into K-2 and 3-8.

Through online learning tools like Zearn and , some work grade levels ahead, others spend necessary time with foundational concepts like multiplication, as guides check in one-on-one. 

Wood recognized their efforts had “to start at the school level, because that’s where our children, Black and brown children, are being negatively impacted at the highest level.”

Raina Chamblee, now a third grader at one of the microschools, recalled how her former Wisconsin public school was a particularly negative experience. 

Diagnosed with ADHD, a new medication she was trying made her drowsy. She’d fall asleep in class, taunted and teased by classmates — behavior left unchecked by the teachers. 

Once, a teacher lashed out at her directly.

“I colored a pink polar bear and then one of my teachers crumbled it up and threw it in the garbage,” Raina said. 

Dudley said some of the difficulties Black children experience in school stems from the assumption that “‘this is a behavior problem’ […] instead of looking deeper to see, really see, the child.”

It’s why, she said, the miscoschools’ personal approach and connect-redirect models are necessary. 

Detailing the last few months in Phoenix, Raina said her new school has made a difference in her learning. New teachers “push” and “help,” she said. 

Her mother, Kylie Chamblee, noticed a difference in her ability to teach, too. She’s making deeper connections with her students. 

When a student needs extra time with reading comprehension and is ahead in geometry, she can work with them more freely.

“That’s what I really like about our model for kids,” said Chamblee. “Because it can be challenging but then it can also be rewarding, because they’re getting what they need.”

Lead Image: Black Mothers Forums

In 2019, the Arizona mother of two sent her older daughter off to kindergarten in Scottsdale, Ariz.’s Cave Creek Unified School District.

But after Mac Ban saw the district’s tepid response to the pandemic, she started home-schooling her at taxpayer expense. Arizona’s publicly funded now underwrites her kids’ education. 

Similar scholarship accounts could soon do the same for millions of other students nationwide as a new raft of proposed laws makes its way through state legislative sessions this month, buoyed by parent anger at district policies. 

Mac Ban balked at homeschooling at first, envisioning herself isolated and sitting at home with her kids for most of the week. But the more she learned, the more attractive it seemed. After she disenrolled her daughter from a district school and applied for the ESA, the child began learning lessons from the “classical Christian” . Her total bill comes to about $200 per month. 

School choice advocates see hope in stories like these. As the omicron variant continues to wreak havoc on schools’ normal procedures and parents lose patience with lockdowns, quarantines, and mask and vaccine mandates — as well as curricula that some view as politically charged — advocates hope that more parents like Mac Ban will insist that taxpayers help pay for their kids’ educations outside of neighborhood public schools. 

School choice has always relied on a fragile left-right coalition, mostly between Black and Latino activists and centrist-to-conservative legislators pushing to rebalance the power structure of public schooling. That coalition has weakened over the past few years. But scholars such as Paul Peterson, who directs Harvard University’s Program on Education Policy and Governance, now see an opening. 

“A couple of years ago, there was a feeling in the country that opposition to school choice was on the rise,” he told attendees at a at Harvard. “Some of the coalition and backing for school choice was eroding and the movement, perhaps, was breaking down. But in light of the pandemic, there is a contrary feeling emerging in the country today: We are finding the passage of new school choice legislation in states across the country, new tax credit programs, new education savings accounts programs, expanded charter school programs. There’s a lot of interest in opening up to parents opportunities that haven’t existed in the past.” 

While culture war issues like critical race theory could upend that coalition once again, the mood at Harvard was one of optimism. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who now chairs the nonprofit reform group , pointed to recent legislative successes in Missouri, West Virginia and Kentucky. “The legislatures are on fire right now for these kinds of things, so it’s all good. And I don’t see it going away. I really don’t.” 

Choice advocates got an unexpected boost in November when Republican Glenn Youngkin won the governor’s race in increasingly purple Virginia, beating establishment Democrat Terry McAuliffe by . Youngkin pulled off the surprisingly solid victory in part by tapping into parents’ anger about public education, giving a voice to thousands who felt schools haven’t risen to the challenge of basic education during the pandemic. McAuliffe, a former advisor to President Bill Clinton, didn’t help his case during the campaign when, discussing over anti-racist education, said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” 

Derrell Bradford, president of the education advocacy group , told attendees at the Harvard conference that McAuliffe’s mistake was displaying “just a complete and utter tone-deafness” to parents’ experiences. “After a year-and-a-half, almost two years, of incredibly disrupted institutional experience that was visited on almost every family in the country, you probably shouldn’t say something like ‘Parents don’t matter.’ You can make it a school choice lesson, but there’s a lesson there about treating people poorly who’ve been treated poorly.”

