Schools as commons

First, schooling can, in some cases, be considered and analysed as an institutional common. While most hybrid schools are private, some are indirectly publicly funded through policies such as education savings accounts (ESAs) or tuition tax credit programmes. Whatever the funding source, these schools tend to be locally governed (as opposed to being a division of, and governed by, a local school district). Schooling can be viewed as a club good or as a common-pool resource when publicly funded but locally governed (Buchanan, Reference Buchanan1965). Schools are excludable (access is restricted by geography, admissions, or capacity) but rival in consumption, since shared resources such as teacher attention and per-pupil funding diminish as enrolment grows. The IAD framework clarifies how overlapping rules structure their governance dilemmas, as in other analyses of other club goods and local governments.

Paniagua and Rayamajhee (Reference Paniagua and Rayamajhee2022) specifically address the idea of applying the ideas of polycentric governance in new issue areas. Alongside governance models in other areas, several authors have begun to note K–12 education as a form of new commons (Hess, Reference Hess2008; Frischmann, Reference Frischmann, Lehr and Pupillo2009). Gyuris (Reference Gyuris2014) most specifically suggests that K–12 education may be seen as a kind of new commons and that the IAD is ‘a reasonable framework for the investigation of basic education’. Most particularly relevant to this study, Gyuris also describes an example of centralised governance of education and the way one country (Hungary) moved in a somewhat more decentralised direction over the course of the 20^th century. U.S. education was also centralised (increasingly so) over the course of much of the 20^th century but then began to decentralise in recent decades, as described below.

Institutional isomorphism

A substantial literature has examined why educational institutions tend towards similarity over time and under what conditions they diversify. Scott and Meyer (Reference Scott, Meyer, DiMaggio and Powell1991) argue that organisations in a given sector tend to converge through three mechanisms: legal and regulatory coercion, mimicry of perceived success, and shared professional networks and training. Tyack and Tobin (Reference Tyack and Tobin1994) describe a similarly persistent ‘grammar of schooling’: the age-graded classroom, the credit hour, the standardised assessment, and the state-credentialed teacher that has resisted reform efforts across more than a century of American education policy. Rowan (Reference Rowan and Meyer2006) sharpens this analysis by identifying the conditions under which isomorphism prevails versus when diversification occurs: when institutional environments are centralised and uniform and information about quality is scarce, isomorphism dominates; when environments are fragmented, market locations are heterogeneous, and information is available, producers form distinctive strategic groups and consumers make discriminating choices. Burke (Reference Burke2016, Reference Burke2023) extends this to the school choice context specifically, arguing that even ostensibly market-based reforms such as charter schools and teacher preparation programmes have themselves shown isomorphic tendencies. Berends (Reference Berends2015), reviewing two decades of charter school research, frames these dynamics in terms of institutional change: charter schools represent both a market response to dissatisfaction with conventional schooling and a change in the social organisation of schooling itself. Why and under what conditions new school forms might escape the isomorphic pressures the prior literature documents is a question this paper addresses by examining hybrid schools as a potential counterexample.

The case for the IAD

Rowan (Reference Rowan and Meyer2006) argues that institutional analyses of schools should look beyond governance alone but also include explorations of market exchanges as well. School systems often have multi-million-dollar contracts with vendors (textbook publishers, for example). In some cases, for-profit entities (such as charter school management organisations) may contract to run public schools. The IAD can capture both governance hierarchies and market-like interactions within a single analytical structure.

The empirical literature on school choice has examined achievement effects (Angrist et al., Reference Angrist, Pathak and Walters2013; Hanushek and Woessmann, Reference Hanushek and Woessmann2015), enrolment dynamics (Musaddiq et al., Reference Musaddiq, Stange, Bacher-Hicks and Goodman2022), and parental choice behaviour (Hastings and Weinstein, Reference Hastings and Weinstein2008), but these and similar analyses have focused on outcomes rather than on the institutional governance structures that shape those outcomes. The IAD framework offers tools for analysing the institutional features that the empirical literature has not directly engaged with.

Ostrom herself occasionally wrote about schools specifically. Davis and Ostrom (Reference Davis and Ostrom1991), for example, create a theoretical framework that explores the potential benefits and drawbacks of various possible policy arrangements, some of which have been tried in the years since that paper’s publication. Davis and Ostrom note some negative externalities that have been generated by centralised schooling (less innovation, higher compliance burdens, and reduced local governance). Wearne (Reference Wearne2025) has situated some of these recent developments along the lines Davis and Ostrom describe as well as some of the ways local communities can cooperate along lines envisioned by them to create positive externalities (co-production of social capital, local experimentation in schooling, and lower barriers to entry). The IAD framework has the ability to address the common nature of both conventional schooling and hybrid school models and also to clarify why conventional schools tend to have institutional isomorphism while hybrids do not.

