Black Moms in Texas Want Vouchers for Microschools

Who benefits from choice in education? The answer, of course, is everybody—at least, everybody can benefit if they’re allowed to choose schooling options that work best for them and their children. That opportunity is perfectly captured by a recent article about black families in Texas who hope to use school vouchers to launch microschools that do a better job than the public school at teaching their children.

When Public Schools Don’t Suit Your Kids

Sneha Dey writes in a Texas Tribune article about a push in that state for school choice:

Here in the eastern suburbs of Dallas, three mothers are home-schooling to reimagine education for their daughters. During school days, the girls get in about two hours of core instruction like reading and math, but they also draw, go on nature walks and build fairy villages with the rocks they find. 

The mothers say their public schools were not equipped to create a learning space that’s wholly safe for Black kids or embraces their culture and identity. Together they create lesson plans to meet each girl’s learning needs and adapt their pace when a child is struggling….

The mothers already have spoken with other parents ready to pull their kids out of private and public schools to participate in their collective. But to grow, they say they need the Legislature to create education savings accounts, a voucher-style program through which families could access state funds and pay for private school or alternative education settings.

The model the Dallas mothers want to emulate is that of Arizona’s Black Mothers Forum, whose efforts I covered last year in a piece on microschools. The Black Mothers Forum dedicates itself to “tear down barriers to academic excellence due to low expectations, and break the cycle of the school-to-prison pipeline.” Like the mothers in Dallas, its founders were motivated by doubts about public schools that are common to many families, as well as concerns specific to their experiences as African Americans.

A Surge in Tailored Education Options

As Dey’s piece suggests, microschools span a continuum of education efforts between homeschooling co-ops, private schools, and learning pods. If that sounds a little amorphous, it’s because such arrangements are structured to meet the needs of their participants, not to match institutional definitions. In whatever form they take, microschools are increasingly popular across the United States.

“Currently approximately 125,000 microschools exist across the country, reflecting an increase since the pandemic,” The Wall Street Journal‘s Megan Tagami reported in August. “Across the U.S., microschools likely serve between one to two million students.”

Dey and Tagami both emphasize that growth in microschools and other DIY education approaches is spurred by programs that make education funding portable so that it follows students rather tha