Many kids are not going to school. That’s the takeaway from the abundant headlines warning about the escalating epidemic of chronic absenteeism that has worsened since 2020. 

The 74’s Linda Jacobson reported earlier this fall on various efforts by school districts to address rising rates of chronic absenteeism. These include districts sending robocalls with the voice of an NFL player, educators bribing chronically absent children with rewards if they return to class, and schools activating “attendance clerks” to monitor students and conduct home visits. 

Millions of taxpayer dollars are funding these programs, including an injection of federal pandemic relief dollars.

But most coverage of the crisis has failed to ask the bigger, far more important question underpinning the attendance numbers: Why don’t kids want to go to school? 

“I think that school has long been perceived as meaningless by most kids,” said Michael Strong, longtime educator, author, and founder of the low-cost virtual school, The Socratic Experience. “COVID confirmed for many students that school is a meaningless waste of time.” 

It may also have confirmed the same for their parents, many of whom got a glimpse of classrooms and curriculum during prolonged school shutdowns and remote learning.

Parents of children who are disengaged from school and refusing to attend are regularly referred to The Socratic Experience, which serves students ages 8 to 19. Other parents are looking for a more individualized educational experience for their children that prioritizes personal agency, and are attracted to the online school’s emphasis on “purpose-driven education.”

“There are kids who reject schooling, but as soon as you put them in an environment where their learning is relevant and interesting, they learn rapidly,” said Strong. At The Socratic Experience, that involves a learning approach tailored to each student’s needs and interests, frequent Socractic discussions with peers and adults about relevant, engaging topics, and creative, entrepreneurial projects.

Educators like Strong, who have long worked in the alternative education space where learners’ needs and interests are centered, may help to unlock the root causes of chronic absenteeism and reveal solutions. 

The Socratic Experience is one example of an out-of-system solution that can help disengaged students rekindle their joy of learning, but there are other entrepreneurial educators who are partnering with school districts to offer in-system answers. 

The Field Academy in Denver, Colorado is one such program. It’s a traveling high school that this fall is collaborating with the Aurora Public Schools and the Englewood Public Schools to address chronic absenteeism and credit recovery in creative ways. High school students who are not showing up to school, and who have either been referred to the truancy court or are at risk of being referred, are picked up in The Field Academy van each day to learn throughout the community in an immersive, personalized environment. 

“I was attracted to the idea of disruption within the public system,” said co-founder and executive director, Anna Graves, who spent about a decade in outdoor and wilderness education before turning her attention to public schools. “The first school I tried to open was a charter school,” said Graves. “I thought, this is great, we can do some really amazing things in this work. And then I realized that, actually, we’re still inside four walls. We’re not at a place where this actually feels innovative to me, and it also does not feel applicable to most people’s lives.”

It was her search for out-of-the-box education solutions that would be more relevant and engaging for students that led Graves to see how The Field Academy could serve low-income, chronically absent students. Graves’s current students, who are still enrolled in district schools, are all about a year-and-a-half behind in credits due to absenteeism. Although they are in high school, they are reading at an elementary school level. 

Using creative, community-based credit recovery techniques, The Field Academy makes learning interesting and applicable to the teenagers’ lives. Daily learning may include rock climbing and related lessons around right angles and geometry. A trip to a bike shop resulted in a bike-building project that incorporated math and language arts. One student is really into cars, so the van stops at an auto body shop to allow for observation and hands-on experience. English class takes place at an art museum, with students writing and talking about pieces on the wall.

Graves explained that students who rarely attended school before this fall are happy and eager to be picked up by The Field Academy van each day. She said that her students grew disillusioned with conventional schooling, and especially its coercive, often punitive, environment. Last year, one student only went to school 14 days out of the entire school year. Now, he is excited to learn through The Field Academy. 

“I think the rise in chronic absenteeism is telling us that the system isn’t working for most students, and students are voting with their feet in the same way that we do with any product that we don’t like,” said Graves. “Honestly, I think that schools are getting really strong feedback, and that is why there’s a possibility for a lot of creativity in this moment.”

Kerry McDonald is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education and host of the LiberatED podcast. She is also the Velinda Jonson Family education fellow at State Policy Network.

From the outside, the headquarters of Alcove Learning looks like any small home in the largely Latino Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles. Flanked by similar houses and located among varied storefronts and restaurants, this self-directed learning center for teens and tweens offers young people the freedom to direct their own education. It is part of an expanding ecosystem of alternative educational models throughout the U.S. focused on individualized learning.

