Commentary

Over the last 8 months, I have been developing a model land-use policy designed to ease the process of building out a microschool ecosystem in California. A handful of states across the country already allow microschools to hatch, grow and proliferate. However, defining is a legitimate challenge, especially for the legislature. So, I needed a fearless advocate to sit before the Senate Education Committee and articulate the concept to a largely indifferent panel.

Lizette Valles was that person.

She talks in rapid, fully-formed ideas that arrive faster than one can absorb them. In less than an hour of us shaking hands to sitting in the committee hearing, her clarity distilled why microschooling mattered better than what I had assembled in months of research.

“If we customize everything from our coffee to our phones,” she said, “we should be able to customize our children’s education too.” And then: “An education system designed for the past won’t prepare children for the future we’re asking them to lead.”

She wasn’t reciting talking points. She was describing the lived reality of the families she serves, more than 35 microschool founders across California who have built something the traditional system couldn’t provide.

What Lizette and people like her are assembling isn’t new, even if the term feels that way. Microschooling is as old as education itself—the one-room schoolhouse on the frontier, the private tutor educating a merchant’s children in colonial Boston, or the kitchen table where a mother taught her and the neighbor children to read by firelight. What has changed is not the concept but the context.

We live in an era of profound learning diversity. Children diagnosed with dyslexia, ADHD, anxiety, sensory processing differences, and a hundred other variations in how human brains work are being asked to succeed in a system built on industrial-age uniformity: same age, same pace, same seat, same test.

For many of them, that conveyor belt system is failing. Not because of bad teachers or bad intentions, but because the architecture itself was never designed to honor individual difference. As Lizette put it plainly: “The goal isn’t to fit children into systems—it’s to design systems that honor who children already are.”

Microschools are an answer to that problem. They are, in Lizette’s definition, “intentionally small, innovative, and personalized learning environments rooted in human-centered design.” They operate under California’s existing Private School Affidavit process, already fully legal under state law. And they deliver on something the research consistently supports: that children learn better when they are genuinely known by the adults teaching them. “Real learning happens in relationship,” Lizette told me, “in environments where children are seen, known, and supported.” For a child who has spent years invisible in a classroom of 35, that is not a philosophical abstraction. It is a lifeline.

The problem is where to put these microschools. Enter SB 1086, a bill authored by state Sen. Megan Dahle and sponsored by the California Policy Center.

SB 1086 really is a land-use bill—modest, targeted, and carefully drawn to avoid the very regulatory overreach its opponents imagined. It would have directed state agencies to develop model local ordinances providing objective, consistent standards for traffic, parking, fire safety, and hours of operation for small groups of children often meeting in a normal living room or a small retail office space a few days a week, not the large private schools with hundreds of students.

Utah did exactly this in 2024 with Senate Bill 13, and the predicted harms don’t seem to have materialized. Neighborhoods have not been overrun. Homeschool families are not swept into new regulatory structures. What did happen is that microschool founders started getting straight answers from local governments so they could accommodate a growing demand of families seeking personalized instruction they were not getting in other venues, instead of a different response every time they talked to a local official behind a different door.

The California Senate Education Committee killed SB 1086 even after the bill cleared the Senate Local Government Committee on the consent calendar just days before.  Affected by every procedural objection raised in that committee room were children who learn differently or struggle in overcrowded classrooms and finally found something that worked in a small barn on a farm, around a kitchen table or in a vacant strip mall. Their parents aren’t asking California to pick sides in a culture war. They’re asking for a zoning code that doesn’t make education impossible.

The families waiting for California’s policies to catch up deserve better. Until then, I’m thankful for microschool founders on the front lines like Lizette and her husband, Oscar. We need more defenders of individualized learning knocking on their legislators’ doors to open doors at the city planning departments that are closed to so many.