SCHOOL'S OUT FOREVER

How hybrid homeschools hoover up your state tax dollars

- Kiera Butler

IN 2016, TECH entrepreneur Chris Turner, a new father in Georgia, set about trying to plan his children's education. His neighborhood schools failed to impress; they were too rigid, with too much busywork. Private schools, despite their hefty price tags, "didn't feel fundamentally different," Turner says. "Their environments were slightly better, the teachers were slightly better, maybe the curriculum was slightly better, but nothing was, like, fundamentally different in the way that it felt like everything else in the world was fundamentally changing." You could have forgiven Turner for his fixation on societal change. A few years before, he had launched a company called Tenrocket, which built apps for other startup founders. At the Atlanta co-working spaces he frequented, he met young people who had skipped college. Their industriousness impressed him.

Turner imagined a new kind of classroom experience in which children as young as 5 could learn through activities like "starting businesses and hosting podcasts and building rockets and going to Costa Rica." In 2020, he launched Moonrise on a bustling corner of the affluent and progressive Atlanta-adjacent city of Decatur, Georgia.

On a recent school day, I drove to Moonrise and parked next to an suv with a bumper sticker that read, "A SMALL LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE TOOK MY MONEY." Inside, I took in the sunlit, loftlike space, which previously housed a home furnishings store. The vibe was less classroom and more co-working space for kids, with midcentury modern chairs and blond wood tables.