The Washington Post published an article asserting that home schooling is the fastest growing sector on American education. I’m leery of the dramatic statistics, however, because a small number can grow by 70% and still be a small number. In the example on the article page, the D.C. home-schooling numbers are offered: “Washington, D.C.’s school district saw a 108% increase in home-school enrollment since the 2017-18 school year. There were 88,626 students enrolled districtwide in the 2021-22 school year.” But the number of home-schoolers declined from 1,126 in 21-22 to 977 in 22-23. That’s a very small percentage of students enrolled in the District. It would have been interesting to post the number in privately-managed charter schools (far larger than those home schooled) and the number who use vouchers.

My home district in Brooklyn enrolls nearly 20,000 students. The number of home schoolers grew by a whopping 216% since 2017. Sounds impressive, no? From 89 to 281. In the last year, the number of homeschooled students grew by 11. A little more than 1% of the students in this urban district are homeschooled. Not so impressive.

You will have to open the link to see the data in the article because I was unable to copy the numbers. Most are in the opening, not behind a paywall.

Home schooling is illegal in most countries in the world. Where it is permitted, there are often conditions, such as oversight by authorities.

For what it’s worth, I oppose home schooling. I believe it is important for students to be taught by a well-qualified teacher. Few parents are equipped to teach the full range of school subjects. I believe there is value in learning alongside students from different backgrounds and being exposed to different points of view. In this country, people have the right to home school, but I think they should entrust their children to professionals. They should get medical care from doctors. They should seek legal advice from lawyers. They should fly in airplanes with certified pilots.

The article in The Washington Post begins:

Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows.

The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions….

The growth demonstrates home schooling’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…

The Post acknowledged how hard it is to get accurate data. “In 11 states, including Texas, Michigan, Connecticut and Illinois, officials do not require notification when families decide to educate their children at home or monitor how those students are faring. Seven additional states have unreliable tallies of home-schooled kids, The Post found.”

But it did collect data for 32 states and D.C.

Examination of the data reveals:

  • In states with comparable enrollment figures, the number of home-schooled students increased 51 percent over the past six school years, far outpacing the 7 percent growth in private school enrollment. Public school enrollment dropped 4 percent in those states over the same period, a decline partly attributable to home schooling.
  • Home schooling’s surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics. The number of home-schooled kids has increased 373 percent over the past six years in the small city of Anderson, S.C.; it also increased 358 percent in a school district in the Bronx.
  • In 390 districts included in The Post’s analysis, there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year, the most recent for which district-level federal enrollment data are available. That’s roughly quadruple the number of districts that had rates that high in 2017-2018, signifying a sea change in how many communities educate their children and an urgent challenge for a public education system that faced dwindling enrollment even before the pandemic.
  • Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling early in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increases were similar regardless of school performance.

Because they do not cover every state, the figures cannot provide a total count of the country’s home-schooled children. The National Center for Education Statistics reported that in 2019 — before home schooling’s dramatic expansion — there were 1.5 million kids being home-schooled in the United States, the last official federal estimate.

Based on that figure and the growth since then in states that track home schooling, The Post estimates that there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data.

By comparison, there are fewer than 1.7 million in Catholic schools, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. About 3.7 million students attended charter schools in the fall of 2021, according to the most recent federal data.

It is a remarkable expansion for a form of instruction that 40 years ago was still considered illegal in much of the country.

Over the past three years, American interest in home schooling has soared. In this series, The Washington Post explores how that rise is transforming the nation’s educational landscape — and the lives of hundreds of thousands of children who now learn at home rather than at a traditional school.

Many parents say home education empowers them to withdraw from schools that fail their children or to provide instruction that better reflects their personal values. But there is little to no regulation of home schooling in much of the country, with no guarantees that kids are learning skills and subjects to prepare them for adulthood — or, for that matter, learning anything at all.

