Families are leaving conventional schools in record numbers. Not because the buildings are old or the teachers don’t care, but because something about the experience is wrong for their kids and they can feel it.
ESA programs across the country are putting public dollars directly into parents’ hands and saying, “You decide.” Microschools are multiplying. Homeschool numbers haven’t come back down since the pandemic spike. The whole movement is driven by a recognition that the institutional model isn’t working; not just academically, but developmentally. Parents are seeing that raising their kids is their kids’ education. Those two things can’t be separated and handed off to an institution.
I’ve spent more than fifteen years creating and sustaining learning environments that don’t use grades, follow a prescribed curriculum, or administer standardized tests (unless absolutely required for their existence by the state). I’ve seen all the ways kids learn when they’re internally motivated and given space and time to explore their curiosities and interests. But I’m not unique in this. Every day, more homeschool parents and microschool leaders are seeing the same thing: when you give more time and space to get to know a child, when his or her curiosities, motivations, and innate gifts are given room to flourish, learning becomes deeper, more meaningful, and multi-dimensional.
The question families and educators then face is always the same: “But how do you know they’re learning?” That question, and the lack of good tools to answer it, is why I built Prism.
That question is legitimate. It deserves a serious answer. But the answer we’ve inherited is the wrong one.
The Right Question, the Wrong Answer
Here’s something that doesn’t get said enough: the question “How do we know what’s happening?” is good. Parents need to know. Educators need to know. And when public money funds education through ESAs and scholarships, the public has a reasonable interest in knowing, too.
The problem isn’t the question. The problem is that the only apparatus most people have for answering it was built for a completely different purpose.
The modern testing regime didn’t come from learning science. It came from sorting. The first widely used American IQ test was developed in 1916 by a Stanford psychologist who wasn’t trying to help children learn; he was trying to categorize them into tiers based on what he believed was fixed, inherited intelligence. That model migrated into schools and became the backbone of an accountability system tightened at every turn: A Nation at Risk in 1983, No Child Left Behind in 2001, Race to the Top in 2009.
After decades of this, a major review by the National Research Council concluded that the emphasis on testing yielded little learning progress but caused negative side effects. So when people say alternatives to conventional schooling “lack accountability,” what they’re really saying is: “They lack the specific apparatus that we already know doesn’t work.”
What We Know About Motivation and Learning
Ryan and Deci’s Self-Determination Theory, one of the most extensively validated frameworks in motivational psychology, argues that schools are not just academic spaces—they are contexts for child development. Confidence, self-esteem, and mental health are all shaped by whether a child’s environment supports or thwarts his or her basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and connection.
Among the factors Ryan and Deci identify as negatively affecting both teachers and students: excessive emphasis on grades, performance goals, and pressures from high-stakes tests.
That finding is consistent across the research. Alfie Kohn’s synthesis of over seventy studies shows that extrinsic motivators, including A’s and other rewards, are not merely ineffective but counterproductive.
And then there’s this, from Black and Wiliam’s landmark research on formative assessment: students given only narrative comments on their work scored 30% higher on subsequent attempts. Students given only marks made no gain. Students given both marks and comments also made no gain. The grade canceled the benefit of the feedback.
The grade didn’t just fail to help. It actively interfered with learning.
The Trap
This is where it gets urgent for everyone building, funding, or advocating alternatives to conventional schooling.
The money comes with accountability requirements. That’s fair. But the only accountability framework most policymakers know is the one built on assessment: standards, tests, grade-level benchmarks. So you get this situation where families leave the system because the system was crushing something in their kids, and then the funding mechanism tries to reimpose the logic of the system they just left.
It would be a huge mistake for the microschool movement to take all of that energy and desire to redefine what a successful education looks like and funnel it back toward standardized testing in the name of “accountability.” The failings of conventional schooling are not because it lacks rigor. They’re because it is organized around control: of children, of time, of attention, of curiosity. That control undermines the very development it claims to support.
If the school choice movement reproduces that logic, it will reproduce those failures. Just in smaller buildings.
Observation Is the Answer
The accountability question is real, but it’s worth asking what we actually need to know. Not if learning is taking place, but what learning is taking place. Who is this child becoming? What interests and skills is he developing? What resources might support him best? Where is a microschool really strong, and what areas get less attention? Is a homeschool family doing what they committed to with their ESA funds?
These are practical questions. Assessment tries to answer them with a test score. Observation answers them directly.
Assessment asks, “Did the student hit the target?” Observation asks, “What is the student doing, and what does it mean?”
Assessment starts with predetermined outcomes and measures distance from them. It’s inherently deficit-oriented; the interesting data is always about what’s missing. Observation starts with what’s actually present and asks what it tells us. The interesting data is about what’s happening.
Both can answer “How do we know?” But they answer it differently, and the downstream effects on the learner, and for how our society approaches education, are profoundly different.
Structured observation with consistent documentation gives you everything accountability actually requires. The challenge has always been making this practical: How do you take qualitative observations from multiple people, parents, educators, even the learners themselves, and turn them into something structured enough to track growth, surface patterns, and satisfy accountability requirements?
That’s what Prism is built to do. Families and educators capture observations, photos and written reflections of learning moments as they happen. From those qualitative entries, Prism surfaces what we call Learning Signals: patterns across subject areas, skills, developmental domains, and interests that emerge over time. The result is structured, legible evidence of learning drawn from the richness of real observation, not reduced to a score.
This is the opposite of what grading and standardized assessment do. Instead of reducing the full spectrum of a child’s learning to a single number, you’re preserving the nuance and letting the patterns emerge from it. The output can satisfy a scholarship program, a state requirement, or a skeptical grandparent. What it doesn’t do is rank, sort, or control.
The Moment
When we ask about the effectiveness of school choice policies, we need to understand what is driving families out of conventional schools in the first place. It’s not a desire for better test scores. It’s a desire for environments that treat their children as whole human beings.
“How do we know our kids are learning?” deserves an answer that doesn’t strangle what made this whole thing alive in the first place. Observation, practiced with intention and documented with care, is that answer. It gives us more honest information about who a child is becoming than any standardized test ever could.
The question is whether the movement has the courage to build on it, or whether it will retreat to the familiar comfort of the system it was built to replace.