Republican strategists such as Christopher Rufo, who last year the raucous campaign to fight critical race theory, now talks of families’  public schools that don’t sync with their beliefs. 

As the omicron variant dominates and infection rates , vaccine requirements for even the youngest children could anger parents further. And while many parents have fought for a return to , others are clamoring for remote options amid the recent surge: Recent polls find that about six in 10 parents of school-aged children favor virtual learning.

For the past year or more, parents have been voting with their feet: Public schools have shed millions of students, recent data show. In New York City, the nation’s largest system, 50,000 fewer students attended last fall than two years earlier, The New York Times — a 4.5 percent decline. 

Chicago Public Schools in October had lost about 10,000 students over the past school year, a 3 percent drop. Overall enrollment was students over two years. 

Across California, the nation’s most populous state, educators are awaiting updated figures, but estimated enrollment has dropped since 2018-19 by about nearly 184,000 students, or about 3 percent, CalMatters earlier this month.

A Tyton Partners issued in July found that since the beginning of the pandemic, an estimated 17.5 percent of children have switched schools at least once, 75 percent more than in average years. And nearly 80 percent of parents said they’d be “more active in shaping their child’s education” in the future. 

At the Harvard conference, Bradford said school closures during the pandemic in 2020 suddenly brought the system’s failures into “high and broad relief” for 60 million families — especially families of color and low-income families.

“If you are a Black kid in New York City, you were the least important person in America for the last two years,” he said. “And if you were a teacher in that system, you were the most important person in America during that time. And we made it very clear and explicit that that was the case. We have a system that is built upon that foundation, with those priorities. And it couldn’t get the majority of kids reading proficiently before the pandemic.”

Randi Weingarten, head of the American Federation of Teachers, one of the nation’s largest teachers unions, said she actually expected “a far higher percentage of families” to opt out of their neighborhood schools, given fears about COVID and “the volatile debates about safety protocols” over the past two years. 

That a mass exodus didn’t happen, she added, “says to me that families are valuing public schools and what a good public school is for: academics, of course, but [also] as centers of communities, where kids eat healthy meals, access health care, and find social and emotional supports.”

For her part, Weingarten has pushed to “have a different conversation” about school choice, one focused on what has worked in private settings during the pandemic — but that also treats public schools less as a commodity that families can buy than as a public good.

“We’re experiencing a crisis in our democracy in which our public schools have a really important role,” she said. “Why not try to figure out how to make this year, regardless of where we are, a year of recovery and revival for our kids and not have a year of winners and losers?”

As 2022 progresses, that seems unlikely.

EdChoice’s director of national research, Michael McShane, that since the beginning of 2021, more than a dozen states have created or expanded school choice programs. The group now says enacted seven new choice programs and expanded 21 existing ones. Robert Enlow, the group’s CEO, called 2021 “without a doubt” for school choice since EdChoice has been tracking it. 

In an interview, McShane said that until recently he was expecting upcoming state legislative sessions in 2022 to be “pretty quiet” on topics like school choice. “I think now that there is going to be a lot going on.” 

Part of the reason may be the billions in COVID relief funds that school districts have received to keep them afloat, he said: “In politics, things happen easier when there’s a bunch of money sloshing around.”

On the one hand, the money softens the blow of all of the student departures — but it also makes it harder for school districts to complain to state lawmakers about the effects of often small choice programs that draw students out of the public system. “This program that’s spending $25 million across the entire state, how can you possibly have a problem with it when you just got $2 billion from the feds?” he said.

As legislative sessions begin in several states, choice is on lawmakers’ minds. In Kentucky last week, lawmakers an expanded school choice bill that would give families tuition assistance for private education.

In Missouri, lawmakers last year approved a tax credit to fund a private-school tuition education savings account, and lawmakers are now pushing to the program before it even takes effect. They’ve proposed lifting a $25 million funding cap and dropping requirements that families who participate live in a city with at least 30,000 residents.

