 Tech-savvy parents are finding that they don’t need the public schools in Nebraska. As Samantha Matalone Cook said in a Wired interview, “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” She was referring to educating her children at home, and with incredible ed tech advances over the last few years, it’s never been easier to “do it right” yourself.
School choice gains across the country have spurred innovation in education as the free market has entered the realm of public education, and while the public school systems in Nebraska have not picked up the ball and run with it, parents certainly can. Parents in Nebraska can “hack education” by homeschooling their kids or by using the public school system here and there as they see fit. Some parents in Lincoln have been using hybrid approaches to education for years, but it’s not until recently that larger numbers of parents have realized that LPS is not only ignoring many parents’ desires but is openly hostile to parental concerns. Fortunately, as things have been breaking down in the top-heavy bureaucratic halls of unwieldy educational institutions, new crops of startups have been creating new educational methods. Jyri Engestrom, co-founder of Flickr, explained his experiences and predictions in the previously mentioned Wired interview: Jyri Engestrom, Caterina Fake’s partner, signed up with AltSchool this year. The couple had been homeschooling for a couple of years, an experiment that gradually expanded into a 10-student “microschool” called Sesat School. This year, his students started attending AltSchool part-time, in what he calls a “hybrid” approach. He says it’s just one example of how a new crop of startups could use technology to create new educational models, somewhere between homeschooling and traditional school. He foresees a day when the same forces that have upended everything from the entertainment industry to transportation wreak havoc on our current model of education, when you can hire a teacher by the hour, just as you would hire a TaskRabbit to assemble your Ikea furniture. “I’m feeling like something is brewing right now,” Engestrom says. “The cost of starting a company has gone down because there are online tools you can use for free. I can see that happening with school. So much of that stuff is just up for grabs.” School Choice Lincoln will be compiling lists of resources and ideas to help families here in Nebraska to create individualized educations using the best sources available. Samantha Matalone Cook was right: If you want something done right, do it yourself.” Luckily for us in Nebraska, the pioneers of school choice in other parts of the country have done much of the innovation for us. We’re the beneficiaries of their forward thinking--if we take advantage of the incredible educational resources that are now available to us with a click of the mouse.
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