Feature Story From 2023
A study by The Washington Post has found Americans in cities around the country, and of various political persuasions, are consistently choosing home education for their children. The newspaper collected data from 7,000 school districts in 32 states representing 60% of school-age children across the country, while pointing out that some states do not collect data on homeschooling.
The Post estimates there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million homeschooled children in the US. To the surprise of many, it found New York City had the fastest growing homeschooling population in the nation. In some areas of Brooklyn and the Bronx, it had tripled in the past six years. Washington, D.C.’s school district saw a 108% increase in homeschool enrolments.
Florida had the largest homeschool population among the states, with more than 150,000 being educated at home. Hillsborough County which takes in the city of Tampa was acclaimed as the homeschooling capital of the country by the researchers.
“There were 10,680 children being home-schooled at the beginning of the 2022 academic year within Hillsborough County’s school district, the biggest total in The Post’s homeschooling database. The county’s homeschoolers outnumber the entire public enrolment of thousands of other school districts across the country, and their ranks have grown 74% since 2017. Over the same period, public school enrolment grew 3.4% to just under 225,000 students,” the report detailed.
Families in Hillsborough County may be getting their most powerful incentive yet to homeschool through up to A$12,000 per child in annual taxpayer funding. Earlier this year, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis followed the lead of policymakers in other conservative states and expanded the state’s educational voucher program to homeschooling parents, subject to qualification rules.
Some veteran educators are wary of the homeschooling boom. “It’s a tremendous imbalance,” said Hillsborough County School Board member Lynn Gray. After decades as a public and parochial school teacher, Ms. Gray taught history part-time for several years at a Catholic homeschooling co-op. She said that experience left her worried about many homeschooled kids’ academic preparation and lack of exposure to diverse points of view.
She is convinced home education should not be most families’ first choice. “I can tell you right now: Many of these parents don’t have any understanding of education. The price will be very big to us, and to society. But that won’t show up for a few years,” she warned.
Elizabeth Bartholet, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and child welfare advocate echoed those concerns. “We should worry about whether they’re learning anything.” Currently, homeschooling is poorly regulated where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, children are being taught.
But that’s not concerning many American parents. In states with comparable enrolment figures, the number of US homeschooled students increased 51% over the past six school years, far outpacing the 7% growth in private school enrolment. while public school enrolments fell 4%.
Despite claims that the homeschooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality and homeschooling growth. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in homeschooling early in the pandemic.
40 years ago homeschooling was considered illegal in much of the country, but The Washington Post declared that its recent exponential growth “demonstrates homeschooling’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.”
Another recent survey found that younger American parents are increasingly interested in teaching their children from home rather than sending them into the public school system. Edutech company Age of Learning found that 70% of mums and dads under 26-years-old would prefer to homeschool their kids to provide them with a “safer environment” and protect them from “toxic socialisation.”
Other factors could fuel more growth in the years ahead. Concerns about school shootings. bullying, and the general quality of the school environment were among the top reasons for homeschooling cited by parents in a Washington Post-Schar School poll earlier this year. Many also said they feared the intrusion of politics into public education amid arguments over how gender and sexual identity and Black history are handled in the classroom.
