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Dear John,

It's week 230 in our new reality and we are thinking about all the kinds of learning that happen outside of a classroom that we label “extracurriculars.”

“What are extracurricular activities for?” Charley Locke asks in a new piece ([link removed]) for Vox.

Her conclusion: “parents and kids shouldn’t think of extracurriculars as part of a checklist for getting into college. They’re more meaningful than that.”

“When kids are young, extracurriculars are all about learning what they enjoy,” Locke writes. “Once they’ve figured out some of their interests, it’s natural to want to pursue them more deeply, whether that’s through a traveling sports team or a leadership position in a club or a personal research project. Encouraging students to follow and hone their natural interests helps them develop a sense of confidence about their values and preferences, which sets them up for more dedicated efforts and commitments beyond high school.”

Given their importances, should these opportunities and experiences be more central to an education policy agenda? In Believe in Better ([link removed]) , we make the case that they should be and in our campaigns we are backing that up with a push to invest more in expanding opportunities for all students to participate in the activities that spark their passion and help them grow.

Last time ([link removed]) in the New Reality Roundup, we warned of FAFSA problems slipping into a second year and looked at a win for JerseyCAN on student literacy in the Garden State.

This week, we look at signs of growth in homeschooling and microschooling and examine solutions to the chronic absenteeism crisis.
Best,

Marc Porter Magee, PhD
50CAN Founder and CEO

@marcportermagee ([link removed])

Seize opportunities created by a growing homeschool and microschool movement
One of the biggest changes in school choice over the past four years is the rapid growth of both homeschooling and microschooling, presenting advocates with new opportunities and new challenges to solve. The cover story ([link removed]) for the latest issue of Newsweek looks at the explosive increase in families who are choosing to homeschool.

[link removed]“An estimated 50 million students are going back to school this fall, but an increasing number of parents are choosing to keep their kids home,” write Jenni Fink and Suzanne Blake for Newsweek. “In 2019, only 2.8 percent of children were enrolled in homeschool education, according to data from the Census Bureau. By 2023, that number was up to 3.8 percent, and the latest data available for 2024 indicates 4.2 percent of kids are being homeschooled. Mimosa Jones Tunney, founder and president of The School House and the American Emergent Curriculum, an online learning platform, estimated that America adds about 50,000 homeschool students a month … ‘It's the greatest mass exodus in education we’ve seen since public school began in the later part of the 19th century,’ said Jones Tunney.”

And those numbers, if anything, understate the size of the exodus, given the number of families also choosing to leave school districts for microschools ([link removed]) –small schools with less than 20 students that are often described as a halfway point for between homeschooling and a traditional school.

Writing in EdSource, Michael Matsuda, superintendent of Anaheim Union School District, argues ([link removed]) that microschools have significant advantages over traditional school districts: “Unlike public schools, which are often bogged down by layers of bureaucracy, microschools can implement new teaching methods, curricula and integrate technologies quickly. This agility allows them to meet the needs of students who may not thrive in a traditional classroom setting, such as those with learning disabilities, gifted students or children who simply learn better outside the confines of a traditional school day.”

He concludes that the “threat posed by microschools is not just a challenge to the public education system, but also an opportunity for redesign and reform. If public schools are to remain relevant in the face of growing competition from microschools, they must find ways to become more flexible, innovative and responsive to the needs of their students.” Matsuda’s plea to embrace the new competition created by the growth of new option and use it as a spur to action is one that all superintendents would do well to embrace.
* The task this week is to remove bureaucratic barriers for innovation as they seek to deliver new ways of learning to more families.

Address the data gap and root causes of chronic absenteeism
“Society may have largely moved on from COVID, but schools say they’re still battling the effects of pandemic school closures ([link removed]) . After as much as a year at home, school for many kids has felt overwhelming, boring or socially stressful. More than ever, kids and parents are deciding it’s OK to stay home, which makes catching up even harder," Jocelyn Gecker, Bianca Vázquez Tomess and Sharon Lurye reported ([link removed]) last week for the AP. “Roughly one in four students in the 2022-23 school year remained chronically absent, meaning they missed at least 10% of the school year. That represents about 12 million children in the 42 states and Washington, D.C., where data is available.”

As states begin to tackle this problem, some proof points of success have begun emerging. The Data Quality Campaign looked ([link removed]) across states, highlighting Connecticut’s LEAP program for reducing chronic absenteeism by 15 points through home visits and targeted outreach. They also noted Rhode Island, who’s own absenteeism reductions have come via a new data system.

