New School Models Embrace Smaller Size

Forbes

02-04-2025

It is tough to understate just how central a role scale has played in education reform.
Starting more than a century ago, reformers looked to scale up schools, inventing institutions like the comprehensive high school to centralize student populations and broaden the offerings available to them. In this century, movements towards statewide teacher evaluation systems or even nationwide educational standards were massive in scale.
Scale has been a part of the school choice movement as well. For a time, if a promising charter or private school model came onto the scene, the first question they were asked was 'can you scale up?' A school was not truly seen as successful unless it could open 5, 10, or 20 campuses.
The tide has turned.
Increasingly, parents, educators, philanthropists, and states themselves are looking to smaller learning environments. Organizations like the National Microschooling Center are tracking the growth in purposely small learning environments. The National Hybrid Schools Project is doing the same for hybrid homeschooling. According to a recent EdChoice/Morning Consult poll, 14% of parents state that they would like to have their child learn from home entirely, with either parents or a tutor working with them. Thirty-three percent of parents identified that they would like their child learning from home between one and four days per week. Thirty-five percent said that their child was either currently working with a tutor or that they were looking for a tutor for their child.
I contributed a chapter to the new book School Rethink 2.0 (edited by Rick Hess, Michael Horn, and Julie Squire) looking at small scale school environments. These include homeschools, homeschool co-ops, hybrid homeschools, microschools, and tutoring.
I identify four forces driving the creation of new, smaller school models.
The wider availability of educational resources and the ability of learning management software to organize those resources into coherent lessons and units makes it much easier for parents or single educators to teach students on their own. Whereas in the past educational resources were expensive to obtain and limited in their offerings, the world really is an educator's oyster today. And, while there is a lot of administrative work to be done managing even a small number of students, technology is getting better at handling that.
When talking to parents who enroll their children in hybrid homeschools (schools that offer formal classes part of the week and have students learn from home for the rest), it was interesting to see how many worked jobs with non-traditional hours. For nurses, doctors, realtors, car salespeople, and others, a non-traditional school schedule could actually work better than a traditional Monday to Friday, 8 to 3:30 schedule. As more and more professionals utilize flexible work schedules, more and more parents may look for flexible schooling schedules. It is much easier for a smaller school to be flexible than a larger one, a difference that can make smaller educational options more attractive.
Historically, funders in the education reform space were more likely to support scalable school models (or models that were in the process of scaling). That is changing. In 2019, the Walton Family Foundation and Charles Koch Institute launched the VELA Education Fund to seed small educational entrepreneurs to launch schools and create other solutions. Educators did not have to serve thousands of students to get funded. At the time the book was published, VELA had awarded more than 2,500 small grants, and the number is surely higher now. (Full disclosure: I received funding from VELA for my research on hybrid homeschooling and the various organizations that I have worked for have received funding from both the Walton Family Foundation and Koch-related entities.)
Perhaps the most transformative change in the past half-decade in favor of small school models has been the creation of Education Savings Account programs in states across the country. Extending public funding to parents in ways that is flexible allows them to find smaller environments and supplement any of their shortcomings with additional resources. Simply making tutoring providers, microschool operators, and hybrid schools eligible for support has been incredibly helpful for entrepreneurial educators looking to launch their schools or services.
This is not to say that there are not headwinds. Technology is not all it's cracked up to be. As more and more parents and educators become skeptical of technology and more forthright about its limitations, what was seen as a limitless horizon of opportunity is becoming much more drawn in. The same is true for work schedules. As businesses rein in flexible work schedules and bring people back into the office for a traditional schedule, schools with alternative schedules could take a hit. Philanthropy is fickle and could return to desiring larger models. Parents' preferences could change too, directing their new state support to larger school models.
All that said, it is clear that parents want learning environments where their children are known and understood. They don't want to see their children lost in the shuffle or slip through the cracks. Educators want the same. They don't want to be cogs in a big impersonal machine. These fundamental realities help explain the allure of smaller learning models.