I recently toured Freedom Learning Academy in Overland Park, Kansas, and was really inspired by what I saw there. Josiah Enyart was a public school teacher and coach for more than 10 years. Over time, he started to get a bit disillusioned by what he was seeing in his school. But it was really when his oldest child entered public school and started having some issues that he began paying closer attention to what was happening.

Then Covid hit, and the district’s mask and vaccination policies were the final straw. He pulled his kids from the district and decided to homeschool them. Other parents found out and wanted Josiah to teach their kids, too. He quickly remodeled his basement and launched Freedom Learning Academy in fall 2021 with 15 students. Word continued to spread, and he had 18 students by the end of the year—with nearly 80 on a waitlist.

With so much interest in his school, Josiah was scrambling to find a bigger location. But it’s hard to find a place that can work for a variety of educational needs, including classrooms, a community space, and outdoor space. Eventually he found a church that was happy to let the school come in on weekdays for an affordable price. Because of the trouble with finding a location, many of the interested families had already committed to other educational options. Despite the delay, Freedom Learning Academy had 36 students in the first year in the church and almost 50 the next year.

Freedom Learning Academy is registered as a Non-Accredited Private School in Kansas, which Josiah likes because it gives him a lot of flexibility and freedom from government intrusion. It is strongly influenced by Montessori principles, like self-directed learning with lots of hands-on activities. Teachers strive to maintain a homeschool-like atmosphere with one-on-one attention and giving students time to explore topics in depth and move at their own pace.

FLA uses Kansas state standards as a guide because Josiah believes it will help students when they transition to other learning environments, but students can move up and down as needed rather than being locked into a certain level based on their age or grade.

So far, Josiah’s experiment seems to be working. Enrollment has grown each year, and he hasn’t lost any students. “The families at FLA have been greatly impacted by our school,” he says. “With FLA, they have found a safe community that supports parental rights, hard work, strong character, good decision making, and a desire to build up every child in their academic and social skills through meaningful and engaging work mixed in with the opportunity to experience nature and participate in society.”

Josiah isn’t just bullish on FLA; he’s bullish on the sector as a whole. “Alternative education models like home-school, micro schools, and hybrid schools are the wave of the educational future,” he explains. “They are the only way I see us strengthening our country and maintaining the family values that shaped our country’s success that so many hold dear. It is a leap of faith. It is a lot of change if you’ve only been in public or private school, but it is worth it.”

To any would-be education entrepreneurs, including parents and teachers, who are considering starting a new learning environment, Josiah is very encouraging. “There are so many people willing to help and support your endeavor to improve education and the lives of those involved. The more options we can provide for parents, the more successful this next generation of leaders will be. We need to rebuild the bedrocks of our society: Strong family values, virtuous behavior, and skilled and knowledgeable individuals with the ability to collaborate, problem solve, and think critically. Alternative education is the answer.”

When the kids in Rosa Aristy’s homeschool co-op said they wanted to learn coding, the moms all looked at each other and wondered who was going to teach those classes. “The kids were so enthusiastic and wanted to learn more,” she recalls. “And I thought to myself, I’m not going to let these kids down. I was a marketing analyst before I became a mom, so I had done some programming. Not the kind they would want to learn, but I thought I could figure things out and take it from there.”

Rosa knew the kids would need a very solid math curriculum if they were going to get into robotics and coding. “I decided to start out with a math club, so then I’d get a rhythm and create a community,” she said. “Then these kids would be equipped to dive deep into robotics and coding and whatnot.”

She arranged for professors from Texas A&M to facilitate some sessions and she facilitated the others. One thing led to the other, and soon Rosa made connections that allowed her to start planning a robotics program. She was spending a lot of money on supplies and hated paying taxes on it when it was for educational purposes, so she decided to start a non-profit called Bridges to Science.

