“What are you doing?” former public school teacher Emma Rodriguez asked herself when she realized she wouldn’t send her own kids to her school. It was 2020, and she’d been teaching for seven years at a highly rated school in Dallas, Texas. She started thinking about her future family and what she believed as an educator. 

Emma began to dream and pray about how she could do things differently. “How could I come alongside families that maybe want to homeschool for the flexibility, the personalization of it, but just don’t want to transition from mom to teacher?” she wondered. She thought there had to be something between full-time school and full-time homeschooling. “I had no idea there was actually a term for it. It was just my thought,” she says. “As I started doing more research, I figured out there was actually the term of microschool.”

Her husband told her, “Please go live your dream. I’ll take care of you. We’ll figure it out.” She quit teaching in May 2024. After a fall spent planning, she soft-launched Lighthouse Christian Academy in January 2025 with two students—kids of a family she already knew—who happened to have empty daytime space in the after-school STEM program they ran. “They said, here’s your first two kids and here’s your space, ready, go,” she recalls. “Like we believe in you.”

After seeing her mom’s crazy schedule as a teacher, Jessica Slayback swore she’d never be one. She studied music at the University of Chicago, harboring visions of a concert piano career. “While there, I started to work in the public schools and started to have this working theory that if we just could get kids to do, like, theater and arts and music, they’d be so much happier and everything would change,” she recalls. “Kind of a young, idealistic view of the world.” 

After college, she joined Teach for America and taught in Harlem for two years, and was completely baffled by the state of public education. It lit a fire under her. “If somebody’s not going to fix this, I have to do something,” she thought. She joined a charter school in Newark with a mission to get kids out of poverty and into great colleges. Jessica says it was completely different from the schools she taught at in New York. But the kids were still miserable. The school “sucked all the joy out of learning,” she explains. 

At 22, Jessica had a wild idea. “I was like, these kids have got to get out of this place. They have to see that there’s life beyond Newark. They have to realize what can happen if you go somewhere else,” she says. So she took 12 high schoolers to New Zealand for two weeks, where they stayed on a marae and traveled the country. That trip changed her plans and shaped her view of what kids needed: “It was really this idea of, like, flourishing. Like kids need to be happy and they need to flourish above all else, and then they can learn.”

She eventually teamed up with a like-minded woman, and they began to dream about the learning environment they would create if they were starting at square one. “We would meet every week just to have this, like, idea session of what we really thought it could look like,” says Jessica. “And then I became pregnant with my first boy and was like, ‘No more thinking about it. We have to do it.’” 

In 2009, they scraped together enough money to rent a small space in Santa Monica, California, and launched Outside the Box. They soon renamed it REALM—Redesigning Education and Living Meaningfully. 

There’s something for everyone at REALM, which now serves about 150 students per semester across roughly 140 classes and employs 23 staff members. A typical day runs from 8:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., organized around each family’s completely personalized schedule. “There are about eight classes that run every hour,” Jessica explains. “Some kids come just a couple hours. Some kids come the full day. Some kids are in classes with like-aged peers. Some are not.”

Unsurprisingly, Jessica isn’t looking for conventional training in her teachers. There’s a marine biologist who also does ceramics, a fine artist who’s a math savant, and a professional “Magic: The Gathering” player who’s an incredible physics teacher. One instructor works with Netflix and PBS on climate science and teaches at REALM on the side. “When you find people who are passionate and want to be with kids and love what they’re doing, the rest of it’s just tweaks,” Jessica says. “It’s not a big deal.” 

The REALM Excursions program sends older students on international trips—including Japan, Iceland, and Scotland—that they plan and fundraise for entirely on their own. Younger kids have their own mini Excursions, which are shorter domestic trips, such as to Alaska, Montana, and Washington, DC, planned by the students. The Excursions program was inspired by Jessica’s trip to New Zealand so many years ago.

REALM graduates are doing all sorts of things. One is working on nuclear fission at MIT. Another finished college at 19 and published her first book. Some start their own business or attend a four-year college. What does Jessica see as a common thread? “Flourishing,” she says. “Just really finding their own course, finding their own paths for who they are.”

In keeping with their original goal of completely changing education, the next chapter for REALM is sharing what they’ve built. “This REALM will only ever exist here,” Jessica says. “But the ideas and the things that we’ve created in the background now that really make it function and work beautifully, we want to just be able to give to others and say, ‘Hey, here’s everything that you can really use as your foundation. Now build what your community needs.’”

