On a spring night in 2022, Ross Hill was trying to get several of his children—he has eight—tucked into bed for the night.
He was having little luck. The oldest three in particular were struggling, and he felt helpless to fix what was troubling them.
“They were in tears because they didn’t want to go to school the next day,” said Mr. Hill, a 38-year-old teacher from Florence, South Carolina (population: 39,958).
Whether he knew it at the time or not, Mr. Hill’s family was part of a trend in the United States. A surprising number of children are miserable at school, research shows, and it’s a trend that began before the pandemic.
The dissatisfaction grew worse during the pandemic.
The National Bureau of Economic Research, which analyzed both pre- and post-pandemic data, discovered something even darker: a correlation between school attendance and youth suicide incidence.
An Opportunity
The idea that our school systems could be damaging to the mental health of children is an alarming prospect because, as researchers in several of these studies pointed out, children typically spend more than a quarter of their waking lives in school.Perhaps just as alarming is the fact that many parents don’t have good options if their children are suffering.
Though a record number of American parents are embracing homeschooling—an option families in many countries don’t have—it’s a difficult leap for some families. Many parents work, and others might simply feel unequipped to school their kids at home.
The Tip of the Iceberg?
Many entrepreneurs will tell you that the key to entrepreneurship is empathy.Mr. Hill didn’t feel like he had a lot of options when his children were miserable in the public school system. In fact, he said he felt trapped.
“Teachers feel trapped in the system, too,” he told me in an interview. “They are doing the best they can in a flawed system.”
Then it occurred to him that if he felt this way, others must too, and most of these people lacked something he possessed: years of experience in education. That’s when he realized he had something he could offer: a schooling service of his own.
Microschools are independent learning institutions that operate outside of traditional school systems. Often described as “outsourced homeschooling,” they tend to be less bureaucratic than traditional schools, which often emphasize standardized testing and fixed curricula. This makes microschools more agile, flexible, and adaptive, proponents say, allowing them to tailor education to students.
When Mr. Hill first learned about microschools, he was intrigued. Then he became excited. He saw his skill set as a good match for what other “edupreneurs” were doing, and he began to explore the business model.
Last August, with the help of a $10,000 private grant, he launched Mariner Learning Collaborative.
Mariner is not a school, Mr. Hill is quick to point out. Instead, it’s a resource center for homeschooling parents that offers educational services to supplement the education that parents do within the home.
“All of our students are registered as homeschoolers,” Mr. Hill said. “It combines the best parts of homeschool and school.”
Mr. Hill said enrollment is already approaching 20 children—including his oldest three, who are thriving in the new environment. He expects the total number of students to continue to rise as the homeschooling trend continues to grow.
‘In God’s Hands’
Like any entrepreneurial venture, there is of course a risk of failure, and this is something Mr. Hill accepts.“We’ve put it in God’s hands,” he said.
Still, he believes the microschool model is sound and is likely to grow as more and more Americans flee a failing school system that has grown dysfunctional, bureaucratic, and sclerotic.
And he might be right.
All of these trends bode ill for the future of public education. But for early mover edupreneurs such as Mr. Hill, they scream opportunity.
