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Is there a story here beyond the pandemic? The data really makes it look like homeschooling increased a significant but not mind-blowing amount at the beginning

Is there a story here beyond the pandemic? The data really makes it look like homeschooling increased a significant but not mind-blowing amount at the beginning of the pandemic, when parents pulled their kids out of school either because they thought they were unsafe or were upset about mask mandates. Now the rate is gradually declining as some kids return to school and some parents decide it's working well so they'll keep going until their kids are older. The pandemic is the most obvious cause, and the article notes that "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." Obviously test scores are not the only measure of quality, but at least in this article there is no evidence of any cause other than the pandemic. The other possible factor discussed in this comment section, politics, doesn't seem to be relevant either. There is no correlation between homeschooling rates and the politics of the parents or the state. Also, "fastest-growing" is not very remarkable when the only other categories are public and private. Home-schooling is by far the smallest category, less than 5%, so basically any increase (which has to come from a decrease in at least one of the other categories) will make it the fastest-growing category. Here are statistics going back further: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_206.10.asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_206.10.a.... Homeschooling gradually increased from 1999 to 2012, and then started to decline a bit until the pandemic.

tivert 3y ago
> The data really makes it look like homeschooling increased a significant but not mind-blowing amount at the beginning of the pandemic, when parents pulled their kids out of school either because they thought they were unsafe or were upset about mask mandates. I think you're forgetting the biggest reason: it turns out zoom school was a disaster and the worst of both worlds.
- burkaman 3y ago
  Yes thank you, definitely should have mentioned that. My point is that there were a wide variety of pandemic-driven reasons that parents decided to homeschool. Even if all these reasons disappeared when the pandemic culturally ended, we wouldn't expect homeschooling rates to suddenly drop back down to the pre-pandemic level. Switching to homeschooling is a huge change, and so is switching back. I would expect the rates to gradually decline as fewer new students enter homeschool, existing students age out of it, and some students switch back to public or private school, and that's exactly what the data looks like.

tivert 3y ago

> The data really makes it look like homeschooling increased a significant but not mind-blowing amount at the beginning of the pandemic, when parents pulled their kids out of school either because they thought they were unsafe or were upset about mask mandates. I think you're forgetting the biggest reason: it turns out zoom school was a disaster and the worst of both worlds.

burkaman 3y ago
Yes thank you, definitely should have mentioned that. My point is that there were a wide variety of pandemic-driven reasons that parents decided to homeschool. Even if all these reasons disappeared when the pandemic culturally ended, we wouldn't expect homeschooling rates to suddenly drop back down to the pre-pandemic level. Switching to homeschooling is a huge change, and so is switching back. I would expect the rates to gradually decline as fewer new students enter homeschool, existing students age out of it, and some students switch back to public or private school, and that's exactly what the data looks like.