Inside an Irving Park bungalow, kids raced barefoot through the dining room, zooming past paper chains taped to the ceiling. Some slouched in couch chairs, trading stories in a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Others lay on the hardwood floor, flipping through picture books.
Teacher Claire Jakubiszyn knelt beside a 7-year-old boy, counting beads for an art project.
“This is how, even though we don’t do math class, we’re incorporating it through hands-on practice,” she said.
Jakubiszyn’s microschool — or “unschool,” as she calls it — enrolls nearly two dozen students, ages 4 to 14. There are no desks, no tests, no set curriculum, just a small group of teachers to facilitate child-led learning. Most of the kids are homeschoolers who attend part time.
“Children aren’t standard, right? Education shouldn’t be standard. Different kids are going to need different things,” said Jakubiszyn, a former high school arts teacher at a Chicago charter school.
The model may seem unconventional, but it’s gaining ground.
The pandemic supercharged interest in alternative education, from microschools, to homeschooling co-ops, to online learning. Years later, many of those kids haven’t returned to traditional classrooms.
Against the backdrop of national debates over school choice and vouchers, homeschooling has burst from the ideological fringe to the center of Chicago’s education landscape.
Illinois is among a handful of states with virtually no data on homeschooling. But among the 30 states that track participation, the numbers are booming. Last school year, homeschooling rose by about 5%, nearly triple the pre-pandemic growth rate, according to the Homeschool Research Lab at Johns Hopkins University.
Jakubiszyn began homeschooling in 2022. Her daughter was increasingly unhappy in kindergarten at a public magnet school, where crammed classrooms and rigid schedules seemed to stifle her curiosity, Jakubiszyn said.
During the pandemic, the family had run a small learning pod. Why not revive the model? That same year, Jakubiszyn opened Blazing Star School on the second floor of her yellow-brick home. Today, it has a waitlist.
“I knew that we couldn’t just be homeschoolers. We would have driven each other nuts,” Jakubiszyn said. “I was like, ‘We need more people. We need a whole community.’”