Amanda Lucas tried to do everything right. A teacher in both public charter and private schools for about 10 years, Lucas felt the tug toward entrepreneurship. She wanted to open her own school, one that would focus on individualized curriculum in an intentionally small learning environment for elementary and middle school-age students. All of them would be legally recognized as homeschoolers in New Jersey, positioning parents as the ones fully in charge of their children’s education, with Lucas’s support, while offering flexible enrollment options.

Earlier this year, Lucas participated in KaiPod Catalyst, a microschool accelerator program founded by Harvard Business School graduate and former teacher, Amar Kumar, to help ensure that she was on track for a successful school launch with a financially sustainable business plan. Lucas secured her ideal location—a home-like building that was zoned for childcare use and had previously housed a school in the town of Old Bridge. By the end of August, she had 16 students registered and was set to open on September 4th. I wrote about Lucas just prior to the launch of Lucas Literacy Lab, explaining how hers was one of several new microschools opening for the new school year.

Then local regulators stopped Lucas.

Entrepreneurs face regulatory barriers in every sector, but education entrepreneurs often encounter particularly onerous ones that can prevent them from operating at all. This is especially true for school founders like Lucas who are creating innovative K-12 learning models, such as microschools for homeschoolers, that don’t fit neatly into existing regulatory boxes designed for traditional schooling.

“The issue was that the zoning officer informed me back in January that if we meet the state’s description of a childcare center, we would be permitted to operate at our location, but during the process of obtaining our childcare center license, the zoning supervisor shut us down, admitting that she is not familiar with microschools,” said Lucas, who has spent the last several weeks pushing back against these local regulators. During one recent meeting with town officials, she convinced them that she meets all state requirements for a licensed childcare center and that her building is zoned properly for this use. They agreed with her, but said that building codes have changed and Lucas now needs to comply with new rules, such as making sure the school’s parking lot is 35 feet away from the neighboring building. Lucas’s building is 32 feet away, so now she needs to appear in front of the planning board for variance approval.

In the meantime, Lucas is carrying the lease on the building that she cannot use, while meeting with her students in the local library and in an enrolled family’s home on alternating days. “The kids are happier than I ever expected them to be,” Lucas told me. “This situation doesn’t change the need for an alternative school, but finding a way to meet their needs despite the circumstances has been so rewarding.” She hopes to be able to occupy her school building by the end of the calendar year.

“This situation highlights the broader challenge that innovative school models face when navigating an outdated web of regulations, often enforced by unelected local officials,” said KaiPod’s Kumar, who has been assisting Lucas in navigating this regulatory morass. She has also consulted with attorneys at Yes Legal, a nonprofit that provides free legal assistance to education entrepreneurs.

Regulatory controls on private education are nothing new. The Foundation for Economic Education’s founder Leonard Read wrote back in 1977 about “government control of private education at the present time.” In his book Awake for Freedom’s Sake, Read described the regulatory troubles a friend of his encountered while launching a private school in Kansas: “This is a point never to forget: The millions of regulations in today’s U.S.A. are controls! Thus, to the extent that regulations exist, to that extent has government ownership replaced private ownership.”

In education, these government controls constrain entrepreneurship and innovation. They can dissuade entrepreneurial parents and teachers from launching new schools and can hinder innovative K-12 learning models from emerging. These regulatory roadblocks are equally present and problematic across the US.

In Florida, for example, Danielle McLean almost didn’t open her microschool this fall because of issues similar to those that Lucas confronted in New Jersey. A mother of six children, including autistic twin boys, McLean wasn’t satisfied with the local middle school options for her neurodiverse sons. They had a great experience at the public elementary school with two talented special education teachers, but middle school options were lacking. After a series of conversations, these two teachers, McLean, and a speech language pathologist that McLean knew, cofounded Keystone Education Center in Vero Beach. The teachers quit their jobs in the public school system to work full-time at Keystone, where they provide a highly individualized learning environment for 17 neurodiverse students, ages 9 to 13. All of the students are legally recognized as homeschoolers, and two-thirds of them came to Keystone directly from public schools. They all attend nearly tuition-free through Florida’s school choice scholarship program for special needs students.

Like Lucas, McLean tried to cross all her t’s and dot her i’s before launching Keystone, which she operates in a leased church space as a full-time, nonprofit tutoring business for homeschoolers—not a school. The city told her that she didn’t need a business license because she is running a nonprofit, while the fire department said she needed a business license because her nonprofit is a tutoring center. “None of these agencies talk to each other. It’s just very siloed and strange,” McLean told me when she appeared recently on the LiberatED podcast.

A week before launch, the fire marshal asked to meet with McLean. He told her that she was not a business, but an educational entity, which was different from the city’s classification. It also includes an entirely different set of fire regulations that McLean knew would be impossible to comply with before the start of school, if at all. She considered her options and decided to make a call to a state senator, who was one of her sorority sisters in college. “I called the senator and said, ‘I think there’s some government overreach here. I’m not sure. I don’t know. This is not my world, but would you please look into XYZ?’” said McLean. “A few days after the senator was so kind to get involved or at least look into it, I got an email from the fire team saying, upon further investigation, they found something in historic documents that allowed us to qualify for this grandfathered-in clause, which was that because this was an education space prior to the fire code being written, we can operate here,” McLean explained.

While it’s great that McLean was able to move past these regulatory hurdles and open her microschool for special needs students, not every education entrepreneur has a sorority-sister senator to call when regulators overstep. Nor should anyone in a free society need a politician to pave the way for them to run their small businesses. In a free market, unconstrained by government bureaucrats intent on regulatory control, buyers and sellers engage in the peaceful process of voluntary exchange—each better off from their trade.

As Read wrote: “With few exceptions since the U.S.A.’s founding, these bureaucrats haven’t had the slightest idea of how the free market, private ownership, limited government way of life, with its moral and spiritual antecedents, works its wonders. Not only do they believe they are wise but they are unaware of the remarkable wisdom that blooms from the free and unfettered market.”

We can see the “remarkable wisdom” that is blooming in education as it becomes more decentralized and market-based. It is evident in the learning spaces that Lucas and McLean have created and also in the thousands of other such microschools across the US, now educating an estimated one in 10 students. Today’s education entrepreneurs are imagining new and creative ways to approach teaching and learning, meeting the needs and preferences of children and families in their communities. But how many would-be school founders get stopped in their tracks by bureaucratic burdens and regulatory barriers? How much innovation is lost? The opportunity cost of regulation is high.

Removing barriers to entrepreneurship will make it easier for a diverse, plentiful education marketplace to bloom and flourish. As Read urges: “May our eyes be more and more attuned to freedom: the private ownership, free market, limited government way of life—the flowing and the good life!”

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This article appeared first on FEE.org under a Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0) license.

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