The Artists Formerly Known as Homeschooler and Teacher

Mom as curator, not classroom instructor. Teacher as artist, not widget maker.

(This is the third of a four-post series. Click here to go to the first post and here to go to the second.)

I think we need a different phrase to describe today’s homeschooling.

SB2 relies on a definition of homeschool that was codified by the Texas Legislature in 2007 (the year Apple released the original iPhone):

Sec. 29.216.(1) "Home-schooled student" means a student who predominantly receives instruction in a general elementary or secondary education program that is provided by the parent, or a person standing in parental authority, in or through the child's home.

This definition says that homeschooling is when a parent is the classroom instructor and the classroom is in the home. It conjures up a vision of a little classroom over the garage, with kids sitting in desks arranged in rows on a linoleum floor facing a blackboard where mom is writing out multiplication tables in chalk.

Of course for some families this is indeed their homeschool experience, and perhaps for others the state’s definition is an accurate description of their activities. But for an increasing number of families who call themselves homeschoolers, it’s not.

First, in many cases mom and dad are not the “predominant” providers of instruction. If a kid is working through Khan Academy’s Intro to Algebra, the instructor is Sal Khan. If that same kid takes a history course at Great Hearts Online, the instructor is one of the GHO National Academy faculty. If that kid then goes to a Drawing and Painting at the Glassell Junior School, the instructor is one of the artists on staff. If the kid ends their day at creative writing microschool at a nearby community center, the instructor is probably the founder of that microschool.

The point here is simple: in today’s homeschooling, kids may be taking a “general elementary or secondary education program,” but little or none of the instruction “is provided by the parent,” and a substantial amount of the content is not (or need not be) delivered “in or through the child’s home.”

Second, homeschooling today is not a sit-at-home-all-day, drill-and-kill activity. The homeschool experience often includes microschools, co-ops, reading circles, math clubs, specialist classes on particular topics, field trips (lots of field trips), work-study programs, volunteer activities, community projects, and a plethora of online options that can be done at home or (thanks to ubiquitous mobile technology) at a café or office or park.

These families may refer to themselves as homeschoolers, but their experience is not “home-school” according to the Texas Legislature’s definition. It is something different.

So rather than continuing to refer to this activity as “Homeschooling,” I’d like to propose that we call it “Parent-Curated Education” or PCE. (Hey, I’m an engineer so I’m a big fan of TLAs¹.)

The Art of Motherhood

Traditional schooling is like purchasing a bundle of channels from DirecTV or Comcast. You buy all 132 channels, and the professional media buyers at these providers decide what channels you get.

Traditional homeschooling is like performing Shakespeare at a community theater. The text is magical and the actors learn their lines and the stagehands do their best, but the production values cannot achieve the level of a professional company in a professional setting.

PCE is more akin to buying streaming services like Netflix or Disney+ or attending a touring Broadway production. No need to pay for the QVC or MTV if you don’t want it. You pay for what you want, and you get only what you pay for. No need to suffer through an amateur in a lion costume struggling through “I Just Can’t Wait To Be King”; the tour version includes Julie Taymor’s puppetry and professional performers who are talented enough for the West End. And in both streaming and live media, the production values are exceptional. It turns out that craft – that magical combination of talent and training – does matter to the audience experience.

In PCE, parents select educational content produced by professionals that addresses the interests, strengths, and weaknesses of each child. No longer do families have to rely on schools to employ and retain teachers to cover a wide range of interests and capabilities; no longer do parents have to spend the time to acquire the skills needed to be an effective teacher; no longer do parents have to master every subject to be an effective homeschooler. Instead, parents can work with a variety of educators to find the best way to stimulate their kids’ cognitive development.

I call it Parent-Curated Education because I believe great education is like art: the best instructors are those who are passionate about their subject matter and craft, and the best curators know how to position a particular artist and work to resonate their specific audience.

A great curator, in short, knows their audience and looks for art and artists who speak to that audience. A curator does not need to be an artist, but they do need to appreciate artists and spend time to find those talented individuals. In the case of PCE, the audience is the student and the artists are the teachers, who can connect with and motivate children to engage with the world in a way that is new to them.

It is remarkable how many resources are now available to families who embrace PCE. Here is a partial list of 50 such programs, generated by ChatGPT in about 20 seconds:²

Families overcome two challenges to embrace and implement PCE.

First, PCE requires significant time from mom to curate education opportunities. Time is needed because the decision about who teaches your child requires research and talking to trusted networks, as well as observing your child’s nature and development. Deciding how to educate your children is akin to deciding where to house your children: curating an education is like buying a house.

