But now she’s got company. 

Down a hallway lined with artwork, backpacks and storage bins, there’s a small Montessori school for 3- to 6-year-olds. A middle and high school operates on the same floor. And across from Blassingame’s two classrooms, Maya Corneille runs Nia School, which serves children with autism and apraxia, a disorder that affects movement and speech.

“Everyone has their own niche and strength,” said Corneille, a former college psychology professor.

Together they demonstrate how the microschool movement, which took off during the pandemic, continues to grow and adapt to students’ needs.

Microschools are also less “micro” than they were last year, according to the of the sector from the National Microschooling Center, shared exclusively with ����Ӱ��. In 2024, the median number of students in a typical microschool was 16. That figure has jumped to 22 — a reflection of the increased experience of school founders, said Don Soifer, CEO of the center. Some now serve as many .

The center’s report provides a comprehensive look at the trend as it continues to mature. Microschools — small schools that typically operate out of homes, commercial spaces or churches — now serve an , or about 750,000 students. Current or former teachers, or those with administrative experience, are increasingly running the programs. Eighty-six percent of founders have an education background, compared with 71% last year.

But some aren’t leaving public schools to join the movement.  Charter microschools and those affiliated with districts are generally larger, with a median size of 36 students, according to the report. 

They include , a project of BridgeValley Community and Technical College in South Charleston, West Virginia. This year, 20 seniors graduated from the charter microschool, where students earn college credit toward degrees in nursing or manufacturing. 

“The families we serve just see the huge amount of money they are saving on college tuition and the incredible learning opportunity this is for their kids,” said Casey Sacks, the college’s president. With small groups, real-world experiences and a personalized approach, the school, she said, “exemplifies many of the core elements of microschooling.” 

In another development, the Indiana Charter School Board recently granted a charter to a within the 1,200-student Eastern Hancock district, outside Indianapolis. Superintendent George Philhower expects one to three sites to launch this fall, with more opening across the state in the coming years.

“There’s a growing number of families looking for something in between the traditional public school experience and homeschooling,” he said. “Some are already homeschooling and doing amazing work, but they’re also looking for community, guidance, or access to certified teachers and additional resources.”

‘Financially sustainable’

The vast majority of microschools operate outside the public system, but the expansion of state-funded programs supporting private schools, like education savings accounts, has further fueled their spread. Primer, a for-profit microschool network, currently has schools in and Arizona, and will add schools in this fall. 

Over the next two years, the company plans to add five to six states, said Lisa Tarshis, head of the Primer Foundation, which provides financial aid to families and support to schools in the network. With ESA funds , she added that some microschool entrepreneurs are replicating their programs. 

“Once you get it down, it’s not that hard to open a satellite campus or to bring on another teacher,” she said. “Then you can become the owner and oversee these two schools.”

Of the 800 schools represented in the center’s survey sample, 38% receive state school choice funds, up from 32% in 2024.

This fall, Blassingame’s Ferguson School could be enrolling students on Georgia’s new Promise Scholarship, a $6,500 ESA targeted to students who live in a zone with a failing school. Others, she said, may qualify for the state’s separate ESA program for students with disabilities. 

ESAs make microschools “more affordable for parents and financially sustainable for me,” said Blassingame, who is accustomed to offering discounts on her $9,000 annual tuition and working out payment arrangements when families struggle. “I ask, ‘How much can you pay?’ But I have to be able to pay teachers and the rent.”

Democratic critics argue that ESAs not only hurt public schools, but also offer false hope to the 1 in 5 students who attend school in rural areas. Those communities often don’t have private options and the schools that exist may not , the left-leaning Center for American Progress argued in a . 

Microschools, easier to launch than a typical brick-and-mortar school, provide an alternative, said Amar Kumar, CEO of the KaiPod network. 

Even choice-friendly states like Indiana and Ohio still have “school choice deserts,” he said at a recent gathering in Atlanta for leaders running “hybrid homeschools,” which often combine microschools with at-home learning. “We can pass as many ESA programs as we want, but until we increase the supply of schools, we won’t really have choice.” 

