The Kid Who Stopped Asking Questions

There's a specific kind of heartbreak that parents of school-age kids know well. It's not dramatic. It happens gradually, somewhere between kindergarten and third grade, when a child who used to ask a hundred questions a day starts going quiet. They stop wondering aloud. They learn to wait to be told what to think about next. They figure out, through enough repetition, that curiosity isn’t always welcome in a room of thirty. 

Not every child experiences this. But for those who do, it’s easy to mistake a loss of curiosity for a natural part of growing up.  

Sometimes, it's a sign that the way they're being taught isn't working for them. 

Children learn differently. Some need to move faster, others need more time. Some learn by doing, others by asking questions, experimenting, or approaching a problem from an entirely different direction. Yet much of American K-12 education is organized around a standardized experience, making it difficult to respond to every student's individual needs. 

The problem isn't that teachers don't care. Most do, enormously. It's that even the best teachers face real constraints when they're expected to meet the needs of thirty different students within the same structure. 

Families see these differences in their children every day. And increasingly, they have more opportunities to find an education that fits. 

The gap between policy and possibility 

Something significant has shifted in American education over the past decade. A growing number of states now offer education savings accounts, vouchers, or scholarship programs, giving more families access to public funding for educational options beyond their assigned schools. About 26% of children no longer attend a traditional public school. The policy momentum is real, and so is the demand from families: in a national survey of 2,873 parents, about 60% said they considered a new school for their child in 2024, and 28% made the switch. 

That's nearly half of the families who considered a switch, suggesting that interest in alternatives extends well beyond a handful of early adopters. 

But the choices families ultimately make tell another story. Among those who switched, nearly 60% moved to a district, charter, or magnet school. About 30% chose private school, homeschooling, a microschool, or hybrid learning. Cost may be one reason, but families also face challenges finding the right options, understanding what's available, and navigating enrollment. 

This is where the gap between policy and possibility becomes clear. 

A family can be eligible for education funds and still struggle to use them. An educator can have an incredible idea for a new learning model and no practical way to bring it to life. More options may exist, but finding, accessing, and participating in them isn't necessarily getting easier. 

The policy is ahead of the infrastructure. And infrastructure is where the opportunity lives. 

At Stand Together Ventures Lab, we invest with two simple convictions: the same families who are being failed by a one-size-fits-all system deserve founders who are building something better, and the administrative barriers that make it hard to access those alternatives are solvable problems. We're betting on a choice-driven market, and we're betting on the founders building the infrastructure that makes choice real rather than theoretical. 

Two problems that look different but aren't 

The first problem is enabling supply, so families have more good options worth choosing. Innovative education models already exist and are producing real results. What they lack is the infrastructure and operational support to scale. Starting a microschool or hybrid learning program means navigating facilities, enrollment logistics, payment processing, and back-office operations that would exhaust even a well-resourced organization. And the people best positioned to run these schools, people with genuine passion for kids and learning, usually aren't administrators. They're parents, teachers who burned out in the traditional system, or community leaders who see what's missing. The barrier often isn't talent or motivation. It's the operational complexity of bringing a new school to life, and much of that complexity can be solved. 

The second problem is access. Families need the purchasing power, the ease, and the information to find and engage with the option that fits their child. Even in states where school choice is well-funded and legally protected, families struggle to find, afford, and enroll in the options that fit their child. The information is scattered, the quality signals are opaque, the rules differ by program, and the money itself can be hard to spend. Many parents default to their assigned school not because they prefer it, but because getting to the alternatives takes effort and know-how that shouldn't be required. 

Solve the supply problem and you get more good options. Solve the access problem and more families actually reach them, with the purchasing power and the ease to follow through. These two things work together, and our portfolio reflects both. 