A new paper released today, Trends in Higher Education: State Funding and Tuition Revenue at Public Colleges from 1980 to 2025, documents state funding, tuition revenue, and total revenue at public colleges over the past 46 years. 

There are four main findings. 

First, the conventional wisdom that states have been disinvesting in higher education for decades is a myth. Indeed, states have been increasing funding over time, not decreasing it, as shown in the figure below. 

Second, tuition revenue rose relentlessly for decades but is now falling. 

Third, total revenue rose consistently for decades, with small dips during recessions, but has now plateaued. 

Fourth, the relationship between changes in state funding and changes in tuition revenue is very weak. This means that the conventional wisdom that tuition rises to make up for cuts in state funding is wrong. As the report notes

if tuition were adjusted to offset changes in state funding, then tuition should have been falling, not rising. For example, in 1980, inflation-adjusted state funding per student was $7,677, and in 2025, it was $12,081, an increase of $4,404. If changes in tuition are driven by changes in state funding, then tuition should have declined by $4,404, but it rose by $5,430 (from $2,029 to $7,459), a difference of $9,834. 

The weak relationship between changes in state funding and changes in tuition revenue can also be seen in the figure below. The red line shows the predicted relationship if tuition revenue merely offsets changes in state funding dollar-for-dollar. The blue line shows the actual relationship. In other words, the conventional wisdom holds that a $1 decrease in state funding will increase tuition revenue by $1, but in reality, tuition revenue only increases by $0.02 to $0.29. 

The already weak relationship between changes in state funding and changes in tuition revenue disappears entirely when looking at the state level rather than nationally. States that experienced dramatic changes in state funding showed similar changes in tuition revenue. For example, increases in state funding varied widely between Oklahoma (+$1,400), Virginia (+$2,900), Maryland (+$6,900), Massachusetts (+$8,100), and Illinois (+$14,700), yet all saw essentially the same change in tuition revenue of around $7,500. 

There are two main takeaways from this weak relationship. First, those who believe tuition rose to make up for state disinvestment are wrong on two counts—state funding has been increasing, not falling, and the relationship between the two is very weak. Second, states shouldn’t try to “buy” lower tuition with more state funding. It would cost states $1 to save their students $0.02 to $0.29.

For more details on these and other related points, read the full paper here. 

In 2021, Farryn Slaton-Barkley picked up her young son from daycare and noticed something was wrong. He kept repeating his teacher’s name, which was unusual for a child who was low verbal and usually only communicated his basic needs. Then she saw the marks on his hands.

An investigation by the state licensing agency confirmed abuse. Farryn, a veteran teacher with a PhD who has taught in public schools and as an assistant professor at both public and private universities, blamed the childcare system rather than just the worker. So she decided to channel her outrage in a way that would make lasting changes. 

Using a grant from a local violence prevention initiative, Farryn trained women in Macon, Georgia, to open their own daycares, equipping them to handle children of all neurotypes. That was the seed of what would eventually grow into Rising Scholars Collective.

The organization’s work is wide-ranging, but the thread running through all of it is expanding academic options for neurodivergent children. Farryn describes Rising Scholars as “really an advocacy company” whose “main job is to help systems and educational organizations be more manageable, be more inclusive for children with disabilities.” 

One of her key programs sends twice-exceptional middle schoolers—kids who are gifted but also have a disability—to college in the summer. She launched the first cohort in 2023, and this summer she’s opening it up to the broader community. The goal isn’t just academic acceleration. It’s making sure kids who can handle college-level coursework still get to be around peers their own age. “They might be able to do calculus, but you know, they might need help with writing,” Farryn explains. “They might still need to help tie their shoes. So just making sure they’re with their age group is important at this point in their development.”

Rising Scholars also helped organize the Middle Georgia School Choice Fair, which grew from eight vendors and roughly 200 attendees in its first year to 48 registered vendors and nearly 400 attendees in year two. It’s now formally partnering with the National School Choice Foundation, and Farryn is already planning for 2027.

Another big focus is growing the microschool ecosystem in an underserved community. Through what she calls the Microschool Builder Series, Farryn connects aspiring school founders to funding sources and national networks. One microschool has already launched out of her trainings. Another is being planned by a respite provider who wants to serve nonverbal, high-needs autistic children who are currently left with few alternatives to public placement. “You have parents take their kids out of institutions for that and homeschool them because it’s not safe,” Farryn says. “They’re not made to feel safe. Just like what happened to my son when he was younger, it wasn’t safe.”

