The Next Big Thing is Getting Small

Combining the community and joy of microschooling with the rigor of top-flight distance learning creates a new path to scale high demand K-12 schools.

Microschooling in San Carlos, Arizona
The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of new combinations.
Steven Berlin Johnson

By Matthew Ladner

Introduction: Crisis and Opportunity 

At the time of this writing, American schools have completed the largest experiment in distance learning in the history of our nation. Against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Spring semester of 2020 presented an incredibly tall challenge for educators. The results were predictably uneven, with a recent poll revealing that 40% of respondents believed their children had fallen behind academically, and 38% reported considering changing schools with another 20% reported as having already done so.[i]

In the summer of 2020, some American families began organically organizing into small schools or groups known as “pandemic pods,” with online groups and firms matching families and sometimes hiring their own teachers. In the absence of a policy environment that would allow public funding to follow the student, this trend has created equity issues whereby this form of education will be available only to those who can afford it. However, public schools could adopt “pods” into distance learning programs, provide devices to students and salaries to staff, and provide academic transparency and accountability.

This paper proposes a method for schools to combine high-quality distance learning techniques developed during the pandemic shutdown with small in-person learning communities. American schools are navigating a terrible crisis within which lies an opportunity for both educators and families to combine the most effective techniques developed by high-preforming distance learning providers along with the tight-knit nature of small communities. This innovative approach may enable high demand schools to offer learning opportunities to both winners and losers enrollment lotteries. Public policy should support this trend to ensure inclusivity.

The Adjacent Possible in K-12 Education

Science writer Matthew Ridley offers an illuminating metaphor for innovation, whereby ideas have children. As with biological offspring, a new idea carries with it the DNA of both parents, but it represents something distinct from both. Similarly, Steven Berlin Johnson describes the idea of the “adjacent possible.” Both thinkers agree that innovation does not happen as a result of an apple falling on the head of a super-genius; rather, it is through a process of trial and error, tinkering with preexisting technologies and practices and finding ways to recombine and improve pre-existing technologies or practices in order to create something new. This paper suggests such an innovation in K-12 education – distance learning and micro-schooling combined.

Innovation sometimes happens quickly, sometimes over the course of time, and almost always as a result of multiple people toiling through trial and error with existing realities. For example, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing existed for many years until innovative efforts led to a combination of both that would  revolutionize the natural gas and then the oil industries, ultimately transforming the United States from the largest oil importer to the largest oil producer in short order.

While education has yet to experience a broad Eureka! moment; within it, there are individuals and systems committed to developing innovative new models. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, American K-12 education faced grave challenges in equity and effectiveness.[ii] Highly effective instructors and schools were in short supply relative to need. And, as is generally the case with scarce resources, wealthy families accessed effective schools most easily, purchasing educational enrichment activities at far higher rates than low-income families. The COVID-19 pandemic may have exacerbated all these challenges, but it also forced the development of new ideas.

Both practical and legal limitations have hampered the reach of choice mechanisms before the pandemic, including, for instance, the need for charter school operators to secure facilities with what is generally a lower total per pupil amount of public funding.[iii] School leaders faced considerable challenges in opening schools to meet demand – especially in the area of facilities – even in states with liberal charter laws. The crisis forced educational innovation and created the opportunity for new instructional models of delivery with the potential to allow high demand school operators to scale in novel ways.

The COVID-19 Forced Experimentation in Delivery of Instruction

What unfolded during the Spring of 2020 spanned from the disastrous to the innovative. To illustrate, in its survey of 477 school districts, the Center for the Reinvention of Public Education found that only a third of districts expected all teachers to deliver online instruction. Rural and small-town districts were more likely than urban and suburban districts to forgo instruction.[iv] Affluent districts were twice as likely as their counterparts with the highest concentrations of low-income students to require at least some teachers to provide real-time instruction. Less than half of all districts communicated an expectation that teachers would either take attendance or check in with students regularly.[v]

Unsurprisingly, by June of 2020, the Wall Street Journal declared “The Results Are in for Remote Learning: It Didn’t Work,” begging the question, “compared to what?” However difficult the Spring of 2020 proved, “normal” learning was no longer an option, and there is no doubt that students learned something rather than nothing as a result of the heroic efforts of educators committed to making the very best of a bad situation.

