When Harvard professor Elizabeth Bartholet spoke against home schooling in 2020, she could not have known how home schooling was about to take root in America – including families not normally seen as stereotypical home-schoolers.  

Since the pandemic, significant increases can be seen among minorities and families with students who have special needs. These trends signal new growth for home schooling.  

What is home schooling? 

Home schooling is generally defined as education for children at home by their parents. It is often used to describe a variety of school-at-home situations. Some parents consider themselves home-schoolers if they are accessing online schooling at home from an online public charter or private school. Others consider themselves to be home schooling if they are using a state-funded program that allows funds to pay for curriculum. However, the term home schooling is often limited to families who don’t use these options – those who are completely outside of the public system and its funding. 

Families come to home schooling for a variety of reasons. Recent data show that many choose to home-school to: (1) get away from a negative or unsafe environment at their current school, (2) improve the academic rigor for their children or (3) offer a more religious education. Reasons for moving to home school in recent years are as diverse as viewpoints seen in general society: biased treatment of minority students as well as worries over CRT; too many COVID-19 safety precautions or too few; and an overall lack of trust that schools would uphold the families’ values. 

A quick history 

Though home education was not a new concept in the early days of the country, by the early 19th century there was very little home schooling because free systems of publicly funded schooling were widely popular. In some cases, in-person attendance at school was required by law for school-age children.  

The first truancy law – which penalized those who didn’t attend their public school – was passed in Massachusetts in 1852, essentially making home schooling illegal. Similar laws spread throughout the nation, with Mississippi being the last state to adopt a law requiring attendance in school in 1917. 

The 1960s – the era that brought Supreme Court decisions removing prayer from public school and outlawing racial segregation in schools – gave way to a renewed interest in home schooling. This surge in interest eventually surfaced across the nation in the 1960s and ’70s due in part to the work of John Holt – a significant leader in the home-school movement during this time. Holt wrote about home schooling in many books, articles, and eventually a popular newsletter called Growing without Schooling.  

In the 1972 case Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of an Amish family who chose to home school notwithstanding a compulsory education law in their state of Wisconsin. The court found the law violated the free exercise clause in the First Amendment. Though often studied as a religious liberty case, the ruling also created constitutional protections for home education.  

With growing parent interest in home schooling in the 1980s, the Home School Legal Defense Association was founded in 1983, and states began to see legislative victories for home schooling. All 50 states allowed home schooling by 1993.  

A look at the nation 

Though data on children being home-schooled is not as readily available as it is for students in public school, there is data to suggest that over 3.1 million children are home-schooled today. According to the Census Bureau two decades ago, in 1999 about 850,000 children were in home school (reported as home-schooled or did not exceed 25 hours at a public or private school).  

From 2012 to 2020, the percentage of students being home-schooled stayed steady at about 3.3% of households with school-age children.  

But since the pandemic, the percentage of U.S. children being home-schooled nearly doubled from spring of 2020 (end of the 2019-20 school year) to fall of 2020 (beginning of the 2020-21 school year) – from 5.4% to 11.1% of households with school-age children. 

While most people picture home-schoolers as conservative, middle-class, white, religious families, there has been a notable increase in home-schooling among other demographics as well. One scholar notes that there is growth among those “not on either political extreme.” 

The percentage of Black families choosing to home-school has increased significantly – rising from 3% to 16% from spring 2020 to fall 2020. Possible reasons for the increase include families feeling that the schools were not meeting their academic, cultural or physical safety needs. Some parents who viewed the classroom environment during the pandemic wanted to get their children away from treatment that they saw as biased.  

The story is similar for Hispanic families, although the increase in Hispanic families is not as dramatic as that of Black families. The proportion of Hispanic home-school families jumped from 3.5% in 2016 to 8.9% in 2022. 

There has also been a surge in home schooling among parents of students with special needs, both for academic and safety reasons.  

State legislatures have responded to the shift toward home schooling with new legislation. Some states have increased regulations on home-schoolers. Far more have repealed regulations or implemented programs that give home-school families access to public funds to pay for home education expenses or non-monetary resources that otherwise fulfill home-school needs. 

While it remains to be seen whether those numbers will be sustained over time, some scholars suggest that there will be lasting effects. For instance, one scholar suggests that some form of hybrid home schooling will be the future not only of home schooling, but of education generally.  

A look at Utah 

The number of Utah families choosing to home-school was already on the rise prior to the pandemic (the number more than doubled between the 2002-03 school year and the 2015-16 school year). And, just as we saw nationally, Utah’s home-school community increased substantially during the pandemic. Looking at spring 2020 to fall 2020, the percentage of Utah families who were home schooling jumped from 5.7% to 11.2%.   

Home schooling is not overseen by the Utah State Board of Education; however, parents choosing to home-school must submit a signed affidavit with the state. Families who choose this route are not required to take any state assessment. In some cases, students being home-schooled can participate in extracurricular or co-curricular activities at their local district public school. 

Utah policymakers – as well as national policymakers – should study the reasons families choose to home-school and consider the long-term future of home schooling, including the benefits and hurdles for racial and ethnic minority home-schooling families. Understanding the wide range of reasons for choosing to home-school suggests that pluralism in education is both where families want public education to be and the outcome to which education policy should aspire.