In 2016, Chris Turner, a new father in Georgia, began a process familiar to many parents: He set about trying to plan his children’s education. His neighborhood schools failed to impress him; they were too rigid, with too much busy work. To his dismay, he found that despite the hefty price tags for private schools, “they didn’t feel fundamentally different than just a typical public school. Their environments were slightly better, the teachers were slightly better, maybe the curriculum was slightly better, but nothing was like fundamentally different in the way that it felt like everything else in the world was fundamentally changing.”
You could have forgiven Turner for his fixation on societal change. When he was school shopping, he was in his early 30s and getting a crash course in the world of tech startups. A few years before, he had launched a company called Tenrocket, which built apps for other startup founders. At the Atlanta co-working spaces he frequented, he met other entrepreneurs, some of whom had skipped college in order to get started making things in the real world. Their industriousness impressed him.
Turner recalls becoming “obsessed with that problem” of educating kids to function in a new world, which led to his next startup project: a new kind of classroom experience. In his vision, children as young as 5 could learn through activities like, he told me, “starting businesses and hosting podcasts and building rockets and going to Costa Rica on a study abroad trip.” In 2018, Turner quit his startup job and spent the next two years planning and fundraising to make this notional school a reality: In 2020, he launched a learning space, called Moonrise, on a bustling corner of the affluent and progressive Atlanta-adjacent city of Decatur, Georgia.
Moonrise has no curriculum or teachers. Instead, adult “guides”—often college students, parents, or retirees—preside over activities like knitting lessons, excursions with virtual reality headsets, or a Minecraft club. If the day’s activities don’t appeal, students are free to do, well, whatever they want. They can play cards with a friend all day, read a book, or, as several students were doing on the day I visited, curl up in a pillow fort with an iPad. The staff doesn’t track academic outcomes, because that’s not their domain: Moonrise is a “learning center,” not a school, so it is not subject to state curriculum and testing requirements. That’s the parents’ responsibility. (Sort of: According to the homeschool accountability group Coalition for Responsible Home Education, just two states, New York and Hawaii, enforce state requirements about documenting students’ academic progress.)
Moonrise is what’s known as a hybrid homeschool, an educational model that offers homeschool families a place for children to learn outside the home a few days a week. Though part-time tiny schools for homeschoolers have existed for decades, their popularity skyrocketed during the pandemic, when some families found that they liked that style of education and never went back to traditional schools. Since 2019, the number of Americans who homeschool has doubled to about 6 percent of US students or about 2.9 million school-aged children. When Moonrise launched at the beginning of the pandemic, just a handful of families were enrolled; today it serves 150.
Turner expects that number to grow in 2025 because, in January, Georgia became one of the 33 states to offer a private school voucher program, which allows families to use funds designated for public education toward private school tuition. Each state’s program works differently; the one in Georgia offers $6,500 to families whose local public school’s test scores rank in the bottom 25 percent of schools in the state. That amount would hardly make a dent in the tuition bills for local elite private schools, some of which charge upward of $38,000 annually. But Moonrise’s unlimited plan, which offers homeschool families up to 12 hours a week in the space, costs just under $6,000 a year, and families can add extra time at the rate of $20 an hour. Georgia’s new voucher program is expected to yield 20,000 more homeschoolers in the state—marking a potentially very significant customer base expansion for Turner.
In states with older private school vouchers, programs similar to Moonrise are already proliferating: A company called Primer runs a network of hybrid homeschools in Florida, Alabama, and Arizona, each of which offers a robust voucher program. Another chain, Prenda, with 1,000 locations across the country, recommends that prospective families take advantage of “generous and flexible” voucher programs in states where they’re available.
In part because the expansion of vouchers and other school choice programs is expected to continue under President Trump, hybrid schools like Moonrise have proven attractive to Silicon Valley investors aiming to “disrupt” the educational system. From the funding he’s now receiving from a Peter Thiel–backed venture firm to the political climate, Turner sees signs all around him that hybrid homeschools like Moonrise are poised to grow in popularity. “So everything that we’re doing,” he said, “is setting up for the ability for us to meet that demand.”
