The Rise of Florida's 'Microschools'

There's a quiet revolution happening in K-12 education, driven by parents and teachers who say they've had enough.

Jessica Zivkovic knows the feeling. "Ultimately I got to a point where I knew that we needed a whole overhaul," she says, "and I could not bring about the change within the system."

A handful of states are pushing school choice to the max. "There are a lot of eyes on Florida right now," says Tiffany Thenor. "We are kind of the pioneers of this universal voucher."

In the Sunshine State, about 14 percent of students attend a charter school and roughly 15 percent use state vouchers or education savings accounts, and traditional public schools are gradually losing students. It's like a slowly deflating balloon. And the teachers union says it's reckless.

"What we're seeing in Florida—it feels like an abandonment of public schools," says Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association.

But it's not slowing down.

Is this the future of American education?

The students at WonderHere in Lakeland, Florida, start their days with farm chores, gardening, and outdoor play. "I like my school. It's fun. I like that we have animals and we get to play outside," says Eva, one of the students. William, another student, adds that farm life "teaches you how to be more responsible"—that if you touch something you're not supposed to, "it could end up costing the lives of some of the animals."

WonderHere was started 10 years ago by public school teachers Tiffany Thenor and Jessica Zivkovic. Zivkovic describes the moment she knew the system was broken: "I was teaching second grade at a different school, and our administration said that they did not want any use of crayons, scissors, coloring pages, any sort of crafting in the classroom—like everything should be paper and pencil. And this is 7-year-olds."

She compares it to a scene in the film Matilda: "It felt like Ms. Trunchbull is coming down the hall and you have to hide all of your colorful things and all of the fun crafts and all the color. Because that's not allowed. Those are the moments that just really taught me that the system was so broken."

They started WonderHere as a private school. Today, it operates out of two converted homes on a 10-acre property. The curriculum incorporates teaching practices from Montessori, the child-centered educational philosophy known as Reggio Emilia, and academic standards from Finland. There are just 120 students on the Lakeland campus.

"We have a 12-to-1 student-teacher ratio," says Thenor, "and that allows for our teachers to be able to personalize each student's learning, to meet with them one-on-one each day, to make sure that they are taking notes and being observant of their learning behaviors and their interests."

WonderHere began accepting state vouchers in 2023 after Florida made them available to all students seeking an alternative to their zoned schools. Thenor says 95 percent of their Florida students now use a voucher.

"It's been a huge blessing for us to be able to accept students with the Florida Empowerment Voucher," says Zivkovic. "When we started WonderHere, we never wanted it to be a place that was only for families who could afford it."

Florida's vouchers, worth about $8,000, almost completely cover WonderHere's $9,000 annual five-day tuition.

Colossal Academy in Fort Lauderdale is also part of the "microschool" movement, replicating the feel of the one-room schoolhouse, with kids of different ages together in one setting. State vouchers enable more families to send their kids here.

"It's been a godsend, literally," says parent Sadiqa Glusman. "We wouldn't be able to afford going here."

The vouchers cover about half the cost of Colossal's full-time tuition. The average secular private day school tuition nationwide is $49,000 a year. By contrast, three-quarters of microschools nationwide charge less than $10,000, according to a National Microschooling Center survey.

"Today's emerging schooling models are nothing like typical private schools," says Kerry McDonald, the author of Joyful Learning: How to Find Freedom, Happiness, and Success Beyond Conventional Schooling.

"School choice mechanisms certainly make alternative education options more financially accessible to more families, and that leads more families to look around and see what's available to them, which then leads more potential founders to go ahead and respond to that demand for something new and different by opening a new school or space," McDonald says.

Families can also spend money from their education savings accounts at homeschool "co-ops," which became popular when public schools shut down during COVID. McDonald notes that "many of these new schools and hybrid learning communities and homeschool collaboratives…were sprouting all across the country, primarily created in many cases by former public school teachers who left the classroom either during COVID or shortly thereafter, and began creating their own learning communities focused around individualized, flexible, student-centered education."

The national homeschooling rate has been increasing at about 5 percent a year, more than double the pre-pandemic rate. Microschooling is also growing, serving an estimated 750,000 U.S. students, though the line between microschooling and homeschooling can be blurry. Microschools serve a disproportionate share of "students with learning differences whose needs aren't being met in traditional schooling environments," according to a 2025 report by the RAND Corporation.

