Do one-room school buildings hold the key to solving this country’s education crisis?
What if the values of local control, a strong sense of community, and built-in accountability have the potential to transform our broken learning system?
As someone who taught in a private school for two years and currently writes for the Herzog Foundation, which publishes Lion, I have long been interested in ways to improve education. Through my research, I learned about microschools, a rapidly growing movement of small learning groups that are springing up across the country. A recent study found that 10% of school children in the United States are educated in some type of microschool environment.
These schools come in a variety of formats, from traditional schools to outdoor-based schools to hybrid schools that meet less than five days a week. They are mostly small, sometimes meeting in homes or churches, and often have one teacher.
These are the revival of the one-room schoolhouse, an educational phenomenon that has served our country for 200 years. Only a few hundred one-room schools out of 200,000 remain today, but microschools are reviving a concept that, if widely adopted, could change the state of education in this country.
Full local control
The one-room school building (ORS) was the epitome of community management. Communities contracted teachers to educate their children. The townspeople knew their needs and chose someone who would meet them. Salaries and terms and conditions were appropriate for the community.
Parents are involved in the content of the lesson, any attempts at strange or “abnormal” topics are immediately reported to parents, and parents are empowered to take action if teachers go against their wishes. I was able to do it.
Microschools offer similar empowerment. Our community of parents chooses teachers and schools that meet their needs. They invest, but can also withdraw their investment if the education offered no longer suits them. Schools balance cost and demand and charge what they think parents can afford. For example, Foundation Christian Academy in Illinois lowered tuition for the first year to open the school to more families.
These small learning communities listen to parents instead of arresting them for speaking out at school board meetings. They can respond to requests to change the curriculum in hopes of satisfying their core constituency. There are no explicit national mandates calling for critical race theory, sex education, or “pronoun studies.”
strong sense of community
The one-room schoolhouse was the definition of community. You are there because you belong to the community and the school is yours. And because learning happens with all grades in the same room (a phenomenon seen in many microschools, homeschools, and homeschool co-ops), you know your community and your community knows you. Masu. If you start stepping out of line, everyone will notice. Aren’t you coming to class? Word should be home right away, not an automated call from the school district.
Classroom discipline was also under direct control, as students were with the same teacher and peers all day, not just for 40 minutes. As a former teacher, I observed my students acting out and found out that other classes were doing the same thing. However, they knew enough ways to avoid consequences in each class despite the cumulative amount of behavior that merited discipline. This is not the case with ORS. The same teacher knew the students every day. If there were discipline issues or personality conflicts, they had to resolve it and find a way to move forward.
Educational historians say students behaved better because they had other age groups around them. The older students had to help the younger ones academically and set a good example. This was beneficial for young learners who received learning support and had good role models. This also helped the teacher. At ORS, students learned to function like a family and everyone worked together to do their part. This includes cleaning the space, maintaining the fire (heating or cooking lunch), and other related tasks. There was a high sense of ownership, community, and belonging.
Many of these features are present in today’s microschools. Students want to be involved, known, and there (because being in these schools is a privilege). And with the expansion of school choice programs in more states, parents can find the educational environment that’s right for their family. With this high level of buy-in, the school is poised for success.
Built-in accountability
Speaking of success, ORS would never have dreamed of graduating students who couldn’t read, write, or do basic math. The school was small enough and the students knowledgeable enough that nothing slipped through the cracks. Moreover, the lack of state mandates and overreaching government programs allowed teachers to focus on the essentials of “writing, writing, and arithmetic,” rather than gender studies and continued suppression throughout American history. .
In fact, many students learned better in a group setting. Hearing again the lessons taught to the juniors, they became even more deeply ingrained among the upperclassmen, who in turn began to help the juniors. This sets the expectation that learning happens all the time, not just during assigned class periods, and encourages teaching others, which has proven to be one of the most effective ways to learn. It was done.
The focus is on mastery, not on moving children forward just because they have reached a certain grade level. There wasn’t much pressure on Johnny to pass even though he couldn’t read, write or do math well. I understood that I needed to keep working and not continue as if everything was fine.
Today’s microschools are characterized by immediate accountability. Parents and teachers can tell if a student isn’t “getting it,” but few slip through the cracks. If teachers don’t do their job, they will lose students and won’t last long in this small, personal environment.
The curriculum is determined by teachers and agreed to by parents. If you deviate too much from that, it will immediately become noticeable. However, teachers have the flexibility to tailor learning to the needs of specific students and classrooms, and to “think outside the box” as needed.
Although it is more common today, a student’s educational identity is related to the school as a whole rather than to individual grade levels (since my days as a teacher, I have always been more concerned with calling certain classes “difficult” or “handy”). There was a phrase to express this: “I can’t bear it.” In a mixed primary school, everyone feels and celebrates their individual and school-wide successes.
A better path forward
The one-room school building was right about many things that baffle the minds of today’s doctoral students. How did these schools thrive and prosper despite the lack of “educational experts” and years of teacher preparation? Children’s education is not what we think it is. Will these dynamics of local control, a strong sense of community, and built-in accountability naturally solve many of the problems of modern education?
Microschools prove that.
Microschools focus attention where it’s needed, at a fraction of the cost, in a streamlined and simplified manner, and work toward outcomes that benefit students, parents, and communities. Many of our founders are former public school teachers, so teachers love us too.
They were designed as community schools but grew out of control as they morphed into today’s cumbersome public school system. Today we have a vast array of administrative agencies, government mandates, and teacher unions, all of which work against the principles listed above. Education is no longer flexible, responsive, or localized, and students are in a worse position.
The number of microschools has skyrocketed, especially in the wake of COVID-19, as the pandemic has exposed the weaker parts of the education beast. As more parents seek creative learning environments and states empower parents through school choice measures, we see a hopeful tide emerging in the challenging educational landscape across our country.
It may not always look like the one-room schoolhouses of yore that still dot the rural landscape of some American counties, but the principle is that way.
Maybe smaller is better, simpler is easier, and community is the key. These values will go a long way toward righting wrongs and fixing American education.