Community Crafted Education Starts April 22nd!

[MUSIC PLAYING] What is the point of school choice? This is Eric Weren from the National Hybrid Schools Project at Kennesaw State University. We've been doing a few things here the past several years. We host convenings for founders, potential founders, current hybrid and micro school administrators, teachers and parents, and policymakers and policy researchers. We conduct cutting-edge academic research in the field of new school models. And we try to understand the different practical aspects of this growing movement of schools that are purpose-built by small local communities. That third point, understanding the implications of this growing movement is the purpose of this podcast. We're going to talk with people who are mostly outside of the school choice sector to hear how these issues are affecting them. In other words, what's the point of school choice? School choice has had a few banner years in a row. Lots of existing state programs have expanded. Many states have passed new education savings account bills to help get more kids into the schools of their choice. And lots of founders have figured out how to start up or to expand even without those programs. Individual people are starting tiny micro schools or hybrid schools where the kids attend school just a few days per week all over the country. The landscape of hybrid and micro schools and homeschooling in various forms has really grown the last few years. It's grown so much that we need new terms, like community crafted education, to cover all of the variations in this growing segment of families who are coming together in small groups and just starting up new types of educational experiences for their kids and starting up new local communities of interests in the process. These schools and communities seem like a really healthy revival of small scale civil society in America. And that's all good for its own sake, or at least a lot of parents have decided it is because they're choosing all of these options. The point of all of this action on school choice is not just the past bills, but to give more kids real opportunities through all of these independent efforts. The downstream hope then is that these choices will improve American society as a whole. So the idea for this podcast is to talk about the downstream effects of school choice and especially hybrid and micro schools, or what we'll call community crafted education models. How are all these policy developments and new schools and educational experiences improving society? To get it that, I'll talk with people who are mostly not a part of the school choice world about how having lots of new options is affecting or could potentially affect their various fields. So I'll talk to people in tech, in small business, and higher education and others about how community crafted education is showing up in their fields and what potential they see in it. This is probably the most exciting time in education policy in the last 30 years. The current landscape has more room and more appetite for creativity than we've seen in decades. It's got the potential to better serve more families and to do that with less political drama than we usually see in education policy discussions. So let's talk about it. (upbeat music)