President Trump has issued a new directive encouraging school choice and education freedom. Across America, parents frustrated with public education are searching for better options. Today, Lisa Fletcher takes us inside a new kind of school that gives families more control: Microschools.

The following is a transcript of a report from “Full Measure with Sharyl Attkisson.”
Watch the video by clicking the link at the end of the page.

This is Acton Academy Falls Church, a so-called “microschool” based in an unassuming storefront ten miles west of Washington, D-C, in Virginia.

It’s a teaching approach that customizes education to fit each student’s needs, interests, and learning styles.

A hundred and fifty years ago, a microschool could have passed for a rural one-room schoolhouse with kids from different grades learning in the same classroom.

This modern version has been around since the 1970’s but really started growing in the early 2000s. The COVID pandemic accelerated their growth.

At this school, and some 95 thousand others like it in the U-S, students are grouped by ability rather than grade level.

And sometimes, class isn’t held in a classroom at all

On this day, kids ages 6 to 9 learn about the science of color by mixing different water paints.

Older kids, between 10 and 13 tackle tougher topics like how to achieve a goal.

Teacher: Question three. Imagine that you’ve decided that rather than focusing on improving a skill you struggle with, you’re going to find a different way to achieve a goal. What is the most important step in that process?

11-and-a-half-year-old Sam explains how learning here works

Lisa Fletcher: For parents who aren’t familiar with this kind of education, they might look at it and say, well, they seem to like it and they’re having a lot of fun, but how much are they learning?

Sam: I think that we learn a lot more than you’d expect here // (3:40) if you’re reading something you won’t just be reading about this subject the whole time. They’ll actually show you how to do it and show you what it is. You’ll be doing it and you’ll learn how to do it.

10 year old Izzy.

Izzy: We have this thing called passion projects. And you pick a project that you really like. You just work on it and I feel like it’s more open. It’s not just sitting at a desk where the teacher tells you what to do and then when you get home and there’s an hour of homework.

At 13, Katie is the oldest in the class.

Katie: Like you said, parents who see this, oh, they’re having fun, they might, how are they even learning? It’s because we want to, we want to learn, we want to get ahead. We want to see the progress that we’ve made and help each other do it as well.

Government definitions of what constitutes microschools are rare and only some states give them official designation. Broadly speaking, microschools are multi-family learning environments serving children from kindergarten through high school. They can be formed by parents, churches, or companies like Minds in Motion, or Acton, which operates this school. It is estimated that between 1.1 and 2.1 million

Children attend microschools, about the same number attending Catholic schools. Microschools can be free because they are supported by taxpayers through vouchers, or cost more than 20 thousand dollars if private.

Jeanne Allen: Parents really have come a long way in understanding that not every school meets every need of their child or children.

Jeanne Allen founded the Center for Education Reform – a group that supports microschools.

Jeanne Allen: For decades, parents were very dissatisfied with education, but they thought it was their child. They thought it was their misunderstanding. They thought there was something wrong with what they were expecting. If I see my fourth grader or my nine-year-old is like a budding artist, why wouldn’t I want her being exposed to real forms of art earlier, without being put aside like it’s an alternative or an extracurricular.

Lisa Fletcher: Does that come at the expense of all of the other parts of academics?

Jeanne Allen: There’s actually more education going on across a wider variety of subject areas that you typically get in a seven, seven and a half hour school day that’s prescribed with 40 or 50 minute blocks.

Lisa Fletcher: These programs are obviously designed to make the lives of students better, but how does it impact a parent’s life who maybe felt unheard?

Jeanne Allen: The one word that parents use more than anything when it comes to their involvement with microschools is empowerment.

For Izzy’s mom, Meredith Davis, collaborating with the school and other parents to set goals for the kids is one of the things that attracted her to microschools. With her son Anderson also attending, she values the opportunity to be actively involved in shaping their education.

Lisa Fletcher: For most people, it’s very safe to go with what you know. And for millions of parents, despite frustration with traditional education, they’re sticking with it because it’s what we’ve done here in the United States forever.

Meredith Davis: We spend more per child on education than any other country, and our educational outcomes, our learning outcomes are pretty abysmal actually. So what you know and what you’re comfortable with might not actually be doing that well

Microschools don’t typically give letter grades or standardized tests and there’s no good data showing how many go on to college.

Jeanne Allen: Microschools, of course are getting pushback in states and in many communities, not from parents or educators, but from government regulators who don’t know what to do with something that operates and looks so unique and different. Education is probably the industry that has the largest amount of vested interest in people who want to protect what they have.

For 10 year old Judah, unique and different is exactly why microschool works for him.

Judah: we get to chill, we get to wear whatever we want, we don’t really have to sit in desks and always be perfect.

Sharyl (on camera): It was under the Biden administration that many of these alternative schools launched. What might happen under the new Trump administration.

Lisa (on camera): Throughout his campaign, he has vowed to “save American education”. He’s proposed a Parental Bill of Rights that includes curriculum transparency and talked about ramping-up funding for schools where parents elect school principals and cut the number of administrators. There’s also growing support in the House and Senate to allow 529 Savings Plans, typically used for college, to cover education costs at microschools or for homeschooling.

Watch video here.