She also works one-on-one with homeschool families, helping design individualized learning plans, connecting students to summer programs, and assisting families in applying for Georgia’s Promise Scholarship and Special Needs Scholarship. As an example, one of the families she serves includes a teenage girl with special needs who is interested in photography. Farryn helped enroll her in a college and career charter program so she could take film and trade classes with peers. “She’s just glowing,” Farryn says. “It is really about looking at the student, finding the needs, finding the programming, getting them enrolled, and then just seeing them flourish.” 

Farryn is still in the classroom herself, teaching high school. “That informs my practice because I am a parent instructor, so I see things from a parent point of view,” she says. Her own son attended four different schools before landing in a microschool that met his needs. In her classroom, she encounters students who’ve masked their neurodivergence for years, picking up coping mechanisms and trauma along the way, with no diagnosis and no support. She uses April’s Autism Awareness Month as an entry point to talk about regulation, neurotypes, and brain differences, giving students language they can use when they eventually access health services on their own.

Rising Scholars Collective is not Farryn’s full-time job. “It is really a labor of love because it’s necessary. And our children, whether they do private, whether they do public, whether they do virtual, are just always at such risk,” she says. “It’s just like the same story over and over of how they’re underserved, not supported, you know, and, like what happened to my son, physically assaulted.” Rather than sit back and complain, she decided to build a stronger community and empower parents through advocacy, homeschool and microschool coaching, and school choice fairs.

“The irony is that I exist because the system’s broken,” she says. “My existence is based on the fact that there are schools and institutions that are not built with the children that I serve at the forefront. And so that’s what I’m working to improve.”

The latest Long-Term Trend results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—dubbed the Nation’s Report Card—are out, and they’re kind of “meh.” On one hand, 9‑year-olds posted modest gains in reading and math compared with the last assessment. But those gains only partially recover losses from the pandemic era, while 13-year-olds remain stuck well below where they were just a few years ago.

Perhaps most troubling, reading performance among older students remains where it was when the test was first administered in 1971, while math is only slightly higher than the first test in 1973. These results are particularly shocking when you consider that we spend three times as much per student as we did in 1970 (adjusted for inflation). According to the latest national figures, average per-student spending in public schools tops $20,000. 

Despite the Nation’s Report Card moniker, NAEP is not a report card for any particular school, teacher, or student. It provides a snapshot of how students are performing nationally. NAEP can tell us whether outcomes for various groups are improving or deteriorating, but it can’t tell us why.

The latest results show that decades of top-down reforms have not produced the improvements many predicted. Policymakers have repeatedly increased spending, expanded regulations, adjusted standards, redesigned assessments, and implemented various accountability systems. Yet long-term results remain disappointing.

That reality should make us cautious about claims that the next bureaucratic fix will finally solve the problem.

The deeper issue is accountability. In a monopoly system, leaders attempt to drive accountability by having government officials measure performance and impose consequences. But success depends on politicians and bureaucracies correctly identifying problems and acting on them. History suggests that is easier said than done.

Parental accountability works differently. Families don’t need years of NAEP data to know when their child is thriving or falling behind. They experience the results directly. When parents have meaningful educational options, schools have a stronger incentive to respond because dissatisfied families can leave—and take their funding with them.

The latest NAEP results don’t prove that school choice is the answer to every educational challenge. But they illustrate something parents already know—the existing system is often not generating the outcomes families deserve. If decades of centralized reforms have produced stagnant achievement and widening concerns about student performance, it makes little sense to double down on the same approach.

Ultimately, the latest NAEP results illustrate that millions of kids, particularly older ones, are stuck in a system that hasn’t meaningfully improved in half a century. Test scores are just a symptom. While not a panacea, educational freedom is a key part of the remedy.