School district consolidation

Conventional public schools are ‘locally’ governed in the sense that they are led by local public school boards, overseeing school districts of one or more schools. The number of school districts has decreased over time, leading to fewer boards overseeing larger districts. In 1920, 270,000 public school districts existed in the United States, serving fewer than 22 million students. By 2022, the number of districts had dropped to fewer than 13,500 while serving nearly 50 million students (Smarick, Reference Smarick2022). Davis and Ostrom (Reference Davis and Ostrom1991) starkly criticise these developments as based on faulty assumptions. The reasons for school district consolidations have been many: professionalising education (through more standardised teacher credentialing, for example), enabling economies of scale, streamlining the allocation and use of resources, among others. While there has been contention over time as to whether this consolidation saved money or improved student outcomes (ibid.), it is something Ostrom herself lamented. At the beginning of the No Child Left Behind era (discussed below), she wrote that, ‘considerable research…has provided contrary evidence to the implicit theory used by policy makers to support the school consolidation movement’ (Ostrom, Reference Ostrom2002). This research included improved test scores, higher educational attainment and local wages, and lower costs in decentralised systems, and Ostrom spoke hopefully about choice-based reforms which were just then becoming more popular (also discussed below).

Federal involvement and expansion

As the number of local school districts shrank over the course of the 20^th century, top-down control from the states and the federal government grew. Federal involvement became much more entrenched with the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) in 1965. The Act mostly operates through increased federal funding directed at low-income schools. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was the reauthorisation of ESEA, rebranded and with new conditions. The concept of the bipartisan No Child Left Behind Act was simple: schools would receive increased federal funding and in exchange would be required to administer tests (chosen by the states) to students, and the results would be made public. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the more recent authorisation of the law, did draw back from some of NCLB’s federal mandates and towards state-level control but cannot be said to be a move towards truly ‘local’ control of education.

As support for NCLB was declining, another top-down, but not technically federal, concept was gaining traction. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), formally announced in 2008, were intended to ‘…provide a consistent, clear understanding of what students are expected to learn’, so that they would be ‘prepared for college and career success’ (CoreStandards.org, 2025). Rather than using federal mandates, as NCLB did, states would voluntarily adopt the CCSS and adapt their local curricula and tests to them. (States were not federally required to adopt the CCSS, but they were functionally forced to do so as adoption was a requirement to become eligible for the Race to the Top funding competition, a part of the federal recovery programme enacted following the 2008 financial crisis).

Charter schools, private school choice, homeschooling, and community crafted education

As federal requirements and federal encouragement grew, various forms of school choice were growing at the same time. The charter school sector grew to serve approximately 7 percent of U.S. students in 2023 (National Center for Education Statistics, 2023). Tuition tax credit and ESA programmes arose in the states to provide public funding for private choice. In 1996, around 10,000 students in parts of three states were participating in ESA, tax credit, or voucher programmes. As of 2025, more than 1.5 million students in 34 states were participating in 75 programmes (EdChoice, 2025). Homeschooling grew to reach 6 percent of U.S. children during the same period (Smith and Watson, Reference Smith and Watson2024). Built mostly on the various state homeschool laws, another form of unconventional schooling – community-crafted education – also began to grow as a sector. Some amount of the massive growth in homeschooling data consists of students participating in community-crafted hybrid or micro-schools.

‘Community crafted education’ encompasses various forms of microschools and hybrid schools (Wearne, Reference Wearne2024). While definitions vary, microschools are, simply, very small schools (Annable and Baxter, Reference Annable and Baxter2021; Tarnowski, Reference Tarnowski2022). Hybrid schools, in which students meet in brick-and-mortar buildings part of the week and are homeschooled the rest of the week, have also begun to grow as a sector (Wearne and Thompson, Reference Wearne and Thompson2025). These models first began to receive some noticeable attention in the 2000s (Horn, Reference Horn2015), but in practice some of these schools have been in existence since at least the early 1990s (Wearne and Thompson, Reference Wearne and Thompson2025). While it is difficult to track due to data limitations, some number of the student increase in homeschooling includes students in these schooling arrangements who are technically registered as homeschoolers. An increase in the social acceptability of homeschooling, improvements in technology, and a growing ecosystem of support (publishers, curriculum providers, etc.) helped spur a growth in varieties of community-crafted education during the 2010s (Wearne, Reference Wearne2020).

