The Rise of Learning Pods: Civil Society’s Expanding Role in K-12 Education in the United States

4.1 Social Entrepreneurship

One area where the learning pods phenomenon can contribute and help build new knowledge is social entrepreneurship, a topic of growing interest and importance for nonprofit researchers and practitioners. A key task of social entrepreneurship scholarship is to study how new social ventures emerge, and learning pods, as observed by Bedrick and Ladner (2020, 12), can be described as an emergent “permissionless innovation” i.e. a form of spontaneous and voluntary action and organizing where the families did not ask anyone’s permission to create a pod. Hence, researchers could look to nonprofit supply-side arguments, which posit a variety of reasons and non-economic incentives for the creation of nonprofit organizations (Young 1983), to explore and unpack what motivated so many parents to establish, or join, learning pods, and if there are any differences in motives and/or intentions among parents creating autonomous pods versus support pods.

Furthermore, the emergence of learning pods occurred in a highly localized context, predominantly at the neighborhood level. This type of confined new social venture, rooted in voluntary action and undertaken by parents involving a relatively limited number of beneficiaries, often tends to be overlooked as it lacks the grand and magnetism of the kind of social entrepreneurship associated with heroic individuals changing the world, catalytic transformational change, and/or high growth and high impact social enterprises. Instead, learning pods illustrate and draw attention to what Welter et al. (2017, 312–313) denote “everyday entrepreneurship”:

[…] much of our research continues the highly skewed quest to develop our understanding of entrepreneurship by studying a tiny group of outliers, while frequently ignoring the vast bulk and diversity of what we label ‘everyday’ entrepreneurship. Not only are the gazelles and unicorns perhaps not as important as we have presumed, but by implicitly defining everyday entrepreneurship as neither important nor interesting we have failed to understand its rich variety and importance.

Investigating learning pods is not just an opportunity for researchers to empirically capture everyday social entrepreneurship, a deeply needed element for the development of social entrepreneurship theory, but also connects social entrepreneurship with the study of grassroots civil society organizations. Such grassroots entities typically entail a locally based voluntary group working towards the goal of improving and develop their own community. They also yield significant autonomy, are usually considered small-scaled and geographically bound, and are frequently dependent on direct in-person relationships (Smith 2000). At the same time, they are deemed essential for engaging individuals in collective efforts, and consequently a key to civic engagement. Learning pods undoubtedly share many of these characteristics making them part of the sizeable, but often overlooked, undercurrent of the American organizational landscape that Smith (2000) refers to the “dark matter” of the nonprofit universe. Empirical research focusing on learning pods therefore has the potential to help overcome and address a noteworthy shortcoming in both social entrepreneurship and nonprofit organizational studies: the under-coverage of the smallest social ventures in our communities.

4.2 Government Failure

Another basic, yet central, feature to explore is the role or function of learning pods from a multi-sector conception of society. One option for examining this topic is to look to the economic theories of the nonprofit sector in general (Hansmann 1987), and government failure theory in particular (Weisbrod 1991). A central starting point for government failure theory is that in societies with great population diversity, such as the United States, the demands for public goods will be equally diverse. As a result, it can be difficult for the government to provide and satisfy all the public good demands that various citizens have. If this occurs, government failure theory posits, nonprofits will take on the role as gap fillers responding to the private demands not provided by government (or from for-profit providers). Based on this perspective, learning pods can be seen as a response to the inefficient provision of public education during the pandemic with learning pods filling the niches left unserved by remote learning or closed schools. Furthermore, government failure theory also posits nonprofits fulfill an important role for satisfying the demands and service needs of minorities, which offers a possible explanation as to why learning pods, relatively speaking, became such an alluring option for many U.S. minority parents and parents of children with special needs. Future research on learning pods ought to further explore and elaborate the minority-aspect, recognizing every community has some degree of diversity along a variety of dimensions e.g. race/ethnicity, income, language etc., and investigate how such diversity affects the formation and function of learning pods.

The government failure perspective is also an entryway for nonprofit researchers to comprehend and study learning pods as a source of non-formal education (NFE). NFE is different from informal education, which encompasses all acquisitions of knowledge, skills, experiences, and attitudes from everyday situations and interactions with friends, neighbors, co-workers etc. However, it is also different from formal education as NFE is not a part of the mainstream educational system typified by most public or private schools with high levels of standardization and regulation when it comes to learning goals, evaluation, accreditation, and certification. Yet, unlike informal education, NFE still take place in a more structured way and is organized with specific individual and/or societal learning goals as a starting point (La Belle 1982). Government failure theory help explicate why NFE will manifest in civil society, where it can be organized and actively managed to provide for a variety of educational solutions addressing tangible problems or situations that government, via the public school system, cannot provide but citizens still demand. Thus, NFE can be seen as the actively organized learning for competencies and values that are not sufficiently transmitted through formal and informal education (Willems and Andersson 2022).

As noted earlier, government failure theory indicates one function of learning pods is to fill in the gaps caused by the inefficient provision of formal public education. However, the NFE perspective expands this function to also include the instruction and diffusion of education that the government, via formal public schools, cannot or will not provide. For example, Black families have acknowledged how learning pods offer them a chance to teach about experiences and values that are not provided via formal education (e.g. Jacobsen 2022).

4.3 Co-Production

As illustrated in Table 1, most learning pods are support pods, that is, they maintain some sort of connection with an existing public (or private) school. According to Salamon and Toepler (2015), one weakness with government failure theory is that it struggles to explain situations where a government institution and a nonprofit cooperates. Thus, given the dominance of support pods in our data, nonprofit researchers seeking to explain the role and function of learning pods might also benefit from looking at the so-called third-party government perspective, where nonprofits functions as partners (rather than as gap fillers) with government in providing public services (Ibid.). One example of such a partnership from the world of K-12 education is charter schools.

