Happy Friday!

Last week, our incredible community submitted over 240 nominations across five categories for the first annual Eddy Awards.

79 students were nominated, and over 50 parents.

One "innovator" received 11 separate nominations from families across the country.

And yes - someone nominated Ed the Horse for Communicator of the Year (thank you – he feels heard).

The stories range from a student running a real food business out of her family’s kitchen, to a parent who built a course tracker for homeschool families, to an educator who turned a shuttered school building into a thriving microschool.

Next week we’ll spotlight the individual stories of our finalists, but in the meantime I want to introduce you to the distinguished judges who will be picking the winners...

Michael B. Horn co-founded the Clayton Christensen Institute and co-authored Disrupting Class, the book that introduced disruptive innovation theory to education. He’s been one of our most frequent podcast guests and a regular feature in this newsletter. Nobody has spent more time mapping how education is unbundling and reassembling itself.

Michelle Rhee ran DC Public Schools as Chancellor and turned one of the lowest-performing districts in the country into a national conversation about what’s possible when leadership refuses to accept the status quo.

Ray Ravaglia founded Stanford Online High School and spent decades proving that rigorous academics could work outside a traditional building.

Matt Beaudreau left a career in traditional education to found Apogee Strong, which has grown into a network of nearly 100 microschool campuses.

Kenneth Danford was a public school teacher who decided the classroom itself was the problem. He founded North Star: Self-Directed Learning for Teens, where teenagers design their own education with adult mentors instead of assigned teachers.

Jon England is a former public school principal who now works at the Libertas Institute, where he builds the legal frameworks that make microschools and education freedom possible in Utah and beyond.

Amy Bowman co-founded OpenEd and wrote the foreword to The Open Education Book. She has spent years building the infrastructure for what happens when you put families at the center of education.

We’re still sorting through the finalists, and the judging begins next week. Stay tuned for spotlights on the incredible nominees!

Gretchen Roe homeschooled six kids over 27 years. She holds a degree in psychology and child development with an emphasis in neuropsychology, and she speaks at 18 homeschool conferences a year. Her position is simple: most homeschool parents spend too much time on academics and not enough on everything else.

“If you’ve got a math program that takes an hour, it’s 45 minutes of obedience and 15 minutes of education.”

She’s citing a formula from neuropsychology – a child’s attention span for new information is their age plus three minutes. A seven-year-old gets ten minutes. If your kid checks out at minute fifteen, the lesson is too long.

The other half of the Roe education was life skills - with specific milestones at each age. Scramble eggs on a gas stove at four. Make your own doctor’s appointments by 13. Get a job by 14 - find it, call about it, interview for it, all without a parent present. Her eldest daughter started working in a coffee shop at 14. At 19, she got a $53,000 SBA loan and bought it.

“We wanted our children to have character. We didn’t want them to be characters.”

She also talks about what to do when your kid seems "lazy" (her fifth child didn’t read until nine - he’s now a computer scientist), why the first job matters more than the first AP class, and how her middle daughter’s pet rat obsession turned into a career in research biology.

Listen to the full episode

"Personalized learning" has become something of a buzzword. We’re probably guilty of using it loosely ourselves. But if so, it’s because the phrase means so many different things to different families - and we’re hesitant to put it in a box. Putting things in boxes is kind of what got us here in the first place.

Our view: personalized learning shouldn’t be one approach among many. It should be the default - whether you’re in a public school, a private school, homeschooling, or piecing together some combination of all three.

This week we published a guest piece from Mason Pashia, who leads storytelling at Getting Smart - Tom VanderArk’s platform that has spent years documenting the most interesting experiments in education. Mason wrote about what personalized learning actually looks like when families build it themselves.

The examples he uses are specific. A parent in Utah picks math from one provider, writing from another, science through a co-op, and sends her daughter to the neighborhood public school on Wednesdays and Fridays for band and PE. A teenager in Iowa builds a portfolio through mentorships and online courses, all rolling up into an accredited transcript. An eight-year-old in Indiana does adaptive math in the morning and spends afternoons at a nature program run by a retired biologist.

Some school districts are even adapting. Arizona’s Vail School District created a "rate card" for individual course purchases - families can buy core classes, electives, even sports and club access while maintaining their primary approach elsewhere.

Whether you call it the "a la carte-ization of education," personalized learning, or (our favorite) open education, we’re glad to find more people talking about the same things we’ve been talking about. There are as many flavors of this as there are families. The labels matter less than the underlying principle - that the people closest to a child should be the ones designing the education.

Read Mason's full piece

Our favorite finds from across the internet this week.

UC San Diego lowered academic standards in the name of equity. Noah Smith walks through what happened next. (Noahpinion)

What if every high schooler spent time on a factory floor, in a hospital, or at a startup before graduation? The "Big Blur" makes the case. (CRPE)

What does it mean to be a "normal" kid? A two-part series making the case that we’ve normalized dysfunction so completely that healthy teenagers look exceptional. (Austin Scholar Part 1 | Part 2)

Parents are demanding better customer service from school choice programs. The ones that don’t adapt are losing families to the ones that do. (The 74)

Grade levels never worked. A short, sharp argument for why sorting kids by birth year was always the wrong unit of measurement. (Above Grade Level)

As microschools multiply, who decides which ones are good? (EdChoice)

Oregon is weighing whether its short school year is partly to blame for dismal test scores. (The 74)

Your public library might be the most powerful free entrepreneurial resource in your community. Almost nobody treats it that way. (Getting Smart)

A microschool founder explains why she started a church to run her school. (Forbes / Kerry McDonald)

How this mom created a microschool specifically for neurodiverse kids. (LiberatED)

Brave Writer had two good episodes recently: one on teaching critical thinking as self-awareness instead of argument (here), and another on the difference between accidental and on-purpose learning - and why both count (here).

Simply Charlotte Mason just released a full new curriculum. If you’ve been curious about the Charlotte Mason method but didn’t know where to start, this is the most complete package they’ve put together. (Simply Charlotte Mason)

Decision fatigue is real in homeschooling - and it builds up in ways you don’t notice until you’re paralyzed by a math curriculum choice. (Simple Homeschool)

Not sure which curriculum fits your kid? Our Curriculove quiz matches your family’s learning style to specific programs and platforms - with reviews from our teachers. Take the quiz and let us know what you think!

"We homeschool not so our kids are insulated from the world. We homeschool to make sure the concrete has been hardened before we put heavy loads on it." via Kari Patterson, Simple Homeschool

Have a great weekend.

– Charlie (the OpenEd newsletter guy)

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