The founders building it 

• Pathfinder is building the financial rails that put education dollars in families' hands. As ESA programs expand, a family receiving funds and a family being able to spend them easily and confidently are two different things. In many programs, parents pay up front, file for reimbursement, and wait to learn whether a purchase counted. Pathfinder is a card families use to pay schools, tutors, classes, and suppliers directly, with each purchase checked against the program's rules. Launched in Arizona, Pathfinder reports that roughly 8% of the state's ESA accounts now use it, and that most of its families spread their funds across several education providers rather than one school. It is now building tools to help families discover and compare what's out there, so the money goes to what's best for their child. 

• Astral is an AI lab with a mission to raise the average IQ of humanity, starting with an AI tutor. Quality tutoring has long been a privilege of families who can pay for it. Astral is built to bring personalized, high-intensity instruction to families who can't, and it is approved for use with ESA funds in eight states and counting, so the family's education dollars can go straight to it. Astral's tutor is used by families across 33+ states, and its team brings together learning scientists and engineers who have built products used by millions. 

• Recess is answering the question that homeschooling families have always had to answer for themselves: how do kids build real friendships and a genuine sense of community outside a traditional school building? Recess is an online community where homeschooled kids take live classes together, collaborate on projects, and show up to daily social hours with friends from across the country and around the world. Parents describe kids who can't wait for their next Recess class, who come out of their sessions energized rather than depleted, who are building rockets and publishing stories and coding with AI alongside peers who actually want to be there. It's what school-as-community was supposed to look like, rebuilt from scratch for kids whose families chose a different path. 

• Prenda is started at a kitchen table. Founder Kelly Smith pulled seven neighborhood kids together and tried something different: small groups, personalized pacing, student-led projects, real ownership over learning. Prenda has since grown that kitchen table model into a full K-8 learning experience, giving any caring adult the curriculum, software, and wraparound support needed to run their own microschool. Guides don't need teaching credentials. Parent after parent describes the same transformation: a child who had gone quiet and anxious in traditional school getting their spark back within months. One parent put it plainly: "I got my kid back." 

• LearningSpring is tackling the access problem at the point where families get stuck: finding and comparing options. In most states, a parent exploring school choice faces a disorienting search: different programs with different eligibility requirements, schools with no comparable quality data, and enrollment processes that vary by institution. LearningSpring is building toward a place where families can browse and compare schools in one spot, filter by what matters for their specific child, and get the information they need to make a real decision. The insight underneath it is that choice without clarity isn't really choice, and that the gap between having the legal right to choose and being able to act on it is where most families get stuck. 

• Prisms is building the learning tools that new school models will need. Founder Anurupa Ganguly is an MIT engineer turned educator who spent more than a decade leading curriculum for some of the largest districts in the country. Prisms is a spatial learning platform where students work through core math and science in first-person, hands-on experiences, then connect what they did to the symbols and vocabulary on the page. Learning is built around how individual kids actually learn, through movement, discovery, and experience. One teacher described students saying "let me try again" where struggle used to feel like failure. Today Prisms is used in classrooms, and the same technology can reach microschools, homeschool settings, and families. As more of them form, they'll need teaching tools that fit the way each kid learns. 

• Omella is removing one of the most underappreciated friction points in education: payments. Schools and learning programs, especially newer and smaller ones, often spend enormous energy on the logistics of collecting tuition, processing fundraisers, managing field trip fees, and handling the dozens of other financial transactions that accumulate across a school year. Omella handles all of it, free for schools, with no fees buried in the fine print, and with the kind of clean, fast experience that both administrators and parents actually want to use. The operational load that once required several disconnected tools and a lot of manual reconciliation gets replaced by something that just works. For a new microschool trying to focus on learning rather than logistics, that matters more than it might sound.

Who we want to meet 

Policy has made more families eligible for these options. What will help more of them participate is a market with enough good choices, the means to pay for them, and a path that’s easy to follow. That’s what we’re backing. 

We want to meet founders closing the gap between eligibility and participation in the school choice movement in K-12. We are especially interested in solutions that serve families directly, increasing their purchasing power and ease, and removing barriers to finding and engaging with the education options that fit their individual students. 

Stand Together Ventures Lab invests in early-stage companies expanding access to personalized learning, enabling new school models, and putting families in control of their children's education. Learn more about our education thesis here.