Physical world

Conventional schools usually serve many more students (often thousands more) than hybrid schools. Physical amenities are often a selling point for these schools, including athletic and fine arts facilities and technology infrastructure, and these amenities are typically paid for through multi-million-dollar referenda or capital campaigns.

On the days they meet in person, a typical hybrid school might look superficially much like a conventional public school in many ways. Their institutional operations, however, are quite different. Hybrid schools often have to move from one rented space to another and carry their capital costs in their operating budgets.

The fact that conventional school capital decisions are made by boards through referenda concentrates authority at the district level. Individual schools have little autonomy over their physical environment. By contrast, hybrid schools’ dependence on market-rate rental space shapes their physical form. Part-time in-person schedules are a pedagogical choice but also an institutional response to a different cost structure.

Community attributes

In a conventional school setting, state legislators and agencies dominate, often directing local board decisions in practice through funding mechanisms. As conventional schools are typically comprehensive and must serve larger communities, they become, in many ways, less diverse from each other. Families can exercise voice through voting, through moving, or through some indirect local entities (parent–teacher organisations, for example).

Some of the same actors matter for community-crafted schools, but they matter in different ways. State education agencies, state legislators, and, in some areas, local school systems matter, mostly as they are tasked with overseeing state homeschool laws. Many of these schools are unaccredited. Family decisions matter much more in these schools in that the schools must be chosen by the families and in that many of them require substantial parent involvement once students are enrolled, especially in the case of hybrid schools, in which students are ‘homeschooled’ during some portion of the week.

The relative powers of the actors in conventional schools dilute parent voice and can lead to bureaucratic capture, along with a collective action problem in which diffuse stakeholders (various parents, with different needs and desires) struggle against entrenched interests. This institutional arrangement predicts that hybrid schools will likely be less susceptible to bureaucratic capture (families have much easier exit options), and so families gain prominence as co-producers, shifting power from various agencies to consumers. These schools may, however, be more susceptible to domination by individual founders, or, from the other direction, they may be more dominated by individual families’ preferences or by donors.

Rules in use

The actions of state education agencies, of state legislators, and of accrediting agencies, of course, drive the policies in individual conventional public schools, but in practice the ways they follow these rules are determined by actions of the local board and of their superintendent and local principal.

Rules around hybrid schools vary widely across states. Identical-looking hybrid schools may operate under very different arrangements in different states; in one state, the school may be considered a private school. In another, it may be required to operate as a collection of homeschoolers.

These layered rules for conventional schools (state laws, rules, and accreditation) create compliance costs, incentivising isomorphism as schools standardise to avoid sanctions or respond to incentives (such as adopting uniform curricula under Common Core, typically to gain access to more federal funding). In polycentric terms, this arrangement can stifle institutional diversity. In most cases, however, a potential hybrid school can select which system of rules it wants to fall under by adjusting the particulars of its model. Therefore, in most states the rules lower entry costs for providers, incentivising niche adaptations. From a polycentric governance perspective, this ability to choose which rule system to fall under promotes diversity by letting local rules evolve without top-down uniformity.

Action situations

To the extent conventional public schools remain the dominant model for assigning students to schools, and choice is limited to families wealthy enough to pay private tuitions or to choose the most-desirable public schools (by moving into those attendance zones), interactions will remain limited to school board and parent teacher organisation meetings and personal interactions with teachers and school administrators.

The action arena for the hybrid school includes participants with different roles, motivations, and relative strengths, compared to conventional schools. In this action arena, there are multiple actors and action situations taking place as well: parents, both making choices about their students’ schools and serving as homeschool parents for part of the week; the schools themselves and their boards/leadership, making admissions and curriculum decisions; the school director/principal, with much more control over the direction of the school; accreditors, if chosen or required, from a higher-level perspective; and state legislators, typically in the form of the state’s homeschool laws.

