Public School’s Market Share Continues to Slip

Our public school system is in trouble. It continues to lose market share when it comes to American families choosing it as their preferred option when it comes to their children’s learning. And it’s biggest competition isn’t private school, or even charters – it’s homeschooling.

Just this week, The Washington Post reported,

“Home schooling has become – by a wide margin – America’s faster-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows.”

“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 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.”

“Obtaining accurate information about the home-schooling population in the United States is challenging. In 11 states, including Texas, Michigan, Connecticut and Illinois, officials do not require notification when families decide to educate their children at home or monitor how those students are faring. Seven additional states have unreliable tallies of home-schooled kids, The Post found.”

“The Post was able to collect reliable data from 32 states and the District of Columbia, representing more than 60 percent of the country’s school-age population. In 18 of those states, private and public school enrollment figures were available for comparison.”

“The resulting analysis – which includes home-school registration figures for nearly 7,000 individual school districts – is the most detailed look to date at an unprecedented period of growth in American home schooling.”

“Examination of the data reveals:

• In states with comparable enrollment figures, the number of home-schooled students increased 51 percent over the past six school years, far outpacing the 7 percent growth in private school enrollment. Public school enrollment dropped 4 percent in those states over the same period, a decline partly attributable to home schooling.
• Home schooling’s surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics. The number of home-schooled kids has increased 373 percent over the past six years in the small city of Anderson, S.C.; it also increased 358 percent in a school district in the Bronx.
• In 390 districts included in The Post’s analysis, there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year, the most recent for which district-level federal enrollment data are available. That’s roughly quadruple the number of districts that had rates that high in 2017-18, signifying a sea change in how many communities educate their children and an urgent challenge for a public education system that faced dwindling enrollment even before the pandemic.
• Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling early in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increases were similar regardless of school performance.”

“’This is a fundamental change of life, and it’s astonishing that it’s so persistence,’ said Nat Malkus, a senior fellow and deputy director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-learning think tank.”

“The rise of home schooling is all the more remarkable, he added, given the immense logistical challenges many parents must overcome to directly supervise their kids’ education.”

“’The personal costs to home schooling are more than just tuition,’ Malkus said. ‘They are a restructuring of the way your family works.’”

“In most states examined by The Post, home schooling has fallen slightly from its peak, while remaining at highs unmatched before the 2020-2021 school year. In only two, Georgia and Maryland, has it returned to pre-pandemic levels. And in four – Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana and South Dakota – home schooling has continued to expand.”

…

“What lies ahead for American home schooling?”

“It has dropped from its pandemic peak in most of the school districts for which data are available through the 2022-2023 academic year. Yet even in those places it remains elevated well above pre-pandemic levels, and in 697 districts it kept increasing.”

“Other factors could fuel more growth in the years ahead.”

“Concerns about school shootings, bullying and the general quality of the school environment – intractable problems, some of which school officials have limited power to solve – were among the top reasons for home schooling cited by parents in a Washington Post-Schar School poll earlier this year. Many also said they feared the intrusion of politics into public education, a worry unlikely to recede amid arguments over how sexual identity, Black history and other subjects are handled in the classroom.”

“Another factor that could boost home schooling’s appeal: Vouchers that offer parents thousands of dollars per year for children outside the public school system. Such vouchers have recently been made available to home educators in states including Arizona, Arkansas, Utah, West Virginia and New Hampshire, as well as Florida, and are on the agenda for conservative education activists across the country.”

Home schooling is another metric to keep an eye on as we figure out the best way to maximize learning in our children. The pandemic introduced America’s parents to a different way to use time, admittedly some parents had already figured it out before COVID-19. As parents began to use their time differently, work time included, they started to see opportunities to work with their kids, and other kids, on learning goals outside of the school setting. Plus, public school’s dismal execution of online learning convinced most parents they could do it better.

One might take issue with one of The Post’s findings mentioned above – the one that found no correlation between how well a school did on state testing and home-schooling enrollment. There are other reasons parents decide not to send their children to public school beyond test scores, with school culture probably leading the way.

Finally, vouchers could give poor families the opportunity to design learning for their kids, the way middle-class and upper-class families have been doing for generations. If that happens, then that must be considered a good day.

Friday News Roundup tomorrow. SVB