The founder of Colossal Academy is Shiren Rattigan, a former Chicago public school teacher. It started as a homeschool pod during the pandemic.

"It's March 2020 and people just didn't know what to do," she recalls. "We started with four students, and I thought, 'OK, well, if you pay me less than what you're paying the Montessori school, it'll still make my salary, and I only have to be responsible for four children.' And so I did, and the students were like, 'Can we go to the beach?' And I'm like, 'yeah, hop in the car. ' They're like, 'can we start gardening?' I'm like, 'whatever you need.' That just completely opened my eyes into the possibilities of what we should be calling school—everything in the world could actually be their classroom."

The actual academic instruction is a blend of in-person and self-directed virtual learning.

Rattigan says the model is especially well-suited to kids who don't thrive in traditional settings, "whether it be like super hyperactive boys that don't want to sit still—and they shouldn't have to, right? The learning environment needs to allow and forgive and give grace for our students that need to move."

Seventy percent of Florida students attended district-run public schools last year. That's down from 86 percent 25 years ago. That means the traditional public schools have a lot less money.

Spar says public schools have absorbed the financial hit. "There was about $260 or $280 million that got withheld from public schools. And those withholdings were because the voucher program needed more money."

Florida state Sen. Don Gaetz (R–Pensacola) supports school choice but also became a leading critic of how Florida has administered its voucher and education savings account program after a state auditor report cited a "myriad of accountability challenges." At a Senate committee hearing, Gaetz noted: "They cannot locate 30,000 students that they're paying for. That's $270 million that we're paying for students, which on any given day of the week, we can't find."

Gaetz introduced a bill that would separate the funding of vouchers and education savings accounts from district school funding to better track the money. "I introduced the bill because as a strong supporter of school choice, I wanted to make sure that school choice wasn't besmirched by the way that the Family Empowerment Scholarship legislation had rolled out," says Gaetz, a former school superintendent.

In some cases, public schools are getting state money to educate students who are also receiving vouchers. Gaetz says "$1 to 2 million" may also have gone to fund education savings accounts for students who don't exist. One private school is accused of taking voucher money for students who never attended. According to the state auditor, the state failed to recoup between roughly $10 million and $59 million in overpayments.

"By mixing all the money we began a chain of accounting problems and financial management problems," says Gaetz.

Some school choice advocates oppose Gaetz's bill on the grounds that separating out voucher funding will make it easier to cut. Gaetz isn't worried: "We have a Republican governor who favors school choice, a Republican House that favors school choice, and a Republican Senate that favors school choice. Who are we afraid of?"

Spar says public schools aren't competing on a level playing field. "We have right now in the State of Florida 1,408 pages of public school law that every public school must follow. But when you look at charter schools, it's less than 100 pages. When you look at vouchers in Florida, it's less than 20 pages of laws that those schools have to follow. So it doesn't sound like we have a very fair system in the state."

Gaetz introduced a bill to cut down on public school regulation, but Spar also wants more regulation of private schools.

"Why shouldn't they be required to tell parents the types of teachers they have there?" Spar asks. "Do they have college degrees? Because in a lot of cases they do not. Are they certified as a teacher in the state of Florida?"

That kind of restrictive licensing and regulation is exactly what the founders of WonderHere and Colossal say they were escaping.

Rattigan says she's held accountable by her customers. "If I'm not doing what my families want, they go, right? And so then I'm either forced to change, whereas we have failing [public school] systems that continue to be funded. When a school is failing, they don't shut it down in a traditional public environment. They keep it open and, in fact, they throw more money at it."

When we visited Colossal, part of the students' day was spent harvesting in the garden and cooking stir-fry. They also study art, music, photography, and how to fly a drone. More regulation and licensing would make such programs more difficult and expensive to operate.

"Adults who are experts really want access to young people, and we just can't do that in the traditional [setting]," says Rattigan. "There are too many barriers to entry to be able to work with young people. We are so happy to take all that expertise." She adds that subject experts "may not know how to work with young people," so "we're teaching them how to teach."