Alcove was co-founded in January 2020 by Alexis Burgess, a former philosophy professor who taught courses at Stanford University, University of California, Los Angeles, and Claremont McKenna College before turning his attention to alternative education.

“So many of the kids I was encountering when teaching Intro to Philosophy felt a little rudderless to me,” Burgess told me in a recent interview. “They didn’t really know why they were at college at all… I think it’s a failure of the system. I think one of my Alcove kids recently described it as a ‘people mover.’ ”

Burgess began thinking more critically about his own “people mover” educational experience and that of his college students, while considering what he wanted for his own children’s education. He started reading about creative learning models and discovered North Star, a self-directed learning center in Massachusetts founded in 1996 by former public school teacher Kenneth Danford.

Burgess was hooked. He connected with Danford, and launched Alcove as part of the Liberated Learners microschool network that Danford and his colleague Joel Hammon created in 2013 to scale the North Star model, which prioritizes non-coercive, self-directed education.

At Alcove and other Liberated Learner-affiliated microschools across the country, young people attend optional classes throughout the week, choosing from part-time and full-time enrollment offerings. Most Alcove learners are legally considered homeschoolers, although some students enrolled in California virtual charter schools also attend Alcove as a complement to their learning programs.

Tuition is typically a fraction of the cost of traditional private schools, making it more financially accessible to more families. Alcove uses a “pay-what-you-can” tuition model, with some families paying nothing while others pay the full $1,600 monthly rate. The average Alcove family pays between $500 and $600 a month.

Burgess describes his microschool as an “unschool,” referring to an educational philosophy that jettisons adult-imposed curriculum and traditional schooling practices in favor of emergent, bottom-up, out-of-system learning tied to a young person’s curiosity and interests.

“There is no set curriculum,” Burgess said. “You can pursue your strengths at Alcove. You can pursue your weaknesses or growth areas. You can do whatever it is that you feel like doing. We’re going to make it up as we go along every semester.”

Class offerings this semester include math, French, political science, magic, psychology, debate, art, and more. It’s “education as improv,” Burgess said.

While programs similar to Alcove have been around for decades, interest in these models has accelerated in recent years, as families look for the personalization in education that they enjoy in other areas of their lives.

“When we started North Star in 1996, there were a few pioneering homeschoolers and unschoolers, and there was the Sudbury Valley School,” Danford said. “Now, I am meeting people every day who are interested in creating alternatives to conventional schooling, and these people sometimes show up with partners, teams and resources.”

With the expansion of school choice policies enabling education funding to go directly to families rather than school systems, self-directed schooling alternatives are poised for further growth. Nine states have adopted universal school choice programs, including Arizona, Florida, Utah, and West Virginia, which have implemented flexible education savings account programs that include schooling alternatives like Alcove.

Danford is focusing his attention on finding and facilitating founders in these choice-friendly states.

“I have become very interested in exploring public funding for educational alternatives, and am deeply engaged with how we can identify and support these founders and their interested families to build sustainable programs,” he said.

He is currently broadening the training and development services that Liberated Learners offers to prospective founders. He’s also growing his team to provide greater support to these entrepreneurs — many of whom are former public school teachers.

“For the most part, the people I meet are not businesspeople seeking a clever way to make money; in fact, most are willing to work for lower wages than they could earn in public schools,” Danford said. “These people have initiative, vision, and a need to find a different way to work with youth.”

Even in states like California that don’t have robust school choice policies, entrepreneurial parents and teachers are working to offer low-cost, learner-centered education options.

Not far from Alcove Learning, former teacher and school librarian Lizette Valles founded Ellemercito Academy in 2021 as an independent microschool with a focus on experiential learning and trauma-informed education. Just outside of Los Angeles, Danelle Foltz-Smith runs Acton Academy Venice Beach, part of the fast-growing Acton Academy network that now includes over 300 learner-driven microschools.

There is a groundswell of demand for new and different educational options, and entrepreneurial parents and educators everywhere are stepping up to create them. Philanthropic nonprofits like the VELA Education Fund provide grant funding and community support to many of these everyday entrepreneurs to help catalyze and cultivate their efforts.

“I think it’s beautiful what’s happening,” Burgess said, noting that Alcove’s little yellow house is now at capacity with 30 learners. He’s wondering about the possibility of leasing the house next door to meet continuing demand, and is optimistic about the growth of decentralized educational models both in Los Angeles and across the country.

“We’re seeing a large scale reorientation away from a top down, federal organization of schooling in the country to something much more bottom up, that was expedited by COVID and by the failures of No Child Left Behind,” Burgess said, referring to federal education policy that has shaped American education for the past two decades.

