Home schooling rises from the fringes
Analysis: It’s the fastest growing form of education
Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows.
The analysis, based on data collected for thousands of school districts across the country, reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 202223 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other COVID-19 restrictions.
The growth demonstrates home schooling’s arrival as a mainstay of the American educational system, with its impact — on society, on public schools and, above all, on hundreds of thousands of children now learning outside a conventional academic setting — only beginning to be felt.
Obtaining accurate information about the home-schooling population in the United States is challenging. In 11 states, including Texas, Michigan, Connecticut, and Illinois, officials do not require notification when families decide to educate their children at home or monitor how those students are faring. Seven additional states have unreliable tallies of homeschooled kids, the Post found.
The Post was able to collect reliable data from 32 states and the District of Columbia, representing more than 60 percent of the country's school-age population. In 18 of those states, private and public school enrollment figures were available for comparison. The resulting analysis — which includes homeschool registration figures for nearly 7,000 individual school districts — is a detailed look to date at an unprecedented period of growth in American home schooling.
Examination of the data reveals:
— In states with comparable enrollment figures, the number of home-schooled students increased 51 percent over the past six school years, far outpacing the 7 percent growth in private school enrollment. Public school enrollment dropped 4 percent in those states over the same period, a decline partly attributable to home schooling.
— Home schooling’s surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography, and demographics. The number of home-schooled kids has increased 373 percent over the past six years in the small city of Anderson, S.C.; it also increased 358 percent in a school district in the Bronx.
— In 390 districts included in the Post’s analysis, there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year, the most recent for which district-level federal enrollment data are available.
— Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, the Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth.
Because they do not cover every state, the figures cannot provide a total count of the country’s home-schooled children. The National Center for Education Statistics reported that in 2019 — before home schooling’s dramatic expansion — there were 1.5 million kids being home schooled in the United States, the last official federal estimate.
Based on that figure and the growth since then in states that track home schooling, the Post estimates there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data.
By comparison, there are fewer than 1.7 million in Catholic schools, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. About 3.7 million students attended charter schools in the fall of 2021, according to the most recent federal data.
It’s not just that there are more home-schoolers — they are now a far more diverse group. Home-schoolers, as a whole, are more conservative than the general public — but not as much as they once were. Among families who began home schooling before the onset of the pandemic, Republicans outnumbered Democrats 3 to 1. But those who began since 2020 are about evenly divided between the two parties.
The survey also found that today’s home-schoolers are more racially diverse, with the white share of the total falling from about three-quarters in 2019 to just under half. The rise was driven in part by increases among Hispanic families.