Are learning pods real or hyped?
Are learning pods likely to have a real impact on education, or are they over-hyped? My conclusions, after digging through quite a bit of information and interviewing two key people at Prenda:
Learning pods and microschools are not the same thing, although they are often conflated and overlap in some ways.
Learning pods, by most definitions, are over-hyped and unlikely to have major impacts on education (notwithstanding that they may be very helpful to relatively small numbers of students and families).
The jury is still out on microschools. They are both interesting and very early stage.
That’s the SparkNotes version. If you’re interested in more detail, read on.
There’s certainly no lack of attention to learning pods. In the middle of the pandemic, the New York Times explained What Parents Need to Know About Learning Pods. Much more recently, school choice advocates announced: Pandemic Pods Are Here, Are You In? The Center for Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) is maintaining a database of learning pods. Michael Horn says that learning pods aren’t going away, and according to Horn’s article, Tyton Partners says that 1.5 million students are in a pod or a microschool. (The link is to an article in The 74 which you can follow to the Tyton website.)
These sources have different definitions of learning pods, and some combine learning pods and microschools. CRPE’s definition is simple and among the best:
“Pods are learning environments that provide in-person support or intensive virtual support to small groups of students, led by one or more adults.”
That definition, while very useful overall, may also create some confusion, which is illustrated by the examples in their database. Breaking these and other examples down further:
CRPE’s database doesn’t include—but some other sources do—pods that are informal gatherings of students supported by adults with no institutional affiliation or support. These seemed to be common during pandemic remote learning, but there is no evidence, nor reason to suppose, that these are continuing at any scale as school buildings have re-opened. They were a parent/community response to a very specific and temporary need.
A category within the database is made up of support centers that say they intend to help students and families during emergency remote learning. Again, this seems pandemic-related and temporary. A counter-argument is that if districts adopt elearning days, they could use these centers to support families. That’s true, but the counter-counter is that many of these seem to be getting funding from one-time grant sources that may dry up.
Another category (these categories overlap) is of pods that charge families, typically in the range of $150-$200 per student per week. These pods are mostly daycare and/or enrichment centers that are a bit more tapped into curriculum than is common, and may have a link to the local school, but it doesn’t seem likely that these will grow to large scale while charging parents, for the same reasons that private schools have never attracted a large percentage of students. The counter to this argument is that if more states offer Education Savings Accounts, parents will have funds to tap into. The counter-counter is that so far, the number of students eligible for ESAs remains very low.
A final category is made up of pods that have a clear link to a local school or district. The number in this category is small, but these are easily the most interesting in terms of impact and scale. In addition, this is where the confusion about learning pods versus microschools arises.
Why is this last category both interesting and confusing?
It’s interesting because people have an expectation of what a school is, and microschools meet many of these conditions. Microschools serve as the primary source of education for their students, with something approximating grade level advancement (even if they are competency-based), and use content area scope and sequence that is recognizable to teachers everywhere. Their main difference is that they have very small enrollments, which allow teachers to instruct in different ways than usual, in particular often free of the age-graded structure of traditional schools.
The microschool concept can be confusing, however, because microschools can be private (most were private pre-pandemic), or they can be programs run in conjunction with an existing school district (like a school-within-a-school, except from outside the school building), or in theory at least they could be completely separate public schools, like charter schools.
This is where the promise lies. Districts have experienced drops in enrollment, mostly among young students. If microschools feed the demand for families to access a different type of publicly funded education, these schools could grow substantially. Our recent research suggests that statewide online school enrollment grew by 75% during the pandemic, and that the numbers have not dropped back to pre-pandemic levels, demonstrating enduring demand. Also, the need for a learning coach—a family member—to support young children is a prerequisite for a young student to be enrolled in an online school. If microschools work in conjunction with districts or charter schools to provide this support, they could serve a meaningful niche.
This is where companies like Prenda and KaiPod Learning come in. Working with districts or individual schools, using public education funding (even if indirectly as schools pay), considering education requirements, etc.—these are all details that require a considerable level of expertise and experience. If microschools are going to take off, we will see it among companies like these.
But we’re not there yet. Are 1.5 million students being reached in learning pods or microschools, as suggested by Tyton Partners? If true, that would be meaningful. But again, there’s little evidence to suggest that number is accurate. In fact, if you leave aside pods that are small, informal, parent-run groups—basically study groups for young students—then it seems impossible to find a number of students that comes anywhere close to a million.
The CRPE database lists 360 pods. Most don’t mention how many students are being served, but of those that do, a rough average seems to be in the range of 100 students. Multiplying 360 by 100 gets us to 36,000 students. If we round up, let’s say 50,000. Or be even more generous and double that again, and we get to 100,000.
Is the difference between 100,000 and 1.5 million found in microschools? It’s highly doubtful. Prenda shared with me that their total current enrollment is under 5,000. Prenda is growing, and as discussed above the model is interesting and at least moderately promising. But it’s early to call this the next wave of education.
Interesting? Yes.
Overhyped? Definitely—if we’re talking about learning pods.
Promising? Maybe—if we’re talking about microschools.
Many thanks to folks at Prenda for helping me understand this landscape, and to CRPE for making their database publicly available and easy to use.