The Koch Wish List (Spoiler: Microschools)

Remember when Charles Koch wrote that he had done an oopsie by being so partisan and dividing the country? That was back in late 2020, and it was followed by the rise of a new Koch Brand--Stand Together aka the Charles Koch Institute's new branding exercise.

So, Charles Koch Institute is now Stand Together Trust, an organization that now has a hip young vibe. Check out the website-- "We help you tackle the roots of America's biggest problems" in bold print over dynamic videos. Hugging! Clapping! Black people! "Everyone is tired of all the fighting over problems with very little focus on real solutions."

Stand Together has mounted a steady PR campaign that may have popped up on your social media feed, highlighting plucky individuals who are making the world a better place and could accomplish even more if there weren't government regulations in their way. Stand Together also maintains the Koch interest in education, and we can see what they're looking for by examining publications like Stand Together's "How Education is Transforming in America."

Like many such publications, this is less interested in predicting the likely future and more interested in pushing their particular vision. "One can't help but notice," it opens, "that education is transforming in America." And so it is instructive. What is it that "one" is supposed to notice? What is it that the Koch folks want?

People want individualized education

People really want this. Koch knows this because a survey they paid for from Tyton Partners says so. Are Tyton Partners pollsters? Nah-- they're "an investment banking and strategic consulting firm that specializes in, and has significantly shaped, the education technology industry." So their report (which you can only download if you have a business address) carries the same weight as a Ford Motor Company survey about transportation or a restaurant industry organization survey about food regulations or just generally time that you ask someone who has something to sell if they think you need the something that they are selling.

Tyton's finely tuned research turns up some stuff, like the majority of parents want learning in small groups and a flexible daily schedule. Also, parents think learning can happen anywhere. There is nothing particularly shocking in any of those findings (is there any parent who would argue their child should stop learning when they leave school). You can read these answers to depict support for smaller class sizes, but that's not where the Kochs are headed.

They will invoke the privatizer trope of the 100-year-unchanged school system and say that people want something new and different? What could that be? For that, they turn to Transcend, an outfit that is funded by Koch money and which has for its board of directors a batch of investment capitalists and entrepreneurs who make bank running education-flavored businesses. 

Transcend has its own "study" of educational alternative approaches that say that parents want flexibility and connection "to the assets, knowledge, needs and opportunities in their communities."

There are loads of policy ideas "for creating an environment conducive to individualized education."

Cut to the chase. They like microschools.

They toss up the far right Reason Foundation report on open enrollment policies and "best practices." They also bring up Assembly, a policy push project that is under the Bellwether umbrella but has a big list of reformster partners, including plenty of the Koch gang. Koch themselves tell us that Adam Peshek, who works for Stand Together, is an advisor. 

Lots of entrepreneurs are working on this.

Well, yes. That's part of the point, isn't it. Eliminate public education and replace it with the free market and voila!- you have money-making opportunities for all sorts of entrepreneurs.

Peshel pops up again to offer the usual baloney about the K-12 system being out of date and "designed for a time that no longer exists": and yes, he invokes the factory model. 

The report goes on to offer an exemplar of individualized education from among the operations supported by VELA. Headed up by Meredith Olson (a VP at Koch's Stand Together) and Beth Seling (with background in the charter school biz), the board of VELA is rounded out by reps from Stand Together and the Walton Foundation. VELA "invests in family-focused education innovations." One of their big successes is the microschooling operation Prenda, which landed itself a big fat contract in New Hampshire.

Microschooling is the hot new thing in "individualized education." A computer or two, a willing adult, a company to provide you with learnin' stuff, and you're good to go. The movement is marked with a remarkable level of amateur hour confidence, a repeated "discovery" of things that are news only if you've never spent fifteen minutes reading or thinking about education in your life. Here's a paragraph from the Stand Together report regarding microschooling:

Sarah and Yamila point out that kids learn how to walk and to talk by observing and experiencing the world around them--why can't they continue to learn that way throughout their school years, too?

Oh, honey.

So why do the Kochs and their assorted libertarian billionaire friends like individualized education in general and microschools in particular?

What are we individualizing?

Vouchers. Microschools. Individualized education. Permissionless education.

What they all have in common is an expression of the belief that government should not do things, that government that just leaves people alone and doesn't regulate them or tax them--that's good government. In fairness to these folks, they are consistent--Koch money opposed the authoritarian Trump and CRT bans. But when they talk about individualizing education, they don't just mean individualizing the education that your student gets.

What all of these have in common is removing government from the education sector and making parents responsible for getting their kid an education. 

Vouchers are not about providing choice; they're about making your child's education your problem. The voucher is just a little payoff to lessen the sting (at least until the amount is reduced some day). Private schools can still decide whether to accept your child or not, and voucher payments may or may not be sufficient to get your child the education you want for them--but that will be your problem. Yours and yours alone. 

Microschools are appealing because they plug one of the holes in this scenario. Are you still too poor to get your kid into a great school, even with a voucher? Does your child have special requirements that no private school wants to meet? Has your kids been rejected from all the private schools because your family is the wrong religion? Is the public school in your area not able to help with any of this because their funding has been gutted?

Well, then-- a microschool is the answer for you. Just get together with a couple of similarly-struggling neighbors, clear off the kitchen table, pool your voucher funds, and hire some service to provide a sort of modified homeschooling combined with some distance learning tools (because we all loved those back in 2020). 

A microschool is not anything that a wealthy family with other options would choose. But when someone asks, "Hey, what are all the families that lack resources and opportunities in yhe brave new world of privatized responsibility for education--what are they supposed to do?" Microschools will make a swell answer. In other words, the push for individualized learning doesn't solve education problems so much as it solves the problem of how to sell the policy goal of dismantling public education.