‘Broader than just a reading score’

As more microschools tap public education funding, they’re drawing increased scrutiny from organizations outside the sector. Whether motivated by curiosity or criticism, growing interest from researchers and policy experts is another sign of the model’s expansion.

At least three studies are underway to examine microschools and report student performance on some of the same measures public schools use, like iReady assessments and MAP tests from NWEA. 

“There’s a lot of appetite for figuring out how we measure outcomes without being spaces that are tailored 100% towards a standardized test,” said Jeffrey Imrich, CEO and co-founder of Rock by Rock, which sells project-based learning curriculum and materials, primarily to microschools and homeschoolers. The company is working with Mathematica, a research organization, on one of the studies. “There’s an interest in making sure kids are learning and growing, but the interest is in a set of outcomes that is broader than just a reading score.”

But critics warn that the microschools still lack adequate government oversight. In a , the Center for American Progress characterized the unconventional programs as potentially unsafe spaces that often “bypass” building codes and are not required to follow civil rights laws, like the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, even if they receive public funds. 

In a , Soifer pushed back against the authors’ call for greater accountability and locking into a federal definition of microschools. Founders in this “many-flowers-bloom movement,” he said, already navigate “complex and often arbitrary” regulations designed for large, traditional schools. For example, in March, the Arizona fire marshall told a microschool founder she would have to spend thousands of dollars for building upgrades even though local authorities had already approved the school’s opening. After the libertarian Institute for Justice got involved, . 

As with last year’s report, founders getting ready to open schools say their number one need is understanding the rules and laws that apply to their programs.

‘Like a four-letter word’

With Texas recently passing a voucher program, Soifer and others are closely watching how the microschool model fares in the nation’s second largest state. Currently, he said, there’s no reliable count of the number of Texas microschools. 

“There are just too many that have been doing things under the radar for a long time,” he said.

But if they want to serve students on ESAs, they’ll have to meet the as other private schools. That means staying open for at least two years and getting accreditation. 

Earning accreditation continues to be a costly, and often insurmountable, barrier for many microschools. The process, which typically includes a financial audit, staff background checks and building inspections, can run up to $15,000. 

But most accrediting organizations haven’t always been what Soifer calls “microschool friendly.” Less than a quarter of microschools in his survey are accredited, but 80% percent said they would be interested in a process geared toward their non-traditional programs. At least one accrediting body, Middle States Association of Colleges and Schools, recently announced a for “innovative school models.”

The issue came up at the Atlanta conference, organized by the National Hybrid Homeschool Project at Kennesaw State University. 

“Accreditation is like a four-letter word in this community,”  said Sharon Masinelli, a lead science teacher at St. John the Baptist Hybrid School, outside Atlanta. She led a session describing why she sought recognition from Cognia, the nation’s largest accrediting body. High schools, she said, wouldn’t accept course credits for students leaving the hybrid school until it was accredited.

Other microschools seek accreditation so they can accept students on ESAs, just like well-established private schools. Mitch Seabaugh, senior vice president of the Georgia Promise Scholarship, also spoke at the conference, inviting attendees to give their input on the new program.

To Eric Wearne, who runs the Kennesaw project, the moment offered yet another sign that microschools had made it into the mainstream.

Addressing the group the next day, he said, “If you had told me that we would one day have a state official in a room full of school founders asking for advice, I would have lost money on that bet.”

Most districts try to prevent chronic absenteeism through early warning systems that identify students who miss too much school, according to the report by . Districts also conduct home visits, call families when students are out and hire staff who specifically address attendance. 

But those efforts meet with pushback from parents. Some say, for example, that letters sent home nudging students to attend school are “too harsh.” 

“Parents’ overall feelings about the importance of school have changed,” said Jessica Hull,  executive director of communication and community engagement for the Roseville City School District, outside Sacramento. Chronic absenteeism in the district has dropped from its pandemic high point of 26% to 11%, but that is still roughly double its pre-COVID rate.

Some students with family members outside of the U.S. can be gone for weeks at a time. Others frequently miss Fridays and Mondays, while some older children are tasked with caring for younger siblings. 

