In most areas of life, when something isn’t working, we look for a better option. In K–12 education, though, children are assigned to public schools based on where they live—and if that school isn’t a good fit, the child is generally seen as the problem. School choice is changing that by expanding access to alternative learning environments. But educational freedom changes lives only if parents and teachers know what options exist, which is why Cato’s Friday Feature highlights the schools, policies, and organizations bringing those choices within reach.

When Robert Barnett was teaching high school math at Eastern High School in Washington, DC, he ran into a problem familiar to teachers everywhere: his students weren’t all at the same academic level.

“I realized that it was impossible for me to teach one lesson per day in such a way that all my students would understand,” Robert recalls. “Some were ahead—they were bored. Some were behind—they were lost. Some were absent.”

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In most areas of life, if something isn’t working, we look for another option. But not in K–12 education. The current system assigns kids to public schools based on where they live, not what they need. When it’s not working, the default is to assume there’s a problem with the child instead of asking if the school is the best fit. Of course, sometimes kids just need to work through challenges. But often, a different environment is what’s needed.

The spread of school choice programs that allow state funds to be used beyond public schools is opening the door to other learning environments—and that’s expanding educational freedom. But many parents and teachers aren’t aware of the diverse array of alternatives available today. Each week, the Cato Friday Feature showcases these options, along with the policies and organizations that make them more accessible, raising awareness for policymakers and parents. Educational freedom can only change lives if the people most affected know about it!

Living in Arizona—a state at the forefront of school choice and education entrepreneurship—Jennie Jones learned about Prenda microschools soon after she began homeschooling her oldest child. She was intrigued. “I thought, wow, that would be so fun to bring a few kids to my house,” she recalls.

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“It can’t be about money,” says Achieve Academy founder Tara Pvel when people ask for advice about starting a microschool. “You have to love doing this.”

Tara had no intention of starting a school when she moved from England to Georgia nearly 30 years ago; she had a background in business. But after watching her son, an early reader, spend his kindergarten days coloring without making any progress, she knew something had to change.

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For most children, playing “city” means cardboard storefronts and imaginary money. But in Germany and Austria, thousands of children spend part of their summer running something much closer to a real economy. 

They elect mayors. Publish newspapers. Open businesses. Bake bread. Argue court cases. Pay taxes. 

These “mini cities”—temporary child-run communities modeled after real civic life—started with Mini Munich in 1979, which is still operating today. Yet they remain almost unknown beyond those countries. Daniel Fetz, an Austrian entrepreneur who attended a mini city in Austria as a boy, wants to change that. He’s translating the handbooks, guides, and essays on mini cities from the original German to English and publishing them on his Mini Cities website. 

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Elizabeth Watkins, director of Ascend Micro School in Colorado Springs, didn’t set out to run a school. She set out to find the right one for her son.

The oldest of five kids, Elizabeth grew up homeschooled in northern Maine and credits that upbringing with giving the close family bonds she still values today. She always assumed she’d homeschool her own children. What she didn’t anticipate was how hard it would be.

Her oldest was “very independent, very wanting to do things his own way,” she says. He also had some learning challenges that meant his way of learning was “180 degrees different than the way I learned,” she adds. After two years of homeschooling him, which left them both in tears, Elizabeth enrolled him in public school. That wasn’t quite right either.

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“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.’”