Formal interactions in conventional schools, like board meetings, often become adversarial games where parents (with limited exit options) resort to costly voice strategies, yielding minimal change due to information asymmetries (e.g., a community challenging curriculum via petitions, only to face delays from bureaucratic inertia). Informal interactions, such as teacher-parent conferences, provide marginal feedback but rarely alter rules. Families in these schools influence these schools in a variety of ways. They do so formally, through the choosing of the school. Family choices create more competitive pressure and provide feedback for schools to adapt to. They also do so informally, influencing the school as a part-time homeschool parent, dealing with the school with repeated interactions almost daily. The availability of exit, combined with the daily co-production relationship, transforms the dynamic between families and schools. Multiple decision centres (families, founders, regulators) interact with overlapping authority.

Outcomes and evaluation

Conventional public schools are ostensibly ‘held accountable’ based on state-mandated standardised tests. Some states now use star ratings or letter grades, which can incorporate tests as an input along with financial ratings or other items. But the schools themselves are generally under no formal threat of closure, no matter how poorly they perform (Gaskins, Reference Gaskins2023; Lake et al, Reference Lake, Pangelinan, Pillow and Pitts2023).

One form of evaluation, and therefore outcome for hybrid schools, is simply the choice parents are making to use these schools. Historically common forms of measuring success (standardised test scores and college enrolments, for example) seem to be less popular among these families, and the fact that these schools are often not designed to address such measures makes them difficult to evaluate consistently at all (Ohls et al., Reference Ohls, Covelli and Schweig2025). While some work has shown that hybrid school students do well academically after graduation (Herndon, Reference Herndon2019), such outcomes are less likely to be cited by hybrid families or by hybrid school leaders as meaningful indicators of success. The actual outcomes these schools seek are both practical (enrolments, needed for continued funding) and non-academic outcomes such as labour market outcomes, civic outcomes, and issues related to family life (Lee et al., Reference Lee, Thompson and Wearne2025).

Conventional schools’ reliance on standardised metrics externalises non-academic goals, which can lead to gaming behaviours such as narrowed curricula (as evidenced by the CCSS). And increasingly, as the school-age population declines in many school systems, even academic measures matter less to school boards, replaced by concerns about home values (Kogan, Reference Kogan2025). Conventional and hybrid schools face different incentives and measures of success: compliance with higher-level mandates versus voluntary enrolment and site-based evaluation criteria (which may or may not include academic goals). This is not a claim about relative performance but about the institutional mechanisms through which accountability operates.

The comparative analysis generates a set of propositions about how institutional arrangements shape governance outcomes in education. These propositions are derived from the IAD framework and represent claims that future research can evaluate.

• Proposition 1 (P1): Where capital decisions are centralised at the district level, individual schools will have less organisational autonomy than schools that bear their own facility costs, leading to greater uniformity in physical form.

• Proposition 2 (P2): When the family is moved to a more central decision-making role, feedback loops are shorter and implementation of or adjustments to policies are likely faster. Schools with greater autonomy, however, may be at risk of domination by the most vocal families or by founders.

• Proposition 3 (P3): Where schools have the ability to choose among multiple regulatory pathways (in this case, as homeschoolers, as private schools, as charter schools, etc.), this lowers entry costs and enables institutional diversity across school types. The tradeoff is the loss of uniform accountability and information systems.

• Proposition 4 (P4): Where exit options are available, schools face competitive pressure to respond to family preferences, reducing the information asymmetries and collective action costs that characterise governance under geographic assignment.

• Proposition 5 (P5): When voluntary enrolment is a metric of success, rather than mandated metrics and geographic student assignment, schools’ incentives about who to focus on change: families or regulators. This is not a claim about relative performance, but about the mechanisms through which accountability operates.

Though beyond the scope of this paper, each of these propositions could plausibly be tested empirically:

• P1 (centralised capital decisions and uniformity): could be tested by comparing physical and organisational variation across schools in districts with different capital decision processes or comparing public schools with hybrid schools serving similar populations.

• P2 (family centrality and feedback loops): survey research on response time to family concerns, or a comparison of curricular adjustments in hybrid versus conventional schools.

• P3 (regulatory pathway choice and institutional diversity): a cross-state comparison of organisational variation among hybrid schools in states with different rule structures, using state regulatory classifications and school choice policy indices as explanatory variables and measures of organisational form (schedule, governance type, and accreditation status) as outcomes.

• P4 (exit options and competitive pressure): a comparison of school responsiveness in choice versus non-choice environments.

• P5 (voluntary enrolment and accountability mechanisms): a comparison of how hybrid and conventional schools allocate effort across academic, civic, and family-life outcomes using enrolment and re-enrolment data alongside school-reported priorities.