However, to date we have little robust research depicting how the “partnership” between a learning pod and a school is organized, governed, or supported, but based on what has been reported in the popular press it appears many parents have taken on multiple key responsibilities as instructors, tutors, and resource providers. This, in turn, indicates that learning pods are different from most education- or school-supporting nonprofits (Nelson and Gazley 2014) as parents creating learning pods deliberately elect to contribute time, energy, and resources directly into the production of educational efforts that previously were the responsibility of schools and certified teachers alone. Hence, in addition to the third-party government perspective we also consider co-production theory as highly potent lens for research learning pods (Verschuere, Brandsen, and Pestoff 2012). Learning pod initiatives are clearly situated within the context of professionalized educational service delivery, and it directly concerns and involves (in this case) parents and their children rather than being undertaken for the benefit of others. Hence, support learning pods appreciably elevate the direct involvement of the nonprofit sector in the production of public education, as the education taking place in pods is no longer solely delivered by professional and managerial staff in public agencies but co-produced in conjunction with civil society-based users.

Still, in order to foster and ensure effective co-production in the field of K-12 education, the nonprofit sector must take on and fulfill a vital capacity building role. For example, beyond strong motivations and sweat-equity, which may be important initial factors to help start up learning pods, these factors may be insufficient to sustain these initiatives over time. According to Verschuere, Brandsen, and Pestoff (2012), to build robust co-production in the education field, the users must be given additional skills, marshal financial and/or psychical resources, and set up structures to help connect teachers, parents, students, peers, and the local community. Although the public sector can help provide some of these pieces, the nonprofit sector will be an equally, if not more, crucial actor for the future evolution and success of learning pods. This includes the already existing population of school-supporting nonprofits as they are strategically well-positioned to facilitate communication and establish connections between pods and public schools. Moreover, these nonprofits are likely to be critical providers of financial resources. As noted by Nelson and Gazley (2014), while there are many national and/or regional foundations with an interest in basic education, school-supporting nonprofits are distinct in that they specifically target and financially support K-12 public education at the local level. In addition, as observed by Carlson (2020), there is a nonprofit homeschooling association in all U.S. states, and a significant number of capacity-building nonprofits focusing on schooling from home, that provide a smorgasbord of support and resources ranging from curricula- and lesson plans to regulatory guidance.

Thus, beyond being a source for financial support and an avenue for building relationships, the nonprofit sector is also the home of many education-related services, and retain specific competences, that parents operating learning pods are likely to search for and demand. One such example is tutoring (Mozolic and Shuster 2016), often considered to be one of the most adaptable and potentially transformative educational tools available (Nickow, Oreopoulos, and Quan 2020). Tutoring has also been highlighted as an essential strategy for remediating learning losses during the pandemic (Kane 2022). Other key services to help support and strengthen learning pods include after school programming, transportation, and services based on specific pedagogical, academic/curricular, or technical skills. The main point is that co-production significantly raises the role and stakes of nonprofits oriented toward educational ends. Whereas interactions and communication in the traditional public school systems often tend to only flow in one direction, learning pods have the opportunity of becoming a conduit connecting various nonprofit and public actors (e.g. organizations/agencies, teachers, administrators/staff, volunteers, parents etc.) closer together in education.

Future research, empirical and comparative, is thus needed to test and explore the assumptions attributed to co-production in K-12 education, such as the generation of new relations, greater cooperation between nonprofit and public actors, and if the co-production leads to greater quality of education, possibly reduced costs, and greater benefits for those involved.

4.4 Learning Pods and Family

Learning pods also open opportunities for nonprofit organizational and policy research to extend into areas having received limited attention in the past. One such area is the role and function of family. For example, Steinberg, Brown and Taylor (forthcoming) recently critiqued the so-called “three failures theory” approach frequently utilized by nonprofit scholars for overlooking the essential productive activities taking place within families and households (e.g. pooling and sharing resources, nurturing and socializing children), and the many meaningful ways in which family interacts with the market, nonprofit- and public sectors. Yet, family remains a contested construct in the civil society literature, and to some “[…] the family is not only outside but even antithetical to civil society.” (Power et al. 2018, 204).

We concur with Steinberg et al. (forthcoming), as well as Power et al. (2018), that greater attention to the family may indeed help expand our understanding of the nonprofit sector. For example, the family is clearly a focal point for the welfare of family members, but as the learning pods example illustrates, families can also be significant entities for the provision of welfare within the wider yet localized community e.g. a neighborhood. After all, it would be difficult to comprehend or analyze learning pods as civil society-based social ventures without recognizing the critical role of families and family members in the founding, supporting, and operating of those ventures. Power et al. (2018, 202) further substantiate this notion of an expanded role for families in providing community welfare by pointing to research on local neighborhoods in the U.K. illustrating the weight and magnitude of “between-family and between-household networks in the provision of support.”

Power et al. (2018) also underscore the overlooked role of family when it comes to civic activism and civil society engagement and observe how the concepts of family or pro-family are often assumed to be the territory of the political right, and thus fundamentally conservative in character, whereas civil society tends to be considered the territory, even property, of the political left. But, as Power et al. observe, such a simplistic positioning conceals there are many forms of civil society activism and engagement in relation to the family that cannot easily be classified as politically right or left issues. The growth, scope, and diversity of families across the U.S. engaging in voluntary action to form and operate civil-society-based learning pods can thus serve a reminder that nonprofit scholars and policymakers (204) “[…] that the relationship between the family and civil society needs more than the largely superficial consideration it has had so far.”