Eric Wearne

Welcome

Eric Wearne is a Visiting Associate Professor with the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University. He was previously Provost at Holy Spirit College, Associate Professor of Education at Georgia Gwinnett College, and Deputy Director of the Governor's Office of Student Achievement in Atlanta.

Dr. Wearne’s research work focuses on education policy, school choice, and the history of American education.

Defining Hybrid Home Schooling in America: Little Platoons

Lexington Books, 2020

In their most common form "hybrid homeschools" operate 2-3 days per week in brick and mortar buildings, with classes of students, teachers who assign work, etc. The balance of the week, these students are homeschooled.

These schools are an interesting phenomenon to study for several reasons:

-They typically have relatively low tuitions, and are started by groups of local parents or other stakeholders with the intention of keeping costs down. Because their tuitions are low, these schools are an excellent way to provide school choice to the broad middle class in America: those too wealthy to qualify for most existing state and local school choice programs, but not wealthy enough to afford private school tuitions.

-They are an excellent example of civil society coming together, creating a new form of (usually) private mediating institution to solve the related problems of large, bureaucratic conventional public schools—and also to solve the problem of expensive and (in terms of market share) declining private schools. As small, private startup entities, their barriers to entry are also much lower than those for charter schools or conventional private schools. This fact is drawing new education entrepreneurs into this space.

-They operate under a variety of regulatory structures—in some states they are mainly private schools, in some states their students are classified as homeschoolers, and in some states there are other designations. Charter and conventional public school examples of the hybrid homeschool model also exist. It is even the case in some instances that these schools are choosing for themselves under which designations they want to be regulated.