On a recent Wednesday morning, I drove to Moonrise and parked out front next to an SUV with a bumper sticker that read “A SMALL LIBERAL ARTS COLLEGE TOOK MY MONEY.” Once inside, I took in the sunlit, loft-like space, which previously housed a gifts and home furnishings store. Moonrise, I discovered, really does feel less like a classroom and more like a coworking space for kids, with pieces of mid-century modern furniture for lounging and blonde wood tables for projects. My tour guide was a manager named Nicole, a former Waldorf teacher who told me she hopes to gain experience at Moonrise so that she can eventually open her own school and eco-village. “I don’t like the school system—I think it’s broken,” she told me as we breezed by the Moonrise podcast studio. “We offer things kids actually want to learn, but it’s not so rigid.”
When I first arrived at around 10 a.m., there were only three “Risers” present: a 6-year-old zooming around the room on her pink and purple roller skates and two more kids relaxing in a fort made of cushions and blankets. A nature show about elephants was playing on the screen above the well-appointed tank of the Moonrise mascot, Mochi, a stately axolotl—a kind of salamander in case you didn’t know. After a few minutes, a Cybertruck pulled up outside, and a dad dropped off two school-aged boys who enthused about their adventures during a recent snow day; a few minutes later, two more kids showed up.
When I called Turner a few hours after my visit, he was eager to share his insights, especially about what he saw as a lag between the educational system and the technology sector. “It seems like everything in the world of tech especially is accelerating at this massive pace,” he told me. “But kids are still sitting in front of teachers, sitting in rows of desks, listening to lectures, and focusing on academics. But everything else is moving to, like, flexibility, creativity, and value creation, not just based on degrees.”
“Kids are still sitting in front of teachers, sitting in rows of desks, listening to lectures, and focusing on academics. But everything else is moving to, like, flexibility, creativity, and value creation, not just based on degrees.”
On the phone, Turner’s tone was affable and measured. But like many people, he’s a more firebrand version of himself on social media, cheerfully engaging in the culture wars, bragging about having refused to wear a mask at airports in 2020, and quoting rightwing provocateur James Lindsay’s statement that “Woke is Marxism evolved to take on the West,” which he described in a 2023 post as “*by far* the best theory of woke ideology I’ve encountered. At times I was almost moved to tears by its explanatory power.” (When I asked Turner about the post he told me that it was something of a one-off and that he’s no James Lindsay superfan.) A policy wish list Turner posted in August included “defend the west,” “let kids work,” and “deregulate founders.”
On X, Turner regularly praises Silicon Valley celebrities who, he told me, he believes get a bad rap because people get caught up in their politics rather than focusing on what they’ve accomplished. Last August he called Elon Musk “a once-in-a-generation engineer with the design and product standards of Steve Jobs and the work ethic of Henry Ford.” He mused last May on X, “Can you imagine what the last decade would have been like without Elon Musk? Dude is like Batman for western values.” By western values, Turner later told me, he meant “things like liberty, democracy, capitalism, scientific and technological progress, and defense against anything aiming to tear down these values.”
Thiel is another favorite—Turner told me unsurprisingly—given that some of the PayPal founder’s thoughts about education align with Turner’s. Thiel runs a fellowship for entrepreneurs who have foregone a college degree to instead launch a company, and his Founders Fund was one of the venture firms that raised $18.7 million in funding for the hybrid homeschool chain Primer. “Whenever I get concerned about the future of this great country, I remember that Peter Thiel is an American and instantly feel better,” Turner posted in 2021.
That post proved prophetic for Turner’s own business. In 2023, Moonrise was chosen to be part of an accelerator run by a Bay Area investment firm called 1517, which is also funded in part by Thiel. The founder of 1517, Michael Gibson, previously helped Thiel launch his fellowship for college dropouts and is the author of the 2022 book Paper Belt on Fire: How Renegade Investors Sparked a Revolt Against the University. In it, he makes the argument that instead of canceling student debt, the government should defund student loan programs. When I asked Gibson why he decided to fund Moonrise, he responded that it was because Turner “knows that if he doesn’t bring a Moonrise to every town, then our current sad failure of an education system will own the next generation like a gulag warden,” he wrote in an email. “That will be bad for these children, bad for America, and bad for the human race.”
