Dr. Grauer's Column - When the Script Breaks: Small Schools Rising in D.C.

When the Script Breaks: Small Schools Rising in D.C.
(12 Small School Leadership Principles that Everyone Can Use)
By Stuart Grauer

DC in Bloom

It seemed like a perfect spring in D.C.—as if when everything is blooming, everything is possible. Dogwoods, tulips, and redbuds made you literally stop along the sidewalk and smell a bud. There was a wisteria breeze across the National Mall.

Small school leaders from across the country and beyond gathered, exchanging stories from Arizona and Bermuda, the UK and Pakistan, Encinitas and the Gaza Strip.

Leaders Gathering

I had the honor of opening this year’s International Micro Schools Conference at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian—a space alive with ancestral wisdom, now under political threat. My keynote included twelve “touchstones” for school leadership I like to call “human-scale” and “locally rooted,” drawn from a life in the classroom, on a surfboard, and in the heart of startup school communities.

For a welcoming, we all greeted each other on all sides of our seats. The four directions, the way I learned it from the Lakota up in Pine Ridge. Real change begins with presence. The simplest things can be challenging—but also the most impactful.

Real leadership begins with connection (which was Point 1)—the kind you feel when you hand a flower to everyone who drops off at the start of the school day, or when you call them by name. That’s where democracy begins. Not in policy—but in presence.

Polarization and Compassion

Point 2 seemed like the bigger challenge these days: embrace polarization (without losing compassion).

The diversity of leaders gathering around was astonishing. We learned about small and micro schools using solar-powered tablets in remote villages. About mothers trained as facilitators in countries without formal teachers. About federated school models in the UK and digital micro-education across Malawi and Bangladesh. We talked about funding, about burnout, about kids who stopped getting out of bed. We talked about what happens when systems fail—and people step up.

One moment that stayed with me was quieter.

As I was leaving, in a personal exchange of thanks and farewell, the conference organizer, Siri Fiske—who’s lived and worked in Washington for the past decade—confided in me that she was leaving. “It’s just become too exhausting here,” she said. “Too intense.”

I thought: if someone as grounded and wise as Siri is feels pushed to the edge, what does that mean for the rest of us?

D.C. and the Disappearance of Trust

Her words took on deeper meaning later that night, as I reviewed recent coverage In the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times about our capital city gripped by fear and anxiety. Where friendships are politicized and dialogue is disappearing. Where trust seems to some like an endangered species and people don’t know what they can say.

Since the new president took office, these reports detail, more than 130,000 federal workers in Washington, D.C. have been pushed out of their jobs—through layoffs, buyouts, or (for some) adverse conditions—fueling a documented wave of burnout, mental health crises, and economic uncertainty across the city. The question, “Will this be good for the nation?” is of course complex and not even discussable, I’m just a teacher.

My question is quite different: What Does This Have to Do with Small Schools? Well, everything. Small schools don’t operate from spectacle or big systems. They run on trust and relationships (Point 3). And trust, right now, is a precious national resource.

In Washington, it sounds like the old civic script is breaking down these days. But in small school classrooms, campuses, tree stump circles, and community gardens, we are writing new ones. Importantly, we are not writing them alone—and definitely not for scalability—but at human scale. The small schools movement is on.

Despite popular misconception, the small school does not have to be scalable except to engage in universal values. Each one can be unique and so they can serve as pockets of peace through the changes.

Founding a Small School Is Activism

I had not been in a room with so many school founders or aspiring founders in a while. I shared my belief that founding a school is activism (Point 4). Especially a small one. When you build a space where students are seen, where teachers are free to lead, where identity is affirmed—that is cultural work that may not be status quo. That is counter-narrative.

We heard it again and again: families and teachers aren’t leaving increasingly large, mainstream schools for higher test scores, or even money. They’re leaving because they feel unseen. Because their child no longer wants to go. Because they need something smaller, something real.

Candace from Florida told about hosting campfire dinners to help prospective founders find the courage to begin. Andrew in Arizona was creating monthly meetups just to ease the loneliness of small school founders. And MIT’s Mette Miriam Bol reminded us that schools are not machines. They are living systems (Point 5). You can’t strip out interconnection and expect life to thrive.

These stories illustrated my next leadership point: develop your founding story and make it a part of your brand (Point 6). As small school leaders, our lineage traces back through Indigenous education, apprenticeship, and land-based wisdom. The small, micro, and pod schools popping up are not new ideas. They are original instructions. They are place-based, and they have storied origins, and forefathers.