“Two months after we launched, Covid came and everything changed,” she recalls. “We started doing virtual, primarily the math circle. We continued that because the students really wanted to, and it gave them a sense of continuity in the midst of it all. Then we also started doing virtual coding clubs. We believe in providing a whole ecosystem for the students. By that I mean it’s not just me and the parents who are there chaperoning.

“We invite professionals—software engineers from different tech companies, faculty members, retired engineers, you name it. Every year in the math circle, we have a theme. Last year it was finance and economics. We did the stock market game, and we invited a lot of financial professionals who gave our students a peek into how they use math to buy stocks, create portfolios, etc.”

Last year, Rosa launched a Youth Ambassador program, where the upper high school students start training the younger students. Bridges to Science also has what they call family creative learning gatherings, which Rosa says are like mini science festivals. The youth ambassadors facilitate the different activities at the gatherings.

According to Rosa, the gatherings got the attention of a sponsor who suggested they host a larger event. “So we did,” she says. “We just launched the Houston Science Festival on September 9, and it was an amazing success. We exceeded expectations in attendance. We welcomed over 15 exhibitors, including the Houston Museum of Natural Science, Texas A&M, Rice University, cyber​.org, and Girls Who Code. We had music to kick off Hispanic heritage month. It was lots of fun. What was very gratifying is that over two-thirds of attendees were people who are considered low income. Many pulled me to the side and told me ‘if you hadn’t done this, we wouldn’t have ever seen any of these.’”

Rosa also focuses on Hispanic outreach. “There aren’t that many Hispanics homeschooling, and we believe there can be more of them,” she notes. “That was another great thing about the festival. Families came to us and said, ‘Oh my goodness, I didn’t know there were so many of us because usually every group has just handful of Hispanics.’ So we want to work with them and help them realize there are others.”

Bridges to Science is now shifting towards becoming an organization that supports the yearly science festival since it’s so much work. In between, the focus will be working with different communities in the Houston area so that families have access to resources that might not be accessible to them now. “If they attend a coding workshop or go to the Houston Museum of Natural Science to explore chemistry or the life sciences, the children begin to see which areas catch their fancy. Once you give them all these appetizers then they might want to dive deep into one of them,” Rosa explains. “The way we see our organization is we are a bridge—on one end of the bridge we have the communities that have little access and on the other we have the organizations, primarily universities, and we connect the two.”

School is back in session and many districts prepared by stocking up on School Resource Officers (SROs). Yet research is unclear about the effectiveness of SROs at increasing school safety, and suggests their presence leads to excessive discipline.

Policies increasing SROs are often proposed in response to school shootings, and officers have adopted additional roles outside of traditional law enforcement in an attempt to maximize security. But as demonstrated in the Parkland, Florida, and Uvalde, Texas shootings, law enforcement isn’t a panacea, and its presence may adversely impact students.

Concern for and calls to address students’ safety amplify when innocent lives are stolen by a school shooter. Such a horrific act of violence leaves many traumatized and shakes the public with fear. But, as seen in the charts below, over the past decade public schools became increasingly hardened, yet active shooter situations remained relatively stable or were even in an increasing trend. Also, far fewer students than usual were physically in schools due to COVID-19 for part of 2020 and much of 2021. This suggests increasing security may not be the best approach to address shootings.

Looking at specific attacks, Scot Peterson, the School Resource Officer at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, remained outside for over 45 minutes until the shooting subsided, acting in opposition to his active shooter training, which directs officers to confront the shooter. Peterson cited confusion about the location of the shooting, yet dispatch audio was discovered of him identifying where the shots were coming from. Peterson was charged with child neglect, culpable negligence, and perjury, but acquitted on all charges.

At Robb Elementary in Uvalde, poor judgment calls between officers led to a 77-minute wait before law enforcement confronted the shooter. Nearly 400 officers were on the scene at Uvalde. Yet the lack of consensus on how to approach the situation and the absence of leadership resulted in a severely prolonged response.

This is especially alarming considering two months prior to the shooting, Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District police officers completed active shooter training at Uvalde High School.

