How do you avoid a microschool being indistinguishable from a private school?

One of the reasons I am interested in starting a microschool is that the public schools in my area are not very good but I don’t want to send my kids to a private school. Not only are private schools overly expensive, I don’t love the idea of surrounding my kids with only rich peers & the culture that tends to exist around that.

However, starting a microschool to teach my/friends’ kids may easily suffer from the same issues. Friends who would be interested in a microschool will almost certainly have very similar socioeconomic status to me & I suspect their alternative to a microschool would be private schooling. So is it ultimately that different?

Rough thoughts:

• I suspect the terms “public school” and “private school” are overly abstracted here, to the point of not being useful. The truly important question is what is the culture like at a specific school and do I vibe with that or not
  • While it’s true that most Public schools don't enforce a specific educational culture, there certainly are exceptions (eg charter schools)
  • Same for private schools – I’m sure certain private schools have cultures I would really like
  • But at a microschool the culture can be much more opinionated & tailored to the individual kids
• The financial aspect of going the private school route is still a big factor, right now it is hard to imagine being ok with spending that much on K-12
• I do think there is a lot of value in hanging out with people that are quite different from you in tons of ways, and that is one negative of both private schools and a microschool
  • I do wonder if public schools do much better on this front though – given how schools are funded by local taxes, people move for school districts, etc, I’m not sure how much diversity there even is within public schools. Especially as I am clearly one of those people who would move to be in a school district that is at least 80%ile+ in quality lol.