Find Your Teachers

Another principle I hope to always share: never stop seeking your teachers (Point 7). This is what brought me to the nation’s capital and to this conference. Whether it means sitting with small school pioneer Deborah Meier in New York (as I would), connecting with amazing school founder Angela Fubler of Chatmore School, Bermuda (who has invited me on her board), or remembering the words of educational heroes John Holt and Marva Collins, who were inspired and successful in facing massive social, political and economic odds against them.

Small school leadership is a lineage. We inherit it and renew it with every next inspiration we dare to act upon. We don’t have to be pro football players or rock stars to have heroes. Education needs them—and it has them.

As small schools, we are challenges. We are inconvenient to the status quo (Point 8). And when your unique school succeeds, people will either copy you or try to discredit your work. Sometimes both.

So we don’t let lies stand (Point 9). We speak simple truths, even knowing they might be rejected at first. Though sometimes never acknowledged, we are heard. When I feel silenced, I have given up—it happens.

Leadership by Noticing

There in the American Indian Smithsonian—under lawsuit, under threat—I intentionally included as many words as I could find on the federal government’s list of non grata words, words that could strip you of your federal funding or nonprofit status. I was aware that this made a few among us in the room squirm, including the conference organizers who might have wanted to get the hook at that point.

What makes one of us empathic makes another queasy. And among the queasy are often people who curse censorship… when it happens elsewhere.  Many claim to embrace polarization, but that’s not really something you just do, it is something that you have to practice your whole life and never take for granted.

Here’s the thing: leaders who try to stand up for the truth, often in the face of dominant systems, like all our educational heroes have, need to be ready to be treated as marginal and polarizing—if not rejected outright (Point 10). Criticism of original work is no reason give up. It may be the very reason to proceed. I love the motto “proceed until apprehended” as a permission structure for educators to act on intuition and care rather than wait on bureaucracy. At a great small school, people feel they have “permission.” They seize days.  I love freedom.

The Freedom to Wander

Small school leaders allow students the freedom to respond to their own needs, feelings, and ideas—and to wander. To walk the school dog without a note. To offer presence and listening instead of policy. To ask the student to help guide them in decision-making.

Teens never cease to amaze me with their sensible rationale even for things that at first, on the surface, strike me as unbelievably boneheaded. To hold joy or grief without rushing toward a set curriculum—or toward judgment: that’s small school leadership. Those are the unscripted moments where the small, democratic, self-directed, and compassionate school comes alive.

And where stories are created. Leaders collect stories and data (Point 11). If we want to defend our models, we must show not just how they feel, but how they work. We need evidence. We need stories and data, side by side.

Despite passion and talent, many rising small school leaders don’t have academic or practical experience in the art and science of data collection, school evaluation, and research (quantitative and qualitative). This could be an Achilles heel. The leaders who succeed will address this. No matter that you may be at a free or un-school, or out in a forest school, no matter how learner driven your program, your existence needs justification and that takes valid evidence, serially.

Know Your Values

Finally: every stakeholder in your world must know—and be able to say—your school’s values (Point 12). If they can’t, start there. The mission consists of your values. They are not slogans. They have to be lived and fought for. Seen. Named by all stakeholders.

All that’s what this conference was about. Not saving the world—just returning to the simple things we started with—one student at a time. One circle at a time. One eye-to-eye greeting at the door and that you trust. I managed to experience that in D.C.

The original 1991 brochure for The Grauer School told the story of a child walking along a beach where countless sea stars lay stranded after the tide. The child gently lifts one and returns it to the ocean, then another. A passerby watches and says, “Why bother? You can't possibly make a difference—it doesn’t matter.” The child picks up another sea star, tosses it into the surf, and replies, “It matters to this one.”

This conference contained people from all walks and politics, but all expressed that in D.C., the unraveling for better or worse seemed to be top-down and bureaucratic. Meanwhile, grass roots, intentionally small schools focused on student voice are stitching things from the bottom up.

I hope to see our good but exhausted conference organizer again: she is moving to Southern California. “It’s just become too exhausting,” she had said. “Too intense,” her voice caught between resolve and weariness. Luckily, her dynamic co-founder Whitney Retzer will stay on the case. I kept thinking: if someone as grounded and wise as she feels pushed to the edge, what does that mean for the rest of us? And yet, we are not really living in the national news, are we? We are living in real, experiential relationships and our feet are grounded.

At least, that is my preference for living. That is where small school leaders make change. And if this all sounds like a small thing, consider this: there are now over 130,000 small, micro and pod schools in the U.S.--that’s news and that’s change. I keep hearing how the world is not so big after all, and wonder if this is the change that will actually show us that.

That’s the script for now. Not efficiency, but belonging. Not scaling up, but staying in the work.

Staying curious. Staying connected. Staying human.

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