Even before the conclusion of the 2020 school year, analysts had begun exploring what went right and what went wrong with Chiefs for Change and John Hopkins Institute for Education Policy publishing a guide to reopening schools. Driven by the hope that the educational challenges of Spring 2020 would help inform practice in the new school year, the guide acknowledges that distance learning as neither a “success” or “failure,” and sagely notes that it is  better to learn from both triumphs and catastrophes:

The COVID-19 crisis is forcing all of us to revisit how we understand and therefore configure teachers’ roles. System leaders are looking to strategic staffing models that maximize students’ instruction from the teachers who have deep subject-area and instructional expertise, and students’ experiences with teachers who excel at forging real connections. Both roles are critical and require retooling teams for the collective responsibility of students. Models that expand the reach of outstanding instructors, while freeing up other educators to provide much-needed one-on-one academic and relational support to help all kids stay on track, hold extraordinary promise for our students.[vi]

At this writing, American schools must confront the possible necessity of reopening with a combination of learning models available to families with varying levels of risk tolerance. Uncertainty reigns supreme, but absent the discovery, creation, and distribution of an effective vaccine against COVID-19, school leaders must prepare to offer a menu of instructional delivery options.

The demand for normalcy may exceed the ability of many schools to supply it. Both students and teachers with immune-compromised family members living in the home may feel a profound reluctance to resume in traditional person learning. In addition, more of the teachers eligible for retirement may choose to pursue this option.[vii]

Necessity is the mother of invention, and America currently needs new school models. This recent period of experimentation with hybrid education may open the door to serving those students on charter school waitlists through micro-school models. As part of their strategy to facilitate social distancing on their campuses, CMOs might also consider offering this option not only to currently enrolled students, but also to students on their wait lists. As the Chiefs for Changes/John Hopkins reopening document notes:

Such models also fit well with the small group learning that is likely to continue well into the future. In addition, as systems consider reentry and the operational requirements of their classrooms and buildings, reshaping teacher time and role will be a necessity. Such models are inherently more flexible, enabling both small in-person or remote class sizes and larger lectures. Any school reopening plan must also be able to accommodate ongoing shifts between distance and in-person learning.[viii]

A possible path forward, and the subject of this paper, lies in combining lessons learned in distance learning during the pandemic with those from micro-schooling in recent years. This concept could take many different forms, but the pages below will discuss Success Academy’s distance learning efforts and Prenda Microschools.

Remote Learning at New York’s Success Academy

In the decade before the pandemic, American education saw the rise and subsequent fall of the Massive Open Online Course – or MOOC. Hundreds of thousands of people worldwide began taking online courses free of charge from prestigious universities such as Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Lectures from many leading experts in the field could be recorded and then viewed by hundreds of thousands of students. Enthusiasm diminished however when information surfaced regarding very low completion rates. MOOCs may yet revolutionize education, given improvements in credentialing and content delivery. Alternatively, they may not – it may be the case that education is fundamentally a social enterprise that works best in person with instructors and classmates. In either case, the distance learning efforts of the pandemic times could scarcely have occurred without the preceding decades of experience with distance learning.

Faced with the urgent need to implement distance learning, Success Academy developed an instructional model to promote student engagement – a hands-on and almost anti-MOOC. Lessons were delivered live rather than through recordings, with teachers actively engaging with students and quickly remediating them when necessary. By modifying the role of the instructor, they created a technological path towards the expansion of access to high-quality instruction.

