Microschools gained national prominence in 2020 as parents desperate to avoid disruption to their children’s education sought out—or created their own—small-scale alternatives to pandemic-shuttered public schools and whatever their staffers lashed together under the banner of “remote teaching.” This stopgap effort to keep kids’ learning from stalling out has endured and grown post-pandemic. Some microschools may still resemble those original home- and neighborhood-based necessities, but the sector has matured and professionalized in the last six years. As many as 1.5 million U.S. students are being educated in this manner today, including many who have known no other form of schooling. A new analysis provides an interesting snapshot of the multifarious sector in 2026.
The first thing to note is that defining microschooling is not the province of this report. Author Daniel Hamlin—faculty director of the Oklahoma Center for Education Policy at the time of this study and currently dean of the College of Education and the University of Texas at Austin—directs readers to another publication for definitions, structures, and operational modes of microschools. Both it and Hamlin’s own analysis were published by the National Microschooling Center, a nonprofit organization that serves over 2,000 microschools in all 50 states. These reports are the first large-scale effort to dig into the state of microschooling today. Hamlin is concerned with the experience of microschooling on the part of students and their families. He utilizes two sets of survey data and the results of two administrations of a computer-adaptive assessment from i-Ready. Neither sample is representative, Hamlin notes. Data come from the National Microschooling Center’s dues-paying members who voluntarily opted into the study.
The parent/caregiver survey comprises results from 291 respondents with children attending 36 different microschools across the country, administered in spring 2026. The student survey was administered in two rounds—fall 2025 and again in spring 2026. Data come from the 1,038 students who completed both rounds, representing 31 different microschools. i-Ready computer-adaptive assessments were taken by students in 27 different microschools. They comprised both English language arts (ELA) and math tests, each administered twice—early fall 2025 and again in late spring 2026—to provide a measure of academic growth during a typical school year. A total of 423 students completed both ELA assessments; 405 students completed both math assessments.
The report’s biggest takeaway: Responding microschools enrolled a large proportion of students with special needs. In the parent/caregiver survey, 47 percent of respondents said that one or more of their children had been diagnosed with a disability. And nearly 40 percent of individuals in the student survey and assessment samples reported either a learning disability diagnosis or a chronic medical condition. These findings may actually underestimate the enrollment of students with special needs, since microschools are not required to—and thus many do not—classify students using “conventional approaches” (as traditional districts do) to identifying them. Roughly one in five microschools in the sample reported an explicit focus on students with disabilities. Other general findings: The average enrollment in responding schools was 20 students, and respondents described their schools as “multi-age learning environments,” as emphasizing individualized learning and strong relationships among students and teachers, and often as focusing on experiential learning.
The parent/caregiver survey results showed high levels of satisfaction with microschools, with 97 percent reporting they are satisfied or very satisfied with their child’s experience. Individualized attention was the most important factor cited in choosing a microschool, and families that compared their child’s current school to his or her previous public school rated their microschool higher on strong relationships, home-school communication, and student safety.
Student respondents overwhelmingly reported feeling safe at school (95 percent), participating in class “most of the time” (93 percent), and having strong relationships with their teachers (90 percent). Students who reported being new to their current microschool were more likely than established students to report that their current school experience was better than the previous year. Among students who completed both the fall and spring surveys, a majority reported enhanced self-perception of their problem-solving ability, communication skills, and respect for others over the school year.
Approximately 52 percent of all students taking the i-Ready assessments exceeded their expected (a.k.a. typical) academic growth targets for the year in ELA; 47 percent in math. However, learning outcomes varied widely from school to school. At least half of students met or exceeded their expected academic growth targets in 12 of the 27 tested schools. The larger the school, the better its students typically performed.
In the end, the picture we get of microschooling in this report is a positive one. Parents are happy, kids are engaged, and academic growth is in line with typical growth norms in U.S. schools, even for students with special needs. But we can’t forget that the sample is small and nonrepresentative, and that the publishers of the report are not disinterested third parties, even if their researcher was independent of the organization. More and more rigorous research will be needed to sharpen the picture beyond this limited snapshot.
SOURCE: Daniel Hamlin, “Measuring the Microschool Experience: A national analysis of student experiences, family perspectives, and learning outcomes,” The National Microschooling Center (September 2026).
