Traditional Schools Are Losing Their Grip on K-12 Education

School’s Out: Why Families Are Choosing Unconventional Education, by Mickey Revenaugh (Hopkins Press, 263 pp., $32.95)

Publicly funded school choice is experiencing historic growth in the United States. State money now follows many students into private, religious, and charter schools, as well as traditional public schools. But a small corner of the education marketplace—homeschooling, microschools, and other alternatives to school-based programs—was booming long before this expansion began.

In her new book, School’s Out: Why Families Are Choosing Unconventional Education, Mickey Revenaugh argues that deep social, cultural, and technological forces are driving the growth of alternative schooling. Parents choosing these options have lost faith in the traditional school model, which places students in age-specific grades in a single physical space to learn a common curriculum. Revenaugh’s book is essential reading for anyone looking to understand the alternative schooling revolution.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 82 percent of all U.S. students are enrolled in traditional public schools, roughly 10 percent in private and religious schools, 5 percent in charters, and 2 percent in microschools or homeschooling.

The families in that last group have rejected the concept of a self-contained school. Instead, they customize education to their children’s individual needs. They take an à la carte approach, mixing and matching virtual learning, learning pods (small-group settings), microschools, community resources, and other alternatives into a comprehensive program. Traditional schools struggle with this type of personalization, at best assigning students to peer groups like gifted, special needs, or the like.

Fine-tuning the educational program allows parents to match the pace of learning to their child’s abilities, rather than to the dictates of the clock or calendar. By focusing on areas of interest—including arts, music, or other subjects often peripheral in traditional schools—parents can also foster educational self-motivation in their children. Finally, these parents see educational opportunities for their children in museums, nature programs, apprenticeships, and community organizations, putting real-world experience on par with book-based learning.

Revenaugh dedicates a chapter to the increasing diversity of families using unconventional education. She cites census data revealing that “the percentage of Black families who are homeschooling spiked from about 3 percent in 2019 to over 15 percent during 2020 and has not subsided much since.” A 2022–23 Census Household Pulse Survey notes that, among homeschooling families, 12 percent were black and 19 percent Hispanic. Revenaugh reports on the Flourish conference in Decatur, Georgia, which brings together parents and “advocates for a celebration of Black and brown ‘parent-first’ education throughout Georgia” as well as numerous online resources for black and Latino families seeking to tailor their children’s education experience.

The interest of black and Hispanic families in educational alternatives should not be surprising. Traditional schools and districts often say that they are pursuing equity, or in some cases equality, in student outcomes. They do so by designing programs intended to meet the needs of various underserved groups. Over time, however, the interests of the adults in the classrooms take priority over those of the children, and money continues to flow into the programs despite a lack of progress.

Revenaugh discusses the possible drawbacks of self- and family-directed education, acknowledging “real concerns about the ‘cloche effect’ of very small, self-contained learning communities of like-minded families.” She wonders how “students  in these enclosed hot-house environments [will] have the kinds of countervailing encounters and experiences that prepare them for the larger world?” But she observes that the traditional public school system is often segregated by racial and economic differences, and that universal access to the internet ensures that children are not locked in a cocoon of values and beliefs defined by their parents.

Revenaugh sees family-directed education’s growth as inevitable. Her impressive book ends with an insightful political observation: “Today’s family-level embrace of unconventional education may actually be evidence of the horseshoe theory at work. This political science construct suggests that far-right and far-left positions actually bend closer together than the distance either has from the mainstream.”

There will likely be many false starts and missteps ahead. But as Revenaugh points out, the confluence of school choice, rapidly expanding AI, and more generous work-from-home policies is irreversibly changing the relationship between families and schools. Parents now have the tools to design an educational program that suits their children. Schools and districts are no longer the sole intermediaries between families and educational technology, for better or worse.

The standardized program of traditional schools and districts is losing its grip on American families.