According to research from Johns Hopkins University, approximately 5% of American school children are homeschooled. That is just a few points shy of the number of students who attend charter schools and a little more than half the number of those who attend private schools.
While this is down from pandemic-era highs (where enrollment is thought to have peaked at 11% of American students), we are still near a doubling of the number of students who were homeschooled pre-pandemic. Homeschooling is a substantial part of the American education landscape that needs to be better understood. Spend a few minutes searching homeschooling on social media and you’ll see a whole set of stereotypes and assumptions about homeschooling families.
Luckily, we have multiple reliable surveys of homeschooling families to understand key issues, like why they choose to homeschool. So why do they?
Earlier this month, the National Center for Education Statistics published Parent and Family Involvement in Education: 2023, a look into the most recent results of the National Household Education Survey. NHES is a nationally representative survey of American parents that asks a detailed set of questions about children’s and families’ experiences inside and outside of school. It includes questions about homeschooling, both about homeschooling practices and homeschooling motivations.
NCES reported on survey responses from homeschooling parents as to why they chose to homeschool. When asked for their most important reason, parents listed, in order:
· A concern about environment of other schools (including safety, drugs or negative peer pressure)
· A dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools,
· A desire to provide religious instruction,
· A desire to emphasize family life together
· A desire to provide a nontraditional approach to a child’s education
· Child has special needs
· A desire to provide moral instruction
· Child has a physical or mental health problem
· Specific academic approaches
In total 83% of parents said that concern about other schools’ environments was an important factor, and 28% said that it was the most important. While 75% of parents said that a desire to provide moral instruction was important, only 6% said it was the most important.
This is similar to findings from our own work at EdChoice. In 2021, we surveyed 1,266 parents, also asking those who homeschool why they chose to. Their most popular responses, ranked by how many said it was “extremely important” to them, were:
· The COVID-19 Pandemic
· Wanted to give my child more flexibility to shape their learning experience
· Wanted my child to have more one-on-one attention
· Concerns about the environment at other schools (including safety and bullying)
· Concerns about academic quality at other schools
· Wanted more supervisions over what my child learns,
· Political aspects of public schools
· Lack of accommodations for my child
· Cost of private schools in my area
· Wanted to provide religious instruction to my child
Clearly issues around the pandemic, and perhaps even around the politicization of the classroom were of particular interest when that survey was in the field. They might not still be as top of mind.
That said, as early as 1997, the researcher June Hertzel referred to the “push” and “pull” factors of homeschooling, with the push describing what drove parents from traditional public or private schooling and the pull describing what attracted them to homeschooling.
We can see from above a mix of pushing and pulling. Low quality academics, unsafe or otherwise undesirable school environments, insufficient treatment of children’s individual needs, and the cost of private schooling can cause parents to want to leave traditional schools. More personalized attention, closer family relationships, and the ability to provide the type of education that parents prefer can pull families into homeschooling.
There is an interesting and open question about the changing nature of homeschoolers and their potentially changing motivations. Vanderbilt’s Joseph Murphy, in Homeschooling in America, already identified more than a decade ago that as the population of homeschoolers grew from the 1980s into the 2000s homeschoolers became less motivated by religious and ideological motivations and more driven by practical issues in both traditional and home education. As the number of homeschoolers has dramatically increased post-pandemic, my impression of the sector is that this trend is continuing. Many are perhaps not even permanent homeschoolers, shifting in and out of different schools and school sectors as needs arise.
Our research from three years ago put religious instruction at the bottom of the hierarchy of motivations. NCES found religious and moral instruction to be a bit higher, but still behind concerns about traditional school environments and academic quality. We gave survey respondents a different set of potential motivations than NCES (though some choices were similar), so comparing them directly to each other is challenging.
Perhaps the more relevant question to as we look to the future of homeschooling is whether or not the push and pull factors will continue to exist. As long as traditional schools provide an education that parents perceive to be either too expensive, academically substandard, or presented in an environment that parents dislike, there will be a push for families to homeschool. As long as families are able to provide a more tailored education with more one-on-one support, they will be pulled towards homeschooling.