“We need something better,” he added. “The kids need something better urgently. And so I’m not ashamed anymore to be offering an alternative to the public system. I think we need microschools.”

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter here.

Nai Hawkins (right) teaches students at Texas’ Leading Little Arrows homeschool co-op and microschool. (Zander Todd)

It’s back-to-school time across America, but millions of families have stepped away from a traditional classroom. Instead, they have chosen to stick with homeschooling, an option that grew in popularity during COVID school closures and has remained above pre-pandemic levels ever since.

“COVID put things under a microscope,” said Amber Okolo-Ebube, a Texas homeschooling mother. “Parents saw how far behind their children actually were and said I can do this better.” Okolo-Ebube has been homeschooling her children since 2011, but she has seen the local homeschooling population swell over the past three years, especially among families of color.

Okolo-Ebube is one of the hundreds of entrepreneurial parents and teachers I have interviewed over the past three years who are creating low-cost alternatives to conventional schooling. In 2022, she founded Leading Little Arrows, a weekly homeschool co-op that grew so quickly she decided to lease a building near the University of Texas at Arlington to accommodate weekly tutorials with hired educators and a part-time, drop-off microschool for homeschoolers.

With nearly 40 learners, three-quarters of whom are neurodiverse, Okolo-Ebube’s programs are already at capacity. She plans to open two additional microschool locations later this fall.

“The homeschooling movement is accelerating here, particularly among BIPOC families,” said Okolo-Ebube, referring to Black, Indigenous, and other students of color. “You see someone like you doing it and it becomes less scary.”

Angela Watson, assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, theorizes that these network effects are contributing to the growth in homeschooling among families of color. “Minority families have begun to network as homeschoolers, something that white homeschoolers have done for decades. We think these grassroots support systems serve to expand homeschool participation in these populations,” she said, explaining that more research is needed.

Homeschooling surged in 2020, with Black homeschooling numbers rising five-fold that year, according to the US Census Bureau. Their May 2023 Household Pulse Survey results showed that the homeschooling rate dipped from its pandemic peak but remains elevated at over 5% of the U.S. school-age population, or more than 3.5 million students.

Watson is part of a team at Johns Hopkins that is creating a free hub for research and data on homeschooling. She sees many reasons for homeschooling’s continued popularity, including a greater openness among today’s younger parents to nontraditional learning options. “This generation of parents is more willing to try something new,” said Watson. “They grew up when homeschooling was more mainstream and is less stigmatized in their view than it may be to older parents. It could also be that younger parents are more tech-savvy and adept at online learning.”

Other reasons that families may choose homeschooling are disappointment with the academic or social environment in local public schools and a lack of accessible private school options, as well as concern over curriculum, including what content is or is not covered. Some parents say they are simply disillusioned with standardized, one-size-fits-all schooling and want an alternative.

“I think more parents are realizing that compelling their kids to sit still, memorize facts, and take tests is not the surest path to success for their children,” said Jenny Markus, a homeschooling mother of a four-year-old daughter in Brooklyn who is seeing more homeschoolers in New York City. “Modern challenges call for creative minds and resilient spirits, which conventional schools do not consistently foster.” Markus just launched a self-directed learning center for homeschoolers this fall.

New research reveals that New York’s homeschooling enrollment increased 65% during the first two academic years of the pandemic, while in Florida, homeschooling enrollment increased by 43%. Florida’s homeschooling population continued to climb last year as well, according to state data.

“This movement is just beginning,” said Okolo-Ebube, who believes that more families will flock to homeschooling and schooling alternatives, such as microschooling, over the coming years. With the national expansion of school choice policies that enable families to use education funds toward an assortment of approved expenses, including homeschooling program fees and microschool tuition in some states, access to these out-of-system models will become even greater.

Parents increasingly want a wider variety of education options from which to choose, including unconventional ones that are more tailored to their children’s specific needs and interests. More everyday entrepreneurs like Okolo-Ebube and Markus are responding to this parent demand by building innovative and affordable schooling alternatives that families want.

“Having gone through the New York City public school system myself, I never felt like I truly had enough time and space to pursue my curiosity and passions at my own pace,” said Markus. “For my own child, I knew I wanted something that provided more freedom and flexibility, and I am as excited as ever to continue on this path with other families who value the same kinds of experiences for their children.”

Kerry McDonald is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education and host of the LiberatED podcast. She is also the Velinda Jonson Family education fellow at State Policy Network.

This article was published in partnership with The 74. Sign up for The 74’s newsletter.