Colleen Hroncich
Colleen Hroncich
After a diverse teaching career that spanned pre-kindergarten through college at public and private schools, Anna Bernanke had some thoughts on what education could—and should—look like. Chance Academy in Washington, DC, is the hybrid microschool she created to bring her vision to life for children.
Anna grew up very poor with parents who were Holocaust survivors who viewed education as the only way to improve your life, particularly from an economic standpoint. Attending a liberal arts college near Boston expanded Anna’s idea of education. “I found that it was just also an intellectual improvement with so many different exposures to new ideas, new people,” she says.
She began teaching part-time at her children’s elementary school so she could have a flexible job that aligned with her kids’ schedule. She fell in love with teaching. When her own kids got older, she began teaching full-time.
Eventually, Anna became department chair at a charter school in Washington, DC. She loved connecting with the kids, but the problem was that administrators were very focused on test scores because charter schools could be closed if scores dropped. They supported her ideas at first, such as giving students three weeks in the summer to work on public policy and allowing them to do internships. But when the test scores didn’t look good, the administration started clamping down on everything.
Anna left the school and realized she needed to either leave the profession or start her own program. She decided to create her own. She began looking for spaces and planning what her program would look like. “I opened my doors in 2008 in Mount Rainier with a teeny group of people. I just had no idea if people were going to show up,” she says. “It was a little before the more homeschool-oriented interest that seems to have grown over the years. » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/friday-feature-chance-academy
