The Homeschooling Surge

Although homeschooling had once been common in the United States, by the 1970s few families taught their kids at home.

This began to change in the 1980s and 1990s. Researcher Brian Day estimates that by 2019, some 2,300,000 children were being homeschooled.

During the recent pandemic, even more parents gave homeschooling a try. But the trend had already been intensifying for decades. Not coincidentally, of course, because public schools continued to get lousy report cards, with the quality of government-​provided education demonstrably in steep decline.

In a recent article on the growth of homeschooling, The Washington Post concludes that it has become “America’s fastest-​growing form of education” as families “embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe.”

Apparently, now even normal people are rescuing their kids from the educrats (unlike back in the day, when only fringe parents like my wife and I did so).

Looking at data from some 7,000 school districts, the Post concludes:

• The number of homeschooled kids has increased by 373 percent in Anderson, South Carolina. It increased by 358 percent in one Bronx district.
• In 390 districts, for every ten children being taught in public schools in the 2020 – 2021 academic year, one child was homeschooled.
• The Post estimates that between 1.9 million and 2.7 million kids are currently being homeschooled in this country.

Post-​lockdowns, the practice is still going strong. In most districts for which data is available on the 2022 – 2023 school year, homeschooling “dropped from its pandemic peak.… Yet even in those places it remains elevated well above pre-​pandemic levels, and in 697 districts it kept increasing.”

That’s good. For the children.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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