Updated June 4, 2023. 

Education choice continues to be a talking point in political races. Two days after South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott announced his bid to run for president of the United States, he met with leaders of an Iowa Christian school, discussing education choice in America. As sponsor of the CHOICE act – which expands options for students – his candidacy will likely give airtime to the change happening across America. 

States like Utah passed universal education choice legislation this year, but an organic groundswell has also been forming for years, ready to meet the moment: the microschool.  

Microschools are a learning environment where a small group of mixed-age students meet for schooling, similar to a modern one-room schoolhouse.  

In Arizona, the Prenda microschool network developed by Kelly Smith grew out of a coding program he started. Since then, Prenda has created an easy-to-use microschool model that has flourished in Arizona and beyond – though Prenda is not in Utah yet.  

With more innovation inevitably coming to Utah, I interviewed Kaity Broadbent, Prenda’s Chief Empowerment Advocate, to learn more about the program and how it has been implemented so far.  

What is Prenda? What’s the unique vision for Prenda? 

At Prenda we help people start and run amazing microschools. By “people” we mean any inspiring, caring, responsible adult. There’s no educational requirement tied to who can guide and who cannot “guide” a microschool. We provide all the educational structure, supports, coaching, all of the curriculum that you would need to run a K through 8 student-centered, student-led learning experience.  

What sort of families or parents are most interested in Prenda? Are they trying to get away from public schools? Or are they trying to move toward something specific? 

We’ve done a lot of research on that. There are three main personas that are drawn to Prenda: 

1. A parent who sees their kid is not thriving in a traditional school setting and they need a different solution for their child. We give them an easy way to create that. We can stand up a microschool in a month or so. There’s a very low barrier to entry, which makes just an individual parent – who has never thought of themselves as an educator, meaning they’ve never home-schooled or had classroom experience, they’ve just always sent their kids to traditional school – we can equip that person to be a very successful microschool leader.

2. Home-school parents who might want to expand their community or who might be looking for more support and structure. Usually moving to a more communal approach to education would mean they were losing some autonomy over what their kids are learning, but with Prenda, they can actually have both of these things and make an income providing the microschool experience for their community. Prenda also allows homeschooling families to use our learning model as homeschoolers, without forming or joining a microschool.

3. The other one is teachers – people who are coming out of teaching. A lot of teachers are burned out, tired of the large class size, tired of the bureaucracy, tired of lots of things. They went into teaching because they love kids and they want to inspire and change lives, so we give them a way to do that again with more freedom to create the learning environment they’ve always wanted – and in a way that gives them a better work-life balance.

The pandemic obviously changed a lot of things in education. Have you seen an uptick in teachers wanting to leave the profession to become Prenda guides? 

For sure. Unfortunately, we’ve created such an impossible job for them in traditional schools. And they’re the best people on the face of the planet. They’re so dedicated to kids, they’re so self-sacrificing. Teachers should not have to be that self-sacrificing. They should all get medals and trophies and pizza parties! But instead, let’s just create a more manageable job where teachers don’t have to wear a thousand hats.  

We use adaptive learning technologies to do a lot of the differentiation and instruction so our guides actually aren’t doing a lot of instruction. There’s no grading. You can give feedback and tutor and coach, but we provide everything so there’s minimal lesson planning.  

What successes has Prenda had so far? 

From the student perspective, we see a significant uptick in the engagement and happiness of our kids. The youth population is struggling right now. There are really high depression and anxiety rates, lots of suicide. All those numbers are trending the wrong way.  

Our kids are telling us, “Hey, the world that you created for us to grow up in is not working for us. It’s killing us.” And no one’s listening to them. We’re still talking about standardized test scores. These people are humans, and they’re little, and they rely on us to provide environments and cultures and relationships that serve them and protect them.  

So, we measure academics, and we measure what we call “empowerment,” which is a kind of our umbrella term for if a student is really starting to take control of their learning. To measure this, we look at adequate differentiation and pacing, intrinsic motivation, and their sense of control.  

