Why Diverse, Decentralized Schooling Models Are Gaining Momentum

Indeed, momentum is accelerating as more parents become aware of creative schooling options in their communities, and more education entrepreneurs build those options. A majority of the founders I interview on my semiweekly LiberatED podcast have launched their new schools and spaces within the past four years, with many quickly hitting enrollment capacity and inspiring the growth of even more models. Together, families and founders are helping to create a dynamic, diverse, and decentralized marketplace of education options.

What we are witnessing now in education is what the Foundation for Economic Education’s founder, Leonard Read, foreshadowed 60 years ago this month. In his classic essay “The Case for the Free Market in Education,” Read predicted the innovation and abundance that would occur as bottom-up education models challenged top-down ones.

According to Read:

I am amazed at how much of Read’s vision is being realized. Today, we have more of that “great variety of coop­erative and private enterprises” in education that he envisioned. We have those “thousands of private schools, large and small.” We have the “various tutoring arrangements” that Read imagined.

Recall that when Read wrote this essay in 1964, homeschooling was illegal in many states and mostly confined to fringe counter cultural communities. Today, homeschooling is an established, mainstream option comprising upwards of 6 percent of all school-age children in the US, or more than 3 million students. Homeschooling is often the mechanism used to establish emerging school models, such as microschools, that offer a highly personalized curriculum within a small, flexible, often mixed-age learning community.

Some microschools operate as homeschooling collaboratives and tutoring centers, but many operate as registered private schools, and this sector is also growing. The Cato Institute has been tracking the increase in private schooling enrollment over the past several years, finding a 46 percent rise between 2022 and 2024. Much of this growth is occurring in states with generous private school choice programs that enable education funding to follow students to their preferred schools or alternative learning models. Florida, for example, has had various school choice programs for years. It saw its private school enrollment increase by nearly 12 percent between the 2019–20 and 2022–23 school years.

Even in states like Massachusetts, where I live and where we have no private school choice programs, private school enrollment is also growing, according to recent data analyzed by The Boston Globe. In my city of Cambridge, for example, over 23 percent of Cambridge school-age students went to a private school in 2023, compared to 16 percent in 2014.

It’s an exciting time in education as emerging school models become more diverse, widespread, and accessible to more families.