Recent years have seen a surge in the popularity of homeschooling. A variety of sources estimate that the number of homeschooled students after Covid is somewhere between double and triple the pre-Covid number. If they’re right, that means as many as 6-10% of students in the US receive their education at home. There are lots of reasons for this increase, but a few stand out.
Technology
The technological tools that are available to us now would make a 90’s homeschooling mom’s head spin. It is now possible for a child to sit before a computer screen and join a class of fourteen peers in real-time even though those peers and the teacher are hundreds of miles distant from one another. The ability to teach online in real-time has fostered a rapidly expanding variety of providers of this kind of education, making it possible for families to homeschool with minimum input from parents. A growing number of parents are taking advantage of this medium.
Covid
Most of that technology was available in 2019, but it was the 2020 pandemic that seems to have triggered the latest increase in families using it for homeschooling. When students were sent home by the government to get their education virtually through their computer screens or with physical work packets, a couple of things happened. In some cases, parents saw their children getting their school work accomplished with little or no teacher guidance, so they began to wonder why they needed school. In other cases, parents were woefully discouraged by what was passing for education at their child’s school, so they longed for something better.
The pandemic changed education in more ways than we have space to explore here, but it was certainly more than just technology and general dissatisfaction with schools. Just as employers began to get creative with how they managed their employees and workspace during and after Covid, people also began to get really creative about how to educate their children. By the fall of 2020, we saw a rise in micro schools, learning pods, and professional tutors. The idea of brick-and-mortar schools where hundreds of children congregated each day was being challenged on never before imagined fronts. Education was not immune to the weird Covid reset that all of humanity seemed to be experiencing. The possibilities for how to educate suddenly seemed endless.
Windfall
In the echo of the pandemic pandemonium, school choice programs were being extended and expanded to cover homeschools. Opponents of private education had been working for years to undo school choice programs that allowed parents to pull their children out of public schools and send them to private schools of their choice. Instead of succeeding, however, these opponents experienced their worst defeats yet when school choice programs began to blossom in even more states and then began to include substantial funding for homeschooling. In states like Florida, parents found themselves able to use government money to pay tuition for online schooling that could be as expensive or more so than local, private, brick-and-mortar options.
The obstacles to homeschooling have fallen faster than Walmart prices in recent years. Parents who have always had a list of good reasons to homeschool their children now find it more possible than ever to do so. All of a sudden, parents who had never considered anything for their children beyond a government-school education have more education choices than any parents before them in history. Many of these parents have taken advantage of the new opportunities and are now homeschooling.
But has the choice been a good one? Well, the answer is a complicated one. In my years of assessing students for entry into Trinitas, the students most prepared academically have sometimes come from homeschools. Homeschooling done well is a beautiful thing, and it finds no enemies at Trinitas. On the other hand, during our last enrollment season, Trinitas received an unusually high number of applications from homeschool families wanting to return to brick-and-mortar school and found the majority of them unprepared to enter Trinitas on grade level.
Why were they unprepared? I don’t think the answer is a simple black and white one, and probably, it is a little different for every family. I have given it some thought, though, especially as I see more parents opting to homeschool each year, and I want to explore the subject a bit more in this space over the next few weeks.