Microschools are creating more choice in education

The decentralized movement poised to solve some of education's biggest problems

Cottage and garden, England, by Raymond McIntyre.

Educational choice is not about building a single new system to replace traditional education, but about decentralizing to create many systems.

Systems that address choice at three critical levels:

1. community: can shape learning environments that reflect their values and needs.

2. families: can access schools that align with how they want to raise their children.

3. students: can receive personalized learning that meets them where they are.

Microschools accomplish this.

Studies estimate that there are roughly 95,000 microschools now operating in the United States with no signs of slowing down following the inertia of the pandemic.

Many parents feel like they are caught between two extremes when choosing between a very structured traditional education and the often overwhelming freedom of navigating homeschooling alone.

Microschools offer a third path. A variety of models to choose from and small class sizes that allow for more individualized learning, coupled with childcare and social experiences.

Put together, the microschool model offers a meaningful response to many of the challenges facing education today.

The one-room schoolhouse meets personalized learning

“One-room schoolhouses offered the kind of community intimacy that larger institutions simply cannot replicate. Every child felt seen.”

— Sarah Mondale

Microschools often look and feel much like an updated version of the one-room schoolhouse, like those of rural and farming communities in the late 19th century.

While they vary in delivery, microschools are characterized by intimate learning environments. This is typically accompanied by a small student body, with an average of 15 students, mixed-age learning, and a home-like community environment.

There was a lot to love about one-room schoolhouses of the past, particularly their intimate communities, but they were limited by the physical resources in the classroom—often outdated textbooks and a lack of advanced or specialized subjects.

The traditional system arose to bring the siloed schoolhouses up-to-date and even the scales, but we’ve arrived at a juncture where the modern schoolhouse as a microschool has newfound superpowers.

With the internet and AI, the microschools of today can truly offer personalized learning once attempted but never tenable with its historic predecessor.

A diversified movement, not a singular pedagogy

What’s promising about the microschool model is that they don’t take on a singular, standardized approach to learning. Some of the most innovative and diverse schools are emerging through this movement.

The strength of this movement is its diversity.

This wide variety of schools can be categorized by two common but distinct formats:

1. independent microschools: grassroots, bootstrapped, highly localized schools. Often the most specialized schools emerge from this category across nature and outdoor learning, arts, STEM, gifted and neurodiverse, and other targeted niches.

2. provider networks: microschools that operate as part of a broader network and often incorporate a provider’s curriculum and/or education technology stack. Organizations like KaiPod Learning, Acton, Prenda, or Primer work with educators to launch their own microschools while supporting these new founders and entrepreneurs with funding and administrative help.

Some examples of schools that vary in missions, methods, and student populations:

Embark Education (Denver, CO): a middle school located inside a coffee shop and bike store, where students apply academic concepts through real-world business operations.

The Forest School (Fayetteville, GA): part of the Acton Academy network, which blends outdoor education with Socratic dialogue and self-paced learning.

NuVu (Cambridge, MA): an innovative design-focused microschool for middle and high schoolers, where students engage in full-time, interdisciplinary projects within a studio setting.

Educators as entrepreneurs

In public schools, teachers assume the responsibility many founders face managing 30 impressionable students, but without the ownership or upside potential. Teachers often enter the profession because they deeply enjoy teaching and working with children, but sooner or later face inevitable burnout from the bureaucratic filibuster inherited with the job.

In a 2022 poll by the National Education Association, 55% of teachers responded that they plan to quit their current education roles earlier than they originally intended.

Teachers aren’t leaving their profession per se, they’re leaving the working conditions.

The burnout causing a mass exodus of public school teachers has led to increased demand for alternative teaching opportunities, and microschools are a perfect target.

The microschool model doesn’t just give families and students choice, it also gives teachers choice.

More flexibility and ownership, without the top-down oversight, untenable assessment demands and policies implemented by disconnected stakeholders. Smaller class sizes to do what they do best—work with children and help them learn.

“This is the great thing about having teachers start them—because teachers have a million ideas about how to do things better... so to give them that flexibility, the bones, the structure to innovate within is exactly what’s right for them.” — Amar Kumar, Founder of KaiPod Learning

When some of the best and brightest teachers leave public schools to start their own, the monopoly public schools have long held will continue to come apart at the seams.

This isn't a bad thing. It invites greater competition and encourages free markets to support better learning outcomes. Public schools are not only forced to reconsider how they deliver education to learners, but also how they retain and incentivize teachers.

Why we haven't seen more of this in Canada (yet)

The growth of microschools has been trending in the U.S. post-pandemic with no signs of slowing, yet we haven’t seen this kind of movement make its way north of the border.

Canada’s absence of Education Savings Accounts (ESAs) is a key barrier.

In parts of the U.S. where ESAs are prevalent, especially universal ESAs that allow any family to opt out of public school and receive vouchers for their child’s education, there is supply and demand for new school models like microschools.

Here in Canada, families can’t redirect taxpayer money that has been allocated for their child’s education (which averages around $14,000 per student annually in Ontario). As a result, only a subset of more affluent families may be able to justify removing their child from public school or seek alternative options when they must pay out of pocket entirely.

Still, interest in microschools is beginning to emerge across Canada, especially among families seeking more personalized education or flexible alternatives to the traditional system.

While the lack of public funding presents a real challenge, a small but growing number of educators and founders are experimenting with grassroots models that reflect the same values driving the movement in other parts of North America.

A few notable examples of Canadian microschools include:

1. Saplings Nature School (Vancouver, BC): A nature-based program where children learn outdoors through unstructured play and exploration.

2. Summit Micro School (Toronto, ON): A K–8 microschool with mixed-age classrooms and project-based learning. Offers small class sizes (avg. 12 students) with a focus on neurodiverse and outdoor learning.

3. Mont-Libre Agile Learning Centre (Montreal, QC): Quebec’s first Agile Learning Centre, supporting homeschool-registered students in a bilingual, self-directed environment with democratic governance.

Microschools as cultural disruptors

The microschool movement represents a meaningful shift toward decentralized education that offers real choice for families, communities, and educators.

Microschools are cultural disruptors that signal something deeper about the desire for more local and community-driven alternatives to top-down institutions.

This movement toward small, intimate schools elucidates the demand for school pluralism—the ability to choose and access a range of educational options as a core feature of K-12 education.

Where the divide was once limited to public versus elite private schools, microschools are primed to serve a diverse socioeconomic spectrum, with a meaningful concentration of middle- and lower-income families. In the U.S., access to ESAs has played a key role in supporting this trend.

This movement is not without its challenges though.

Barriers for greater microschool adoption

Zoning restrictions, regulatory complexity, and a lack of long-term data around accreditation, quality assurance, and student outcomes continue to stand in the way of broader adoption and growth.

Microschools are still in the early stages of adoption, facing regulatory and funding structures that were designed for the traditional system, not decentralized learning models.

Just as healthcare and financial services had to modernize their systems to support innovation and consumer choice, the long-term growth of microschools will depend on whether outdated education frameworks can evolve to support what these models make possible.

Watching this unfold, I’m less convinced that we need one big answer to education and more convinced that we need space for many. Microschools offer that possibility.