“I’m generally a very positive person,” Hull said. “But I don’t know that we’ll really dramatically change those things.”

The report comes as more states are showing leadership on the issue. On Monday, Attendance Works, an advocacy and research organization, announced that have committed to cutting chronic absenteeism in half over five years in response to a challenge it issued in July along with the American Enterprise Institute and EdTrust. Chronic absenteeism peaked at 28% nationally in the 2021-22 school year. The Rand survey of nearly 200 district leaders estimates that rates dropped to about 19% last school year, but that’s still above the pre-COVID level of 15%. 

In a statement, Hedy Chang, executive director of Attendance Works, said states are “uniquely positioned to alert everyone to the size of this challenge.” 

But the Rand report suggests district leaders feel a sense of urgency to reach families with children who miss the most school now.

“The leaders we interviewed were frustrated because there are chronically absent students for whom their interventions aren’t working,” said Lydia Rainey, a researcher with the 

Center on Reinventing Public Education, which with Rand on the survey. “Some of the leaders had ideas for new programs to try; others were at a loss for what to do next. No one talked about giving up.”

The authors urged districts to emphasize approaches that foster stronger relationships between students and staff — an ingredient that even discouraged leaders say is the key to more successful strategies. Parents need to understand how poor attendance impacts their children’s academic performance, researchers said, and districts should collect better evidence on which methods make students want to come to school.

The U.S. Department of Education last week encouraged similar strategies in for low-performing schools identified as part of states’ accountability systems. The public has until Oct. 4 to provide comments on the draft. In addition, a recently posted  from the Department of Transportation offers other ideas, like teaching students to if transportation is unavailable.

In its effort to address the problem, the Roseville City district supplies gas cards to families who can’t afford to fill up and encourages transient and homeless families to transfer schools if their living situations have changed. 

“One school that works at the beginning of the year might not be the school that works at the end of the year,” Hull said.

Lines of communication 

School leaders sometimes modify district-level practices to keep the connections with parents positive. 

In central Wyoming’s Fremont County district, for example, home-to-school liaisons call families when students miss too much school. But Katie Law, principal of Arapahoe Charter High School in the district, changed the title for these liaisons to student advocate — “so families see that it is an attempt to help.” 

To comply with state laws and tribal codes, the district also sends letters and truancy citations to families of chronically absent students. But Law said those messages are often counterproductive.

“This just made relationships and trust between the school and the parents worse and led to students dropping out entirely,” she said. “It wasn’t effective.”  

Law has tried some of the conventional strategies Rand studied, but she has also added some home-grown ideas, like handing out prepaid phone cards so she can text students when they’re not in class.

“We can open those lines of communication instead of trying to find four different phone numbers that might be disconnected,” she said. 

Food is another incentive. Once a month, the school holds a community day, including a “giant potluck.” Last week, students and staff made pancakes and volunteered at the local food bank. 

“Kids start to feel that somebody’s depending on them the way they depend on other people,” Law said. “It shows them that accountability.”

‘Tricky’ questions

That mixture of approaches demonstrates how schools can connect with students socially. The “next phase” is ensuring families see an academic payoff as well, said Liz Cohen, policy director at FutureEd, a research center at Georgetown University. She recently examined a to reduce chronic absenteeism in Rhode Island.

“Do students, especially high school students, feel that going to school has value? Is it a good use of their time?” she asked. “We have to start tackling the tricky and sticky questions of what happens within the school day, academically, that makes it worth it for students to stay in those buildings.”

As part of the Rhode Island effort, the state posts data showing how chronic absenteeism affects the percentage of students meeting math and reading expectations. The state also operates a that is updated every night and gives the public a real-time picture of absenteeism rates.

This year’s data is promising, with the rate declining from almost 29% in 2022-23 to less than 25%. 

Nearby Connecticut, which publishes on chronic absenteeism at the district and school level, has seen a decline from 20% in 2022-23 to 17.7%. 

But few states offer such timely, localized data, and most don’t even release statewide figures until October or later.

That’s part of the problem, Cohen said.

“This should be unacceptable,” she said, “given the agreement on how urgent this problem is.”

