High-Agency Schooling Guide 2025-2026

High-Agency Schooling Guide 2025–2026 is a straight, usable manual for parents who want control over ideology, pace, and proof of learning—and who are weighing three real options now: build at home with a print-first curriculum, buy community and accountability in a microschool, or pick a brick-and-mortar program that already optimizes for a specific philosophy. The argument is plain: outcomes follow clarity. Choose a humanities spine you can defend (either a classical Western-first path with real Latin or a plural canon with a defined Western:Global ratio), enforce weekly “book hours” on paper, and demand visible artifacts—annotated pages, essays with rubrics, and orals—that a stranger could evaluate. Screens still have a job (lookup, drills, drafting), but longform comprehension lives on paper.

To make trade-offs obvious, the guide first uses five campus models as reference frames (compressed-core AI schools, classical great-books charters, mastery/capstone labs, AP/STEM engines, and global immersion independents), then shifts to the center of gravity: five homeschool programs you can adopt anywhere and five microschool formats you can bolt on for community without surrendering control. A due-diligence checklist walks you through what matters—print policy and text lists, mastery definitions, time budgets, AI use, language requirements, essays/orals cadence, outcomes by distribution, and (for pods) who employs the adult and carries liability.

Policy snapshots clarify why supply looks different by state, and a practical city lens shows how Austin signals parent taste, Phoenix shows the ESA template, and Florida shows the rollout at scale. A “how to use this guide” section gives a one-week start plan—choose your spine, set print rules, shortlist options, run the checklist, map funding, and commit—so momentum doesn’t stall. This edition is aligned to 2025–2026 planning windows; future editions refresh on a May cadence.