Colleen Hroncich
Colleen Hroncich

Entrepreneurship is hard. Education entrepreneurship can be even harder, in part because education is highly regulated and in part because you’re trying to attract families who have a “free” option in the public school system.
Microschool founder April Jackson has experienced these challenges firsthand. As a military wife, April was a public school teacher and academic coach in several different states. “No matter where I went, it was consistent. I almost always taught in schools with predominantly black students. And the prevailing issue was that they could not read or they were reading well below grade level. And I was seeing where they were not doing anything to address actual reading,” she recalls. Since she was a secondary teacher, she was trained to teach analysis of literature, not how to read. But she knew someone needed to be teaching them the fundamentals of reading.
“They kept telling me to teach to the standard, and I’m like, ‘This child is on the second-grade level in ninth grade. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing with this.’ So overall, it just became frustration with seeing children that were well below grade level being pushed through,” April says. But then she felt like her hands were tied, and she had to do the same thing. She made student growth her goal because she didn’t feel like she could punish them for being so far behind when they had been pushed along up to that point. 

Her first breaking point came when an assistant superintendent was observing her classroom. “It was a gifted class, but some of the kids were reading below grade level, some were above grade level, and some were on grade level. So I had differentiated instruction,” she explains. “They had a curriculum map that they wanted me to follow,  » Read More
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