Founded in 2006, Success Academy Charter Schools is the largest and highest performing network of charter schools in New York City, with 45 schools serving 18,000 students in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx. The Success Academy network includes 78% of students from low-income households; 8.5% are current and former English Language Learners, and 15% are current and/or former special needs students.[ix]  Minority students comprise 93% of Success Academy students, and they also boast some of the highest levels of academic achievement in the state of New York. Stanford University’s Educational Opportunity Project linked and compared state tests across the country between 2008 and 2016. The project’s data includes academic achievement results for five Success Academy schools, all of which ranked between the top 2% and top 3% of all schools nationally included in the Stanford data base in overall academic achievement.[x] “For decades, there has been widespread anxiety over how, when, or whether the educational test score gap between white and non-white youngsters could be closed. But that gap has already been closed by the Success Academy charter school network in New York City,” writes economist Thomas Sowell in the Wall Street Journal. “Their predominantly black and Hispanic students already pass tests in mathematics and English at a higher rate than any school district in the entire state. That includes predominantly white and Asian school districts where parental income is some multiple of what it is among Success Academy students.”[xi]

Success Academy closed relatively early during the COVID-19 pandemic and, in response to the extraordinary circumstances, developed a high-engagement model of distance learning that required differentiated teaching roles and significant interactions between students and staff. Under the Success Academy remote learning model, the most effective lecturer in the entire network of schools delivered live instructional lectures broadcast over an Internet platform. Other teachers then created smaller virtual student groups in order to facilitate group discussion and projects – all at the touch of a digital button. To illustrate, if 200 students were viewing a 7th grade math lecture, teachers would then create 20 groups of 10 students on the digital platform to participate in discussions and engage in teacher-led projects before reconvening for a lesson wrap-up.

In some ways, this model resembles a large university survey course in which a professor delivers lecture, and teaching assistants lead small group discussion and project sessions. The roles played by both professors and assistants are vital. To ensure meaningful student engagement, teachers must closely monitor progress on assignments in order to proactively identify students in need of remediation that would take the form of tutoring sessions. In other words, Success Academy took great efforts to keep students on track.

During the Spring of 2020, authorities cancelled statewide standardized testing, leaving limited tools to ascertain the academic effectiveness of remote learning efforts, including those of Success Academy. However, any school would appreciate a parent review such as this:

Success Academy Kindergarten took a few weeks but once they got going their offsite learning for covid was *fantastic* Several hours of live training a day. Interactive, dynamic online classes. Lots of homework. Raising hand to go to bathroom. Typical Success aura. Interesting, we got to watch how the teachers teach which made us like the school even more.  Previously we had thought we didn’t like some aspect of one of his teachers but after having watched her we better understood and grew to love her style (which we previously thought we didn’t like).[xii]

A parent of a Success Academy 5th grader also endorsed the effort:

My daughter is a 5th grader at Success Academy Bed Stuy Middle School. School is on summer break as of last week, but she has been having consistent live lessons from 9am to 3pm every day. The school also started offering early mornings specials classes. She had tests throughout the learning period, culminating in finals at the end of the school year. Attendance was compulsory and teachers let me know by text message if my daughter wasn’t logged in. I believe there were also classes in the afternoon for kids who needed some extra help. I’ve got to say, it was pretty impressive how quickly they got this running. There were a few technical hitches, but on the whole, I really think that the school did the best that it could.[xiii] 

Although academic data is in short supply nationally due to the widespread cancellation of 2020 accountability testing, Success Academy reports individual student level reading improvement of 65% for K-6 students on benchmark assessments.[xiv] More data and study must be given to this form of distance learning, but it is difficult to imagine more difficult circumstances in which to pilot it than in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Success Academy and others offering a similar model may also be able to present it as a win-win for both admission lottery winners and losers. Undoubtedly, there are students who prefer Success Academy’s distance learning to their other options, perhaps even to Success Academy’s in-person education, depending on family preferences and circumstances. Regardless, it is important to view this crisis version of Success Academy distance learning as a mere prototype. Undoubtedly, Success Academy will continue to improve elements of this mode of instructional delivery. And, while Success Academy’s distance learning strategy may seem daunting for either a single-site school or even a small district, especially if that school was also simultaneously conducting in-person education, it is important to consider the possibility of schools forming co-operative efforts to tackle the project. For example, a group of arts-focused magnet and charter schools might cooperate to create a distance learning program drawing upon the expertise of participating schools.

