Poll: Home schooling today less religious, more diverse
A pandemic-era boom has fundamentally changed the face of American home schooling, transforming a group that has for decades been dominated by conservative Christians into one that is more racially and ideologically diverse, a Washington Post-Schar School poll finds.
The survey, the first of its kind since the pandemic spurred hundreds of thousands of families to try home schooling, offers the clearest reasons to date for its explosive growth, documenting shifts with broad implications for the future of U.S. education.
The poll’s findings suggest that American home schooling is evolving from a movement into a practice — no longer driven by shared ideology and political goals but by circumstances specific to individual families.
These trends are powered by people like Elisabeth Hotard, a veterinarian from Folsom, Lousiana, who never considered home schooling before the pandemic. But remote learning during the school shutdowns went better than expected, and her family decided to keep her children, now ages 10 and 5, home.
The family attends a Baptist church, but Hotard has no desire to mix religious instruction into her children’s coursework.
“We’re going to talk about the Bible, and we’re going to talk about religion,” she said. “But I don’t need it to be in your reading lesson. I don’t need it in your math lesson.”
The Post-Schar School poll finds a group with a new blend of motivations and identities. Specifically, the survey finds that families who began home schooling after the onset of the pandemic are:
Ashley Perisian, a white stay-at-home mom in Buffalo, Minnesota, sent her oldest child to public school and figured she would do the same with her younger children. But when it looked like school might be remote as her middle child was set to enter kindergarten in fall 2020, she found the prospect wholly unappealing.
That sentiment stands in dramatic contrast to earlier generations of parents for whom home schooling signaled a philosophical commitment to protecting their children from what some derisively called “government schools.”
“It’s on a year-by-year basis for us,” Perisian said.
‘It’s just so terrifying’
Hännah Woods’s son wasn’t even in school yet, but she was terrified that a gunman might walk into the building and terrorize his school. Woods noticed how prevalent guns were in her town of Sweet Home, Oregon. Once, she heard about a child bringing a weapon into a local school.
“It’s just so terrifying to think of it even happening,” said Woods, 32, a stay-athome mom who is white.
And even if there never is a shooter, she fears her child could be traumatized by drills.
“That was not what I had in my childhood,” she said. “We had fire drills. That was the scariest thing we went through.”
The most common reason cited for home schooling is a general concern about the school environment — encompassing worries about safety, drugs and negative peer pressure. Three in four parents cite this group of factors as part of their motivation, a figure unchanged from the 2019 survey.
Tiffini Cavitt’s daughter was harassed on social media and at her middle school, where kids would try to find her and start fights, she said. It left the girl with intense anxiety. Officials in her Baltimore County school, her mom added, weren’t helpful.
“She was calling me from the bathroom, saying, ‘I’m afraid to go to class,’ ” recalled Cavitt, 34, who is Black and from Owings Mills, Maryland.
Cavitt knew next to nothing about home education at the outset, but with the help of an aunt who is a retired teacher, she cobbled together a curriculum based partly on what her daughter’s peers are studying in public school. She also branched out into subjects such as Black history, literature and film. Their study materials have included the 2013 movie “12 Years a Slave” and “Notes of a Native Son,” the collection of essays by James Baldwin.
“I’m kind of winging it,” she said.
Teachers said her daughter was bright but struggled to stay focused in class. Chavarria suspected she had an attention disorder but said school officials were slow to evaluate her and develop a specialized learning plan. She pleaded with administrators at the child’s elementary school to hold her back, but they said doing so was against policy.
“If she’s not keeping up in third grade, why are you passing her on to fourth grade and fifth grade?” Chavarria remembers asking.
Another factor: politics, and concerns that ideology is seeping into public schools.
Unions push teachers to take liberal stances, Johnson argued, and conservatives are driven out of the profession. The only motivation he can imagine for becoming a teacher, given the low pay, is to help kids, but he said too many see advancing their liberal ideology as a way to do that.
His wife sympathizes with public school teachers — “it must be so hard to be underpaid and undersupported,” she said. But she, too, thinks the schools are pushing a liberal agenda. “This is weird to say as someone not white,” said Sara Johnson, who is Latina. “A lot of anti-white things are happening in our local school. I’m like, ‘No, everyone has value.’ We should be treating all people the same.” She declined to offer examples.
Similar motives were at work for Luis Bonilla, 41, a Hispanic pastor in Des
Moines. He said schools push kids to change genders. He said he knows of a boy who said, casually, “I’m a princess, I’m a girl,” and he thinks many schools would “push him that way.” His family was also attuned to pandemic politics. Their oldest, now 8, was entering kindergarten in the fall of 2020. Bonilla opposed compulsory masks in school and feared the district would ultimately mandate COVID vaccinations.
Briceño, who is white, said last year her daughter was taught that the Trail of Tears involved Native Americans “leaving the reservations because they wanted more land.” In fact, white settlers backed by the government forced Native Americans off their land, including in Florida, and marched them hundreds of miles away.
In addition, Briceño said their local school library was subject to book challenges and temporarily closed while librarians were forced to check whether every title was on
an approved list. After that, she said, one of her sons, a prolific reader, was so angry that he stopped using that library.
“He stopped bringing books home from school completely,” she said.
While home schooling, she said, her family plans to travel and visit places important in American history. Their first stop: a Native American cultural center in Mississippi.
Together, these new findings paint a portrait of American home schooling that has not just grown larger but changed in ways that could have far-reaching implications.
In the 1980s and 1990s, activists who viewed home schooling as a form of religious liberty persuaded officials in many states to eliminate or minimize testing of their children’s academic progress and to do away with basic qualifications for parents who wished to be home educators. Today, there may be more openness to oversight.