A Message for Potential Founders and Starters of New Microschool Programs in ESA States!
I have attended several conferences in the past year and I am encouraged by the range of people and groups offering start-up coaching to teachers and parents interested in joining the current school choice movement. There are a lot of innovative, creative, and practical programs and organizations ready to coach and support new start-ups, including our friends at AERO, ASDE, the National Microschool Association, Prenda, Kaipod, Acton Academy, a number of faith-based groups, and a slew of individual consultants. This landscape is entirely new compared to when we began North Star in 1996, and even compared to when we started Liberated Learners in 2013.
Given this plethora of expertise, what makes Liberated Learners necessary?
Our answer comes from our initial framing of what problem we are trying to solve: that schooling creates a constraining and limiting relationship between teachers and students. We are frustrated with the regulations and testing required in conventional public schools, and we know these issues extend to charter schools as well. However, leaving our jobs in the public sector to teach at private schools does not appeal to us either, as we see private schools as having many of the same issues. We are seeking a fresh, more open way to work with students.
We want more than to be people who “give young people freedom” to develop their own project-based learning through a required curriculum. Instead, we support young people and their parents to fully “claim their freedom” and then invite them to share as much of their time and energy with us as they wish. We host centers that are open regularly and offer classes, but have no mandatory attendance or participation. We operate like a health club or a senior center, trusting our members (and checking in with them regularly) to create their own ideal weekly routines. We encourage our members to declare interests and figure out how to pursue them, without demanding that they complete our curriculum first.
We are coaches, hosts, teachers, mentors. These are the relationships we seek, uncorrupted by external needs to evaluate with grades or to provide credits and diplomas. Those of you who have read Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn understand that, “Rewards corrupt relationships.”
We know that our students enter into young adulthood, including top competitive colleges, with success. We support young people to live their best lives as children and teenagers, and then move along to further study, work, entrepreneurship, the arts, and every facet of life that high school graduates utilize. We celebrate joyously that living in freedom is a head start, not a dead end.
Our students and families need us to exist. They would not leave school and sustain a homeschooling-unschooling-self-directed learning approach without our community, without our coaching, and without our confidence. Liberated Learners is a challenge to the whole enterprise of schooling. Our slogan is “Learning is natural. School is optional.”
The recent expansion of Education Savings Accounts in many states has helped cause a major proliferation of microschools and homeschooling programs across the country. The reality that each student in these states may receive $5,000-$10,000 per year makes the sustainability of new private schools and homeschooling-oriented programs much more plausible. Liberated Learners is excited to offer our approach to individuals and teams in these states who are now considering the idea of creating their own project, and we have received a grant from Stand Together Trust to do so with some assertiveness and generosity in 2024-2025.
For those of you wishing for something more than creating your own best version of school, and dreaming of a world beyond schooling, Liberated Learners has the vision, the experience, and the coaching you may need. If these concepts appeal to you, please consider joining us for an introductory webinar or contact us about our Starters Program.