Youngkin, just a few days into his term in Virginia, backed a GOP-led effort in the narrowly divided state legislature that would the number of charter schools from fewer than 10 to about 200. The bill would allow the state Board of Education to create regional charter school “divisions” with the power to approve new charter schools, despite opposition from localities. 

Higher graduation rates … or winning the culture war?

Concerns about parents’ role in their kids’ education played a “huge role” in Youngkin’s Virginia election victory, McShane said, but more broadly, parents “want to be back to normal now. And the fact that things aren’t back to normal is leading to a lot of discontent.”

Whether from rolling quarantines, mask or vaccine mandates, he said, “I think all of this stuff is just going to continue to roil schools, and you’re going to have people that just want out — they don’t want their school’s vaccine policy to be set by 51 percent of their neighbors. They’re going to want to have the option to go to a school where it’s decided at the school level.” 

Whether the current push for school choice plays out in both blue and red states, however, remains an open question. 

Most of the recent legislation has prevailed in reliably Republican-controlled legislatures, even if a few of the with the endorsement of a Democratic governors, as in West Virginia — or despite a governor’s veto, as in Kentucky.

In reliably blue Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who was elected in 2018, campaigned on a promise to slash funding for a . But once he was elected, “he actually signed a bill to strengthen it modestly,” said Greg Richmond, a longtime school choice advocate who now leads the Archdiocese of Chicago Catholic Schools.

“It seems to be one these classic cases where it’s easy to say anything when you’re running for office, but when you get into office, you find out voters have an interest in the program you want to eliminate — you start to change your mind about it a little bit,” he said. “So he backed off.” 

But these days, Richmond said, even private Catholic school parents are talking about exercising their right to leave schools over concerns about so-called critical race theory or enforcing mask and vaccine mandates — the latter two are required by an executive order signed by Pritzker, and also apply to private school students. 

“Some people got very mad and wrote to me: ‘We should be fighting this [mandate]. This is tyranny. This is against God — this is Satan. If you don’t change it, I’m going to pull my kids out of your school and send them to public schools,’” Richmond recalled. “I was like, ‘What? That makes no sense.’”

But the more he thought about it, the more he realized that these parents “were paying tuition in order to avoid that stuff.”

The trend toward ideological reasons for opting out is worrying for the larger school choice community, said Richmond, who from 2005 to 2019 was CEO of the National Association of Charter School Authorizers. He was also the founding chairman of the Illinois State Charter School Commission.

A decade ago, he said, “you could get bipartisan support for statements like, ‘Parents ought to be able to choose from a range of options that best meet the needs of their kids.’ Now conservatives aren’t saying stuff like that anymore. It’s like, ‘We’ve got to do this to save America from the Satanic clutch of CRT.’”

The new rhetoric, he said, is “not in pursuit of higher graduation rates and test scores,” he said. It’s “choice in pursuit of winning the culture war.”

That risks alienating politically moderate or left-leaning teachers and parents who would otherwise support choice. If the only politicians who support school choice also happen to be hard-right culture warriors, “,” or Trump supporters, “that might be an Achilles heel of all this,” he said.

‘Every kid is unique’

Mac Ban, the Phoenix mother, said part of her decision to homeschool actually revolved around what she saw as a social justice sensibility creeping into the district — she has heard examples of math word problems that included references to white subjects stealing from Black subjects. Mac Ban said such ideas are “not appropriate for an elementary school student.”

Young children, she said, “need to learn the basics. They need to learn the fundamental things, and they need to learn to think on their own, to think critically, not be told that they are an oppressor.”

Mac Ban, a first-generation American — her family came to the U.S. from Communist-controlled Poland in the 1970s — said she was able to qualify for Arizona’s ESA because her younger daughter had an individualized education plan due to a diagnosed speech delay. Simply being in the same family qualified her older sister, the kindergartner, for ESA funds as well.

Her initial concern that she and her kids would be isolated quickly passed when they joined the Highlands Latin community. “By homeschooling, I don’t mean that I’m just sitting here with my daughters every day and we don’t see anyone …We do all kinds of group lessons, activities. I’m never home. We’re always out and about, doing different things,” she said.

