The Rise of the Homeschool Brigade
A startling article in The Washington Post reports that even two years after COVID lockdowns, homeschool remains the fastest-growing form of education in the United States.
Consider these stats from the WaPo story:
Nearly 400 districts included in this article report 1 in 10 children as homeschooled. That is 4X the number of districts reporting such a high percentage in 2017-2018.
In all but 9 districts in NYC, homeschooling has grown by at least 200% over the past 6 years. (Hence, not just a conservative phenomenon)
2.7 million American children may now be homeschooled.1 That is more than the number attending Catholic schools.
6 states now offer vouchers as high as $8,000 per child per year in taxpayer funding for homeschooling families.
I know of no clearer disavowal of civic life than homeschooling. It is the ultimate rejection of a shared American experience. Divesting from public schools might feel right at the personal level, but it has consequences for communities, the way relying on herd immunity without contributing to it does.
If homeschooling continues growing at its current pace, it will weaken many institutions at the municipal, state, and federal levels, including one of the primary catalysts for civic conversation and social mobility: our public universities.
But the greatest harm, I fear, will fall on the children themselves.
Public schools open the world equally to everyone
I’ve always felt guilty for remaining in public school while my sister moved to homeschool in junior high. A lot of it had to do with my father wanting me to play sports so he could puff out his chest in the bleachers, whereas my sister’s coming of age made him imagine running her suitors off with a shotgun. Best to tamp down the Cyndi Lauper and Madonna influences, seemed to be the thinking.
My sister and I both had opportunities to see the world. But I got to experience Washington, D.C., with Close-Up, a national nonprofit. I roomed with two Latino teens from Albuquerque, attended a performance of “Grease” at a dinner theater, and slow-danced with a girl from California.
My sister also traveled to Washington during her high school years as a live-in nanny with an evangelical family. She stayed for several months, but she saw less of the Capitol than I did in a week.
These are personal triggers for me, and I don’t claim that they hold true across the board. But when I see an uptick in homeschooling, I think of young women whose self-realization will be stunted or denied. And I think of young men who won’t get to forge friendships with people from different social classes, races, or religions.
The stakes are high. If homeschooling is a shield against the world, it teaches young people that they only belong to a tiny slice of it. And if they discover that they don’t belong to that little clutch of humanity, they may feel they have no home at all, like an Amish youth who slides too far into Rumspringa to ever return.
Public schools allow our children to enrich others
When I asked a prominent writer recently why he planned to homeschool his children, he confessed that he had little faith in the local schools. I don’t know the particular grievances about schools in his area, but parents responding to a joint survey by the Washington Post and Schar School of Policy and Government revealed that concerns about safety and academic quality were the most widespread.
Like any parent, I worry about mass shootings and bullying. But I am fortunate to have raised my children in communities with excellent public schools. The Iowa schools my kids attended often blurred the line between church and state (my daughter once casually mentioned the Bible that her teacher let her keep in her desk). But academic quality was never a concern, teachers seemed proactive about bullying, and resources for special needs were plentiful. The same is true of our Pennsylvania schools now.
I realize that my experience does not match the reality for many families. The school I attended in Montana, where I did not even rank in the top 10% of my class with a 3.96 grade point average,2 was decimated by declines in logging and mining. Now I’m told that few graduates from my hometown even consider college. Truth be told, I could not imagine sending my own children to the same school I attended.
Schools are indelibly linked to larger factors, such as unemployment rates, median household incomes, and affordable housing. And even if homeschool represents bourgeois flight for people in less buoyant areas, I can’t say that I would choose differently. We all want what’s best for our kids.
A few weeks ago, while chaperoning my first middle school dance, I watched my daughter rocking the Macarena with her friends, dashing to the gym for a little dodgeball, then crashing the snack table for refreshment. If she were homeschooled, she’d have missed out on all that fun and the belonging that comes with it. But my daughter’s friends would also have missed out on her friendship, her encyclopedic knowledge about wildlife, and the unique stories she tells, which run from the Jersey Shore through the Midwest and up into Wild Montana.
But it’s easy for me to sing the virtues of mutual aid when the benefits of my kids’ schools truly run both ways. I would not be so eager to share my children with others if they were getting less in return, if I feared for their safety daily, or if I felt that their peer group narrowed their horizons.
It feels cold to describe this as a tragedy of the commons, even if it is. Yet I can’t imagine any rationale that would sway a parent who felt that a public school had begun to fail their child.
Public schools (should) build trust in public institutions
Many parents who pull their children from public schools have legitimate concerns about politics. And this grievance cuts both ways. Parents who never questioned multiculturalism balk at a rehearsed consensus about anti-racism and white fragility. And families with progressive sensibilities who once picked their battles in right-leaning communities now find book banning and curriculum censorship a bridge too far.
A Facebook friend who is also a teacher posted something shocking recently about how a student’s chosen name slipped out in a parent-teacher conference, when the plan had been to stick with the student’s dead name. Presumably the parents weren’t supposed to know that the name they’d chosen was now moribund.
I didn’t know any of the context, but it shot a chill through me — not because I fear any of my children discovering they are queer, but because it seemed that the parents weren’t given an opportunity for allyship. What a painful situation for all involved. And I can’t help but wonder why the school needs to be in the middle of it? These feel like avoidable breaches of trust.
But despite my parents’ concerns that I would be brainwashed by secular teachers, I discovered that most of them simply gave me opportunities to think for myself.