One possibility to improve upon the Success Academy distance learning model considers marrying its technique to micro-schools, therefore providing community and custodial care along with high-quality instruction. While many students thrive in the distance learning environment essentially forced upon schools by a pandemic, learning is still viewed predominantly as a fundamentally social enterprise. Technological-based learning, however, does not preclude social learning – if the two practices are combined. As a prospective partner in this marriage, we now turn from New York to Arizona to discuss Prenda Schools.

The Prenda Microschool Model

Currently in partnership with several districts and charter schools and also operating some independent private schools, Prenda is an education firm that creates K-8 microschools in in Arizona. Demand is growing. At the time of this writing, the Prenda website reports 109 schools in Arizona with more anticipated for Fall 2020.   Prenda students engage in an education program aligned to state academic standards and take the state accountability exam. If we think of Success Academy distance learning as a technology-based version of a college survey course, then we might think of Prenda as a one-room-schoolhouse-meets-Scout-troop with a distance learning twist. While there is no agreed upon definition for the term “microschool” Prenda defines it as “a group of 5-10 students meeting in person, setting daily goals and collaborating on activities and creative projects, all supported by an adult guide who cares deeply about helping kids love learning.”[xv]

Prenda’s origins date back to 2013 when MIT graduate, Kelly Smith, began teaching an extra-curricular coding program to students at a public library in Mesa, Arizona. As a system of code clubs evolved, Smith noted that many of his students were very engaged in the code club but reported a general apathy about school, inspiring him to create a system of microschools, in which he served as the first “guide.”

In a Prenda microschool, there are 8-10 students and, instead of a traditional teacher, an adult guide. The instructional methodology – Conquer, Collaborate, and Create – depends on a combination of distance and project-based learning. Prenda’s use of “conquer” is intentional – a reminder for students and adults that they own their learning, and that it is possible to learn anything with determination and persistence. During Conquer time, students work on their computers to access video content, tutorials, and problem sets. They are encouraged to own their own learning, figure out problems for themselves, and to seek help from peers or the guide.

During Collaborate, students put away their devices and engage in social learning in a variety of structures that include, for example, Socratic discussion, debates, and collaborative science projects. Debates involve not only students presenting differing viewpoints, but also incorporate peer-assessment. Science projects are inquiry-based, hands-on, and engage students in practicing the scientific method. Historical exploratory exercises place the student in charge to choose a destination in history and assign other students specialty research topics and culminate with each student reporting what they have learned to the group.

Finally, Create engages students in small groups to demonstrate mastery of learning goals. They create videos, reports, computer programs, gardens, posters, dance routines, theatrical performances, paintings and other authentic products to demonstrate mastery. Students are encouraged to submit their own ideas for creative projects, and those that are approved are entered in a project log that can be used by guides and students throughout the Prenda network.

In 2019, a 44-year veteran Arizona public school teacher called into a Phoenix radio show to share with the host that the main problem with teaching these days is not the financial side, which he describes as “always having been tough.” Rather, he noted, it is that the joy has been strangled out of the profession. Fortunately, this did not appear to be an issue for your author during a visit to a Prenda micro school on the Apache Nation in San Carlos Arizona.

The small number of students allows Prenda schools like the San Carlos school to launch without raising large amounts of money or building facilities – a major challenge in scaling charter schools, especially in rural areas like San Carlos, where the Prenda school operates out of a community church. The school started with a total initial investment of $5,000 for supplies and technology.[xvi]

Hadassah John, the school’s guide, had attended Apache reservation schools as a child. In an interview, she reveals that she was inspired to start a new school because public schools in the area were low performing with students facing obstacles that included bullying as well as a lack of academic challenge. Eligible for financial aid not available to most Arizona schools, the local school district spends well above the Arizona state average. Still, with a letter grade of “F” and scathing reviews of the local public school system from both parents and a district teacher captured on The Great Schools website, John was convinced that families in her community needed an alternative. “I believe a child cannot learn if, one, they do not feel safe; and two if they are not understood. This alternative offers each child a chance to learn at their own pace. They do not have to feel insecure or inferior to the student sitting next to them.” Invoking Einstein, Ms. John notes that “It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge.”[xvii] Joy was indeed evident on this visit. Prenda students were happily spending the day engaged in learning activities that included three-dimensional design and printing with the assistance of a visiting graduate student.