Mac Ban likes having the ability to choose what lessons and subjects her daughter — now a second-grader — pursues.

“Every kid is unique, and the parents know what’s best for their child, ultimately,” she said.

“[My daughter] needs social interaction,” she said in an interview. “I know there’s other kids out there that need social interaction. I know there’s working parents out there that could use the support of somebody like me, and then it just snowballed from there.”

Running a learning pod turned out to be a transformative experience for Samantha. “This is probably the most professionally satisfied I’ve ever been in my entire career,” she said. And she felt there was no turning back: “[After] this experience, I’m not going back to formal K–12 education. I can’t. You can’t. I want to be able to replicate what I had here. You can’t do that in public school.” 

Samantha was not alone in her sentiment. This spring, when CRPE researchers surveyed and interviewed teachers who worked in learning pods, we were struck by how many preferred these learning environments over their prior schools.

The learning pods that proliferated during the 2020–21 school year were unplanned educational experiments that often looked far different than a standard school. They took place in living rooms, community centers, and even neighborhood parks. Many were started by parents who either hired professional educators or took on the role of teacher themselves, often as a complement to their regular school’s remote instruction. 

Learning pods were generally small, with most averaging about six students, though they could still be logistically complicated to run. Along with her daughter, Samantha hosted four other elementary schoolers ranging from first to fourth grade and juggled their remote schedules, which shifted throughout the year between synchronous, asynchronous, and hybrid in-person varieties. “We’ve literally been on nine different schedules since we started,” she said during our interview last March.

Despite their complexity and untested nature, instructors found a lot to like about learning pods. According to a majority of the thirty-five pod instructors we interviewed, teaching in pods was emotionally fulfilling and intellectually satisfying. Like Samantha, many explicitly said that they were not interested in returning to a traditional school setting or—if they did not have previous teaching experience—pursuing a career in formal education. 

What made their experiences in learning pods so positive and their take on traditional education so pessimistic? The answers could point the way toward a more humane and sustainable teaching profession.

Teaching in pods — The joy of autonomy, creativity, and connection

The reasons educators we interviewed enjoyed their pod experience centered on two main factors: the development of close relationships and the professional autonomy to shape what, when, and how their students learned.

Pod instructors frequently cited their ability to get to know their students well. One pod instructor gushed about the experience: “Being able to closely watch them grow and give them so much feedback and all my attention and so much love and just be a close mentor for them. . . .  I don’t think I would have expected to feel as just completely fulfilled from this year as I have.” 

Many instructors also said that having control over their time, curriculum, and lesson design significantly contributed to their satisfaction with the work. One teacher put it succinctly, saying “the freedom to be creative in how I present the material, even what material to present, that’s been the most fun for me,” while another observed that “much like the kids I’m enjoying the freedom of taking things in different directions. It’s so nice as a teacher to . . . just have the gift of time.”

Interestingly, a few instructors made an explicit connection between this autonomy and the strong relationships they had built with the parents who hired them. “I wish this could be in my actual long-term job . . . I just have loved it,” one instructor said. “I’ve loved the families. I’ve loved getting to know the kids. I’ve loved the freedom and flexibility and the respect that the parents have for me.”

Underlying both the relationship development and instructional flexibility was one of the essential characteristics of all pods: their small size. Yet, size was only one factor which allowed for instructors to be more responsive to students’ needs. As Samantha put it: “I can tell you every single one of their strengths. I can tell you their weaknesses. I can tell you what’s going to set them off. I can tell you what’s going to make them happy. I’ve never been able to do that before in my life, except with my own child, and that’s super powerful.” 

Teaching in school — Constrained, overburdened, and underpaid

Whether pod instructors had firsthand experience as teachers or were outsiders to the profession, their sentiments about formal education were generally poor. In fact, much of their reflection on the positive aspects of learning pods were expressed in contrast to school. 

When parents praised Samantha—the pod instructor mentioned earlier—for giving daily feedback on each of their students, she thought it indicated a major inadequacy of the traditional school experience: “I don’t think that that’s the treatment that they are used to getting from an educator. These are highly invested parents . . . and they still don’t feel like they’re a part of their kids’ education.”

The impression these instructors had of teaching in schools was one focused on constraint, control, and monitoring—and specifically in ways that were not central to student learning. 

