LiberatED Podcast

Despite today's dominant cultural messaging that insists that young people must go to college, there are in fact multiple pathways to adulthood and to a fulfilling, successful life.   A longtime leader in building alternatives to college is Praxis , an apprenticeship boot camp program that helps young people to gain mastery of sought-after workplace skills while connecting these apprentices with e...

I came across the work of our guest today, Luma Mufleh, back in 2019. Even then, I was enchanted by the story of how she created Fugees Academy, a successful private school in Georgia for refugee children who are too often overlooked and underserved in traditional district schools. But I recently finished reading Luma's newly released book, Learning America: One Woman's Fight for Educational Justi...

Lorianne Bolotin, an immigrant physician and midwife who grew up in the Dominican Republic, and Jack Bolotin, a finance executive, never thought that they would be in the education business, until mandates and lockdowns of 2020 led them to find an alternative for their children's education. After months trying to balance career and homeschooling and connecting with like-minded families, Lorianne a...

The past two years have seen a rise in education entrepreneurship, as parents have fled district schools for other options including homeschooling, virtual schools, pandemic pods, and microschools. Entrepreneurs like today's guest are building new learning models that recognize and respond to mounting parent demand for customized schooling alternatives. Amar Kumar is the founder of KaiPod Learning...

Advocates of school choice policies that enable education funding to follow students instead of going to school systems are typically motivated by stories like that of our guest today, Denisha Merriweather. The tax-credit scholarship program that her family stumbled upon when she was young allowed her to escape a public school system that was not serving her well. In my Forbes spotlight of Denisha...

Microschooling, and its various iterations including learning pods and hybrid homeschools, is swiftly and dramatically changing the face of education across the US. Microschools are modern twists on the quaint, one-room schoolhouse model, where small, typically multi-age groups of students learn together in more intimate educational settings, including private homes and small community spaces, wit...

The push for federally-funded universal preschool and child care programs continues despite new data showing the harms of government preschool programs, as well as harms to small community preschool providers who get pushed out of business when a "free" universal preschool program emerges. To talk more about the educational and economic hazards of universal government preschool programs, I am join...

The exodus of parents away from conventional schooling and into homeschooling has unleashed extraordinary levels of education entrepreneurship, as visionary parents, educators, and innovators launch new products and services for families choosing to learn outside of a standard classroom environment. One of those "edupreneurs" is this week's podcast guest, Ada Salie. Recognizing the mounting parent...

"School has become a toxic place for children and we refuse to say that publicly," asserts Peter Gray in this illuminating episode. Dr. Gray is a psychology professor at Boston College and the author of the book,  Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life . He speaks and writes frequently on the value of self-...

The past two years of education disruption have catalyzed support for school choice policies that enable education funding to follow students instead of going to bureaucratic school systems that are increasingly unresponsive to parent (and taxpayer) preferences.  In today's episode, Corey DeAngelis, one of the country's leading school choice advocates, talks about why so many Americans now support...

Michael Strong has been a longtime education entrepreneur and advocate of free markets and school choice. He has teamed up with Chris Engl to launch the Liberation of Education, helping parents recognize the many education options available to them. Their first major initiative is an online spring conference showcasing education entrepreneurship, innovative K-12 learning models, and education poli...

Jack Lloyd worked as a lawyer and teacher, which helped shape his views on education early in his career and led him to become a proponent of self-directed learning and unschooling. Today, Jack is a producer for liberty, creating content for a variety of media sites, including The Honest Teacher , and The Pholosopher. In this episode, we talk about education, libertarianism, and Jack's new book, T...

Hybrid schools blur the lines between schooling and homeschooling, expand education choice access to the middle class, and offer personalized, family-centered, hyper-local learning solutions. Today's podcast guest is Eric Wearne, an Associate Professor in the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, and Director of the National Hybrid Schools Project . He is also the aut...

Tolerance of different viewpoints and values is a key principle of a free society, and yet in classrooms and on campuses across the country, young people increasingly self-censor and self-silence to avoid speaking out against the dominant cultural narrative. Some may not even realize that there are different viewpoints and values, conditioned as they are from their early days in a public school cl...

New Hampshire takes the lead as the freest state in the country, according to a new Cato Institute analysis of personal and economic freedom. Not surprisingly, people seem to gravitate toward freedom. In fact, while states like California, New York, Illinois, and Massachusetts lost population between July 2020 and July 2021 according to the US Census Bureau , New Hampshire saw its population grow...

The American Dream is alive and well, as David Morales illustrates in his powerful, new book, American Familia: A Memoir of Perseverance . David spent his childhood in Puerto Rico and moved to Massachusetts when he was 11, where he was surrounded by the love of his family but also widespread poverty and despair. Determined not to be a statistic and instead to seize the opportunity this country off...

Teachers and doctors are confronting similar challenges related to institutional bureaucracy and rising levels of professional burnout. Teachers, in particular, have been quitting at record rates over the past two years, leading to a nationwide teacher shortage. Some of these teachers are leaving the education sector entirely, but more of them are striking out on their own to create microschools,...

It's been a tragic few days in Ottawa, Canada as the Canadian government used rare emergency powers to round up and arrest peaceful protesters and freeze their bank accounts. It's hard to believe this is happening in North America, and in peace-loving Canada no less.   My guest today is Patti Tinholt, a Canadian mother of 5 children and a successful wellness entrepreneur who is deeply saddened by...

According to new data released from the US Census Bureau on Dec 21st, California led the nation in the most population loss in 2021, after years of increase.   The other top two states for population loss last year were Illinois and New York. In contrast, Florida and Texas topped the Census list of states with population gains between 2020 and 2021. States' varied responses to the coronavirus have...

The coronavirus response over the past two years has transformed education, putting parents back in the driver's seat and inspiring education entrepreneurs to create new K-12 learning models. Jill Perez is one of these educators. A longtime teacher and mom of 4, Jill is the founder of Tranquil Teachings Learning Center in Monmouth County, New Jersey   that is meeting mounting parent demand for fre...