Demand for Prenda in Arizona is growing. At the time of this writing, the Prenda website reports 109 schools in Arizona with even more anticipated for Fall 2020. With its one-to-one device to student ratio and the pre-existing distance learning practices in place, Prenda facilitated a relatively smooth transition into distance learning during the pandemic.

Pandemic Pods

During the summer of 2020, affluent families took advantage of social media sites to begin forming “pandemic pods” with a plan to privately hire their own teachers. In a July 2020 article, “For parents who can afford it, a solution for Fall: Bring the teachers to them,” ThWashington Post reports that parents were essentially creating their own one room schoolhouses:

Fed up with remote education, parents who can pay have a new plan for fall: import teachers to their homes. This goes beyond tutoring. In some cases, families are teaming up to form “pandemic pods,” where clusters of students receive professional instruction for several hours each day. It’s a 2020 version of the one-room schoolhouse, privately funded. Weeks before the new school year will start, the trend is a stark sign of how the pandemic will continue to drive inequity in the nation’s education system. But the parents planning or considering this say it’s an extreme answer to an extreme situation.[xviii]

Teachers have been hired, with one interviewed in the piece reporting that she looked to make more money teaching four children than she did at her previous school. Similar reports are emerging from around the country. Good Morning America recently featured the creator of the Facebook page, Pandemic Pods and Microschools, which matches families with individuals wishing to form a small school.[xix] Within a couple of weeks of forming, the page had more than 33,000 members.

While the “do it yourself” micro-school may be a wholly foreseeable cultural adaptation to the circumstances of a pandemic, it is important to note that there are as yet no systematic mechanisms for gathering academic outcome data. In the case of Prenda and its partnership with charter schools, participating students take state academic assessments with the sponsoring charter owning the results under Arizona’s accountability system. Researchers are unlikely to learn much about the academic outcomes of entirely private pandemic pods.

More important still, without financial assistance, the cost of participating in a microschool will be prohibitive for many families. Partnering with a charter school provides students access to the state weighted funding formula, which is adjusted to reflect equity concerns such as Individual Education Plans, federal free or reduced lunch program eligibility, and English Learner status. States with publicly funded mechanisms have not only been able to include educationally disadvantaged students, but teachers have, in some cases, founded specialized schools geared specifically to their needs.[xx]

Microschooling is obviously set to advance regardless of what public policymakers choose to do next. To do so in a transparent and inclusive fashion, micro-schools will need public support. If further combined with distance learning, such as that offered by Success Academy, micro-schools could simultaneously enjoy the intimacy of being small and all the academic benefits of scale. Moreover, if micro-schooling is combined with public school distance learning, a variety of equity issues can be addressed, not the least of which include device access, public funding for staff, and the administration and collection of testing data.

Combining High Quality Distance Learning with MicroSchooling

Success Academy style distance learning effectively engaged students at an extremely high level. It changed the roles of educators, scaled the reach of high-quality instructors, and designed practices to keep students on track. This alone would be a worthy vision to offer to students stranded on the Success Academy waitlist. Additionally, currently enrolled students who prefer this model of education would free up more in-person spots for students on waitlists.

For all its virtues, Success Academy remains a high-quality emergency model of education. During more normal times, it is probably more of a niche model regardless of size and importance. It does not provide custodial care for working parents; however, it may provide something closest to a sense of community that can be achieved in a period of mandatory social distancing. Looking forward to a post pandemic world, the conventional wisdom would suggest that many – but not all – families will prefer the opportunity to participate in an in-person learning community.

Pairing the Success Academy style distance learning with the Prenda style microschooling model would bring the addition of both in-person community and critical custodial care to high quality distance learning. Returning to the metaphor of the university lecture hall, the digital instruction provider would assume the role of professor; and, the guide at the partnering micro-school, in addition to leading in-person group discussions and other student learning activities, would also serve as a resource for struggling students. The digital “mothership” could provide additional academic support to both students and guides.