Rattigan says she can try new things and abandon them quickly if they aren't working. "If a student wanted drones, they would tell me on Tuesday. By Thursday, I have drones. By the next Tuesday, we have a teacher in, we're doing drones. It's actionable and fast." That flexibility disappears in a more regulated environment. "If I was in a traditional public [school], I would have to go and ask my principal, and then they'd have to check the district, and then everybody in eighth grade, the following year or two, would be doing drones. Not the four kids that asked me for it."

When asked about accountability, Rattigan pushes back: "It's a new market. You can't use old standards to measure a new market. That's with anything, right? When you build anything new, you have to create new matrices by which you decide something is successful or not. In our particular school, we believe in rigor. And our students are taking a standardized test. But we're in a moment now of innovation—can we use the same old archaic measurement tools to study something that's brand new?"

Voucher and education savings account recipients do have to take some standardized tests for tracking purposes, but the results don't affect a private school's "rating" or funding in the way they would a traditional public school.

"We do not consider those tests to be high stakes," says Thenor. "We just consider them to be one additional piece of data."

The founders at WonderHere say the government's intense focus on standardized test scores has created the one-dimensional, stifling environment they want to disrupt.

"The Department of Education really wants there to be accountability and cohesion because that's easy to create data from, it's easy to monitor progress, it is easy to determine whether a school is passing or failing," says Zivkovic. "But there is a cost to that accountability. We're not opposed to monitoring students' progress, but it cannot come at the cost of such a rigid structure. Our children—we're humans, right? We're not like a product in a factory that can be easily discarded if it doesn't meet quality standards."

Florida has made the wager that if public and private schools alike must compete for students, standardized tests alone will no longer determine whether a school is failing or not: Families will.

Gaetz puts it bluntly: "It used to be that you move into a community, you know where your local school is, your zone for that school, that's where your child goes. Now, none of that is true anymore. Now it's an unstable and unpredictable marketplace. And school districts are going to have to choose: Do they want to be a collection of buildings that begin to be emptied out and an employment agency for unions? Or do they want to supply services and goods to parents and teachers and students?"

And that seems to be exactly what's happening. Many district-run public schools have adapted to the competition by rebranding as "magnet" schools and touting their arts, science, or other specialized programs. Even Spar's daughter bypasses her zoned high school to attend one with an extensive dance program. When asked whether he supports that kind of choice, Spar says "that absolutely is something I support wholeheartedly." He adds: "We're not advocating for ending vouchers or charter schools. We're not in that position at all. The question is, are we going to give public schools the ability to experiment too?"

Gaetz, for his part, wants to do exactly that. "I think it's a fair assessment that public schools are regulated more. That's why I support as much deregulation in public schools as we possibly can do. In fact, we have a major dereg bill moving through the legislature this year."

And at least one Florida public school has plans to incorporate lessons from the private sector. WonderHere will run two K-1 classrooms at a struggling public school next school year. "The parents will opt in. They will lean into the learning environment the way our private school parents do. We will not do letter grades. We will not do report cards. We will do far less paper [and] pencil. They will play outside. We might even get chickens if I can pull it off," says Thenor.

"When we started WonderHere, our goal was always to try and influence public education," adds Zivkovic. "We never wanted to leave and turn our backs and just say, 'Well, good luck, guys.' We wanted to do something that proved that a different type of learning could exist."

So what about waste and fraud? Gaetz's bill failed in the Florida House, but the State Department of Education has begun checking directly with school districts instead of relying on parent surveys to avoid paying for double enrollment. The nonprofit, Step Up For Students, that distributes the funds has enhanced its monitoring efforts and reports that accounts flagged for possible double-billing fell from 28,000 to 6,000.

School choice in Florida remains broadly popular. Education savings accounts are the most popular form of school choice, according to recent polls. The future of education looks more decentralized, nimble, and, for some, micro.

"I think microschooling is here to stay," says Rattigan. Thenor agrees: "All of these beautiful vouchers that are coming out, giving parents the opportunity to take their funding and choose what's best for them and their family—I think that is powerful and it's a power parents should always have." McDonald puts it in broader terms: "More and more families are demanding more options for their children's education, more education models that are reflective of the realities of the 21st century. I have so much personalization in the other goods and services that I access. I want that same level of personalization in my children's education."