Modern U.S-based homeschooling has grown since its humble beginnings of ~10,000 homeschoolers in its founding in the 1970s. The countercultural left felt that traditional schools were too strict and didn’t allow children to learn at their own pace or explore their own interests.
Since 1999, the percentage of students who were homeschooled increased from 1.7 percent to 6%. This percentage indicates a surge in homeschooling following the sharp increase of home-based education due to the COVID-19 shutdown, when families sought alternatives to traditional in-person education amid health concerns and school closures.
In actuality, homeschooling’s popularity had been on the rise even prior to COVID, though the stay-at-home orders did provide an opportunity for individuals to give homeschooling a try. In fact, homeschooled children doubled between 1999 and 2016. If you have made the decision to homeschool your children, you are not alone:
Today, roughly 3.4 million students across all political and social backgrounds are learning at home.
So, what does the modern-age homeschooler look like today, where is homeschooling going, and what has fueled the rapid rise in homeschooling across the nation over the past ten years?
What Has Fueled Homeschooling Growth?
The Covid-19 pandemic didn’t create the demand for homeschooling education, but it did compress a decade of policy work, societal change, and crucially, the political energy of frustrated parents into a few short years during and following the pandemic. The result has been an explosion of School Choice policies which have in turn created a surge in behavior change. These policies made it easier than ever for families to homeschool, microschool, or hybrid school.
Alongside this explosion of school choice policies which fundamentally reshaped the foundation of the alternative schooling landscape, the post-pandemic world saw a rapid increase in dynamic and easy-to-use ed-tech available for families.
Homeschooling’s Real Demographic
Homeschools’ swift expansion over the past ten years coincided with a rapid proliferation of new homeschoolers into the movement. Today, while religious homeschoolers remain a significant base, fewer families are choosing homeschooling for overtly religious reasons. Concern about the environment of other schools has been the primary catalyst for homeschooling since 2012. Even so, most people imagine one image of a homeschooler: conservative and evangelical, but homeschoolers have expanded greatly beyond this singular demographic.
People’s understanding of who homeschools still has a ways to catch up with the reality of who is homeschooled in our modern-age: a rapidly broadening plurality of families from varied religious, secular, social, geographical, racial, and political backgrounds that is representative of the population of the United States.
The Future of Homeschooling
Hybrid-homeschooling and micro-schooling have completely disrupted the homeschooling eco-system. With more structure than traditional homeschooling and more flexibility than traditional school, families are increasingly mixing and matching the format that best fits their needs, and are utilizing a mix of all forms of alternative education to make a homeschool education that fits their needs.
Homeschooling has rapidly changed how it looks following the pandemic. With a combination of technology and evolving state policy changing the nature of how parents choose schooling for their children, allowing them to customize their level of involvement with other parents and schools. For example, many parents are using online courses to bolster particular subject areas or otherwise finding programs like microschools or enrollment in specific public school classes part time.
- Traditionally, homeschooling is a model of education where parents or guardians direct their children’s learning at home instead of enrolling them in traditional public or private schools.
- Homeschool co-ops are generally understood to be a group of homeschool families educating their children together. Co-ops are as varied as homeschooling is, but all co-ops aim to provide homeschoolers with shared learning and socialization through classes or activities, and are often used as a supplement to their homeschool education.
- Microschools have skyrocketed over the past five years as many homeschoolers use them as a hybrid option, but some may be full time. They are generally private with either a paid teaching staff or sometimes led by parents. They are typically tuition based and serve 16 mixed-age students or fewer.
- Hybrid-Schooling is a hybrid between homeschooling and traditional school, with less required days of school. Hybrid schools closely resemble a public or private school, but students are required to attend less than 5 days a week, with homeschool or microschool education supplementing the educational requirements of the child, or vice versa.
This new mix-and-match-homeschooling model offers key features of traditional school and homeschooling which creates a flexible mix that has allowed many new families to take an alternative education and home-based education path who might otherwise be too intimidated to dive into home-based education.
All of these new forms of educational pathways that have opened to homeschoolers are being fueled by school choice policies that have coincided with the rapid growth in homeschooling following the pandemic. These policies are providing funding opportunities for families seeking alternative education –sometimes more than $7,000 per child who is homeschooled– that didn’t exist prior to the pandemic in most states. These policies are showing no sign of slowing down in popularity or expansion, nor is the growth in mix and match homeschooling.
Homeschooler choice and flexibility is the future of education, and this is just the beginning. Rather than following one educational model, families will have the power to build learning experiences tailored to what their family needs. Families are increasingly mixing and matching educational resources, in-person experiences, online learning, community programs, and AI-powered tools to create customized educational pathways, and these options are only getting better!