One pod instructor who planned to return to the classroom lamented that even elementary school teachers will have to forgo many of the creative, exploratory activities they were able to do in pods because of perceived accountability pressures, like the rush to make sure every student was meeting state standards: “You literally can be an effective teacher making a real positive difference in a child’s life but ultimately there are guidelines, there are certain expectations, there’s certain things each teacher has to meet and produce.” 

Along with several other pod instructors, she noted that returning to school would mean “going from making pretty good money in the pod to making terrible money.” That said, money was not always a driving factor. One instructor said, “I would much prefer to do this and work directly with the families and forge the relationships that I have with students now in the future as well, knowing that long-term I may not make as much money. This is the ideal job for me.”

Interestingly, one of the few instructors we interviewed who had a negative experience in a learning pod described it as similar to being a classroom teacher: “When I became the pod teacher, I basically became that system that has failed them. I became this . . . really unappreciated person working a thankless job with hours and hours of work being added on without even anyone batting an eyelid about it.” This comment underscores a particularly bleak view on the way public school teachers are viewed and treated. 

What could a better teaching profession look like? 

While we spoke to a less-than-representative sample of teachers, the combination of positive experiences and an almost uniform resignation that their pod was unlikely to continue beyond the pandemic raises an intriguing question: Why not? What would it look like to normalize learning environments like the pandemic learning communities we studied, provide them with public funding, and make them accessible to all families who wanted to participate—and not just the affluent families with household budgets lavish enough to accomodate teachers for hire?

States should explore policies that allow teachers to operate with a similar level of independence as they had in pods after the pandemic passes. could allow teachers to operate one-room schoolhouses or microschools. Education savings accounts could allow families of all incomes to pay for educational services a la carte, giving a top high school English teacher the option of operating in private practice in the same way a medical specialist could. 

But creating alternatives to the existing system won’t be enough. Policymakers and school system leaders should not accept the normalization of . 

Working in learning pods gave the teachers we interviewed a break from that norm. It showed them they could thrive professionally with greater autonomy. It showed them that they could work flexibly from living rooms or home offices, with more flexible hours—as professionals across the country, including the author of this blog post—discovered during the pandemic. 

It’s no surprise, then, that these teachers reported greater satisfaction. How much better could we do if we designed educational institutions to treat teachers with dignity, encourage their autonomy, honor their expertise, and reward their successes?

There are pockets in public education where this happens. In certain schools and classrooms, teachers build the lessons they’ve always wanted to build, form authentic relationships with students, and design learning experiences around their students’ needs. But tellingly, these pockets often form outside the “core” of the traditional system—in specific schools with peculiar missions, or , in electives or extracurriculars, where teachers enjoy more freedom and students often enjoy more authentic learning experiences. Policymakers and school system leaders should look for these pockets in the school systems they govern, and they should ask what it would take to make the whole system more like that.

Samantha, the pod instructor we interviewed, exhorted school decision-makers to take note of the positive experiences taking place in pods: “I truly hope it does change education, because this is what we need to get back to—not kids being treated like numbers and just pushed through the system.” 

The same can be said for teachers.

Note: We used pseudonyms to protect the identities of teachers we interviewed for this project.

Steven Weiner is a research analyst with the Center on Reinventing Public Education. This analysis . 

These experiments from last year provide some important examples of how families and educators can affirm students’ identities, instill a sense of belonging, and help them resolve conflicts and navigate social situations when they are freed from traditional assumptions and rules about how school is supposed to look.

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Over the past year, we surveyed 253 pod parents and educators throughout the United States. Among the 101 teachers we surveyed, 57 percent previously taught in a public, charter, or private school. We also conducted detailed interviews with twenty-seven parents and thirty-five pod educators to gain a deeper understanding of how they supported students’ well-being.

Fifty-eight percent of surveyed teachers reported they were better able to support their students’ social and emotional well-being in pods than they had been in traditional classrooms.

In interviews, parents and teachers said the combination of small group sizes and flexibility to shape the learning experience enabled educators to form strong relationships with their students and ensure students felt seen, known, and heard, which, in turn, helped them support students’ learning and well-being.

