The Washington Post published a series called Home-School Nation near the end of last year exploring both positive and negative stories about homeschooling. Reporters Peter Jameson and Laura Meckler shared with NPF Future of the American Child Fellows the questions they asked and what they found – and what to keep looking for.
“We set out to collect data from ideally all 50 states about how their homeschooling numbers had changed,” Meckler said, adding that there were 11 states without data. She said there has been a 51% net rise in homeschooling since 2017-18.
Here are some trends they found:
Religion still plays a part, but less.
When homeschooling became legal in the 1970s, it was historically popular on the counter-cultural left in the United States, Jamison said. “One of the early proponents of homeschooling is a man named John Holt who proposes this idea of unschooling… a liberation of children from any structure of formal education.” But in the 1980s and up through the pandemic, homeschooling became dominated by conservative Christians, he said.
Jamison and Meckler went to find out whether or not this was still the case.
Jamison said, “…Just looking at the data from where homeschooling is growing and how much it’s growing, you could see that this is not a practice that you can really define by particular geography, whether that’s urban or rural or suburban, any more than you can define it at this point by politics.”
But, Jamison describes “enough of a trend that it’s been noticeable” in the other direction.
He wrote the story “The revolt of the Christian home-schoolers” as part of the series, which followed Arron and Christina Beal, a couple who grew up in the conservative homeschooling movement but ended up embracing the public education system.
“And this is a remarkable thing because this couple, Aaron and Christina had really been taught all their lives to believe that public schools are not only bad or that you get a bad education there, but they’re sort of actively evil places,” he said. “I mean, the word demonic is not too strong an adjective for the way that Aaron and Christina were taught to perceive public schools growing up and their decision to send their children to public school really caused a rift within their own families.”
In the article “Homeschooling today is less religious and more diverse, poll finds,” data shows that religious instruction as reasoning dropped from 63% in 2012 to 24% in 2023.
The changing nature of homeschooling.
Meckler wrote the story “For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching” on recent innovations in homeschooling, like micro-schools and pods.
Katy Rose, a registered nurse, is a “guide” at her own “micro-school,” where “she’s a businessperson looking, as she says in the story, to grow her business and to create more micro-schools.”
“In a lot of states there are now educational savings accounts, which are vouchers on steroids where you get the voucher and you can use it for any educational expense you want,” Meckler said. You can use it on private school tuition, but a lot of these educational savings accounts also allow you to pay for homeschool expenses, she said.
“And finally, there’s this for-profit piece with venture capitalists investing millions of dollars into new businesses serving this market.”
Abuse in “no-notice” states and low-regulation.
“When you remove a child completely from that system, obviously concerns arise about whether abuse might be concealed,” Jamison said. “And this story examines one of them from a few years ago, a young boy named Roman Lopez, who was pulled out of school to be “homeschooled” by his stepmother, a woman named Lindsey Piper, who’s now serving a 15-year life prison sentence in California for his murder.”
When Piper pulled him out of school, she lived in Michigan, one of the 11 “so-called no notice states,” said Jamison. She said they didn’t have to tell anyone that she was pulling him out of school and disappeared until years later when his body was discovered.
“So, this is a really tragic case of how homeschooling and specifically the lack of homeschooling regulation essentially in states like Michigan or Texas or Illinois or Connecticut or these 11 no notice states,” Jamison said “And I’d encourage each of you to check and see what the homeschooling regulations are in the states where you report.”
Meckler also said they wanted to try to answer the question of how homeschools fair academically. She said Brian Ray, a homeschool activist and researcher, has published flawed research to help legitimize homeschooling.
His research is based on standardized tests that not all homeschoolers have to take, she said.
“In fact, most homeschool students do not take standardized tests,” he said, adding that only three of 50 states require students to take a standardized test at some point.
Journalists writing about homeschooling can also look at the monetary incentive for homeschooling – where in some cases, families can get up to $9,000 per child to homeschool. “And yet, the traditional Christian Homeschooling Association, they are very, not just skeptical, concerned, but straight up opposed to these measures because they really fear government regulations and they fear that with government money will come government regulations,” Meckler said.
Access the full transcript here.
This fellowship is funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Heising-Simons Foundation. NPF is solely responsible for programming and content.
