A homeschool cooperative is a type of school. People often don’t call homeschool cooperatives “school” because the term “school” is currently so closely associated with regulated education systems. A homeschool cooperative is an alternative to the current school system. It is appropriate to call a homeschool cooperative an alternative school program. However, to differentiate it from the mainstream schools, and to highlight its unique opportunities — including control by the learning community itself — it is common to refer to a homeschool cooperative by terms other than “school.”
Usually homeschool cooperatives have classes and designated teachers. Often parents are involved, and may even be the designated teachers, but the level of parent involvement varies. The schedule and classes (including electives) can be personalized to a great extent because of the typically small number of participants. The exact form of the cooperative depends on the families involved. I taught for a while at a homeschool cooperative before I had my own family. That cooperative met in the home of one of the parents. They hired two teachers and the owner of the home also taught. Parents who wanted to were able to teach “classes” of varying length. For example, they had an ongoing but intermittent Spanish language class taught by one of the moms.
Homeschool cooperatives do not have the same level of government involvement or oversight as a mainstream public school. The power for directing the educational program is in the hands of the homeschool group itself. Some publicly-mandated policies do not apply to homeschool cooperatives. Thomas Hatch (Professor of Education at Columbia University and Director of the National Center for Restructuring Education, Schools, and Teaching (NCREST)) refers to alternative school groups who prefer to do things their way without government involvement as “Jeffersonian,” while groups who feel that government oversight, regulation, and intervention are needed in schools are “Hamiltonian.” I personally think that both groups have merit and that there is not a clear dividing line between people involved in education. There are pros and cons to both.
I like the term “learning community” because that really is at the heart of any good educational system. The term “learning community” is currently used in various ways. A learning community can mean 1) a group of people who have a shared vision and commitment for learning or a type of learning model; this is the way I am using the term for Volo, 2) a group of people within a school — for example, some colleges nowadays let students enroll in groups called “learning communities” where those in the group have similar classes and see each other a lot, 3) a group that includes the primary group of students and teachers and families together with other businesses and entities in the greater community. This also applies to Volo, but in my usage it is a secondary meaning of the term.