Homeschooling has doubled in the past 2 years

[mike]

I haven't seen this topic discussed very much, although I heard about it.

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/americ ... -goes-boom

The number of kids going to school at home nationwide has doubled over the past two years. In 2019, there were about 2.5 million students learning at home. Today there are nearly 5 million. That means more than 11 percent of American households are educating their children outside of traditional schools.

Home schooling has been growing for years, but this really is a boom.



The interesting questions to me are:

Why?
How will it go for all these new homeschoolers?
Will they hang in there for the long run, or go back to school when things settle down?

Weiss answers the why question this way:

The American Schoolhouse was in serious disrepair before 2020 — about that no one would disagree. But the events of last year tore the whole thing down to the studs. First, the pandemic. Then, the lockdowns. Then the summer of unrest: George Floyd, the protests, the riots, the mea culpas. Many local school boards seemed more concerned about teaching critical race theory and renaming schools than reopening them. Parents didn’t know what to do — what was safe, what was right, whom to trust. It was like being inside a tornado.

[temporal1]

Many have been praying for a serious overhaul of the DOE for years.
God works in mysterious ways.

[QuietlyListening]

My first question is- are they counting those going to school virtually as home schooling because they are in the home?
I've heard quite a few people who did school virtually last year- both for public and private schools and the parents said they were homeschooling. I homeschooled my children from middle school on - doing school virtually is not homeschooling

So I am just curious if those numbers are true homeschoolers or include the many who are still schooling virtually but using their school for teaching etc.

[mike]

My first question is- are they counting those going to school virtually as home schooling because they are in the home?
I've heard quite a few people who did school virtually last year- both for public and private schools and the parents said they were homeschooling. I homeschooled my children from middle school on - doing school virtually is not homeschooling

So I am just curious if those numbers are true homeschoolers or include the many who are still schooling virtually but using their school for teaching etc.

It looks like that number is counting people who are true home schoolers. Here's another article reporting on these same numbers.

https://news.yahoo.com/more-11-us-house ... 00845.html

More than 11% of households in the United States are homeschooling rather than sending children to public or private institutions, according to census data.

The number of homeschooled students in the U.S. has nearly doubled during the pandemic, as some parents have lost faith in traditional schools while others have opted out due to concerns over COVID-19.

Around 2.6 million students have switched from traditional schooling to home learning since the pandemic began, according to a new report from Bellwether Education Partners, commissioned by the Walton Family Foundation.

"Over the past 18 months, the parents of an estimated 11.3 million students, or nearly one in five of the nation’s schoolchildren, did not get what they wanted from their child’s school," the Bellwether report said. The total number of students being homeschooled in the U.S. now stands at approximately 5 million.

[Josh]

My first question is- are they counting those going to school virtually as home schooling because they are in the home?

No. The methodology excluded that. If it did, homeschooling last year would have been closer to 100%.

I've heard quite a few people who did school virtually last year- both for public and private schools and the parents said they were homeschooling. I homeschooled my children from middle school on - doing school virtually is not homeschooling

So I am just curious if those numbers are true homeschoolers or include the many who are still schooling virtually but using their school for teaching etc.

The source I read (and posted on MN a few months ago) had a figure closer to 13.5%. That specific number is people who homeschool now and intend to continue doing so, not just temporarily due to covid or remote virtual school.

[Somebody]

We are schooling virtually for the past 4 years, due to Lyme Disease.

[Ken]

There actually is a lot of hybrid stuff going on that is probably difficult to accurately count. I’m not talking about so-called hybrid learning from last year but something different.

For example, I have had homeschooled kids from the Russian immigrant evangelical community come to school just to take my AP chemistry class while homeschooling the rest of their education. Lab science was just something they weren’t equipped to do at home. My daughter had several homeschooled running partners on her HS cross country team. And there are a lot of homeschool kids who are doing partial or complete online education through local school districts, charter schools, private online academies, and community colleges. If you are homeschooling but take online Spanish and Calculus through your local community college or school district’s virtual academy, are you still homeschooling?

I think a lot of it will stick around post-Pandemic. Some kids really do better with more independent self-paced instruction. Students are being a lot more creative about putting together a HS education or K-12 education. I would be curious to know what percentage of the home-schooling category maintains some connection to the local schools and universities, and what percentage is completely independent with no connection.

[Josh]

We are schooling virtually for the past 4 years, due to Lyme Disease.

I’m a little confused. Why would Lyme disease cause you to need to stay home for 4 years?

[Josh]

There actually is a lot of hybrid stuff going on that is probably difficult to accurately count. I’m not talking about so-called hybrid learning from last year but something different.

For example, I have had homeschooled kids from the Russian immigrant evangelical community come to school just to take my AP chemistry class while homeschooling the rest of their education. Lab science was just something they weren’t equipped to do at home. My daughter had several homeschooled running partners on her HS cross country team. And there are a lot of homeschool kids who are doing partial or complete online education through local school districts, charter schools, private online academies, and community colleges. If you are homeschooling but take online Spanish and Calculus through your local community college or school district’s virtual academy, are you still homeschooling?

I think a lot of it will stick around post-Pandemic. Some kids really do better with more independent self-paced instruction. Students are being a lot more creative about putting together a HS education or K-12 education. I would be curious to know what percentage of the home-schooling category maintains some connection to the local schools and universities, and what percentage is completely independent with no connection.

Yet that’s not what this is about. The study and methodology excluded these kind of situations.

Homeschooling - pure homeschooling - is 13.5%. Private schooling is up as well. People are rejecting the failing, bloated, and expensive public school system.

[mike]

Private schooling is up as well.

It's supposedly down in my state.

I found mixed ideas about this.

How Covid-19 Boosted Private School Enrollment Forever

The Cato institute says private school enrollment is down.

Private Schooling after a Year of COVID-19: How the Private Sector Has Fared and How to Keep It Healthy

So I'm not sure.