In April, we released a report highlighting reforms that would both save taxpayers money and improve higher education, and we are delighted that some of these ideas are being put forward by the House Appropriations Committee. The proposed bill takes up three recommendations from the report: 

• Convert subsidized student loans into unsubsidized loans (the subsidized version waives interest while the student is still enrolled)
• Cut funding for the Federal Supplemental Education Opportunity Grants (FSEOG)
• Cut funding for work-study

These reforms would be worthwhile even if they didn’t save taxpayer money, because each of these programs suffers from serious flaws, even when their stated purpose is taken as given. For example, subsidized loans have very little impact on student enrollment decisions yet cost more than a billion dollars every year. FSEOG and work-study, the campus-based aid programs, are not allocated based on the share of needy students on each campus (their stated purpose) but rather based on historical political power. (See the full report for much more detail on why these reforms are worthwhile.)

But these reforms would also save taxpayers money, which the bill would then use to address the current shortfall in Pell grant funding. Pell grants, essentially means-tested vouchers for college attendance, are the best-designed aid program and the least objectionable on libertarian grounds, so cutting these programs and using the savings for Pell grants should be considered a win. 

The main objections raised so far tend to overstate the cost to students of eliminating subsidized loans. For instance, the National College Attainment Network (NCAN) argued that

ending subsidized loans—which don’t accrue interest while students are attending college at least half-time—would increase average student debt by $6,000.

This is quite misleading. Not all students borrow (about 37% of students borrow), and not all are eligible for subsidized loans (around one-third of borrowers). Moreover, a student who borrows the maximum subsidized loan each year and graduates in four years would have around $3,000 of interest accrue over those four years at current interest rates. Thus, the quote should read something like “increase average student debt for those that previously borrowed the maximum amount of subsidized loans by around $3,000.” The average across all students would be much smaller, less than $400. Lots of other adjustments could be made, such as accounting for dropouts, those that take more than four years to graduate, or those that don’t attend four-year colleges. But the bottom line is that $6,000 is a dramatic overestimate. 

Overall, asking students to pay interest on their student loans to fund Pell grants is an eminently sensible tradeoff.

After years of political fights over excessive student loan debt, there is a new, surprising twist. Twenty-five states with a Democrat governor and the District of Columbia are suing the Trump administration to allow students to take on more student loan debt. What’s going on?

As background, last year’s reconciliation bill made a host of beneficial changes to student loans, and one of the most important changes was phasing out the Grad PLUS student loan program. Graduate students (e.g., those pursuing a master’s or doctoral degree) can already borrow up to $20,500 per year from the main (Stafford) student loan program, and that remains unchanged. But Grad PLUS was implemented in 2006-07 to allow graduate students to borrow up to whatever their college decided was appropriate. It should not come as a surprise that colleges exploited the program to raise tuition, leaving colleges richer and students with more debt. 

Ending Grad PLUS was the right move. 

But there was a problem. While the remaining limit of $20,500 per year is enough for most graduate programs, there are some, like medical school, where providing the education is very costly, and students should arguably have access to higher loan limits. The legislation therefore increased the $20,500 limit to $50,000 for “professional” programs, pointing to a definition of “professional” in previous regulations. Unfortunately, the regulatory definition was not definitive. I happened to sit on the committee tasked with determining which programs are eligible for the higher loan limits based on the ”statute, congressional intent, and ambiguous regulatory text.” The committee used the existing examples already in regulatory text (law, medicine, dentistry, etc.) and then included any other fields that were similar, with clinical psychology being the only field that was sufficiently similar to warrant adding to the list. 

This distinction came to a head with nurses. While undergraduate nurses are completely unaffected, students attending graduate nursing programs are now limited to $20,500 per year in debt. Colleges with nursing programs want them to take on more debt so they can charge more, and therefore want these programs to be classified as professional, which would then allow students to take on $50,000 of debt per year. 

This is a terrible deal for the nurses in graduate programs. The PR message is that the Trump administration is disrespecting nurses by failing to classify them as professional. This is wrong for two reasons.

First, it is a misreading of what professional means in this context. The professional distinction was for decades merely a categorization tool for the Department of Education with no practical effect on students or colleges. This obscure definition matters now only because it determines how much debt students can take on. It was never designed to be, nor was it ever considered the government’s official determination of which professions are considered professional in an everyday context. For instance, no undergraduate program is categorized as professional, but that clearly doesn’t mean that accountants, teachers, and nurses are not professionals in the everyday sense of the word. 

Second, if this lawsuit succeeds, it would be a Pyrrhic victory. The only practical impact would be to load up nurses and other graduate students with more student loan debt. Being categorized as professional in a government database isn’t worth an extra $29,500 per year in student loan debt.