“Where does your child go to school?” used to be an easy question to answer with the name of a building. That straightforward response is getting harder to give.
A growing number of families now build their children’s education from parts. A young person might spend three days a week at a microschool, take an online math course, join a homeschool co-op, and take a dual-enrollment class at the local community college. More and more often, an education savings account pays for some of it.
American K–12 education is going modular. And new studies show families moving faster than the categories we use to describe, count, fund, and judge schooling. That gap between how families behave and how our systems are built deserves more attention than it gets.
