LiberatED Podcast

In this episode, recorded live at the 19th annual Porcupine Freedom Festival (PorcFest) in New Hampshire, Michelle McCartney joins the show to talk about how to be an education entrepreneur, including tips and challenges. Michelle is the owner of Granite Minds Homeschooling Center in Weare, New Hampshire, a mom of two, wife, small business owner, and liberty activist.  Granite Minds on Facebook

This episode was recorded live today at the 19th annual Porcupine Freedom Festival (PorcFest) in Lancaster, New Hampshire! It features a conversation with three New Hampshire homeschooling parents about homeschooling and unschooling. We talk about homeschooling rewards and challenges, how the past two years of education distruption impacted the homeschooling community, and advice for new, current, and prospective homeschooling families! Latitude Learning Resources learning center, Derry, NH Moms for Liberty - Hillsborough, NH

David D. Friedman, a physicist, economist, and law professor who is the son of the famed Nobel Prize-winning economist, Milton Friedman, is a staunch supporter of unschooling, or the idea of self-directed, non-coercive learning that occurs either as an approach to homeschooling or in “unschooling schools,” such as those schools modeled after the Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts. I wrote extensively about unschooling, Sudbury Valley, and other “unschooling schools” in my 2019 Unschooled book. I had been familiar with David Friedman’s libertarian writings and focus on anarcho-capitalism, but I somehow missed his focus on unschooling until recently. The most recent edition of Friedman’s well-known book, Machinery of Freedom: Guide to A Radical Capitalism, first published in 1973, includes a chapter on unschooling entitled, "Unschooling: A Libertarian Approach to Children," which also appears on his blog.

Despite today’s dominant cultural messaging that insists that young people must go to college, there are in fact multiple pathways to adulthood and to a fulfilling, successful life.  A longtime leader in building alternatives to college is Praxis, an apprenticeship boot camp program that helps young people to gain mastery of sought-after workplace skills while connecting these apprentices with eager employers.  I am thrilled to be joined on this episode by Cameron Sorsby, CEO of Praxis. "College Enrollment Drops, Even as the Pandemic's Effects Ebb," New York Times The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, by Bryan Caplan Skip College: Launch Your Career Without Debt, Distractions, or a Degree, edited by Connor Boyack

I came across the work of our guest today, Luma Mufleh, back in 2019. Even then, I was enchanted by the story of how she created Fugees Academy, a successful private school in Georgia for refugee children who are too often overlooked and underserved in traditional district schools. But I recently finished reading Luma’s newly released book, Learning America: One Woman’s Fight for Educational Justice for Refugee Children, which joins the story of Fugees Academy with her own powerful story as an immigrant, entrepreneur, soccer coach, school founder and change maker, and wife and mother. Truthfully, Learning America is one of the most extraordinary books I have read in awhile, and it should definitely be on the top of your list of books to read this summer.  Fugees Family Luma Mufleh's 2017 TED Talk

Lorianne Bolotin, an immigrant physician and midwife who grew up in the Dominican Republic, and Jack Bolotin, a finance executive, never thought that they would be in the education business, until mandates and lockdowns of 2020 led them to find an alternative for their children’s education. After months trying to balance career and homeschooling and connecting with like-minded families, Lorianne and Jack founded Metsada, a Private Membership Association (PMA) dedicated to protecting families’ freedom of choice in health and education. As a project of Metsada, they created Independence Day Academy, a parent-organized discovery site (PODS) in New Jersey that enables families to have their kids learn in a homeschooling-style environment with high parental involvement, while allowing parents to stay in their jobs and fulfill other demands of daily life. Metsada is hoping to create a network of independently run learning centers, and shortly after the opening of Independence Day Academy, Lorianne and Jack welcomed Jenny Markus to the Metsada family.  Jenny is a lifelong New Yorker, parent, and self-directed education advocate. She is the co-founder of Coney Island Clubhouse, a child-led learning center in Brooklyn, NY.  In this episode, Lorianne and Jenny talk about their experiences and educational vision.

The past two years have seen a rise in education entrepreneurship, as parents have fled district schools for other options including homeschooling, virtual schools, pandemic pods, and microschools. Entrepreneurs like today's guest are building new learning models that recognize and respond to mounting parent demand for customized schooling alternatives. Amar Kumar is the founder of KaiPod Learning, a fast-growing, venture capital-backed network of learning spaces designed to blend a highly-personalized, online curriculum with a dynamic, social, in-person community. Empowerment, Exit and Entrepreneurship Will Continue to Transform Education (Forbes.com)

Advocates of school choice policies that enable education funding to follow students instead of going to school systems are typically motivated by stories like that of our guest today, Denisha Merriweather. The tax-credit scholarship program that her family stumbled upon when she was young allowed her to escape a public school system that was not serving her well. In my Forbes spotlight of Denisha earlier this year, she said that school choice changed her life, and she has spent most of her adulthood advocating for expanding school choice policies. Today, she works for the non-profit American Federation for Children promoting school choice through the Black Minds Matter initiative that she founded in 2020. One thing that the Black Minds Matter website does is capture the growing list of hundreds of black-owned schools across the country, helping to elevate their work, inform families of their options, and inspire greater education entrepreneurship.

Microschooling, and its various iterations including learning pods and hybrid homeschools, is swiftly and dramatically changing the face of education across the US. Microschools are modern twists on the quaint, one-room schoolhouse model, where small, typically multi-age groups of students learn together in more intimate educational settings, including private homes and small community spaces, with individualized curriculum and personalized attention from adult educators and mentors.  The microschooling movement was gaining traction before 2020, but interest in this innovative education model has accelerated over the past two years, as Don Soifer and Ashley Campbell have witnessed first-hand. Don and Ashley lead MicroschoolingNV, a non-profit organization that developed a first-of-its-kind, public-private partnership microschool with the City of North Las Vegas. They have continued their work as leaders in the microschooling movement, helping individuals, businesses, and municipalities across the country to launch microschools.  In 2021, MicroschoolingNV won the prestigious Ed-Prize award for their efforts.  Further Reading: Got Teacher Burnout? Launch A Microschool

The push for federally-funded universal preschool and child care programs continues despite new data showing the harms of government preschool programs, as well as harms to small community preschool providers who get pushed out of business when a “free” universal preschool program emerges. To talk more about the educational and economic hazards of universal government preschool programs, I am joined in this episode by Colleen Hroncich who recently published a new policy analysis on this topic for the Cato Institute. Colleen is a policy analyst with Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom.  Further reading: Vanderbilt University Study Shows Why Biden's Universal Government Preschool Program Would Be a Disaster