In the rare situations in which active shooters enter schools, both cases highlight the complexities around confronting the shooter, school security failures, and law enforcement’s pitfalls. Large settings where schools are divided into two buildings, like in Parkland, make it increasingly difficult to locate the shooter, despite the presence of security cameras and personnel. Both schools had multiple doors unlocked, allowing the shooter access to the buildings. Schools can be heavily hardened, but if security measures are not applied as intended, that can be in vain.

Even in cases where an SRO successfully intervened to apprehend the shooter, like at Great Mills High School in Maryland, the assailant was able to bring a firearm into school, fire, and injure two students before being stopped. Despite the known presence of police, schools remain a target. In fact, a study found that after controlling for factors such as school type, location, and characteristics of the attack, the rate of deaths was 2.83 times greater in schools with an armed officer present than without one. These findings could be a result of shooters attempting to commit “suicide by cop,” when the shooter targets settings in which they know police protocol is to neutralize the target, suggesting an underlying mental health issue.

Perhaps SROs are charged with doing too much, including serving as counselors. According to the National Association of School Resource Officers, SROs assume a triad model: teacher, informal counselor, and law enforcement officer to maximize school safety. Such a wide net leaves SROs’ duties applicable to several issues within a school, but they may not be suited for such complex roles.

SROs are not required to have any additional education or training to police schools. Teachers, in contrast, at a minimum possess a bachelor’s degree, while counselors typically hold an advanced degree or additional certifications. Degrees are not always synonymous with greater ability to do a job, but schools are not the same as the street, and police officers might be poorly prepared to do work outside of traditional law enforcement.

Police officers are trained to respond to threatening and dangerous situations, not to counsel children, which can leave students underserved when serious mental health support is needed. Filling schools with police also sends a message to students that school isn’t safe, fostering a climate of apprehension and uncertainty.

It’s important to take necessary protective measures to ensure student safety, but SROs may not be the best avenue.

When education was disrupted during the pandemic, Dominque Burgess didn’t waste time. An educator with more than a decade of experience, she had started Burbrella Education pre-COVID-19 to support parents, teachers, and school leaders with coaching and support. In spring 2020, she started offering remote learning options to help families while schools were closed.

Dominque was very flexible and began adding options as parents and teachers expressed interest. She now operates Burbrella Learning Academy, which includes an online microschool, an in-person microschool in North Carolina, and tutoring.

In the beginning, she says most of the families who signed up with Burbrella were already homeschooling their kids and were looking for academic support and a consistent schedule. Then there were parents who were frustrated by the poor communications from their local school and wanted something more concrete. As schools started to return in person, some parents who weren’t ready for that turned to Burbrella. But at the same time, other parents were asking for in-person options. “So we coordinated some homeschool co-ops in specific states where we had interest from parents,” she explains.

As the homeschool co-ops spread, more families were asking for in-person options in their locations. Dominque says, “I did a good amount of research on microschools for about a year. After looking at the parameters around how a microschool can operate in North Carolina, I decided to start the first one here because (1) this is currently home for me, and (2) I spent a lot of time during Covid analyzing the different educational institutions and dynamics of education here in North Carolina.”

She chose Alamance County for her first in-person location to help parents see that there are other educational options out there and because she didn’t find many alternatives in the area. “The first question that we get is ‘what’s a microschool,’” says Dominque. That gives her the opportunity to explain what a microschool is and how they are revitalizing education while providing families with choice.

The Burbrella microschool in NC, which opened this year, is K‑5 and meets Monday through Friday. Parents can choose a hybrid option as well, where they do three days in person and two at home in the online school. There’s also a homeschool drop-in option for homeschoolers on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The after-school program is open to district, charter, and private school students.

Plans are in the works to open an in-person microschool in Indiana next year. The online microschool is preK-12, which is Dominque’s goal for her in-person locations as well.