Learning in pods “really shifted to focus on the social and emotional, and working together as a group,” said one teacher. “[Learning is] more focused and more based on their interests, and [with a] more reactive and smaller group, I can do more than a teacher who has thirty students.”

Pod teachers said they had more control over their schedule and lessons, which allowed them to address students’ needs on the fly. When teachers could be more responsive, they said their students trusted them more, which improved relationships throughout the pod, leading to a more positive learning environment.

For example, one teacher we interviewed described how she used her flexibility to work closely with a second-grade student who struggled with interpersonal skills and socializing with his peers. The structure of the pod allowed her to spend additional time to understand his frustrations and help him communicate his needs. This led to stronger relationships between students. “He learned to be with other children … We were able to deal with so many social and emotional issues over time in such a communicative way,” she said. “We had so much time in between lessons.”

Ultimately, pod environments allowed teachers and students to build deeper connections with each other and work through conflicts that arose— something that might be difficult to achieve in large, traditional classrooms where it’s easier for students to get lost in the crowd. 

One parent said the pod experience was “tremendous for [my child’s] social and emotional development … They had conflict. They had disagreements. They had a hard time working things out sometimes. But they learned to … sit down and talk and hear each other … They were like, ‘These are my people. I’ve got to figure this out.’” 

Another parent remarked that her six-year-old daughter had developed better communication skills than most adults while attending her pod. The strong relationships that formed in pods helped set up an environment where teachers could easily support students as they worked through social situations and learned to advocate for themselves, creating a learning environment where students felt safe among their peers.

Small groups and teacher flexibility are hardly new or innovative ideas. But pandemic pods are a good reminder of their power. Both are difficult to implement in traditional school systems with large classes, mandates, and pressures on teachers. 

Still, school system leaders can draw lessons from small pandemic learning communities to better support their students’ well-being and learning. For example:

—Community-based organizations and parents spend the most time with students outside of school and understand their needs best. They know how to create environments where students feel safe, known, and heard. Leaders should honor their expertise by forming partnerships with organizations and parents (e.g., including them as advisors) to design new learning environments—both inside and outside traditional campuses—where students feel valued and motivated to learn, as some districts have done with. 

—Within schools, students often form their most authentic relationships and experience some of their most profound learning outside of their core classes, of school (extracurricular activities, or elective classes like music or drama). Schools should look for ways to develop that same intimacy and authenticity in math, English, or science classes.

—While existing tools for gauging student well-being are often inadequate, measuring students’ perceptions of safety and belonging at school can help leaders understand and respond to their needs. Myriad surveys can measure student well-being; leaders should be intentional about using survey data as a starting point to dig deeper into their needs and experiences. For example, used a combination of student surveys and interviews. When leaders learned students didn’t feel understood by teachers, they searched for ways to improve teacher-student relationships and create a culture of belonging. Creating a feedback loop where leaders track and respond to students’ needs can help build trust and show students that their school cares about them.

Fundamentally, the positive experiences many families and teachers had during their unplanned experiments with learning pods underscore the benefits of giving educators and families the ability to shape learning environments around students’ needs—rather than assumptions about what the school day should look like or how students should spend their time. 

This flexibility allowed teachers to respond more effectively to student needs, which in turn built trust, strengthened relationships, and created the conditions for better learning. The question this raises for our education system is: What will it take to give educators, parents, and students everywhere that same power over their learning environment that allows student needs to drive every decision?

Lisa Chu is a research analyst with the Center on Reinventing Public Education. This analysis . 

This summer, as COVID-19 vaccinations increased, it seemed like the major impetus for these efforts was fading from view. We turned to our of 372 school district- and community-driven learning pods to answer this question: How sustainable is the learning pod movement?

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That question has taken on greater urgency as new, more transmissible variants of the virus raise new safety fears — especially for children too young to be vaccinated — and school systems explore options for families who remain hesitant to return to normal classrooms.

Our analysis found clear evidence that a little over one-third of the learning environments we tracked operated through the end of the school year. But we also identified promising evolutions of the original concepts that will continue into next school year. While, in the short term, most students will likely return to some sort of “normal” school model, the lessons of these small learning communities have the potential to persist in new ways.