Such a hybrid model of instruction would allow innovators to seek multiple gains, the most important being to increase pluralism in the K-12 system. The focus of micro-schools could vary according to both student interest and the affiliations with digital providers. For instance, a small group of students with an interest in music could digitally affiliate with an arts school; similarly, those with a preference for classical education could partner with a like-minded institution. The resulting variety would be limited only by the number of schools, universities and/or other institutions, and the accompanying micro-school curriculum to be developed.

While schools with waitlists may be the obvious starting point, they are not the only possibilities. Imagine a large museum or university with a K-12 charter to provide digital instruction and n intent to partner with in-person micro-schools – in the right hands and with the development of appropriate new curriculum, the artistic, scientific, and historical resources available to leverage could be considerable.

Successful employment of these various techniques would allow high demand schools – whether district, charter, or private – to provide a quality education to an expanded number of students without the need to build costly facilities – as noted previously, a major limiting factor to charter school expansion. During the 2007 to 2017 period the percentage of new charter schools dropped from 8.4 percent to 2.3 percent. While multiple factors played into this decline, it also coincided with rising costs for facilities as the nation recovered from the Great Recession.[xxi]

Small microschools do not require large capital outlays and therefore represent an innovative pathway to scaling high demand schools. Their small size provides an advantage to a network of micro-schools in reaching economies of scale in terms of online instruction. Combining the two models provides the possibility of providing access to a world class education with the personalization, community, and joy of a small tight knit group of students.

A mutually beneficial association could naturally develop between local education authorities (LEAs) and pandemic pods. Education providers proficient in distance learning could address equity concerns in the ability of students to participate in microschooling by paying guides and by providing needed digital devices to educationally disadvantaged students. They could also enhance the ability of research scholars to study the efficacy of these combined techniques through the accumulation of student academic data.

Conclusion – Going to School Where Everybody Knows Your Name

The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore them. Each new combination opens up the possibility of other new combinations.  
Steven Berlin Johnson

While the previous pages laid out the possibility of combining a form of distance learning with another form of micro-schooling, it is important to acknowledge the multiple forms of micro-schools, including fascinating co-op models in which parents take the lead on instruction by teaching their specialties. Likewise, multiple forms of distance learning existed pre-pandemic, and educators developed even more during the pandemic. In reality, the only way to learn how to combine the techniques is to just do it and  then decide which new elements to add and how to reconfigure them.

The combination suggested here combines the personalization that a small school offers with access to high quality live instruction. Educators can create this through the recombination of what already exists – waitlisted students and a refined model of distance learning that should be the standard when school reopens in the Fall of 2020. This can be accomplished without raising millions of dollars for facilities.

In the process, the pluralism of schools now available to families can increase, and new opportunities for educators can flourish. Diversity and pluralism can flourish if micro-schools could vary in their emphasis according to the strengths of their sponsoring entity-whether that turns out to be STEM, classical education, a cultural focus or a large variety of possibilities. This form of education should not be the exclusive privilege of the few, but an option for all. The next big thing could be getting small.

References

[i] Bathgate, Katherine. 2020. “Poll Results: What are Parents Thinking About Education?” Publication of the State Policy Network, available on the internet at https://spn.org/poll-results-what-are-parents-thinking-about-education/?utm_content=bufferd62ad&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

[ii] For a discussion of the need to increase the productivity of K-12 spending, and rethink K-12 delivery, see Duncan, Arne. 2010. “The New Normal: Doing More with Less,” speech at the American Enterprise Institute, November 17, 2010. Available on the internet at www.ed.gov/ news/speeches/new-normal-doing-more-less-secretary-arne-duncans-remarks-americanenterprise-institut

[iii] In Arizona Fiscal Year 2018 for instance district schools receive a statewide average of $9,859 per pupil while charter schools received an average of $8,767, see https://www.azleg.gov/jlbc/districtvscharterfunding.pdf.