Home-schooled children have attended Ivy League schools and won national spelling bees. They have also been the victims of child abuse and severe neglect. Some are taught using the classics of ancient Greece, others with Nazi propaganda. What all share is the near-absolute control their parents wield over the ideas they encounter.

“This is a fundamental change of life, and it’s astonishing that it’s so persistent,” said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow and deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank.

The rise of home schooling is all the more remarkable, he added, given the immense logistical challenges many parents must overcome to directly supervise their kids’ education.

“The personal costs to home schooling are more than just tuition,” Malkus said. “They are a restructuring of the way your family works.”

In most states examined by The Post, home schooling has fallen slightly from its peak, while remaining at highs unmatched before the 2020-2021 school year. In only two, Georgia and Maryland, has it returned to pre-pandemic levels. And in four — Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana and South Dakota — home schooling has continued to expand.

Celebrated by home education advocates, the rise has also led critics of weak regulation to sound alarms. Home-schooled kids don’t have to submit to any form of testing for academic progress in most states, and even states that require assessments often offer loopholes, according to the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, which urges greater oversight.

Many of America’s new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught.

“Policymakers should think, ‘Wow — this is a lot of kids,’” said Elizabeth Bartholet, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and child welfare advocate. “We should worry about whether they’re learning anything.”

If there is a capital of American home schooling, it may be Hillsborough County, Fla.

The Gulf Coast county of 1.5 million — including Tampa and its orbit of palmetto-studded suburbs — is famous as a barometer of the nation’s political mood. Its vote results have predicted the winner in 22 of the last 24 presidential elections. Now it is a harbinger of a different trend: the widespread adoption and acceptance of home schooling.

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 home-schooling database. The county’s home-schoolers outnumber the entire public enrollment of thousands of other school districts across the country, and their ranks have grown 74 percent since 2017. Over the same period, public school enrollment grew 3.4 percent, to 224,538 students.

Just as remarkable is the infrastructure that has grown up to support home-schoolers.

Their instruction still happened at home much of the time when Corey McKeown began teaching her kids 14 years ago in Carrollwood, a Tampa suburb. Once or twice a week, parent-run co-ops offered a chance to mingle with what was still a small community of home educators.

Today, Hillsborough home-schoolers inhabit a scholastic and extracurricular ecosystem that is in many ways indistinguishable from that of a public or private school. Home-schooled kids play competitive sports. They put on full-scale productions of “Mary Poppins” and “Les Miserables.” They have high school graduation ceremonies, as well as a prom and homecoming dance.

The Christian home-schooling co-op that had about 40 kids in 2011 when McKeown joined it — a co-op she would go on to direct — has grown to nearly 600 students.

“Home-schoolers in Hillsborough County do not lack for anything,” she said. “We have come such a long way.”

Of the 10 districts with the most home-schooled kids in The Post database, nine are in Florida. That’s partly because of the state’s large school districts, but also because its elected officials have grown friendlier to home education as they saddle public schools with politically charged restrictions on what can be taught about race and gender.

Home-schooled kids in Florida aren’t required to sit through the same standardized tests as their public-school peers. But they are allowed to join the same high school sports teams, and are eligible for the same scholarships at public universities.

“It’s a tremendous imbalance,” said Hillsborough County School Board member Lynn Gray. After decades as a public and parochial school teacher, Gray taught history part-time for several years at a Catholic home schooling co-op. She said that experience left her worried about many home-schooled kids’ academic preparation and lack of exposure to diverse points of view, and 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,” she said. “The price will be very big to us, and to society. But that won’t show up for a few years.”

Some of home schooling’s immediate costs to society will soon be more directly measurable in Florida. Earlier this year, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), following the lead of policymakers in other conservative states, expanded the state’s educational voucher program. Children who learn at home are now eligible if their parents submit instructional plans and they take an annual standardized test.

As a result, families in Hillsborough County may be getting their most powerful incentive yet to home-school: up to $8,000 per child in annual taxpayer funding.

Open the link to conclude the article.