Public school learning models changed considerably between our and the end of the school year. Though there were school districts that remained fully remote through the school year, by the end of the year had added at least some in-person options which would, in theory, minimize the need for many of the learning pods in our database since many of them were designed to provide in-person support and internet connections to students who were learning remotely. If pods continued after school districts resumed in-person instruction, that offers some evidence families valued the alternatives to traditional classrooms that they provided.

We found that 37 percent of all learning pods identified in the database operated through the full 2020-21 school year (figure 1). Half of the pods were “unclear,” meaning there was no clear end date to the pod-like offerings, but also no clear indication they continued through the end of the year. Only 12 percent had definitively closed at some point before the end of the year. It’s possible that many of the “unclear” pods also ceased school-day support but never updated their websites or social media to make the announcement.

Many of the learning pods that existed before the pandemic as afterschool programs or summer camps switched back to their pre-pandemic programming. For example, as schools opened, some YMCAs, Boys & Girls Clubs, and other afterschool enrichment clubs simply closed their school-day supervision.

But others continued on. Some, like the network, which supported culturally relevant community-based pods across the country for Black and brown students, finished out the school year even as districts in some locations opened for at least some of the year. Some virtual learning centers, such as the city-led options in or , likely continued based on ongoing need as schools reopened late in the school year and some families chose to stay remote.

Even as the school year came to a close, some organizations that emerged specifically to support remote learning are evolving to serve their communities in new formats. For example, , a learning pod that provided whole-student support to BIPOC youth through the full school year, runs a summer program and continues to provide mentorship opportunities for teens. And a program between a local nonprofit and the Jefferson County School District in Kentucky is leading summer learning hubs across the county with staffing support, including counselors and teachers from the school district, to re-engage students and prepare them for the upcoming school year.

These continuing programs provide glimpses of where the learning pod movement might go beyond the pandemic. Six school districts in the organized by CRPE and TNTP are developing plans for pod-like structures in the next school year, with goals like providing space for students to focus on their purpose and passion projects, or to create opportunity for mentorship and serve as a pipeline to develop a more representative teacher workforce. Programs like the new , or the virtual learning pod program launched by provide further examples of efforts to build intentional small learning communities into the future—and seed ideas for school districts that want to find new ways of supporting students who continue with virtual learning options.

In all of these examples, it’s clear some families and communities discovered something during the pandemic that they would like to preserve—different ways to organize school, new approaches to supporting students, stronger ties between school and community. And while many learning pods simply launched to meet a specific need in a crisis — providing in-person support to students learning virtually — that function, too, is likely to remain relevant as school systems across the country create or expand virtual learning options.

Sustaining these crisis responses through the next phase of the pandemic will likely require shifts in funding and staff, as well as changes in policies governing everything from teacher credentialing to the definition of school. CRPE will continue to share lessons we learned from studying small pandemic learning communities. We can’t afford to let the possibilities they uncovered simply vanish.

About this analysis: The CRPE database focuses on learning pods sponsored by school districts and community organizations — as opposed to the learning pods some parents and independent educators offered in their homes. We checked the original sources for each of the learning pods in the database to identify whether the learning pods were still operational as of the end of the 2020–21 school year. As in prior analyses, the data here should be considered an estimate and is not representative of all learning pods across the country. For many learning pods in the database, we could find no updates from the original source. In these cases, we marked that it was “unclear” whether or not the pod continued through the school year. We only coded “yes”—that the pod continued—if we could closely ascertain that the pod was offering services through the end of the year by advertising program end dates, session schedules, or other evidence such as an end-of-year report noting that school-day learning supports had continued.

Alice Opalka is a research analyst with the Center on Reinventing Public Education. This analysis .

The VELA Education Fund has made grants to a number of groups engaging in these learning models and the Center on Reinventing Public Education has taken on the intriguing work of tracking their progress. Together with The 74, the two groups hosted a panel discussion Thursday with three founders to hear about the ways they have worked to meet students’ needs in their community and what innovations they hope to keep when COVID-19 recedes.

The 74’s Beth Hawkins moderated a discussion with CRPE Director Robin Lake, Engaged Detroit founder Bernita Bradley, Elijah Moses of Wise Young Builders in Buffalo and Washington, D.C., and Green Gate Children’s School co-founder Katie Saiz in Wichita, Kansas.

Disclosure: The Walton Family Foundation provides financial support to both the VELA Education Fund and The 74.