FEE Senior Education Fellow Kerry McDonald
his article is excerpted from LiberatED, a weekly email newsletter where FEE Senior Education Fellow Kerry McDonald brings you news and analysis on current education topics. Click here to sign up.
While the past two years have been characterized in many ways by top-down policy approaches and greater centralization of power, there have also been positive signs of decentralization and bottom-up solutions. This has been particularly true in education, as parents seek new learning options for their kids and entrepreneurial educators create a variety of new models.
A decentralized education ecosystem is characterized by diversity of options. Rather than parents being forced to send their child to an assigned district school with a standardized curriculum, they now have increasingly greater opportunities to access a charter school, low-cost private school or microschool, learning pod, homeschooling center or co-op, or virtual learning platform.
The more robust the education marketplace, the more choices there will be for parents. The more choices that are available, the more likely it will be …