I’ve written about this analogy before, but let’s do a quick overview.

When buying a house, you have to research neighborhoods, look at available inventory, decide whether to buy a new or old house, calculate how much you can afford to pay and how much much you can borrow, tour houses of interest in person, reach agreement with the seller on price and terms, inspect the house, apply for a mortgage, purchase title insurance, and more. It is a complex, high-stakes, infrequently made decision.

To do this kind of activity well, you need time and professional help (in the case of a home, from a real estate agent; in the case of education, from a trusted network or advisor). PCE is very time-intensive, and there is not (yet) an industry akin to real estate brokers to help with this effort, so it is not a good fit for working moms.

Second, PCE takes money. The activities listed above – tutors, microschools, instructional materials, curricula, online programs, etc. – require cash. Community theater might be free but going to a touring Broadway production costs money because the professionals need to be paid. Educators – the “artists” that mom is curating – need to be compensated for their time and talent. PCE families currently have to come up with additional money to fund their program while still paying the taxes needed to fund the public education system.

As a result, PCE is financially unviable for most homemaker moms, especially those in low-income, working-class, and middle-class families (note to file: the rich already do PCE). These moms don’t have enough additional income to pay for the expenses associated with PCE, as they are already scrimping to get by on a single income with a part-time job or an occasional side-hustle.

Alas, there is not much that can be done to create more hours in the day for working moms to take on the challenge of PCE. But the Education Savings Account (ESA) program enabled by SB2 can significantly expand the number of homemaker moms who can embrace PCE. It addresses the money gap by giving kids their own education trust fund, with mom as trustee. It also creates an opportunity for homemaker moms with the requisite skills to create education side-hustles for which they can be paid.

I will say it again clearly: ESAs create new and exciting opportunities for current and former teachers to ply their trade within a PCE ecosystem.

Small is beautiful

Many teachers are deeply frustrated by the current top-down, routinized, administrator-driven education system. Kids are treated like widgets, and teachers are treated like widget makers. I’ve written in the past about the scourge of scale, and many teachers in the public system have scars from being on the whip end of scale.

PCE funded by ESAs creates a new paradigm for teachers. Whether they work as tutors, or coaches for an online curricula, or instructors in microschools or co-ops, teachers can break loose from the constraints of the current school paradigm to focus on, well, teaching. They can choose how much of their time they want to dedicate to practicing their craft - some will spend hours each day, others will just teach the occasional class. Some will want to do one-on-one tutoring, while others be happy to teach twenty kids in more of a classroom setting.

This de-institutionalization of the teaching profession could be a wonderful thing. So much of the profession is trapped in a large-scale industrial model: administrators, managers, unions, regulators, yadda yadda yadda. The alternative - something more like a guild model where teacher-craftsmen-artists ply their trade individually or in small groups - sounds like a step back into a medieval model, but it’s really restoring teaching as a human-scale enterprise where the secret ingredient of great teaching - love - can be deployed without the depersonalizing ethic of a centralized bureaucracy.

Please note that this vision is not a theoretical one; it is already happening in other states with ESAs. Here’s one story about that phenomenon, but if you want to see more examples just use Google. You’ll be amazed.

Some of these teachers will be past retirement age and looking to practice their craft away from the grind of a traditional school. But the more powerful impact will come from young teachers with kids of their own.

Imagine a mom working full-time as a teacher. She wants to spend more time with her three kids. She applies for and gets ESAs for all three and enrolls them in an online academy. She quits her teaching job and opens a tutoring service that teaches algebra to middle school kids who pay her with ESA funds. She takes an income hit, but gets back a huge chunk of her day, lots of flexibility, and saves money from work-related costs like commuting and work clothing. She can focus her teaching skills on a handful of algebra students, and is able to help them progress at a rapid pace. More importantly, she gets to spend more time with her kids and other PCE moms, who share lifehacks that improve her day, save money, and free up even more time.

That’s one of the great promises of ESAs: enabling millions of moms to live the life they want that is currently beyond their reach. It would also allow moms already homeschooling to fully embrace PCE by giving them access to resources they can’t afford without a trust fund for their kids. And since these families have been paying into the system for years and receiving no benefits, it will be a nice change for them.

The bottom line: if ESAs are done right, they have the ability to re-invigorate the homemaker mom social imaginary, helping millions of moms to live their best life.

And that is a really big deal.

1. Three Letter Acronyms

2. These are just active programs currently on offer in Texas and do not include programs that are operating in other states that could easily expand to Texas. And since it was generated by an LLM, it’s likely to be incomplete and could be hallucinating.