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America Experiences a Homeschooling Boom
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many things here in America. As every parent knows, one of the major disruptions took place in the realm of education. News has been coming out that among the disruptions in education has been the number of parents choosing to homeschool their kids. Now, we’re not talking about the quasi-homeschooling that all kids experienced when their schools closed and all the kids went to Zoom School, we’re talking about folks who have decided to unenroll their students from public or private school and teach their children themselves.
In March, the Census Bureau released results of their Household Pulse Survey. The Survey said…
By fall, 11.1% of households with school-age children reported homeschooling (Sept. 30-Oct. 12). A clarification was added to the school enrollment question to make sure households were reporting true homeschooling rather than virtual learning through a public or private school.
That change represents an increase of 5.6 percentage points and a doubling of U.S. households that were homeschooling at the start of the 2020-2021 school year compared to the prior year.
The Survey additionally reported that a staggering 16% of African-American households were homeschooling last fall – up from 3% pre-pandemic! It will be interesting to see if data for the 2021-2022 school year reflects a return to public and private schools as school buildings reopen, or if these parents decide to continue homeschooling.
A guest post in Bari Weiss’ Substack today takes a look at why some parents chose homeschooling.
When the covid lockdowns hit in March 2020 — in a matter of a few weeks, some 124,000 public and private schools with 55.1 million students shut down — American families suddenly had to adjust to school-via-screen.
The parents weren’t just upset about all the screen time their kids were logging. They were upset about what they saw on those screens. For the first time, millions of moms and dads could watch, in real time, their children’s teachers teaching.
It was a moment of “parent empowerment,” said Kerry McDonald, a senior fellow at the libertarian Foundation for Economic Education. That’s one way to put it.
Here’s another: “My kindergartener was getting maybe twenty minutes of instruction per day,” said Pauline, a house cleaner in Durham, North Carolina, who prefers using only her middle name to stay anonymous.
Pauline and her child lasted about two weeks in remote school before she decided it was a waste of everyone’s time. After a summer of lockdown, Pauline opted for a “homeschool co-op” with four other families. She was planning to send her now seven-year-old back to public school this year. “Being isolated made my kid miserable,” she said. “And I like public school. I was excited to send my kid there.”
The Delta variant, combined with her husband’s asthma, and the fact that there is no vaccine requirement for teachers in her district threw a wrench in that plan. What started as a short-term solution has morphed into a new normal.
As my colleague Jamie Lord and I recently discussed, this is the real beauty of the concept of school choice: whether you want kids masked, or unmasked, have your school teach a certain curriculum or not, all parents, no matter their income status or location, should have choices in how and where their kid is educated. Kudos to these parents!
Published in Education
There does seem to be a massive shift going on in NYC: https://nypost.com/2021/08/23/park-slope-school-lost-a-third-of-its-students-since-pandemic-principal/ and https://nypost.com/2021/08/10/half-of-nyc-school-districts-lost-at-least-10-percent-of-students/.
The Park Slope school had to lay off staff because there weren’t enough students returning. I think this is mostly due to people shifting their kids to private and parochial schools or leaving NYC altogether. But education has been disrupted, there is no doubt. But no lessons will be learned from this, I’m sure. All it will mean is that the teacher’s union will cry for and receive more money and fewer hours spent in the classroom.
When historians study this I bet this is going to be considered a major culture marker of a change in our nation culturally. Homeschooling is the only cultural movement that is actually affecting the culture for good to a much more conservative viewpoint. If you care about the future of this nation raise your kids right and don’t let somebody else brainwash them teach them yourself. Even highly liberal Democratic households the kids are going to be much better off for our culture.
Next we need to demand a tax credit for all parents whose children are not attending school.
The unions don’t care about the declining school populations because those classrooms will soon be filled with immigrant children. That’s a big reason the Democrat Party teachers’ unions are in favor of open borders.