"Being educated and being schooled are not the same thing." with Denise Lever of Baker Creek Academy

What We See is a conversation series across Indie Education. Microschools, homeschool families, and hybrid programs talking about what they're actually doing, how they know it's working, and what the metrics miss. In this episode I talk with Denise Lever, a former wildland firefighter who started homeschooling while her family moved nine times in thirteen years, and who now runs a network of eleven microschools in an Arizona town of six thousand people. We get into her three-tier model of autonomous founders sharing one building, the GPS meetings where guide, parent, and student sit down together to design a learning plan, and her four conditions for how kids actually develop: relationships, autonomy, respect, and competencies. Denise also tells the story of her daughter's senior year on an off-grid ranch in Mexico, which led to an archeology interest, a state college scholarship, and a useful argument about the difference between being educated and being schooled.