“Families are looking for something different,” GROW Program Director, Elizabeth LĂłpez, told me when I visited the learning center last month. Located in the New Life Worship Center, a large, fast-growing, predominantly Hispanic Christian church in New England’s second largest city, GROW is part of the congregation’s mission to support families in and around their community. Similar church-based learning centers for homeschoolers are sprouting across Massachusetts, as more families seek alternatives to conventional schools. 

“These centers are inspiring not just the parents to engage more in the education of their children, but grandma and grandpa and auntie and uncle. The church is truly rallying together the family to raise up the children,” said Michael King, CEO of the Massachusetts Family Institute, a conservative advocacy organization that is helping to catalyze the creation of low-cost, church-based learning centers like GROW. Over the past three years, King’s organization has supported the launch of 15 of these learning centers across the Bay State, serving approximately 600 students. 

This may help to explain why Massachusetts is one of at least 19 states reporting an increase in 2023-24 homeschooling numbers compared to the prior academic year, according to analyzed by Dr. Angela Watson at Johns Hopkins University. While Massachusetts, like many states, experienced a large surge in homeschoolers during the pandemic and related school closures, this recent uptick in homeschooling is being caused by unknown factors. 

“What is clear is that this time, the growth is not driven by a global pandemic or sudden disruptions to traditional schooling,” Watson concluded. “Something else is driving this growth.” 

According to LĂłpez, families are attracted to homeschooling with GROW because it provides a safe, nurturing, family-centered, values-affirming learning environment. “Students here feel like they’re in a safe and trusting environment, and their parents feel the same way,” LĂłpez told me. Indeed, the most recent federal on homeschooling released in September reveals that a top reason why parents choose homeschooling is that they are “concerned about the school environment, such as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure.” 

Homeschooling allows GROW families — most of whom are Hispanic — to have much more control over their children’s education. They collaborate closely with the learning center’s nine staff members and seven additional adult volunteers, who work to individualize learning to meet children’s specific academic needs. 

I talked with some of the parents of students who attend GROW to find out why they chose homeschooling over conventional schooling in recent years. “I think that there has definitely been a big shift in the curriculum, what is being taught in schools, and how that doesn’t align with my values and my beliefs,” said Tanya Tovar, a behavior analyst whose son Sebastian is a full-time first-grader at GROW. As Sebastian neared kindergarten age,Tovar looked into conventional public and private schools — including traditional Christian ones — but none appealed to her. She decided instead to enroll Sebastian at GROW last year, due in large part to its emphasis on faith-based education along with high-quality academics targeted to each child’s academic ability. 

GROW’s customized approach to education has enabled Sebastian to do advanced coursework, challenging him in ways Tovar thinks wouldn’t be possible in a conventional classroom. But for Tovar, GROW is about more than just Sebastian’s academics. “He’s happy, he loves his classroom, he loves his friends,” she said, adding that she plans to keep her son, and eventually his one-year-old sister, at GROW through high school. “I want them to be able to think independently, have autonomy for themselves and for their life. I think GROW does that. I think homeschooling does that.”

Erika Serrano agrees. She has an eleventh-grade daughter and a second-grade son at GROW, along with her three-year-old daughter, who attends part-time. A full-time community health worker, Serrano’s two older children attended Worcester Public Schools before enrolling at GROW last year. It was when her daughter began her freshman year at the public high school that Serrano realized she had to make a change. “That was a tough year for us,” she told me, explaining how her daughter’s behavior changed from middle school and how she was encountering negative peer pressure. 

Since attending GROW, Serrano has noticed a transformational change in her daughter. “Honestly, it makes me so emotional because she has flourished into such a beautiful, kind young woman since she’s been going to GROW. Words can’t even express how thankful I am. This has been such a great opportunity for us,” said Serrano, adding that her daughter plans to attend college after high school and become a teacher. Last year, GROW had its first high school graduate who received multiple college acceptances, beginning his freshman year this fall. 

Some students attend GROW a couple of days a week, but the majority are enrolled full-time, five days a week at an annual tuition of $2,400. To defray tuition costs even further, GROW has recently partnered with Children’s Scholarship Fund (CSF), a national nonprofit founded in 1998 that provides low-income families with partial scholarships to attend private schools. CSF is now offering scholarships to students who attend creative schooling options, such as microschools and learning centers. (Parents are encouraged to check if their school participates in CSF’s scholarship programs)

The parents I spoke with expect GROW and homeschool learning centers like it to continue to gain popularity, both in Massachusetts and across the country. They say that more parents are looking for alternatives to traditional schooling and, as more of these alternatives sprout, it makes it easier to choose something else.

“I grew up in the public school system,” Serrano told me. “I raised my daughter mostly in the public school system. That’s all I knew, but I knew I needed to shift. I was so scared because you think this is the only way, right? But then I said, wait a minute, there are so many other ways that our kids could be educated.”

Serrano urges parents to consider new and different educational models. “Be open-minded,” she said. “Take that leap of faith and do what you know is right for your children.”