As part of the 1517 accelerator program, Moonrise received $500,000 in seed funding. That windfall has allowed Turner to think much bigger: He plans to launch four locations next year and double the number of locations every year after that, with a goal of 100 locations nationwide by 2030. It’s an ambitious plan, but in addition to his Silicon Valley funding, Turner believes the political winds are at his back. “The Trump administration is more pro-school choice, so we just expect that to increase demand for options like Moonrise,” he told me. Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick for secretary of education, has supported programs that divert public school money toward charter schools and vouchers. America First Policy Institute, the right-wing advocacy group she helms, says it lobbies for school choice so that “every family has the funds to send their children to the school that fits their needs.” Like President Trump, Turner believes that the federal Department of Education is a “failure,” and that it should be dismantled so states would have more control over their education systems. Eliminating the DOE as Trump has suggested, he says, “will allow the expansion of school choice, and it will reduce the national debt.”
One major critique of private school voucher programs is their propensity to shunt taxpayer money to religious institutions. Studies of private school voucher programs have found that about 90 percent of the money they provide is used to pay for tuition at religious private schools.
“The modern version of the indulgence is a piece of paper many believe will save you from Hell. Only they call it a college diploma and they charge $200k. Well, that was bullshit in 1517 and it’s bullshit now.”
Turner said Moonrise has no faith affiliation, though many of its member families are Christian. Some of 1517 Fund’s staffers are vocal about their Christian faith on X, though in an email to me, Gibson, the 1517 co-founder, called himself a “pagan heretic” and said the firm’s name—which comes from the year of the Protestant Reformation—was meant as a nod to the practice of papal indulgences that the movement sought to end. “The modern version of the indulgence is a piece of paper many believe will save you from Hell,” he wrote. “Only they call it a college diploma and they charge $200k. Well, that was bullshit in 1517 and it’s bullshit now.”
Yet Gibson has also posted occasionally on X about what he sees as the dangers of an overly secular society. “You know you’re talking to the atheist Church of No Christ when: (1) they substitute ‘humanity’ for soul e.g. ‘this person’s humanity is as vital and precious as our own’ (2) instead of God, they say ‘the arc of justice’ or ‘the right side of history,’” he wrote in 2022. When I asked him what he meant, he replied that he had intended the post as “a commentary on how leftism is a warped version of Christianity without Christ. That is to say, the moral intuitions of the left are the vestiges of Christian intuitions at work after the death of God.”
Other growing hybrid homeschool chains have funding from groups that are more explicitly religious. Primer secured a funding round from New Founding, a venture capitalist firm that says it aims “to shape institutions with Christian norms.” The conservative political activism group Turning Point USA runs a national network of 41 Christian hybrid homeschools.
Hybrid homeschools aren’t regulated, so it’s impossible to say how many of them have religious underpinnings. That ambiguity is concerning to Rachel Laser, president of the nonprofit group Americans United for Separation of Church and State. She worries that many of the schools that vouchers fund could “indoctrinate students in one particular faith and discriminate against students, families, and staff who don’t share the school’s beliefs.”
What’s more, says Laser, voucher programs don’t always deliver the results they promise. In Arizona, where private school vouchers are available to any families that want them, the program cost the state 1,000 percent of the initial estimate. It also served five times more affluent than low-income families—the opposite of its initial intent. In Arkansas’ program, which was designed to offer alternatives to students in the lowest-ranking public schools, just 2 percent of participants come from schools ranked “D” or “F.” Vulnerable students, says Laser, “aren’t the ones who primarily benefit from universal private school voucher programs.”
As for the future, Turner hesitated to share details about where the next Moonrise locations will open, but the employee who showed me around told me that Turner had been eyeing Florida because of its robust voucher program. Turner said he is also courting more Silicon Valley investors, though he declined to say which ones. In the next year, he plans to restructure Moonrise’s pricing plans to allow for greater flexibility. The question now, he said, “is not whether or not people want to use it, it’s how much they’re going to use it.”
In the meantime, at the Georgia Moonrise space, it’s business as usual. A recent list of activities included weightlifting, making ice cream, learning about startup founder careers, a NASA Spacecraft STEM Challenge, and debate club. (The topic: “Is College Worth It?”) On X in October, Turner likened his founding of Moonrise to the history of the United States. “We first rejected monarchy (school), then we invented democracy (co-learning), and now we’re in the ‘democracy has to function’ phase,” he wrote. “The next phase is to build a strong culture of excellence, most likely through our equivalent of capitalism.”
