Micro Schools – what the future of schools might look like
It is in the very nascent-too-early-to-tell stage of knowing whether it will take off, but micro schools are possibly starting to trend into somewhat of a movement. Micro schools are mostly private schools where there are 1-2 teachers for say 25 mixed age students. AltSchool headquartered in the Bay Area is the most famous of these micro school networks due to the $100M in capital it raised from funders like Facebook’s Founder & CEO Mark Zuckerburg.
I love how friend and colleague Matt Candler of 4.0 Schools describes micro schools, cautioning that they are not a silver bullet but nonetheless offer rapid ways to prototype and test new models of learning while personalizing learning and relationships in adult to student to fellow student ratios that are manageable.
Akin to music listeners who want to buy the song not the album and readers who want the article not the newspaper, perhaps micro schools represent the same for parents who do not want the “full school” experience. This micro schooling trend dovetails nicely into the trend of increasing compartmentalization and unbundling of content seen in other industries being disrupted by technology.
Services like Uber and Zipcar capitalize on the need people have to be transported from point A to point B without the burden of all the additional costs of owning and maintaining a vehicle when you are not traveling from point A to point B. Micro schools could be the Uber app of education. Micro schools cannot offer the breadth of physical facilities, teaching staff, after school programs and school calendar events that a full or macro school could. However, they offer a much leaner, more direct mode of academic transportation from learning point A to learning point B without all the other administrative costs to maintain.
The future of education much like the future of transportation is increasingly moving to more direct, more personalized, on-demand services housed inside leaner forms of infrastructure.