The researchers found these schools, five out of six with high numbers of students of color and those on free and reduced-price lunch, asking how to offer students multiple pathways to postsecondary success, beyond just college, without lowering academic rigor or expectations. Chosen because they had a track record of innovation, the schools were questioning whether the accommodations given to students during the throes of remote learning or right after the return to in-person instruction were still serving them well.

In doing so, they are expanding their visions of success and reimagining their purpose, a move which researchers note could mark a departure from past understandings of schooling. They titled their study “A ‘Good Life’ for Every Student.”

“We saw high schools starting to adjust the goal posts, where they were taking on more responsibility for student success in the long run,” said Chelsea Waite, senior researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University.

Between April 2022 and November 2023, Waite and her partner, Maddy Sims, from Columbia University’s Center for Public Research and Leadership, did 266 interviews with current high school students, graduates, parents, teachers and school administrators. Of the six schools, including some in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, four were traditional public and two were charter schools. 

Two were alternative programs for students who are overage and undercredited, pregnant or parenting or have a history of chronic absenteeism. These students, administrators said, would have once been considered a success if they just reached graduation. Three other schools were focused on increasing access to Advanced Placement and other rigorous academic courses and to “Early College Experience” offerings.

Participating students and families identified three major priorities for post-high school futures: happiness, fulfillment and stability. For some, this included college. For others, it meant immediately entering the workforce. The concept of a “happy life” included financial security, but no one interviewed said salary was the main determinant of success.

These schools were not just trying to get students across the finish line to graduation and then directly to college, Waite said. Instead they were asking “What are students’ individualized understandings of who they want to be as adults and what they want to be in the world?” And “How can we set them up with a corresponding, individualized plan that can help them on that path to a good life?”

Each of the six schools prioritized students graduating with a “good plan” in place, but educators also acknowledged that “there really hadn’t been full alignment on what constitutes or what defines a ‘good plan’ in practice,” said Sims.

Looking to provide roadmaps for other high schools, researchers asked what success means to school communities, especially for students who have been historically marginalized; what solutions schools were exploring to help all students achieve; and what obstacles they were facing in this attempt. 

Challenges they observed across schools:

• Educators’ concerns that increasing flexibility could decrease rigor
• Desire to give students room to define their own paths to success without perpetuating historical “opportunity gaps”
• Overreliance on traditional data (such as test scores or graduation rates), despite recognizing that these are insufficient to meaningfully track success

 Examples of innovations they observed schools introducing to ensure students were academically engaged and supported:

• Shifts to interdisciplinary units and coursework. For example, in one school students were learning about marketing, social science, financial literacy and ratios in a multi-week course on the loan industry. One administrator said, “I think we can do a much better job of trapping kids in the honey of each content area. To be a writer is such a powerful thing. To be a scientist is such a powerful thing.”
• AP courses and “Early College Experience” courses, which partner with local colleges and universities
• Shift in grading towards “grading for equity” practices that focus on measuring what students know rather than how they behave
• Moving toward using the classroom as a space of exploration of identity and student-driven learning. One school allowed students to build credit-bearing “personalized learning experiences,” essentially independent studies with an advisor
• Individualized mentoring and counseling. For example, two schools used a “primary person” model, in which each student has one adult mentor who they check in with regularly 
• Alternative approaches to discipline, such as “restorative circles,” which they defined as “conversations intended to repair relationships and find mutually-agreeable solutions, after a behavioral incident or conflict”

“We did feel ourselves really compelled to illustrate how many different actions— taken by different people at different levels of the system— are necessary to support high schools systemically to be the kinds of places that set students up for a life of their own choosing,” said Waite.

While most of the schools started this transformational work before 2020, the pandemic provided a unique opportunity to study high school reform, according to the researchers. These challenging few years “strengthened educators’ dedication to achieving new designs for high school,” while increasing their focus on race, racism and equity.

Waite and Sims noticed that educators and administrators across the board were reflecting on how to provide students with flexibility and support without compromising rigor and high expectations. As teachers welcomed students back from remote learning, they needed to prioritize creating a supportive environment to see young people through a disruptive, traumatizing period. But now they’re questioning what comes next.

In discussing leniency during the pandemic, one teacher said, “We didn’t teach coping mechanisms, we just protected [students].” Teacher turnover and burnout also made it hard to hold students accountable. At two of the schools studied, the teaching staff was so new that they didn’t know what the classrooms looked like before COVID hit.

As for “college for all,” the researchers found a number of reasons some students are moving away from that mindset, including financial stress and risk, burnout, high-stakes testing and applications, and an understanding that there are an increasing number of jobs that don’t require a college degree. Schools wanted to ensure that college doesn’t become a privilege for a select group of students, while also communicating that a wider variety of options exist. 

High schools alone cannot be held wholly responsible to address all of the challenges presented in the report, the researchers said. “Instead, what we really observed is the incredible power of bridge building between high schools and the higher education sector, as well as between high schools and local employers.”

Waite acknowledged the study’s limitations, noting that these six schools don’t necessarily represent the entire country or even the Northeast. “What we do believe is that the themes and ideas and challenges that came through in the research … are really widespread and challenging issues that feel relevant to many different kinds of high schools.”