We’ll ask them, “Before Prenda, describe your day. Were you able to follow the teacher and learn or did you feel like it was going too fast, or did you feel like you already knew everything, and you were bored?” And year after year, two-thirds of the kids are saying, “I was either lost or bored.” And there’s only a third of the kids that say the teacher-led whole group instruction was working for them. Then after a few months of Prenda, it moves to about 75-80% of kids that are saying that they are learning at a level and pace that is working for them. So, from that 30%, that’s a big shift.

We ask them, “Why do you do your schoolwork? Is it to not get in trouble? Is it to get good grades? Is it so people will think you’re smart? Or is it because it’s fun, it’s interesting, and it’s going to help you obtain what you want in the future?” We see the same shift from very, very low numbers of being intrinsically motivated to largely 75-80% of the kids saying, “I’m learning for me now.”  

And then we ask, how in control are they feeling of their learning? There’s so much research that talks about mental health and motivation and internal locus of control based on someone’s perception of control. Does a kid feel like their decisions matter? Do they have a say in what happens to them and the path that they take, what they learn, how they learn it, and the pace they learn? Every week, we survey the kids on things like, “Are you feeling like you’re making most of the decisions about your learning, some of the decisions, or none?” And we see a positive shift toward kids feeling in control. 

We also see, on average, about 135% growth in math and reading, regardless of where they start out. You can come in a year ahead and you can grow here. You can come in two years behind and you can grow here.  

Parents in Arizona can access Prenda either through enrollment with a specific charter school or via funds from the state’s education savings account. What are the practical differences for parents between using those two options? 

I’ll start with main differences: testing requirements, intervention requirements, curriculum restrictions, pacing restrictions, leveling restrictions – meaning where there are requirements that mandate that all fourth graders have to be exposed to a certain set of information. Those are kind of the big-ticket items for why we see families switching to an ESA. School’s just not working for all kids and parents need more flexible options. They want to use their favorite home-schooling curriculum and it doesn’t happen to be on a state-approved list, or they want their child to be allowed to use all their learning minutes to work at a level that’s above or below their grade level, or maybe their child has lost their love of learning because they aren’t allowed to follow their interests at all. It requires essentially the same amount of effort to enroll your kids in Arizona’s ESA program as it does to enroll them in any other school. You have to have proof of address and a birth certificate. The form takes about four minutes to fill out. In Arizona, the ESA program in October was something like 11,000 kids and now it’s over 55,000 kids. The staffing office was not ready for that. No one could have predicted how many people were going to come through that door. So, there were a lot of delays and confusion. That’s been a little tricky, but really all of that is settling down now and people have been pretty happy. 

Some states have started to regulate microschools. Are there any regulations or legislation that is helpful to Prenda, or anything that’s hurtful or an impediment? 

In Arizona we can have a microschool in a home. Not all of our microschools meet in homes, but it’s definitely the norm, I would say. It’s a barrier to entry if you have to go find a rented space and navigate that. There’ll be a lot fewer microschools if you have to find rented spaces. 

In Arizona our guides don’t have to have childcare licenses. In some states they will need to, and that’s OK. We are all for keeping kids safe, but some of the hoops you have to jump through for childcare might not need to apply to an educational setting. We have our own set of safety criteria that we hold to to make sure kids are safe, since that’s our priority.  

In New York, I believe the law says that if you’re educating four or more kids, you’re a private school, and you have to meet all of the regulations and accreditations for private school. So essentially, Prenda can’t happen in New York, at least not easily. 

Universal ESA legislation that does not limit its usage to private schools or income bands also helps more families have access to these unique learning experiences.  

(End of interview.) 

Conclusion 

Although Prenda originated in Arizona, it has expanded into several states (not including Utah yet). Its simple-to-use structure allows parents of all types to have an easy entry into a home-schooling type of environment. Prenda and other types of microschool networks have the power to change education in the long run.