Homeschooling surged when schools were closed, and has continued to grow, according to the John Hopkins Institute for Education Policy’s Homeschool Research Lab, reports Lexi Lonas Cochran in The Hill. "Ninety percent of states that report homeschooling enrollment found increases for the 2023-24 academic year despite assumptions many made that home instruction would fizzle out after the pandemic," she writes.
“People really thought that when schooling went back to normal, as the pandemic kind of waned, that everybody would go back to their normal way of educating," says Angela Watson, the lab's research director. That's not happening.
It's hard to track homeschooling, says Watson. Home-based "microschools" are growing rapidly in many places. Some states classify microschools as private schools, while others call them homeschools. Homeschool co-ops also are a popular option.
The lab's report notes that the number of homeschooled students is growing even as the "overall number of U.S. students is declining due in part to declining birth rates." So the percentages homeschooled (and microschooled) are rising.
With the expansion of Education Savings Accounts (ESA), many more parents access to public funds to pay for homeschooling, microschooling and private schools tuition. In Arizona, ESA-using homeschoolers have filed a lawsuit against the state's attorney general, Kris Mayes, reports the Goldwater Institute.
Over the summer, Mayes declared that homeschoolers must prove that every expense is explicitly called for in a curriculum. For Velia Aguirre, who has three sons with special needs, and Rosemary McAtee, who has seven children using ESAs, that "meant no pencils, no erasers, no poster of the periodic table of elements, no flashcards, and no classic educational books like Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? — unless they could sink hours into tracking down or coming up with various “curricula” that explicitly call for each and every book title or material’s use."
They're now using ChatGPT and similar AI to generate curricula, a particularly worrying innovation, as I see it, since teachers who are worth anything need to understand what they are teaching, rather than simply absorbing taxpayer money and doing God knows what with it.