More than three years after the pandemic began, a crisis in teaching quality may be stalling academic recovery, new research shows. 

Faced with exhaustion, staffing shortages, and frequent student disruptions, many educators are using “outdated and ineffective” methods and content below grade level, according to a by the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University, part of a research project done in conjunction with the RAND Corporation. 

Researchers analyzed interviews from 30 leaders, predominantly superintendents and chief academic officers, across five traditional districts and charter systems. 

To cover extra classes amid shortages, teachers lost prep periods and opportunities to collaborate with colleagues, the report found. Many went years without feedback from principal observations, and are managing higher rates of challenging student behavior. These challenges, and a tight labor market that leans on early career educators who don’t yet have the experience to weather them, are all contributing to the crisis.

As a result, educators reverted to older, more basic strategies. For instance, students were asked to work in groups without further direct instruction from the teacher; prompted to use screens or technology unnecessarily; and were frequently disengaged. 

“Just like we’re hearing about student learning loss, these leaders were seeing that their teachers were also experiencing teaching loss,” said Lydia Rainey, who co-authored the last of four reports that explored how school leaders were responding to the pandemic with Paul Hill and Robin Lake.

Teaching quality is not solely responsible for the stall in academic progress — high dosage tutoring and technology supports, baked into recovery plans to help fill academic gaps, were ideals difficult to obtain in practice. 

It’s possible, too, that teachers’ classroom choices have been impacted by .  

“When folks are stressed or depressed, or have not fully mastered what policy is asking them to do, they will revert to what they know. And what a lot of people know is how they went to school,” Rainey said. 

Both researchers and the leaders they interviewed were shocked by how much the quality of instruction had suffered in the wake of the pandemic — something leaders didn’t anticipate when drafting recovery plans. 

“No one was thinking about this possibility, that teaching would suffer returning to school,” Rainey added. “Beyond just these leaders, this was not in the national conversation about COVID recovery, either. This was a surprise to them and to us.”

As one leader at a mid-sized, suburban district in the West summarized, there’s “a survival mode in teacher practice” right now.  For an urban charter system leader on the East coast, “It’s difficult to point to a model classroom at this point.”

Staffing and mental health crises that put teachers under daily duress also strained efforts to boost instruction quality. Leaders knew teachers “were ‘exhausted,’ and they worried about asking them to do more,” according to the report.

Beyond the classroom, a compounding challenge is making accelerated learning a nearly impossible task: ambitious school district recovery plans have gone unrealized.

“Tutoring has been difficult, retention bonuses were ineffective, technology tools that they purchased didn’t work exactly as hoped,” said Rainey.

Still, teachers were tasked with bringing pandemic learners back on track, without planned support from key interventions like quality high-dosage tutoring. 

In the 2022-23 school year, leaders diverted time and resources away from tutoring or other student interventions in order to rebuild teachers’ core skills.

The response, because resources are limited, “means there are few, if any, of the extra supports that research suggests will help the students who need them most,” the report stated. 

Researchers recommend that federal Title I funding become more flexible, so that schools can afford both to address learning and teaching loss, and encourage states to subsidize and evaluate high quality tutoring options. 

Principals could continue to ask teachers directly about what supports they need and provide regular feedback from classroom observations, Rainey said. 

They also suggested leaders leverage quality resources already in their communities, like bringing parents in to tutor as has, and consider creative ways to support students who may graduate with core gaps in knowledge, like gap year programs.  

While findings are not representative of all U.S. public schools, they do provide some explanation behind in academic performance. Systems represented in the report serve 6,000 to 40,000, predominantly students of color and large proportions of low-income students.

“These five systems are showing that they can’t get out of this on their own,” said Rainey. “This is really an all-hands-on-deck moment.”

The Rand Corp. report shows this year has been especially tough on Latino teachers, with one in three reporting symptoms of depression, compared with one in four non-Latino teachers. Black teachers, however, were less likely to report stress on the job than White and Latino teachers, the researchers found.

“Repairing” teacher and principal well-being, they wrote, “is essential for pandemic recovery” and leaders shouldn’t view it as a short-term problem that will fade once COVID-related disruptions pass.

