This project has concluded. 

The pandemic opened up unprecedented opportunities for families, educators, community-based organizations, and entrepreneurs to design their own educational solutions, including microschools and learning pods. Some of these solutions recall one-room schoolhouses, freedom schools, and free school movements of the past; others harness technologies and novel configurations for schooling. While these innovations were designed to address the crisis of the moment, many—like those formed by parents and educators of color—also sought to remedy problems that long predated the pandemic.

However, our research tells us that many of the community-led innovations that we studied during the pandemic are fragile—several have since disappeared since our initial study. The learning environments that remain evoke many of the long-term trends that CRPE started studying before Covid-19, but they face sustainability issues that could limit their impact. This project builds upon our pandemic-era research to understand what happens when communities, families, and educators take learning into their own hands. Throughout this project, we partnered with many community-led learning organizations, including Black Mothers Forums and The Oakland REACH.