take classes at local community colleges as part of Texas’s “dual enrollment” program, in which high school students can take a certain number of credits, for free, at community colleges and receive high school credit. Some did this in order to prepare for college, while others did it in order to learn something that was harder to pick up independently, such as Japanese language.
In between these two ends of the spectrum are a variety of other practices and approaches. Some of these approaches, such as Classical education and the Charlotte Mason method, are centered on specific educational philosophies. Classical education, which a few of the Christian homeschooling families I interviewed used, centers on what is called the “trivium” of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, each of which corresponds to a developmental stage and segment of a child’s schooling (elementary, middle, and high school). In the Classical approach, children are exposed to many of the same topics (e.g., history) over the course of their education, but with a different focus at each stage: memorizing facts as elementary schoolers, analyzing and critiquing the logic of arguments in middle school, and effectively communicating arguments in high school.30 The Charlotte Mason method, which a couple of the families I interviewed had used when their children were younger, centers on the use of literature to teach subjects such as language arts, history, and geography. It emphasizes the importance of journal keeping, creative play, and time spent in nature as important components of children’s intellectual development.31 Other homeschoolers borrow from other forms of alternative education, including the Waldorf and Montessori philosophies.
Finally, those who patchwork together an approach from a variety of sources and philosophies, including prepackaged curricula, online resources, and learning-through-doing, are often referred to as “eclectic” homeschoolers.32 Many, if not most, of the homeschoolers whom I interviewed used this term to describe their approach to homeschool instruction. As some of these parents explained to me, everyday experiences can become part of the “curriculum” very easily: a trip to the grocery store can turn into a math lesson on weights and measures, a nutrition lesson, a budgeting lesson, or even a lesson in manners and etiquette. Like unschoolers, then, many eclectic homeschoolers see the boundary between “school” and “life” as fluid.
This observation points to one of the common misconceptions about homeschooling: that it takes place always, or even primarily, in the home. No matter the approach they take to education, nearly all of the homeschooling parents I interviewed described activities that their children took part in outside the home with other children—often, but not always, other homeschoolers. Many belong to homeschool co-ops or organize specialized classes for small groups of children that could be taught by a parent. Those with young children usually attend regular “park days,” where homeschoolers gather at a local park or playground for play and social time. Most children take part in what would typically be called extracurricular activities, including sports teams, science or robotic teams, scouting, and 4-H—though homeschoolers tend to talk about these as curricular, rather than extracurricular, pursuits.33 Families also go on regular outings, at times with other homeschool families, to museums, zoos, and plays and other cultural events, and many of the children are regular fixtures at their local public libraries.
Homeschooling Outcomes
One of the most frequent questions I get when I tell people that I research homeschooling is whether it “works”—in other words, is homeschooling an academically viable practice? While outcomes (academic or otherwise) are not the subject of my research, the question of outcomes is certainly a valid one. Homeschooling advocates are often quick to cite studies that show that homeschoolers have better academic outcomes than their peers, saying, for example, that homeschoolers tend to perform at least one grade level ahead of their peers in public and private schools, that they score higher than students in public schools on various standardized tests, and that they attend and graduate from college at higher-than-average rates.34
That said, many scholars argue—and rightfully so—that it is important to take the statistics on academic outcomes for homeschoolers with a grain of salt.35 Because homeschoolers are a diffuse population, it is hard to collect random samples of homeschoolers, so there is likely some degree of sampling bias influencing these statistics, wherein those who choose to take part in research are not statistically representative of the whole population.36 Additionally, the practice of homeschooling itself has a high degree of selection bias: those who opt in to the practice of homeschooling are not representative of all parents in a lot of ways.37 Perhaps most notably, homeschooling parents tend to be highly involved in their children’s education, and it is likely that they would have been highly involved even if their children were enrolled in public schools. Because parental involvement is a key predictor of academic success, it is highly likely that these youth would have better-than-average academic success no matter where—or how—they were educated, and most of the existing studies of homeschool outcomes do not contain the necessary data and/or control variables to account for this selection.
This does not mean that homeschooling is more or less the same as any other academic option. What it does mean, however, is that we cannot necessarily rely on measures of academic success, such as test scores, to determine whether homeschooling “works.” My research indicates that it could be helpful to approach this question by looking at differences in skills, such as critical thinking, time management, and self-motivation, between homeschoolers and those in traditional schools. Many parents I interviewed argued that homeschool students are better prepared for college courses than their peers in public schools because the methods of learning are more similar; homeschoolers are used to taking charge of their own learning, rather than relying on classroom instruction as the primary site where learning takes place. In other words, it may not be what they learn but how they learn that makes many homeschoolers successful, not just in college but in the workplace and beyond.
Current Trends: Who Homeschools?
The number of homeschooled students has increased continually over the last several decades.38 While education analysts estimate that somewhere around ten to fifteen thousand children were homeschooled in the United States in 1970,39 most current estimates place the number of homeschooled children in the United States at between 1.5 and 2 million, with some estimates over 2 million.40 According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), approximately 1.75 million students, or 3.3% of school-age children in the United States, were homeschooled during the 2015–2016 school year (the most recent year for which data are available).41 However, these point-in-time estimates only provide us with part of the picture: a 2012 national poll found that 7% of mothers would prefer to homeschool their children than send them to public, private, and charter schools,42 and scholars estimate that between 5% and 12% of all students will have been homeschooled at some point during their K–12 education.43
Demographic research on homeschoolers has shown that homeschooling parents tend to be more highly educated than nonhomeschooling parents, with a greater percentage having received high school degrees, engaged in postsecondary education, and received a college diploma. Most research finds that homeschooling families tend to be middle class; both low-income and high-income families tend to be underrepresented among homeschoolers. Homeschoolers are disproportionately likely to be white, though there is evidence that this disproportionality is shrinking, as the number of minority children being homeschooled has increased in the last decade. Homeschoolers also tend to be in heterosexual, married, single-income families with one stay-at-home parent—usually the mother.44
Two noteworthy changes have taken place in recent years regarding who homeschools and why. First, homeschooling in the United States is no longer dominated by Evangelical Christians in the way that it once was. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, much of the growth in homeschooling was due to the practice being taken up by conservative Evangelicals. In 1999, the majority of homeschoolers—about 65%—were primarily motivated by a desire to educate their children in ways that aligned with their religious convictions.45 This has changed in recent years. According to the NCES, in 2012, 64% of homeschooling parents said that “a desire to provide religious instruction” was one of the important reasons why they homeschooled; this number fell to just over half of homeschooling parents (51%) by 2016. In both 2012 and 2016, only