We are committed to impacting as many children as possible through our work.

Last year, Long-View Micro School served 78 students and we reached another ~4,220 students through the teachers we worked with across the year from rural Edgecombe County, NC to urban San Francisco, CA.

Long-View is an organization that holds two aims: impacting children and impacting educators.

Our micro school was founded in 2015 and is located in central Austin, nestled between The University of Texas and a 84-acre wooded urban park. Long-View serves a diverse community of approximately 80 learners in grades 2 through 8. Most of our team is embedded in our micro school, working with the learners on a daily basis.

Our team also works beyond the walls of Long-View Micro School, contributing to the education profession under the larger umbrella organization, Long-View Learning. We teach and support educators across the country. We travel to schools to run workshops, host a summer institute in Austin, and conduct coaching sessions embedded in Long-View classrooms. In addition, we create content on a membership-based platform called Learning for the Long-View. The goal of Learning for the Long-View is to give teachers sustained support developing content knowledge and shifting to more complex pedagogy.

At present, we are working to impact these two problems: 1) the need for math instruction that accelerates learning, and 2) the need for optimistic examples of innovation to halt teacher attrition from the profession.

At the core of all of Long-View’s work is a set of assumptions that have transformed the experience of teaching and learning for young learners, parents, and educators.

Assumption number one and the “why” behind everything we do is that we believe children have significant capacity to understand many of the complexities that are part of the world in which they live.

Our other assumptions get to the heart of how we teach. Most schools view learning as acquisition and have strong behaviorist underpinnings. Their institutionalized teaching has a transmission orientation, focuses on covering granular objectives, elevates textbooks, and invites a passive stance among participants. Long-View Micro School is revolting against this and aims to be an environment that strives to push against this out-dated formula of schooling, instead aiming to be a “radical space of possibility” (hooks) in which learning is central. We focus on learning with understanding, and through our assumptions and culture we attempt to design so as to reverse what Richard Elmore termed “the progressive dissociation between learning and schooling.” We are redefining schooling through a conceptualization that positions learning as a socio-cultural activity in which the goal is building durable knowledge and robust ways of thinking. 

Parents and educators can’t stop talking about the Long-View experience.

Long-View is a very transparent learning environment—we constantly have visitors—interested parents, researchers, school leaders looking for inspiration, and educators working to transform their own instruction. Feedback from these various visitors showcases Long-View's exceptional impact.

A visitor well-versed in observing schools said: “I saw everything you wrote about in action. Every student in that room was going through his or her own process of reasoning. I do not, and have not, seen that in the schools that I think are some of our top performers. I could have stayed [in your classrooms] and asked [students] “Why?” ten times and they would have a real reason, they were owning it. That is the type of learning and learners we aspire to have.”

A teacher who spent four days learning through Long-View’s summer institute for math teachers said: “I want more than anything to bring this way of learning math back to rural North Carolina, where our students lack so many opportunities. If we can approach math such that our students have a deep understanding of reasoning and concepts from a young age, we can open doors that have long been shut to them.”

A parent of two Long-View students said: “I believe that Long-View is the future of education—a place where kids guide their own learning, where they learn to learn, where they are taken seriously in their quest for knowledge.”

By design, Long-View Micro School is a truly independent and innovative model of schooling.

The three co-founders of Long-View worked together for over a decade and though they worked in positions of leadership at well-resourced schools, they became increasingly frustrated by the lack of focus on learning and on students. Everything was about maintaining the status quo and was focused on adults. They envisioned a school with a very different culture and started Long-View to challenge the traditional, antiquated assumptions and practices of K-12 education.

Long-View Micro School is for-profit because the founders didn’t want a board of non-educators making key decisions. The trio boot-strapped the school with income from consulting with other schools, choosing this route so that they would have complete creative freedom. The school runs through a distributed leadership model; all teachers actively participate in day-to-day management.

In addition, the founders also wanted to remove the focus on fundraising that is integral to the traditional private school financial model and has a negative influence on culture. Tuition at Long-View covers ~93% of expenses, which is similar to most private schools across the country. However, rather than raising money through an annual fund or asking for donations from the parent community through an annual gala/event, the founders purposefully designed the gap between tuition and revenue as a creative constraint for the team.

We work as a team to fund this gap by leveraging what we have created for daily instruction into a product that can be shared. This diversifies our revenue, infuses an entrepreneurial focus into our work, and drives us to be purposeful in all we do: we generate curriculum and we strive to crystalize our vision of good teaching and enact it with coherence.

While conducting workshops on mathematics for educators, we’ve seen them grapple with the disconnect between the experience they are striving to create for their students in math and the very premise of their existing school environment. The “permissionless” and innovative model of our micro school has pushed them to think about being change agents in the educational landscape. We are working to document and codify the Long-View model so it can be shared. This will benefit teachers who want to start their own micro school or provide them an opportunity to be a part of a Long-View Micro School network.