It began as a casual question — and a flicker of curiosity — uttered during a meeting of ProPublica journalists who this year are reporting on publicly funded private schools. We were discussing how, in many states, basically anyone can open a private school wherever they want. No experience, no training, no curriculum required.
One of our editors jumped in and asked: What if ProPublica tried to establish a private school?
We were intrigued. We are longtime education reporters, not educators. Would that matter? Where, if anywhere, do states draw the line on who is fit to run a school — and in some cases, collect public money to fund their ventures?
We decided that testing the thesis that anyone can open a school would be valuable to our ongoing reporting, particularly at a time when we have found that private schools are growing rapidly across the country — in barns, farms, co-working spaces, people’s homes and parks. These new schools are fueled by taxpayer-funded vouchers and other programs, and our reporting has revealed states have little interest in monitoring them.
We had some inspiration to draw from: In 2015, comedian John Oliver founded a tax-exempt church to show how easy it was for televangelists to avoid paying taxes while soliciting millions of dollars.
Some of us live in Chicago and are well aware of the lore of the Mirage Tavern, a real bar that undercover reporters operated in the 1970s to expose corruption in the city. While that investigation had a substantial impact, and led to a new city oversight agency, it also drew criticism for its deceptive practices.
We drew lessons from that reporting and set some ground rules at the start of our experiment. To be clear, we had no intention of operating schools. We won’t enroll any students.
Most importantly, it would be critical for us to be transparent about who we were in our applications, using our newsroom phone numbers and email addresses. In one state, we even disclosed that we were “journalists exploring opening a microschool.” We also decided we would stop the experiment if it would require doing something illegal or using public resources for our own benefit.
Have you had trouble finding a school or using a voucher-style program? Do you have concerns about schools — public or private — in your area? Help us understand how families across the country are navigating their school options.
Here’s how we went about the experiment in Arkansas, West Virginia and North Carolina:
First, we partnered with newsrooms in the three states — the Arkansas Times, Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia and The Assembly in North Carolina — and pursued creating the schools together. No one knows their states better than reporters who live there, so we wanted to work with the experts. Plus, the school applications required local addresses and we reasoned that newsroom addresses, which state officials could easily look up, would be extra transparent.
Then, we came up with names for the schools. We aimed to call them Curiosity Academies to reflect our curiosity as journalists. We succeeded with the ProPublica-Arkansas Times Curiosity Academy and ProPublica-Mountain State Spotlight Curiosity Academy. A word-count limit required us to scrap curiosity for our school in North Carolina. We simply called it the ProPublica-Assembly Academy.
Next, we filed paperwork with each state. That turned out to be easier than working through the legal and ethical questions with our editors, our legal team and our standards editor to design our experiment in the first place.
In Arkansas, we didn’t need permission from the state Education Department, which does not regulate private schools. All it took was filling out a form on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to be recognized as a private school business (yes, Arkansas requires all schools to have an American flag — but only public schools also are required to have the Arkansas flag). The secretary of state’s office even emailed us a certificate.
But when it came to applying for our private school to become eligible for public funds, a process that does add some guardrails, we didn’t think we could do it. In Arkansas, private schools participating in the voucher-like program have to be accredited or working toward it, which often requires creating curriculum and school handbooks. That seemed like a step too far since we weren’t actually opening schools.
However, we discovered that Arkansas allows a subset of schools called microschools to use public money with fewer requirements. So, we decided to apply for public funds as a microschool. That process also took only about 10 minutes. We didn’t need to provide our credentials or a background check, prove our fiscal stability or assure that the newsroom was a safe place for students. (If approved, we would not take the next step and register to receive public money.)
A state employee who reviewed our application, which we submitted in early September, said we missed the deadline for this school year but could apply for next school year. He also suggested another way we could tap into public money.
Kaelin Clay, the Arkansas Department of Education spokesperson, said the agency reviews applications to the voucher-like program to determine if the schools meet state requirements. She said microschool families have the “freedom to choose” where and how their children learn.
In West Virginia, we spent little time handwriting the required information on notebook paper and submitting it to the state Education Department. We eventually established our school as a microschool after a state employee shared that, unlike the regulations for private schools, we would not need an inspection.
We did need proof of at least a high school diploma, and we shared one of our real college transcripts from the late 1990s with the local school district, which then notified the state of our new school. (We couldn’t find the high school transcript; does anyone keep them?)
In an official statement, a spokesperson for West Virginia’s Department of Education said it “does not approve or deny the operation of microschools for any reason, including the qualifications of the owner/operator.” State law includes no mechanism for oversight of microschools.
In North Carolina, our project’s own rules and ethics — not the state’s determination of the quality of education we would (or wouldn’t) provide — prevented us from completing the process there. Instead of using the address of The Assembly’s newsroom on our application, our editors let us use the address of a brewery for our school. We needed a property with fire and sanitation inspections. The co-working space that houses the newsroom had a fire inspection but wasn’t required to have one for sanitation. But the brewery, which has a partnership with the newsroom that led to the creation of a light and lemony ale called Tell the Truth, did have one. They let us use their inspection reports for the project.
But when a state official told us that, in fact, we needed to get school-specific fire and sanitation inspections, we abandoned our quest. This crossed our line of straining public resources, as we didn’t want inspectors, whose salaries are paid by tax dollars, to devote their time to our experiment.
The rest, as they say, is history. A bunch of journalists are now school owners, administrators and heads of schools. And though we plan to close down the academies we opened to ensure no potential students mistake us for a proper school, we did want some mementos of our brief school experience. So we snagged ProPublicaAcademy.com and designed some fun pencils to show our school spirit.
And that’s not all. Now that we’ve told you about our journey opening private schools, do you think you have what it takes to open one, too? Find out by taking our quiz. Let us know how you did by replying to this email or tagging @ProPublica on your favorite social platform.
