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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5 replies on “The Homeschooling Surge”
Moreover, parents who do not feel that they can homeschool their children but do love them are looking for the means to get their children into private schools. Support for voucher programmes has greatly increased.
Unfortunately, rather a lot of parents are indifferent to the fates of their children except to the extent that these parents may face social condemnation if their children are discovered to be uneducated. How many times have we heard a parent cry “I sent my child to school!” when that child is exposed as illiterate and as innumerate after twelve years of being neglected both by the school and by the parent?
Worse, a great many people are quite happy to see an army of the ignorant being made of other people’s children, and a jobs programme for the lazy, greedy, and incompetent as employees of our system of formal education.
The fight to free our children from the state-run schools is far from over, and far from sure victory.
I feel remiss in not having sent you this article. I thought about you when I read it. I suppose you know as well as I do that one plus one is a 100% rate of growth. But yeah I thought about you because of course.
In the context of “by 2019, some 2,300,000 children were being homeschooled” the percentages are plainly not being used to mask small base-numbers.
I am a retired public-school teacher with over 30 years of experience (including 3 as a principal). For over ten years I administered a nationally normed test to Christian homeschooled high school students. Those students are bright, polite, well-adjusted, and articulate.
Public schools cannot be fixed.
Whatever victories gained trying to fix public schools will need to be monitored beyond the capacity of hundreds of volunteers. The teacher unions and their allies such as the ACLU own government schools. They will quickly take back any lost ground and they will not hesitate to do it in an under-handed manner while your group operates honestly and ethically.
I unequivocally proclaim that there is no hope for America if Christians and conservatives allow their children to be indoctrinated in the public schools. We must rescue our children!
Wasn’t the original idea of public (government) schools to produce human cattle for the big corporations?