Liz Cohen of FutureEd has more ([link removed]) in a new report on the Ocean State: “The state data system pushed detailed absenteeism information into every corner of the state and led to some unpleasant surprises for local leaders newly confronted with the information. One municipal leader met with the RIDE team, confident he knew the two schools in his town with no attendance problems. A RIDE staff member recalls the leader describing one of them as a ‘rock star school’ because it had a new facility. ‘But then we showed him the data,’ the staffer told me, ‘and he said, Oh my God this is a crisis. The schools I thought were fine are the schools that are the most troubling.’”

What will it take to build upon these early successes and bring this crisis to an end? We will likely have to tackle the challenge of motivation. This is the argument of 50CAN National Voices Fellow Leslie Colwell in her piece ([link removed]) for Fordham’s Wonk-a-thon competition: “If we hope to rekindle disengaged students’ joy of learning and dramatically reduce absenteeism, we must improve their day-to-day experience of school. This requires us to rethink traditional ideas about where, how, and with whom students learn. It will also require us to actually listen to students and design learning with their interests in mind.”

Leslie points to “Salem Public Schools in Massachusetts for an instructive example of what this could look like. There, a pilot to improve student experiences at Collins Middle School cut chronic absenteeism in half, from 28 percent to 12 percent. The absenteeism rate among the pilot cohort continued to fall this year to less than 10 percent. Why? Because students don’t want to miss what’s offered at school.”

* The task this week is to build upon the outreach and data successes to date while working to deliver the school experience that will keep students coming back for more.


Parents organized by GeorgiaCAN gathered at the Muscogee County school board to protest their denial of a charter for Dominion Purpose Academy. Despite being voted down by the local board against the wishes of the community, the state authorizing board voted through the charter several days later.

HawaiiKidsCAN welcomed Kareem Weaver, who plays a starring role in the documentary The Right to Read, to the Aloha State for a week focused on literacy. In addition to screening the film to a packed house, Weaver and HawaiiKidsCAN Executive Director David Miyashiro hit the airwaves to promote literacy resources and the benefits of structured literacy.

Staff members at ConnCAN partnered with students and caretakers at KIND (Kids in Need of Defense), an organization that supports child refugees. The ConnCAN team worked with caretakers to understand the school enrollment process and the resources available to students.

50CAN President Derrell Bradford is out with two pieces this week. In the first, he spars with ([link removed]) Fordham’s Michael Petrilli in Education Next over just how universal private school choice should be. In another, he and Stand Together's Andrew Clark make the case ([link removed]) for eliminating school boundary lines by 2030.

Matthew Ladner, writing ([link removed]) for Heritage Foundation, suggests that the next policy step for school choice supporters will be personal use tax credits.

Brookings will host a webinar ([link removed]) on September 6, with the Brown Center for Education Policy, on the role that schools and colleges can play in nurturing citizenship and civics.

A survey of teachers ([link removed]) in EdWorkingPapers suggests that following the pandemic, there’s an increased use of technology by educators for both instruction and communication with families.

CRPE’s new report ([link removed]) looks at how AI could be a catalyst to transforming education, along with an action plan for districts focused initially in building AI literacy among educators and students.

Six out of every 10 grades on middle schoolers’ and high schoolers’ report cards are wrong, with inflation being more common than deflation, reports ([link removed]) the Hechinger Report.

A new survey by the Knight Foundation finds ([link removed]) that Americans who strongly oppose books being removed from public school libraries outnumber Americans who strongly support book bannings, three to one.

Huge test score gains in Oklahoma are an illusion, according ([link removed]) to new reporting from the 74 Million.

School accountability is over and done with, claims ([link removed]) Paul Peterson in Education Next, pointing to its absence from both parties’ political platforms.

Fordham’s Victoria McDougald makes the case ([link removed]) for continuing the use of standardized tests to combat grade inflation and to ensure comparable data.

The Century Foundation argues ([link removed]) that with 1 in 5 community college students being dual enrollment high schoolers, there’s a need for greater information about the quality of courses offered in these programs.

Jason Riley lauds ([link removed]) Michael Bloomberg’s investments in HBCUs in an editorial for the Wall Street Journal, arguing they have a proven track record of success.

Black and Latino enrollment has fallen ([link removed]) at MIT and Asian American enrollment has jumped following the Supreme Court’s ruling on affirmative action, according to the New York Times.


The 2024-2025 school year has begun, with kids all across the country zipping up their backpacks and heading out the door to meet their new teachers. In Alexandria, Virginia, students of all ages gathered ([link removed]) at the local high school for a community-led resource fair.

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ABOUT 50CAN

50CAN: The 50-State Campaign for Achievement Now is a nonprofit organization that works at the local level to advocate for a high-quality education for all kids, regardless of their address.

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