LiberatED Podcast

Microschooling, and its various iterations including learning pods and hybrid homeschools, is swiftly and dramatically changing the face of education across the US. Microschools are modern twists on the quaint, one-room schoolhouse model, where small, typically multi-age groups of students learn together in more intimate educational settings, including private homes and small community spaces, with individualized curriculum and personalized attention from adult educators and mentors.

The microschooling movement was gaining traction before 2020, but interest in this innovative education model has accelerated over the past two years, as Don Soifer and Ashley Campbell have witnessed first-hand.

Don and Ashley lead MicroschoolingNV, a non-profit organization that developed a first-of-its-kind, public-private partnership microschool with the City of North Las Vegas. They have continued their work as leaders in the microschooling movement, helping individuals, businesses, and municipalities across the country to launch microschools.

In 2021, MicroschoolingNV won the prestigious Ed-Prize award for their efforts.

Further Reading:

Got Teacher Burnout? Launch A Microschool

The push for federally-funded universal preschool and child care programs continues despite new data showing the harms of government preschool programs, as well as harms to small community preschool providers who get pushed out of business when a "free" universal preschool program emerges.

To talk more about the educational and economic hazards of universal government preschool programs, I am joined in this episode by Colleen Hroncich who recently published a new policy analysis on this topic for the Cato Institute. Colleen is a policy analyst with Cato's Center for Educational Freedom.

Further reading:

Vanderbilt University Study Shows Why Biden's Universal Government Preschool Program Would Be a Disaster

The exodus of parents away from conventional schooling and into homeschooling has unleashed extraordinary levels of education entrepreneurship, as visionary parents, educators, and innovators launch new products and services for families choosing to learn outside of a standard classroom environment. One of those "edupreneurs" is this week's podcast guest, Ada Salie. Recognizing the mounting parent demand for new learning programs, last fall Ada launched Life Rediscovered, a learning center in Massachusetts, and she continues to adapt her programming to meet the needs and preferences of local families.

"School has become a toxic place for children and we refuse to say that publicly," asserts Peter Gray in this illuminating episode. Dr. Gray is a psychology professor at Boston College and the author of the book, Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life.

He speaks and writes frequently on the value of self-directed education, the problems with coercive schooling, and the importance of childhood play, including on his popular Freedom to Learn blog at Psychology Today.

Learn more about Peter Gray's research here.

The past two years of education disruption have catalyzed support for school choice policies that enable education funding to follow students instead of going to bureaucratic school systems that are increasingly unresponsive to parent (and taxpayer) preferences.

In today's episode, Corey DeAngelis, one of the country's leading school choice advocates, talks about why so many Americans now support school choice policies and how these policies expand K-12 learning options for families.

Follow Corey on Twitter @DeAngelisCorey

Link to Corey's articles

School Choice Myths: Setting the Record Straight on Education Freedom, edited by Corey DeAngelis and Neal McCluskey

Education Freedom Pledge

Michael Strong has been a longtime education entrepreneur and advocate of free markets and school choice. He has teamed up with Chris Engl to launch the Liberation of Education, helping parents recognize the many education options available to them. Their first major initiative is an online spring conference showcasing education entrepreneurship, innovative K-12 learning models, and education policy trends.

Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World's Problems, by Michael Strong

Jack Lloyd worked as a lawyer and teacher, which helped shape his views on education early in his career and led him to become a proponent of self-directed learning and unschooling. Today, Jack is a producer for liberty, creating content for a variety of media sites, including The Honest Teacher, and The Pholosopher.

In this episode, we talk about education, libertarianism, and Jack's new book, The Definitive Guide to Libertarian Voluntaryism.

Hybrid schools blur the lines between schooling and homeschooling, expand education choice access to the middle class, and offer personalized, family-centered, hyper-local learning solutions.

Today's podcast guest is Eric Wearne, an Associate Professor in the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, and Director of the National Hybrid Schools Project. He is also the author of the 2020 book, Defining Hybrid Homeschools in America: Little Platoons.

Tolerance of different viewpoints and values is a key principle of a free society, and yet in classrooms and on campuses across the country, young people increasingly self-censor and self-silence to avoid speaking out against the dominant cultural narrative. Some may not even realize that there are different viewpoints and values, conditioned as they are from their early days in a public school classroom to accept whatever their teachers say. And their teachers are being similarly conditioned, spending time in schools of education that tie grades to ideological activism and link achievement to allegiance with an approved interpretation of concepts like "social justice" and critical race theory.

All of this can lead parents to wonder what they can do to help prevent their children from being indoctrinated into a belief system that may run counter to their own values or may not allow for viewpoint diversity.

The answer, according to Bonnie Kerrigan Snyder, is to undoctrinate your kids. Bonnie is the director of high school outreach at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and author of the new and important book, Undoctrinate: How Politicized Classrooms Harm Kids and Ruin Our Schools—and What We Can Do About It.

New Hampshire takes the lead as the freest state in the country, according to a new Cato Institute analysis of personal and economic freedom.

Not surprisingly, people seem to gravitate toward freedom. In fact, while states like California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts lost population between July 2020 and July 2021 according to the US Census Bureau, New Hampshire saw its population grow during that time.

The state is also gaining a reputation for educational freedom, thanks in large part to the work of our guest in this episode, New Hampshire Commissioner of Education, Frank Edelblut. During Edelblut's term in the state education department, New Hampshire has expanded school choice policies and introduced an exciting program called "Learn Everywhere," that enables students to accrue high school graduation credits outside of their schools through their community activities and extracurriculars.

Edelblut is also a homeschooling dad of seven, now-grown children who is supportive of homeschooling families throughout New Hampshire.

"New Hampshire Is The Freest State in America: Here's Why," by David Brady (fee.org)

"Want to 'Learn Everywhere' In NH?," by Kerry McDonald (The Union Leader)