Home schooling is America's fastest-growing form of education, but some are concerned about the results

The Washington Post graph

Amid school shootings, political polarization, controversial mask mandates, teacher strikes and student-to-student bullying, the U.S. educational system has been under tremendous pressure in recent years. In response, many parents are opting for an unconventional approach. "Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America's fastest-growing form of education," report Peter Jamison, Laura Meckler, Prayag Gordy, Clara Ence Morse and Chris Alcantara of The Washington Post. "As families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows. . . . It is a remarkable expansion for a form of instruction that 40 years ago was still considered illegal in much of the country."

"The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions," the Post reports. "The growth demonstrates home schooling's arrival as a mainstay of the American educational system, with its impact — on society, on public schools and, above all, on hundreds of thousands of children now learning outside a conventional academic setting — only beginning to be felt."

The Post "estimates that there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data."

The Washington Post graph

The sheer number of home schooled children has left some citizens worried. The Post reports, "Many of America's new home-schooled children have entered a world where no government official will ever check on what, or how well, they are being taught." Elizabeth Bartholet, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School and child welfare advocate, told reporters: "Policymakers should think, 'Wow — this is a lot of kids.' We should worry about whether they're learning anything."

"If there is a capital of American home schooling, it may be Hillsborough County, Fla," the Post reports. "There were 10,680 children being home-schooled at the beginning of the 2022 academic year within Hillsborough County's school district, the biggest total in The Post's home-schooling database." Corey McKeown, a home schooling advocate and teacher in Hillsborough, told the Post: "Home-schoolers in Hillsborough County do not lack for anything. We have come such a long way."

But Hillsborough County School Board member Lynn Gray, a former public school teacher who taught history part-time for several years at a Catholic home-schooling co-op, told the Post, "I can tell you right now: Many of these parents don't have any understanding of education. The price will be very big to us and to society. But that won't show up for a few years."