microschool

Microschool blends school with micro, meaning “extremely small.” Microschools are indeed small, as some enroll no more than a dozen or so students. Evidenced as early as 2010, the term microschool has been credited to British education blogger Cushla Barry, although its exact origins are unknown.

At this time, some intentionally small private schools were founded in such places as Austin, Texas, Brooklyn, New York, and San Francisco, California. In the latter city, for instance, entrepreneur and former software engineer Gever Tulley co-founded a microschool called Brightworks in 2011; a 2014 NPR story on the microschooling trend credited Tulley with coining the term “hyper-local micro-school.”

Fun to hang out with Anya Kamenetz (author of DIYU) at #TEDxAtlanta yesterday. We both like the "hyper-local micro-school" idea.

— gever tulley (@gever) May 19, 2010

Inspired by a similar movement in the United Kingdom, more small private schools opened throughout the 2010s, seeking to update the one-room schoolhouse for the twenty-first century. Microschools are also often motivated by a desire to provide much more intensively student-centered education than some families feel public schools can—and at a more affordable tuition than private options.

Currently, there is no one governmental or educational definition of a microschool, but microschools share common features. In practice, microschools are considered to blend aspects of private schooling  and homeschooling.

Typically, a microschool usually has anywhere from a dozen to several dozen students of a variety of ages and grade levels. Often consisting of a single classroom run out of a family’s home, the teacher of a microschool works to personalize the curriculum for each student, often utilizing digital, hands-on, project-based methods.

Legally, microschools are generally considered private schools because many of them charge tuition—and this means microschools have to adhere to their respective state and local laws for accreditation.

Microschools gained more mainstream attention in 2020. As most traditional schools had to close due to the COVID-19 virus (which spreads easily in close, indoor gatherings, as commonly form in hallways and on buses, for instance), some parents looked to microschools as a potentially safer, more engaging, in-person alternative to virtual offerings.

Some parents even collaborated to form small, informal learning groups in their communities to supplement their children’s virtual schooling from their local district. These groups have been called learning pods, pandemic pods, and microschools, though they are not full-fledged, private operations as such.