The Burbrella online microschool offers live classes Monday through Friday. Students get all of the core content area subjects—math, reading, history, and STEAM [science, technology, engineering, art, and math]. Dominque says teachers must understand that Burbrella is play‑, projects‑, and nature-based. “Our classes are structured just a little bit different than the traditional online classes, and we hire teachers that are aligned with our philosophy and our mission,” she says.

According to Dominque, Burbrella operates kind of like a network school district. “We say, ‘Here are the parameters around curriculum. Every class that will be taught in the online school needs to cover these four subjects—because we’re in a large number of states and want to make sure that the homeschooling expectation for every state is covered.”

It’s clear that Dominque’s flexible approach is appealing for many parents. She has 168 students from 18 states in the online microschool.

Dominque’s advice for parents is “know what’s available to you in your community, in your county. If it’s not there, push for it, ask for it.” And, like other education entrepreneurs I’ve talked to, her advice for prospective school founders is “take the leap.”

She notes that many teachers are afraid to leave the traditional setting because they don’t know where they’ll get things like insurance and retirement plans. “It will find you,” she says. “I tell teachers all the time the same 401K that I had and insurance premiums that I had, I still have. And that’s because people in this community found me. I was able to bring plans over for a much cheaper rate. So, take the leap. Do it. All the things will fall into place for you.”

I’ve got a new article in Reason on an unusual regulatory arrangement in Maryland that requires universities to ask permission of the state higher education commission to start new degree programs, and invites rival institutions to file objections on the grounds that they would be harmed by the resulting competition for students.

In short, it replicates for higher education the kind of “certificate of need” rules strongly criticized by libertarian thinkers in the realm of health care. As in health care, I write, the “result can be state-enforced cartel arrangements that protect inefficient incumbents, slow innovation, and leave consumers with fewer and less attractive choices.”

The Maryland program is not, for the most part, rationalized as a matter of cost containment and, in fact, is very poorly suited to such a purpose. It does nothing to curb the number of students that can be admitted, only the opportunities they can be given. In practice, the rules often protect incumbent programs with low rates of student completion, which are among the worst offenders in contributing to government spending and burdensome student debt.

The fiercest disputes under the law tend to be over degrees in sought-after professional fields like business, engineering, and computer technology. (The Maryland Higher Education Commission guidelines provide that basic liberal arts programs are not normally suitable subjects for objection since colleges have a core interest in offering them.)

Contrary to the picture sometimes painted by “campus life gone wild” accounts, the top fields in which Maryland’s major state system awards degrees are sober and career-oriented: business, computers, and health professions. (All the social sciences combined, including economics and political science, come in as fourth.)

After documenting some recent battles under the law, worsened by a racial angle in which the state tries to bend over backwards to assist historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), I quote a Baltimore Sun editorial: “The insanity of it” is that the conflict has little to do with the well-being of the students and “everything to do with protecting the institutional prerogatives and egos of the schools.” The best way to promote students’ interests, I argue, would be to allow competition and choice. You can read the piece here.

One of the great things about the increase in microschools, hybrid schools, and similar options is the flexibility they give families. Rather than being locked into a Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. schedule, parents can find the options that meet the individual needs of their children. Streams of Hope Christian School in Fort Wayne, Indiana, takes flexibility to a whole new level.

Despite being only in its fourth year, Streams of Hope offers an amazing range of education options: full-time school; part-time school, which meets each morning and covers all core subjects; homeschool enrichment classes, which meet in the afternoon; online classes; and a Friday homeschool co-op. A new hybrid option, which will meet in person two or three days a week and provide at-home lessons for the other days, is in the works.

Executive Director Jill Haskins says the school was started by a teacher who had been offering classes from her home for 30 years. The pastor of Heartland Church in Fort Wayne asked the teacher to start a school at the church. Jill, a former public school teacher who had been homeschooling her children for six years at that point, enrolled her youngest son in Streams of Hope when it opened in 2020. The following March, Jill became a teacher at the school; she took over as Executive Director earlier this year.

