Two children are learning at the kitchen table in a Denver suburb home with a good school district, high test scores, and the kind of neighborhood where parents used to compete for kindergarten spots. The older student is completing an online math course at a speed that is too fast for a classroom. Tuesday afternoon was free, so the younger one went to a science museum. The change, according to their mother, a former marketing executive, was that she no longer thought the system was designed with her kids in mind. She is not alone, and it turns out that most people don’t think of her when they think of a homeschooling family.
The surge in homeschooling that started during the pandemic has continued. The old stereotypes are complicated by its demographic complexity, depth, and dispersion across income levels. In the US, there are currently over three million homeschooled children. That number has increased by about 50% in Maryland alone since 2020, to about 43,000 kids. During the pandemic, 1.3 million students nationwide left public schools and never came back; this number remained constant even after schools reopened, mandates were lifted, and the immediate disruption subsided. Enrollment in public schools is falling more quickly than decreased birth rates can account for, and this disparity is not coincidental. Families that had other options and decided to exercise them are more likely to experience it.
The most obvious example of this change, though not the only one, is the wealthy suburban parent. Homeschooling has evolved into what some observers have begun to refer to as a private, private school for wealthy families. It includes the flexibility. Go on a Tuesday. a curriculum that is not based on a state-mandated order but rather on a child’s individual interests. the capacity to progress more slowly through subjects that require more time and more quickly through those that a child has mastered. Parents who are already considering college while their children are still in elementary school have taken note of Harvard’s and other prestigious universities’ subtly updated admissions guidelines, which now treat homeschooled applicants with the same consideration as traditional applicants.
However, it misses something if this is reduced to wealthy parents pursuing educational optimization. Concerns about school safety are mentioned by more than 80% of homeschooling parents. These concerns include not only physical safety, though that is important, but also more general anxiety about social settings, bullying, and the psychological costs of environments that are centered around performance and comparison. According to research from Australia, where homeschooling has increased significantly since 2020, the main causes are bullying, school refusal, and mental health issues. These concerns are not hypothetical. These are the experiences of parents who saw their kids return home dejected, nervous, and reluctant to return, and who ultimately concluded that the system that required them to persevere wasn’t functioning as intended.
Neither side of the argument typically recognizes the complexity of the academic picture. Studies conducted in the United States consistently demonstrate that homeschoolers score 15 to 30 percentile points higher on standardized tests, and homeschoolers in Australia outperform their peers who attend school by significant margins on national assessments. There isn’t any solid evidence that homeschooled kids have worse long-term outcomes or social skills. Stronger self-esteem and reduced anxiety are suggested by some research. However, it is challenging to generalize research on homeschooling because the population is so diverse, the methods used are inconsistent, and the families who opt for homeschooling are not a representative sample of the population. Regardless of the educational environment, children raised by motivated and involved parents typically perform well. The research hasn’t entirely answered the question of whether homeschooling itself or the parents’ decision to do so determines the results.
What’s happening to public schools as this exodus continues is more evident. The financial model of public education, which is primarily financed by per-pupil allocations, means that departing students take money with them, and enrollment is declining state after state. More than a million students participated in school choice programs for the first time in a single year, and more than thirty percent of American children now have access to some kind of program. Some education analysts are drawing an uncomfortable but instructive comparison: Blockbuster did not anticipate streaming until it was too late to react, and schools that assume families will return because they have in the past might be making a similar error.
Observing this in school board meetings and suburban neighborhoods gives the impression that the disruption is genuine and long-lasting in ways that policy responses haven’t yet caught up with. The parents who left during the pandemic learned that there were alternatives they hadn’t previously given much thought to, that their kids could learn outside of the building, and that the institution wasn’t indispensable. A few returned. Many didn’t. One kitchen table at a time, the people who stayed away are constructing something that increasingly resembles a parallel system.
