Homeschooling: Overview

Introduction

Homeschooling is the educational instruction of children in the home, usually by parents, as opposed to education in a public or private school. Homeschooled children generally follow a course of individual instruction tailored to their interests and abilities. They are able to move at their own pace and achieve specific academic goals before moving forward through their curriculum.

Homeschooling is undertaken for many reasons, including dissatisfaction with the public-school environment, instructional styles, or overcrowded classrooms; desire to incorporate (or exclude) certain religious beliefs; fear of school violence; and the need to tailor instruction for students with special needs, to name just a few. Critics of homeschooling often cite their primary concerns as socialization and instructional effectiveness. They fear that homeschooled children will not be exposed to the range of beliefs and backgrounds that other children encounter in the public-school environment. They also point to the lack of consistent homeschool teaching and testing standards from state to state and the uncertainty of the average parent's ability to adequately and effectively teach children.

Understanding the Discussion

Effective education: Teaching in a style and environment that permits students to satisfactorily learn the material.

Secular: Not relating to religion; worldly.

Selective socialization: Limiting social settings and the opportunity for social growth to a particular controlled or semi-controlled environment.

Standardized testing: Testing students on a given set of materials deemed age-appropriate by a governing body such as a state or federal educational organization.

History

In colonial America, homeschooling and community schooling were the most prevalent forms of education. In the absence of formal public education, families and neighbors usually either hired individual teachers for small groups of students or taught their children at home. In the nineteenth century, states began adopting compulsory education laws, most of which required all children to attend public schools until the age of sixteen.

With the exception of a relatively small number of families nationwide who chose private (mostly Roman Catholic) schools, the majority of American families participated in the public school educational system until the early 1960s. For the most part, homeschooling was primarily a rural phenomenon, with little influence nationwide. However, the issue attracted brief attention in the late 1940s when Atlantic Monthly ran a two-part series by William B. Barrett that was later published in book form as The Home Education of a Boy (1950). Otherwise, the subject remained of minor interest to the general public for another twenty years.

When prayer and Bible reading were removed from the public-school curriculum in 1962, many Christian families began questioning the public-school environment and looking for alternative means to provide what they deemed to be a suitable education for their children. One of the methods was to launch independent private schools that would support a curriculum grounded in religious principles. By the early 1970s, the number of Protestant private schools had increased rapidly. However, some families could not afford the expense of a private education and began considering the possibility of homeschooling.

In 1970, social critic Ivan Illich challenged the very concept of compulsory education in his book Deschooling Society. The book ignited debate and moved educational reformers such as John Holt to attempt to change the status quo. Holt had been arguing for public-school reform for nearly twenty years. His 1976 book Instead of Education: Ways to Help People Do Things Better raised concerns regarding assessing and educating students based solely on test scores.

Homeschooling families noted that Holt had failed to mention homeschooling as a viable alternative to public schools. Later, Holt started a journal for homeschooling families called Growing without Schooling (GWS) and published the book Teach Your Own: A Hopeful Path for Education (1981). Holt's efforts helped bring the homeschooling issue closer to the forefront of public debate.

Other commentators also weighed in on the homeschool debate. Educators Ray and Dorothy Moore concluded that children should not begin formal education until age eight, ten, or twelve, depending on their maturity level, and recommended a homeschooling methodology known as the Moore formula. Ultimately, the writings of Holt and the Moores contributed to the development of homeschooling in the United States.

As attention and awareness of homeschooling grew, it became increasingly accepted as an alternative to traditional public-school systems. From the early 1980s to the turn of the twenty-first century, the popularity of homeschooling grew among both religious and secular families. This, in turn, spurred the growth of a cottage industry to provide educational materials for these families.

In 2019, the United States Department of Education estimated that 1.69 million primary and secondary students in the United States (3.3 percent) were homeschooled in 2016. That same study found that parents' most important reason for homeschooling was "concern about the school environment" (34 percent), followed by "dissatisfaction with the academic instruction" (17 percent) and "desire to provide religious instruction" (16 percent).

Homeschooling Today

Homeschooling continued to gain traction as an acceptable mode of education in the United States into the 2020s. As an increasing number of families chose homeschooling, the debate between parents and professional educators remained ongoing. A key area of concern for professional educators has been the lack of standardized requirements for parents who homeschool their children. While homeschooling is legal in all fifty states, laws governing the practice differ greatly from one state to the next. Several states do not require parents to have any specific credentials for homeschooling, and most of those with requirements seek only high school diplomas or GEDs. These standards differ greatly from the requirements for public-school teachers, which are often rigorously enforced by state educational authorities. In addition, only twenty-four states require homeschooled students to undergo some form of academic assessment, though many of those offer options to bypass the state's assessment requirements.

