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국제무역
Microschools as an Emerging Education Model
RAND
2025.03.21
Microschools typically are small, have multi-age classrooms, and focus on self-paced learning. But they vary tremendously in setting, size, and focus. The best currently available estimate is that between 1 million and 2 million students attend microschools full time, and many more attend part time.

Microschools seek to serve a wide range of students including those with learning differences and students whose social, emotional, or behavioral needs are not being met in traditional learning environments.

Free from the state and federal accountability requirements and reporting requirements faced by public schools, microschools often make decisions about how (and whether) to assess students‘ academic proficiency and growth on a student-by-student basis.

Increasing the efforts to regulate the sector has implications for the sustainability of individual microschools. Forced closures have occurred when microschool leaders struggle to navigate increasingly stringent regulatory environments.

Microschool leaders view securing stable sources of funding as a critical challenge to sustainability.

Data on microschool students‘ backgrounds, proficiency, and academic growth are often unavailable, inconsistent, or unrepresentative. This lack of data poses threats to both the internal and external validity of studies intending to evaluate the impact of the sector on student outcomes, particularly those leveraging existing administrative datasets.