My Government teacher was a liberal who laughed at Bill Clinton’s claim to have *not* inhaled marijuana. “Of course he did,” my teacher said. “And he loved it.” He recalled his students pranking him with pot brownies in the 1970s, how he had to ask the principal if he could go home since he was high as a kite. But there was never a moment when my teacher wasn’t fair. He asked questions that he expected me to take seriously, and he allowed me the space to listen to the answers coming out of my mouth, which is how some of us learn best.
The same is still true of most public educators that I know. They aren’t out to indoctrinate or brainwash. They aren’t trying to steal kids from their parents or drive unnecessary wedges into families. They really do want to create spaces for dialogue and discovery. Yet they seem perpetually backed into a defensive stance.
Pulling children out of public education breeds doubt in other institutions. Why listen to the CDC if you have no faith in your public high school? The SMELL test for reliable information doesn’t mean a thing if we can’t agree on how to define authoritative sources. Not to mention election results, climate change, or basic facts about public health.
And if taxpayer funds are being allocated for homeschooling, where virtually anything might be taught, why spend any tax funding whatsoever on education? This may well be the point for the far right, which would love nothing more than to destroy teacher’s unions.
An additional concern is that for at least three generations, public schools have offered pipelines of mobility into public universities. The two systems are indelibly linked, not only through state and federal funding, but because universities credential teachers and pioneer new instructional methods for K-12.
Data from public schools also set a baseline for university standards. If K-12 preparation isn’t sufficient for college success, then the modern education system collapses. The more families divest from public schools, the closer we move to the 19th, 18th, and 17th centuries, when the masses learned basic literacy and a trade while the wealthy protected their power with advanced degrees.
The problem makes me want to convene a liberal arts panel to discuss the implications of homeschooling for higher ed. I’d ask the social scientists whether I’m right that a spike in homeschooling means a decrease in the overall number of young people who attend college. Maybe the economists could make some predictions – if 2.7% of the school-age population is homeschooled, is that already cause for alarm (as I think it is)? What percentage of homeschooled Americans would spell demographic doom for public universities? Historians could explain the civic ramifications of these shifts — echoes of earlier ages, lessons that modernity allowed us to forget.
There’s a lot about this trend that I don’t understand. I don’t want my tax dollars paying for someone to teach their kids that vaccines cause autism or infertility. I understand why they might feel the same way about decolonizing the classroom with public funds. But these skirmishes require our kids to take cover or desert to an enemy camp.
I’m reminded of a Sunday more than thirty years ago when my church simulated the Battle of Jericho by marching through the streets of my hometown. Some blew trumpets, others shook tambourines, and the rest of us carried banners etched with Bible verses. I’m not sure what we were hoping for, but it couldn’t have been the bloody outcome of the Old Testament battle, in which nearly every Canaanite died. The pastor who worked us into that lather cared more about shows of force than about any text.
Public schooling liberated me from that marching crowd. I’m glad that my own kids will know instead the joy, the belonging, and the civic pride of a homecoming parade.
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Is the American Dream a Fairy Tale? Confessions of a First-Generation College Student
What Does Academic Freedom Mean Today? A Meditation on the Hamline University Debacle
The percentage might be even higher, since 18 states have problematic data. 11 states do not require any notification when a family switches to homeschooling. And 7 states report unreliable statistics. This article reflects reliable information from 32 states (and D.C.), representing just 60% of the school-age population in the U.S.
There were 52 total students. I was tied for 6th. It was astounding to learn that some of my college classmates had become valedictorians with worse grades than mine.
I have known many Christian families who homeschool for religious reasons and short-change their kids on academics, so I share many of your concerns. There absolutely are families that restrict the opportunities of their daughters in this manner. It happens. I can name names. But it's not universal by any means. I also know young women whose parents recognized that the social pressure of trying to deal with the boys' hormones and the girls' social machinations were taking up their daughter's every minute at the expense of academics. I am on-call to help with the math for two of them, if they get stuck. They're doing calculus in ninth and tenth grades, respectively, and are more confident. Girls often lose all confidence in adolescence, and that has a lot to do with schools that are toxic in various ways. The parents have to be committed to providing friendship and community and socialization in other ways, but if they are, it can be a very good option for some kids and some families (key word, of course, "some").
I also think you may underestimate how bad the schools are in some areas--how much it's purely political indoctrination, at the expense of academics. I personally know a 7 yr old whose second grade class gets read books about transgender issues so often that he spent weeks in tears, his parents having no idea what was wrong, until he finally confessed that he was sad because he doesn't want to be a lady when he grows up. He had gotten the idea from being read books about transition daily in school (yes daily, his parents were able to verify this as part of an investigation with the school in the course of trying to get the teacher to read books about other things) that it was part of growing up--everyone has to become the other sex when they get bigger. 3 of 22 students in his class are transitioning (so far). I have no laundry in my apartment so I pay a local 16 year old to do my laundry at his house. He tells me that about 25% of his class identifies as trans on some level, some making medical modifications and some not, and that it gets talked about in every class, nearly every day, but he doesn't mind because he can usually get a lot of his homework done while various teachers check to see if anyone's pronouns have changed since the day before. (To be fair it's Vermont, so cobalt blue and likely more extreme here than in many places, but still, Vermont kids deserve to learn math and science and other things besides pronouns, too.)
All that to say -- homeschooling isn't a monolith and it's a good choice for some kids and some families.
It’s great that millions of children have parents who don’t make them stay in broken school systems. Public school didn’t fit me, and it doesn’t fit my son. We’re not religious. I just care about my son’s education. I asked the local principal where his daughters go to school. It’s a private school in Durham. That tells you all you need to know.