The educational effectiveness of homeschooling has been studied with mixed results. Some test scores have shown that homeschooled students excel academically and even socially beyond their public-school peers. The validity of these test results has been questioned, however, because not all homeschooled students were tested, and thus the results have been deemed inconclusive. A more accurate assessment of the effectiveness of homeschooling can be seen when formerly homeschooled students integrate into public-school classrooms. Some of these students are advanced beyond their assigned grade level and are bored in school, while others struggle to achieve at the level of their public-school peers.

Students with special needs present a unique challenge for homeschooling parents, many of whom believe that they are better equipped than public schools to accommodate gifted children or children with disabilities. While parents may be motivated to provide greater levels of personalized attention and assistance to students with special needs, some public schools have at their disposal occupational therapists, speech therapists, and other trained professionals to ensure each child's success, as well as advanced academic programs for gifted students. However, many schools struggle with funding and are forced to cut these resources or to make other compromises, such as sharing counselors within a school district, that can limit the resources actually available to students with special needs. Some professional educators argue that homeschooling is actually depriving school systems of essential funding, which is often based on the number of students participating in public-school education. Thus, fewer students in public schools results in less funding for schools and other academic programs.

Beyond academics, selective socialization is often at the core of debates over the merits of homeschooling. Homeschooling advocates believe that parents are able to provide adequate socialization for their children through the presence of selective extracurricular activities, such as community sports, art programs, local library programs, and joint field trips with other homeschooling families. Further, homeschooled children are shielded from school-based social interactions that parents perceive as overly competitive, intimidating, harmful, or violent.

Those opposed to homeschooling counter that selective socialization is detrimental to students' development. They argue that children in homeschool settings do not experience support from peers or help from teachers who are trained in handling different learning styles and miss out on daily opportunities to interact with children of diverse backgrounds. They maintain that children participating in homogenous community sports or clubs do not learn the same socialization skills that they would from the more diverse population of a public school. In some cases, cooperation between homeschooling families and public schools at the state and local level has resulted in homeschooled students being permitted to participate in certain public-school courses and extracurricular activities, thus helping alleviate concerns over selective socialization.

Another concern regarding homeschooling is ensuring the physical and mental safety and well-being of children, as almost all states do not require criminal background checks on prospective homeschooling parents and many do not require immunizations for homeschoolers. Reports of neglect and child abuse through Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out and news media have highlighted the fact that homeschoolers may lack regular contact with anyone outside their families who could intervene if child maltreatment were taking place.

In response to these concerns and criticisms, the Coalition for Responsible Home Education has called for notifications to the states that a family is homeschooling; background checks; annual independent achievement assessments; increased oversight of families with social services histories; and medical requirements comparable with those for public-school students. The Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) has stridently opposed all of these recommendations.

Online learning has further enabled at-home instruction and offered a multitude of educational subject matter to homeschooling families. This, along with the growth of charter schools, has given families greater choice in how and where to educate their children. During the COVID-19 pandemic, online, or remote, learning became the norm for most American families as public and private schools closed during lockdowns at the height of the pandemic. When many schools returned to in-person learning later in 2020, some families chose to remain at home due to concerns, including fear of contracting the COVID-19 virus and reservations over sending students to schools wearing masks. Thus, homeschooling rates rose significantly during that period. The US Census Bureau reported that rates increased from 5.4 percent of US households during the spring of 2020 to 11.1 percent during the fall of 2020, according to the Census's Household Pulse Survey.

In 2023, the Washington Post published an article in which it deemed homeschooling the fastest-growing form of education. Noting that pandemic-prompted shifts to homeschooling had remained and even inspired further spreading of the education choice, the newspaper conducted a study of thousands of school districts representing over 60 percent of the school-age population nationwide. Their findings indicated that by that point, there were between 1.9 and 2.7 million children being homeschooled in the US. The article also emphasized that high-scoring public-school districts saw increases in homeschooling just as lower-scoring districts did. That same year, discussions about school choice and government oversight and funding ramped up as some states, such as Ohio, attempted to adapt to the growth in homeschooling populations. Meanwhile, another 2023 Washington Post article raised challenges of the research carried out by leading and influential homeschool advocate Brian Ray. In addition to highlighting criticism of the scientific validity of Ray's research, the article included insight from one of Ray's own daughters, who questioned her parents' homeschooling methods.

These essays and any opinions, information, or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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