HYBRID HOMESCHOOLS BIG BATTALIONS VS. LITTLE PLATOONS

by Eric Wearne

American institutions are failing. According to Gallup, which has been polling public opinion for decades, Americans are disenchanted with our chief institutions—congress, the Supreme Court, the military, the media, and so forth. Political scientist Hugh Heclo writes in On Thinking Institutionally,

In recent decades we modern people have grown more suspicious of almost all our society’s major institutions. That includes business, unions, public schools, the legal and medical professions, religious institutions, journalism, and nonprofit organizations. With a few exceptions, growing distrust in the modern mind is directed toward the entire apparatus of modern society. If you imagine that apparatus as a sort of bank, the overall picture is one of many withdrawals, few deposits, and a continuous depletion of reserves.

This is not a new sentiment—On Thinking Institutionally was published several presidencies ago, but Heclo’s observations are even more germane today than when first published. Mankind’s need for institutions, after all, is ancient and perennial. Heclo spends considerable effort on defining the concept of “institutions,” but as a shorthand, he observes that institutions are entities that “represent inheritances of valued purpose with attendant rules and moral obligations. They constitute socially ordered grounding for human life.” So as our large institutions crumble, many Americans are turning to smaller, more local solutions that will meet their needs for community, coherence, and fellowship. Educational “institutions”—both formal and informal, at home and in classrooms—affect all families with children at some point, and an increasing number of families are seeking alternatives to the struggling educational institutions we have. “Hybrid homeschools” are one such alternative.

Hybrid Homeschools as Little Platoons

In my book treating the phenomenon, Defining Hybrid Homeschools in America: Little Platoons, I explore who attends these schools, why families found and patronize them, and how they operate.

But first: What exactly are “hybrid homeschools”? One might think of them as more formalized versions of homeschool co-ops. The frequency with which students attend school varies from one day a week to five half days, depending on the model. Most frequently, students attend school two to three days a week and are homeschooled the rest of the week. These schools differ from co-ops in that they incorporate more formal curricula, class schedules, grading scales, etc. They often start as co-ops, as less formal groups of homeschoolers, or as church ministries, and then grow and formalize in time. What problems are these schools trying to solve?

In a 1977 speech, Russell Kirk discussed the nature of educational institutions at the time and the problems they faced. In the speech, he criticizes the then-current trend of centralizing institutions, especially in education, which sought to take more and more control of basic tasks from families and reassign them to larger and more centralized institutions. Kirk is skeptical, for example, of “educationists” who sought policy goals like state infant care, universal early childhood day care, nine-to-five schooling with after-hours services beyond that, social and health services run through schools, and more. While many likely see this list and think, “That sounds like a good start,” Kirk was rightly concerned that such centralization of responsibilities, combined with a centralization of decisions about the purposes of schooling, would be extremely detrimental to families, and therefore to society as a whole. It would mean taking daily and long-term decisions out of the hands of those with most connection to and knowledge of the children involved. The social bonds that would result from every family sending every child to forty-plus hours of centralized schooling each week would eventually look very different and would be a sorry imitation of the social bonds that are supposed to come from cohesive families and smaller, more local communities. Hybrid homeschools are an attempt to avoid these problems. One hybrid homeschool’s website describes community well in its “student life” section: “Ideal community springs from good families and friends partaking in good activities together.”

While the problems Kirk notes in his speech— centralized schooling, a deterioration of family bonds, and so on—have in many ways only become worse since 1977, we have more ways to address them today. Many forms of school choice, such as homeschooling, education savings accounts, charter schools, and others, are more available and accessible in 2021 than they were in 1977. The earliest incarnations of hybrid homeschools date from the early 1990s, but they have been steadily increasing in the last ten years or so, due to the deterioration of larger educational institutions, due to improvements in technology, and due to a general desire for greater individualization. I will discuss some of the practical specifics around hybrid homeschools—their demographics, curricula, and some structural issues—below.

Hybrid Homeschools in Practice

One important advantage that is worth noting is that these institutions serve a large audience that most modern school choice programs do not—the broad middle class. Most American families access school choice in one of three ways: either they earn enough money to pay tuition; they move into a school district they prefer; or they live in an area with low-performing schools, and so are eligible to receive localor state-based aid, or have charter schools located nearby. Families in between these groups—those too wealthy to qualify for choice programs, but not wealthy enough to pay tuition or to move anywhere they’d like—are typical clientele for hybrid homeschools. Because hybrid homeschools use mostly part-time teachers, and often rent space, they are typically able to charge tuitions that are half or less of nearby conventional private schools.

To address one definitional question: Some people object that because hybrid homeschools often choose curriculum, grade assignments, etc., these entities are not “homeschooling” at all. I use the term for two reasons. First, many people who use these schools themselves call them “hybrid homeschools.” A meaningful percentage of hybrid homeschool families have been, at some point, full time homeschoolers (likely almost a quarter of them) and continue to see themselves as involved in some form of homeschooling. And second, it is simply a compromise umbrella term that everyone easily understands, even if a particular school prefers another term.

That discussion aside, what do these schools look like? Based on my research over the past several years, the following demographic picture emerges: Hybrid homeschools are mostly, though by no means entirely, a suburban phenomenon. These families have above average educational attainment, marriage rates, and incomes. This is the broad middle class whom existing school choice programs leave unserved.

