“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.

Read the rest of this post →

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. 

Read the rest of this post →

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.

Read the rest of this post →

“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.”