Editor’s note: This essay is an entry in Fordham’s 2022 Wonkathon, which asked contributors to address a fundamental and challenging question: “How can states remove policies barriers that are keeping educators from reinventing high schools?” Learn more.
I do not mean that entirely literally, but something close to it. There are schools which have successfully done this for decades—setting their own schedules, developing their own curricula, hiring whoever was the best fit to be their teachers. “Hybrid schools”—schools in which students attend classes a few days per week and are homeschooled the rest of it—have existed for years, and have become more popular post-COVID. A concept that started as a niche private school model has grown to include increasing numbers of charter and even conventional public school districts. I will present some background on these schools, and then illustrate three ways they can/have been redesigning the high school experience for their students: through scheduling, through curriculum, and through teacher recruitment and hiring.
Background
Some important background is that hybrid schools are easier to start up relative to new charter schools, conventional, five-day private schools, or other alternative schools. In many cases (though not all), hybrid schools operate using their state homeschool laws. This is appropriate, as many hybrid school families think of themselves as homeschoolers, and operate very much as homeschoolers several days each week. This arrangement also permits much of hybrid schools’ operational flexibility. So how are hybrids reinventing high school?
Schedules, curriculum, and teachers
First, and maybe most obviously, through scheduling. A high school senior’s daily schedule in a conventional school often looks strikingly similar to what it looked like when that same student was in elementary school: classes separated by subjects, moved into and out of at the sound of a bell, with little variation. In the last several years, that has changed, with students dual-enrolling in local colleges, taking more online classes, etc. Hybrid schools build this kind of flexibility into their normal operations, with students meeting only a few times per week—most often 2–3 days in school, and the others at home. This type of schedule has academic benefits: Students in humanities classes, for example, can be assigned much more reading if they are home two days per week, rather than sitting in class every single day.
Hybrid families also choose schools with these schedules for extracurricular reasons: Many students are high-level performers, artists, or athletes, and need time for additional creativity, auditions, training, tournaments, etc. Other families appreciate the pace and flexibility of a week with part-time classes that enables them to spend more time together or with extended family, and to visit museums or other enriching places and events on their recurring long weekends.
Curriculum is another area of flexibility. Hybrids are often small, and may not offer as wide an array of courses as nearby conventional schools. This more focused set of offerings tends to be a feature, not a bug, as hybrid schools also tend to try to have clearer identities (as classical schools, as STEM schools, or as arts-based schools, for example) than their comprehensive high school counterparts. Still, students may want or need classes they cannot get at their hybrids. In these cases, many hybrid high school students are able to piece together additional classes through online schools, or to gain credits in other creative ways; their schools are often very flexible on allowing this sort of thing, as well. Hybrid schools are able to construct extremely creative curricula, and they must seek out relationships with the admissions offices at the colleges their graduates are likely to attend. These relationships are important, as hybrid school graduates seem to be well-prepared for college as a group (though we need more research to learn whether that is due to hybrid school attendance itself, or to other factors).
Finally, hybrid schools are able to attract teachers in ways different from other schools. Many attempts have been made to draw in teachers to specialized high school classes—a local pharmacist to teach a class or two of chemistry, for example—by tinkering with state certification requirements. These projects often become very complex and often unwieldy, such that even the “alternative” path into the classroom is not worth these potential teachers’ trouble. Hybrid schools can simply not require certification. By offering teachers the ability to teach a class or two once or twice a week, and focus solely on their instruction, they are able to bring in artists, scientists, or retired experts who might be interested in teaching, but are not interested in a full-time teaching load and everything that comes with it. (In all K–12 grades, hybrids are also able to bring in many former teachers who have left the profession to have children. These teachers have experience and may also want to stay in the profession, but not at a full time level of commitment. As with other aspects of hybrid schools, we are still learning about them. Who exactly teaches in them, and why they choose to do so, are questions worthy of more research).
Policy recommendations
Taken together, hybrid schools can offer high schoolers: schedule flexibility; highly-specialized and creative curricula; and access to an entirely new set of teachers who either cannot or do not want to teach in conventional school settings. (They also tend to be much smaller than America’s large, conventional, comprehensive high schools. At a time when high school students are experiencing increased mental health issues, a smaller and more personal school environment may bring benefits of its own.)
Hybrid schools are not for every student or every family. Then again, neither are conventional five-day a week public or private schools. A small number of families had their children in hybrid schools twenty years ago. A lot more students were in hybrids ten years later. Many more so today, and even more will be attending hybrid schools ten years from now, as more parents work from home and more families learn about the flexibility, focus, opportunity, and community afforded by hybrid schools. Some policy recommendations, then, which we could use to reinvent more American high schools using hybrid school approaches:
- Encourage many more schools—including conventional public and private schools—to startup and to test out hybrid programs. Some conventional public school systems already are. As are many charter schools.
- Give these programs’ independence to set their own scheduling, course assignments, course and program design, etc.
- Eliminate certification requirements for as many instructors as possible in these programs.
Passing education savings account programs could be a boon to the hybrid landscape and may help transform high schools by making hybrid options more popular. But hybrid school growth is not conditional on waiting for ESAs to pass. These schools are very low cost, and the philanthropic community is getting behind them.
The best way we can use hybrid schools to reinvent the American high school is simply by creating more of them—public versions, private versions, or partnerships, which is more of a civil society and philanthropic question than it is a policy question. Many small and local community groups got together and started up hybrid schools over the past few years with no political help, precisely because policymakers were ignoring their wishes. Community groups themselves will have to decide whether they are up for the task of founding new hybrid schools. Of course, state policies like public university admissions, accreditation, and others still constrain what many hybrid schools are willing and able to do. But to the extent we can enable and encourage educational entrepreneurs to found and run hybrid schools—to innovate without asking permission—that will lead to more high schoolers having the experiences they and their families are looking for.
