Homeschooling Is Booming, and the Pandemic Has Little to Do With Ithttps://pjmedia.com/rick-moran/2025/11/20/homeschooling-is-booming-and-the-pandemic-has-little-to-do-with-it-n4946214Homeschooling has gone mainstream. In less than a generation, teaching children in the home has gone from a choice made by religious parents to the fastest-growing segment of educational choice in America.
"In the 2024-2025 school year, homeschooling continued to grow across the United States, increasing at an average rate of 5.4%," writes Angela Watson in the Johns Hopkins University School of Education's Homeschool Hub. "This is nearly three times the pre-pandemic homeschooling growth rate of around 2%," she added.
A third of the states that report homeschooling figures claim the highest homeschooling numbers ever, surpassing even numbers reached during the pandemic. That's the most surprising aspect of the boom in homeschooling.
"This isn't a pandemic hangover; it's a fundamental shift in how American families are thinking about education," comments Watson.
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"Five years after the pandemic's onset, there has been a substantial shift away from public schools and toward non-public options," Boston University's Joshua Goodman and Abigail Francis wrote last summer for Education Next.
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According to the Johns Hopkins Institute, using census data, about 2.8% of children were homeschooled in 2019. That number is now close to 6% and continues to climb.
Pew Research surveyed parents about why they pulled their child out of public school and decided to homeschool.
Newsweek:
The most common reason cited was concern about the school environment, including safety, drug exposure, or negative peer pressure, with 83 percent of parents saying it was a factor. Dissatisfaction with academic instruction at schools was also a top concern, cited by 72 percent. About half of parents said the desire to provide religious instruction and to provide a nontraditional approach to their children’s education were factors.
I'm mildly surprised that homeschooling growth has persisted and increase post-Covid. I can think of two reasons (of probably several): parents saw daily what was being taught in the children's PS; parents realized, over the shutdown time, that they could be very good teachers for their children. Parents also probably saw the kinds of resources available to homeschoolers and the support available in the close-knit homeschooling community.
This webpage from HSLDA summaries of various states' laws relevant to Homeschooling,
https://hslda.org/legal . FWIW, the states whose laws are most restrictive/onerous are NY, MA, PA, and RI.
Back in the mid 80s when we decided to homeschool, our main concern was the academic decline in public schools, which has worsened. The prospect of strengthening our family and bypassing peer dependence were also a couple of our main concerns. If the term "generation" in the article means ~40 years, we were part of a large surge of religious homeschooler. Before that homeschooling was a varied fabric of religious people and people not happy with PSs focus on academics (se, e.g. "unschooling") and the one-size-fits-all methods.