“We’re still working on figuring out what a couple of the programs will look like,” she says. “I don’t know what will stick and what won’t long term. We’re just trying to figure out what the need is and how to meet that need.”

According to Jill, the 2020 opening was unrelated to the pandemic and accompanying school closures. “They had been planning on opening prior to Covid hitting and never once closed down during Covid, which was amazing,” she notes. “We’ve grown kind of massively in the past four years. I think Covid is probably one of the catalysts that helped bring that growth.”

While each day and each class is different, the school follows a general schedule. A typical day starts with morning prayer and announcements and individual teacher/​student check-ins. Then students work independently, in small groups, and in whole class groups. Half-day students leave at noon, while full-day students eat lunch. After lunch, full-day and homeschool students participate in afternoon classes, which are focused on enrichment and creative pursuits.

Streams of Hope has multi-age classrooms. Jill currently has 26 students in her class; the youngest is in 6^th grade and the oldest is in 12^th. There are two additional classrooms with fewer students and narrower age spans. Jill says they plan to even out the age ranges in each classroom as the other teachers gain more experience.

There are currently 42 students enrolled in the full- and half-day private school option that covers all of the core curriculum. In the afternoon enrichment sessions there are 25 students, which includes a mix of full-time and homeschool students. While many of the students take individual online classes, only two are enrolled exclusively online. And there are 33 children in the homeschool co-op.

Some private school leaders are hesitant to adopt creative scheduling options that include part-time and à la carte classes because they fear it will be too complicated. “From the administrative, back-end side of things, it creates a bit of extra work,” Jill acknowledges. There are different enrollment forms, and the school really emphasizes the distinction for families. “We’re very specific to clarify ‘You’re enrolling in the private school option, you are a private schooler. You are not a home schooler.’ Or ‘You are enrolling in an à la carte homeschool class. You are still a homeschooling family.’” And there are logistic challenges of which child is being dropped off and picked up at what time. But she says it’s not too complicated overall, and it’s seamless for the students.

“We’re still kind of exploring what our hybrid option is going to look like,” she continues. “Our hybrid students will be enrolled at our private school, so they wouldn’t be homeschooled. But will they be doing two or three days here and two or three days at home? And are we going to do that project based? Is it going to look completely different than how we do things here or are we going to give them the planner pages like our regularly enrolled students do and then just have them continue that at home? We don’t quite know yet. That’s something we’re trying to develop and figure out.”

The front page of the Streams of Hope website proclaims, “We approach education in ways that meet the needs of each individual student & family.” It’s clear from the multitude of options available at the school that they really strive to live up to that goal.

In recent years, there has been an explosion of school choice programs that enable parents to use state education dollars for learning options beyond the local district school. Education savings accounts (ESAs) have become particularly popular for the flexibility they provide: parents can use the funds for a variety of education options like tuition, tutoring, curriculum, and services for children with special needs. It seems like homeschoolers would be prime beneficiaries of ESAs since they often tap into multiple resources to educate their children.

While some homeschoolers support ESAs, more traditional homeschoolers and homeschool groups often fight these programs because they want to avoid government entanglement. In the 1960s and 1970s, parents had to wage legal and legislative battles to secure the right to homeschool their children. Homeschoolers who know this history often want to remain completely separate from the government. These traditional homeschool groups are politically active and will fight against programs that they think will encroach on homeschool freedoms.

As my new Cato Briefing Paper, School Choice Programs Need a Firewall for Homeschoolers, explains, there is a solution that can satisfy both groups. ESA programs can be written to exclude students who are officially registered as homeschoolers while creating a separate category for students who use an ESA for home-based education. Because each state’s education laws are different, there isn’t a cut-and-paste solution. But by looking at the compulsory education requirements and homeschool provisions in a particular state, policymakers can craft language that will work.

As school choice programs continue to expand and spread, it’s important for homeschoolers to be engaged and for policymakers to listen to their concerns. With careful design, education savings accounts can help new families begin their home education journey while protecting those who want to stay independent of the government.