Four full school years after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, leading to prolonged school closures and the mayhem of Zoom schooling, the United States is continuing to see a steady rise in the number of homeschoolers.
The Johns Hopkins School of Education's Homeschool Research Lab report showed that 90% of states that shared numbers on homeschooling showed an increase since the previous school year.
The only two states in the report that showed a decrease since 2023 were Vermont and New Hampshire. However, since the previous year's report, New Hampshire changed how some homeschoolers are classified, so the decrease in that state is most likely attributed to that change.
The report said of the sustained increase in homeschoolers,
While homeschooling grew rapidly during the pandemic, most people thought that students would return to more traditional schools when the pandemic disruptions abated. Some states did show a decline, but few have returned to normal, even four years after the onset of the pandemic. What we see with the most recent increases in state-reported homeschool participation is something new — these numbers are not driven by the pandemic.
Two different trends emerged post-pandemic, "continued growth" and "rebounding growth."
Some states saw sustained growth in homeschooling over the past four years, while others saw a surge immediately following the pandemic, followed by a return to the classroom, followed by a rebound in homeschooling as many families realized that the traditional education model is just not all it's cracked up to be.
And who can blame them? After a taste of the freedom that homeschooling offers, it would be hard to just casually transition back to the rigid school structure, woke curriculum, and toxic environment of the classroom.
Some states categorize hybrid school and micro-school models along with homeschools. Still, the point remains, that the traditional school model is becoming less popular, while alternative educational methods are growing, with homeschoolers leading the charge.
The report went on to conclude,
What is clear is that this time, the growth is not driven by a global pandemic or sudden disruptions to traditional schooling. Something else is driving this growth. Also, it is important to note that these are counts of homeschooled students, not percentages. So the increase is even more interesting because the overall number of U.S. students is declining due in part to declining birth rates. In other words, ultimately we see that the number of homeschooled students is going up as the total number of U.S. students in going down.
While John Hopkins didn't speculate on the specific reasons for the continued rise in homeschooling, anyone following the disaster zone that is the public school system can probably make a good guess at some of the issues that are at the forefront of parents minds when they choose how and with whom their kids will spend the majority of their waking hours.
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