[iv] Gross, Betheny and Alice Opalka. 2020. “Too Many Schools Leave Learning to Chance During the Pandemic.” Publication of the Center for the Reinvention of Public Education, available on the internet at https://www.crpe.org/publications/too-many-schools-leave-learning-chance-during-pandemic

[v] Lake, Robin, 2020. “Analysis-Just 1 in 3 districts required teachers to deliver instruction this spring. They mustn’t be left on the own again in the fall.” Article appearing in the June 16, 2020 edition of the 74 million, available on the internet at https://www.the74million.org/article/analysis-just-1-in-3-districts-required-teachers-to-deliver-instruction-this-spring-they-mustnt-be-left-on-their-own-again-in-the-fall/

[vi][vi]  Chiefs for Change and the Johns Hopkins University Institute for Education Policy. 2020. “The Return: How Should Education Leaders Prepare for Reentry and Beyond?” Publication of Chiefs for Change and the John Hopkins University School of Education Institute for Education Policy, available on the internet at https://edpolicy.education.jhu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/CFC-TheReturn_5-13-20FINAL.pdf, page 5.

[vii] Belsha, Kayln. 2020. “Older Teacher Health Concerns.” Article in the May 9, 2020 edition of Chalkbeat, available on the internet at https://www.chalkbeat.org/2020/5/9/21252608/older-teachers-heath-concerns-coronavirus-return-to-schools

[viii] Ibid, Chiefs for Change

[ix] Success Academy Charter Schools. 2020. “About Our Charter Schools: Redefining Possible.” Publication of Success Academy Charter Schools, available on the internet at https://www.successacademies.org/about/

[x] The Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, available on the internet at https://edopportunity.org/.

[xi] Sowell, Thomas. 2020. “Charter School Enemies Block Black Success.” Column appearing in the June 18, 2020 edition of the Wall Street Journal, available on the internet at https://www.wsj.com/articles/charter-schools-enemies-block-black-success-11592520626?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

[xii] Adams, Alina. 2020. “NYC Parents & Teachers Reveal What Worked in Remote Learning and What You Should Demand for Your Child.” Article published on New York School Talk, available on the internet at http://newyorkschooltalk.org/2020/06/nyc-parents-teachers-reveal-what-worked-in-remote-learning-and-what-you-should-demand-for-your-child/

[xiii] Ibid

[xiv] Success Academy. 2020. “Success Academy Reopening Update-July 02, 2020.” Publication of Success Academy available on the internet at https://www.successacademies.org/education-blog-post/success-academy-reopening-plan-faqs/

[xv] Prenda. 2020. “What is a Micro-school?” Publication of Prenda Schools, available on the internet at https://prendaschool.com/

[xvi] Ladner, Matthew. 2019. “Teacher-led micro schools, ESAs create opportunity in Native American Education.” Article in the April 15, 2019 edition of RedefinED, available on the internet at https://www.redefinedonline.org/2019/04/teacher-led-micro-schools-esas-create-opportunity-in-native-american-education/

[xvii] Ibid.

[xviii] Meckler, Laura and Hannah Natanson. 2020. “For parents who can afford it, a solution for fall: Bring the teachers to them.” Article in the July, 17 2020 edition of the Washington Post, available on the internet at https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/fall-remote-private-teacher-pods/2020/07/17/9956ff28-c77f-11ea-8ffe-372be8d82298_story.html.

[xix] Good Morning America. 2020. “Parents considering ‘pandemic pods’ ahead of schools reopening.” Broadcast news on the July 20, 2020 program, available on the internet at https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/family/video/parents-pandemic-pods-ahead-schools-reopening-71873615

[xx] Matus, Ron. 2019. “Miss Ana and Her Mighty Home School Micro-Cluster.” Article appearing in the February 22, 2020 edition of RedefinED, available on the internet at https://www.redefinedonline.org/2019/02/miss-ana-and-her-mighty-home-school-micro-cluster/.

[xxi] Lake, Robin, Trey Cobb, Roohi Sharma and Alice Opalka. 2018. Why is Charter Growth Slowing-Lessons from the Bay Area.” Article appearing in the Summer 2018 edition of Education Next, available on the internet at https://www.educationnext.org/why-is-charter-school-growth-slowing-lessons-from-bay-area/

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