Regarding curriculum, rather than acting as onesize-fits-all comprehensive schools, most hybrid homeschools are high-identity institutions, with well-defined missions. A significant number of them are classical in nature: the St. Augustine School in Ridgeland, Mississippi (a member of the University-Model Schools network), Sequitur Classical Academy in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (an independent school), and all of the schools around the U.S. in the Regina Caeli network are examples. The research literature on outcomes for graduates of these schools is still scant, but the work that has been done indicates that these students tend to perform well on conventional academic measures—test scores and college GPAs.

In terms of enrollment, these schools are generally small (often a few hundred students K-12, with a number of them enrolling well under one hundred students). The dissatisfaction with large institutions affects schools—both public and private—as well as other institutions. While large schools may be efficient in some senses, “efficiency” and “scale” are not typically things parents seek out when they consider what kind of education they want for their children. And yet that is what most schools increasingly offer: large-scale comprehensiveness. If families want something different, schools will sometimes create programs within their existing structures to try to fill those needs. But the bureaucratic size which enables them to do this also works against them. The machinery only gets bigger. Schools in many places have ceased performing their function as mediating institutions, tempered by local preferences and serving as buffers between families and large, formal state agencies, and have simply become larger and larger, and more impersonal.

Though in many places people argue that public schools are already locally controlled, school sizes have been growing, while the actual number of schools has decreased by about 84 percent in the last seventy years, a combination that renders public schooling increasingly less responsive to individual families. Hence our current situation: More spending. Flat test scores. Less parental interest in those test scores. Larger schools. Less direct responsiveness to parents. A desire among parents for more individual responsiveness. This combination cannot continue, especially at a time when general respect for large institutions, including schools, is at near-historic lows. As Kirk says later in his speech, “We begin to look to the little platoon. The big battalions are failing us.”

A Time to Build New Institutions

Many of our institutions are failing us, but as humans we need institutions. Churches being closed or nearly closed to their congregations for much of the past year helped demonstrate this. The best churches, schools, and other institutions serve as collective means to meet individual needs, and are responsive to those needs while maintaining their essential character. Of E.F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful, Joseph Pearce writes,

If structures—economic, political or social— became too large they became impersonal and unresponsive to human needs and aspirations. Under these conditions individuals felt functionally futile, dispossessed, voiceless, powerless, excluded, alienated.

Parents will not long accept feeling “functionally futile, dispossessed, voiceless, powerless, excluded, alienated” from their children’s schools. One hybrid homeschool notes on their website that “the family is ‘the vital cell’ of society, and rebuilding the culture to a civilization of love and life must begin precisely where the breakdown began: in the family.” Hybrid homeschools allow the parent to participate in their child’s education and root education within the family.

While supporting the family, they also offer ties to the broader community through practical, realistic means. Because they are part time, their personnel and facilities costs are typically lower than nearby private schools, and their tuition can consequently be much lower (on average, around $4,000–5,000 per year). They typically do not seek charter school status, which would require a variety of local and state approvals and navigating a number of political engagements (a colleague of mine has suggested that charter schools are very slightly less regulated than nuclear power plants). Though most of these schools are private, they do not operate in the same way as full-time, five-day schools, which would require a much heavier fundraising effort and tuition structure. Thus, small, local groups can conceive new institutions and stand up to these existing institutions without the typical political fighting necessary to establish other kinds of schools.

Hybrid homeschools are not, however, “easy” to set up. Many families describe them as “the best of both worlds,” with increased family time and flexibility, amidst a formal school structure and community. Yet they can also be the worst of both worlds. Administrators (or, in some cases, the lone administrator) must deal with all of the issues a private school does–facilities, human resources, board relations, etc.–while simultaneously allowing the flexibility and independence homeschooling families expect. While establishing K-8 hybrid homeschooling is comparatively straightforward, adding high school greatly complicates matters, as these middle-class families often expect the schools to provide access to higher education, which affects curricular decisions, accreditation, etc. Does setting up new schools simply mean abandoning one set of institutions to create another? Perhaps. While as humans we need institutions, those institutions can also be dangerous and harmful to us. Heclo writes that, as twenty-first-century Americans, “we are compelled to live in a thick tangle of institutions while believing they do not have our best interests at heart. Like a disgruntled teenager, we are not quite willing to run away from home, but there is no mistaking the sullen malcontent in the house.”

Rather than existing as “sullen malcontents,” we would do better to build intentional solutions to our institutional problems. Family is the first and most important institution. Following Hugh Heclo’s definition of institutions, families certainly “represent in- heritances of valued purpose with attendant rules and moral obligations” and “constitute socially ordered grounding for human life.” If existing institutions fail to reinforce families’ beliefs, families will seek to create institutions that will do so (and they should). Redeeming educational institutions presents a complex challenge, but our institutions cannot remain on autopilot. In Robbery Under Law, Evelyn Waugh writes, “Civilization has no force of its own beyond what is given from within. It is under constant assault and it takes most of the energies of civilized man to keep going at all. . . . If [it] falls we shall see not merely the dissolution of a few joint-stock corporations, but of the spiritual and material achievements of our history.” A return to labor in little platoons in education is one important way to maintain civilization. Through hybrid homeschools, families, schools, and communities can work in concert together to prevent this spiritual and material dissolution of which Waugh speaks.

Eric Wearne is Associate Professor of Education Statistics in the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University. He is the author of Defining Hybrid Homeschools in America: Little Platoons (Lexington Books, 2020). He was previously Provost at Holy Spirit College, Associate Professor of Education at Georgia Gwinnett College, and Deputy Director of the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement in Atlanta. He has taught courses in statistics, literature, teacher training, and other subjects in hybrid homeschool, public school, and college settings.