It is a few weeks into the school year at Flourish Schools in Nashville. In a bright, flexible classroom tucked inside a renovated office building, seven middle schoolers are reflecting on curiosity. They call it a “superpower,” one of the skills and mindsets they practice daily. The school’s founders, John Danner and Adam Nadeau, designed Flourish to measure what many schools overlook: a student’s ability to stay curious, collaborate, and persist in a world that is changing faster than any single curriculum can keep up with, demonstrating what microschools can teach us about scale.

Flourish blends project-based learning, social-emotional growth, and technology-enabled feedback to help learners develop these “superpowers.” Each student’s progress is guided by educators who know them well and by AI tools that support skill tracking and reflection. It is part of a growing wave of microschools that are small by design and built to show that personalized learning can be both rigorous and deeply human.

Across the country, microschools like Flourish are reframing the conversation about scale. For decades, education systems have equated size with impact. Bigger schools, larger districts, and standardized programs were considered the hallmarks of efficiency. But microschools are proving that small can be scalable — that systems can expand their reach not by growing larger, but by growing smarter.

Through our work with microschools and public systems, we have seen how the most meaningful innovations often begin in settings where every learner is known, where educators can adapt quickly, and where community and curiosity fuel achievement. “Small by design” is not a retreat from systemwide progress. It is a strategy for achieving it.

Scaling Depth Before Breadth

Microschools are no longer a niche idea. They have become one of the most visible movements in education innovation, representing both new starts and internal pilots across districts and networks.

Recent research from RAND found that 90 percent of microschool leaders report higher levels of student engagement and belonging compared to previous settings. The National Microschooling Center estimates that more than 1.5 million students could be enrolled in microschools by 2030, and that a majority of new founders are educators who left traditional systems in search of flexibility and purpose.

Read the full article about what microschools teach us about scale by Jordan Luster at Getting Smart.