In this episode I talk with Denise Lever, a former wildland firefighter who started homeschooling while her family moved nine times in thirteen years, and who now runs a network of eleven microschools in an Arizona town of six thousand people.

We get into her three-tier model of autonomous founders sharing one building, the GPS meetings where guide, parent, and student sit down together to design a learning plan, and her four conditions for how kids actually develop: relationships, autonomy, respect, and competencies. Denise also tells the story of her daughter's senior year on an off-grid ranch in Mexico, which led to an archeology interest, a state college scholarship, and a useful argument about the difference between being educated and being schooled.