Last year in The 74 I wrote about the Chipotlification of Charter Schools, and how the charter model can customize education. And by customization, I didn’t mean “personalized learning” per se, but an education that can “flex” to the needs of families and serve as the “bowl” for tailored learning opportunities:
Imagine a public school where you can choose how many days you want your child to attend in person, or that supports home-based instruction, including for students with disabilities. Or schools that allow a family to access a particular curriculum that isn’t available in a nearby school. Or schools can also adapt to students who want to integrate apprenticeships or other workforce experiences.
Our new report, In Our New Hybrid World, Where do Charter Schools Fit? describes these kinds of charter schools and how they deliver customized public education and identifies some of the initial policy challenges to seeing those schools in more states. In practice, flex-based instruction can take a variety of forms, including microschools, hybrid homeschools, learning pods, blended learning schools, non-classroom-based programs, and independent study arrangements. While these programs may look different in implementation, they all offer highly adaptable learning environments. Often, these nontraditional models are well suited for families seeking a level of customization for their student that is not possible in a more structured, traditional school environment, an example includes students with dyslexia or autism that could benefit from a highly personalized learning experience that includes high levels of family engagement.
Because students in flex-based learning environments are not spending every day in school for six hours, traditional measures of student engagement, such as attendance or chronic absenteeism, cannot be linked to critical policy levers such as funding and accountability. Instead, policymakers in some states have allowed for flex-based learning models to measure student engagement using successful work completion and/or mastery of content. California, which boasts a large portfolio of non-classroom-based charter schools, requires these schools to develop written agreements with families which detail how student engagement will be measured through submission of student accomplishments and deliverables.
Among the most persistent challenges we’ve identified for these schools include funding, over-regulation, facilities, and broad misunderstanding of the model. Because these publicly available, flex-based models challenge our notion of public school, they are met with both confusion and suspicion, which can often result in a difficult policy landscape. Still, we are seeing a number of states find success where innovative, flexible charter schools are increasingly offering families highly personalized models. One of our top priorities at the National Alliance is to remove obstacles to these types of innovations so that more states can develop a more flexible and welcoming policy environment for customized learning options.
Christy Wolfe is the senior vice president for policy, research, and planning for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools
Katie Burke is the senior director of policy at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.