“Stress on the job can negatively affect educators’ physical health,” said Elizabeth Steiner, lead author of the report. “And poor well-being is linked with lower quality student learning.”

While most educators — about three-fourths — say they’re able to cope with the added pressures, the findings reinforce comments from teachers who say this school year has been the most grueling since the pandemic began. The Rand findings echo the results of a Gallup poll released this week and confirm earlier surveys suggesting sizable percentages of teachers want to leave the profession. The Rand survey shows about a third of educators report plans to quit — up from a quarter of teachers and 15% of principals in January 2021.

The findings point to multiple factors contributing to job dissatisfaction and intentions to leave. In addition to addressing learning loss, other pandemic-related stressors included taking on additional responsibilities because of staff shortages, harassment over COVID policies and balancing child care responsibilities.

But some sources of stress, such as racial discrimination, predate COVID. More than half of teachers said other staff members hold them to a different standard because of their race, and two-thirds of principals said they have faced online or in-person harassment from students’ families because of their race or ethnicity.

Staying ‘past the burnout stage’

The increase in teachers saying they want to leave doesn’t mean they will, nor does it predict “a major disruption in the workforce,” the authors wrote. But Colin Sharkey, executive director of the Association of American Educators, a nonunion group, said an exodus of teachers could be a “lagging indicator.”

​​”It will take time for educators to follow through on a decision that was likely made during this time period,” he said, adding that many educators might stay “past the burnout stage,” to the point that they’re “unrecoverable.”

The Rand findings are based on responses from 2,360 teachers and 1,540 principals, collected in January. The researchers compared the answers to those from a nationally representative sample of working adults. They also interviewed 60 teachers to better understand their experiences.

Roseangela Mendoza, a middle school social studies teacher at The Ethical Community Charter School in Jersey City, New Jersey, is among those who found the return to in-person learning particularly challenging.

“We were exhausted by October” of 2021, she said. “It’s been the worst stress that anybody has ever gone through.”

Teaching assistants have been covering classes when teachers are absent, leaving lead teachers without their usual support, Mendoza said, adding that students, who learned remotely for a year and a half have trouble staying focused and are always bouncing out of their seats to socialize or go to the bathroom.

“They will question you, ‘Why do I have to do this?’ ” she said. Parents also challenge her, asking that their children get extra time to complete work. “Tons of parents want to tell us what we have to do.”

But she says she still believes in the mission of her school, which she joined not long after it opened in 2009, and likes that she can be creative in planning curriculum. Her lessons include making tortillas and quilting.

“That flexibility is what keeps me here,” she said.

The report also points to conditions that make educators feel better about their jobs and less likely to leave, such as involvement in school decision-making, strong relationships with colleagues and access to mental health support.

Teachers and principals with access to at least one mental health program, such as a peer support group or counseling, were significantly less likely to say they were considering leaving their jobs, the survey found.

Many districts have been using federal relief funds to address students’ mental health needs, but some are expanding services for staff as well. The Moore Public Schools, near Oklahoma City, used a new state grant program to add eight positions for mental health professionals, including two employee assistance providers.

The district revamped an unused building into offices with private entrances where employees can see a therapist.

“I think it’s pretty rare,” said Kristi Hernandez, the district’s director of student services. “Most schools partner with outside providers.”

Teachers also just want to focus on teaching and spend less time on other responsibilities , such as meetings and bus duty, the Rand researchers found. And in their interviews with teachers, they heard that pay raises wouldn’t necessarily reduce the stress, but could convince teachers to stay in the field.

Principals listed staffing challenges as their greatest source of stress. But some feel the worst of the pandemic is finally behind them.

“A year ago we were doing temperature checks. We were doing masks,” said Adam Lane, principal at Haines City High School in central Florida, south of Orlando. “The past two and a half years were the most challenging thing we’ve ever had to deal with.”

He said he just attended a statewide administrators conference, where the mood had noticeably lifted.

“We were laughing, drinking, collaborating,” he said. “Even though it was stressful, it was so rewarding to make it through.”