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Brigid Bergin: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Brigid Bergin filling in for Brian today. Homeschooling is now the fastest-growing form of education in the country. That's according to a year-long series by The Washington Post that included more than 100 interviews and two significant data projects. The Post estimates that there are now between 1.9 and 2.7 million homeschooled children in the United States.

By comparison, there are fewer than 1.7 million children in Catholic schools nationwide. This phenomenon was forced to grow during the pandemic era, and has sustained itself, and changed the face of a practice once considered the domain of the Christian right. Even here in New York, between 2017 and the 2018 school year, and the 2022 and 2023 school year, New York saw a 103% increase in total homeschool student enrollment. Wow.

The Washington Post has spent months documenting the rise of American homeschooling, and its changing phases, it grows more ideologically, and racially diverse. We're going to dig into some of the data, and talk about what's motivating families who opt out of conventional academic setting. Joining me now is Peter Jamison, an enterprise reporter at The Washington Post. Peter, welcome to WNYC.

Peter Jamison: Thank you for having me.

Brigid Bergin: Listeners, we want to hear your perspectives, too. If you've opted to homeschool since the onset of the pandemic, help us report this story. What motivated you? In what ways has homeschooling been better or worse for your family or child? The number is 212-433-WNYC, that's 212-433-9692. If you can't get through on the phone line, you can always text at that number, or tweet @BrianLehrer.

Peter, let's start with the data. What does the data suggest about the pace of the rise of homeschooling? What did you and your team set out to do with this project?

Peter Jamison: As far as what we set out to do, it's become apparent to many people towards the end of last year that there'd been this very precipitous rise in homeschooling across the country during the pandemic. Now, the problem was that much of the data we had on this, insofar as we had any data at all were incomplete. A lot of the assumptions were based on anecdotes of people observing homeschooling increased in their communities.

Local homeschooling associations, they've seen many more people join, but we didn't have a great idea of exactly how much homeschooling had gone up, just as importantly where it had gone up. There were different geographic trends in homeschooling. Also, who the new homeschoolers are, and the reasons for doing it. What we set out to do is to answer these questions. The homeschooling population in the US is notoriously difficult to study, at least in years past.

This is a group of people that in some cases by definition want to be off the grid a little bit, don't necessarily want to be answering the surveys, or registering themselves with local or state education departments. What we did was we conducted a poll of homeschooling families, and then we set out to obtain homeschool registration figures in states and in school districts where we judged there were accurate data to be had. That led to this latest project that we published this week.

What we found is that we could obtain data that we felt comfortable with in 32 states, and the District of Columbia, comprising about 60% of the country's school-age population, as well as figures for nearly 7,000 individual school districts in the United States.

Brigid Bergin: Wow. I think it's fair that many associate homeschooling with more of a conservative Christianity, at least before the pandemic. Is that picture really just a generalization? What did the homeschooling landscape look like before this rise that you've documented? How do you think it's changed?

Peter Jamison: Before the pandemic, it was certainly an accurate generalization. It helps a little bit to understand where homeschooling is now, and where it's arrived if you understand a little bit about its history. Homeschooling began in the 1970s, very much as a countercultural movement. More on the left than on the right. One of the early pioneers of homeschooling is John Holt, who came up with this concept of unschooling, which is essentially the philosophy that children should learn and can learn what they want to, when they want to.

It's this ideal of liberating children from the structure of formal education, of the kind they had receive in a normal public or private school. Now, towards the end of the 1970s and into 1980s, and certainly the 1990s, which you have is that this practice, this movement is really co-opted, and it comes to be dominated by the Christian right, and by conservative Christian families who for a number of different reasons they're not happy with what their children are learning in public schools.

They see homeschooling as the ultimate expression of imparting to their children the biblical, if they would put up world view, that they want to inculcate in them. For these families who really created what we now think of as the modern homeschooling movement into a great extent really still dominated infrastructure, and many of the lobbying and state-level associations for homeschoolers, homeschooling is essentially an expression of religious freedom. It's a function of freedom to worship in the United States, and freedom to follow your conscience on how you educate your children.

That's very clear in the data we have. In 2012, the federal survey, something like two-thirds of parents gave a desire to provide religious instruction as one of the major reasons they're homeschooling their children. Now, in our survey which we published in September, which was conducted in August, that number has dropped to one-third of homeschool parents who now say religious instructions is one of their major reasons for homeschooling.

This is really a C-shift. You want to be careful a little bit in characterizing this. The homeschooling population is still markedly more religious and more conservative than the American population at large. One in three homeschoolers in our survey still said they believe the Bible to be the literal word of God, which is a traditional mark for very strong flavor of evangelical Christianity, but it's changed a lot since 20 years ago, or even 10, or even really 5 years ago.

Brigid Bergin: Sure. If you're just joining us now, my guest is Peter Jamison, enterprise reporter at The Washington Post. We are talking about a fascinating new report that they published, looking at homeschooling across the United States. We're interested in listeners helping us report this story. We want to hear your perspectives if you've opted for homeschools since the onset of the pandemic, and perhaps continued, or perhaps you were doing it before the pandemic.

What motivated you to do it then? What motivates you to continue? The number is 212-433-WNYC, that's 212-433-9692. You can also text or tweet us @BrianLehrer. Let's go to Dylan in Hoboken. Dylan, thanks for calling WNYC.

Dylan: Thanks for having me.

Brigid Bergin: What's your experience with homeschooling?

Dylan: My wife and I have four boys, eldest is 17, youngest is 9. We've homeschooled them their entire lives, and have had just an incredible experience in the New York Metro area. He just spoiled for choice when it comes to institutions, and places just falling over themselves to make themselves available, and create incredible programming off-peak during school hours when folks are in school. That's been fantastic.

Online, numerous platforms have been very helpful. Outschool is a great resource. Locally, in person, NYCHEA is an incredible organization. Has a list serve, you couldn't possibly do all the activities and the experiences that they make available to homeschoolers in the New York area.

Brigid Bergin: Dylan, can I ask you, and you're going to help me segue to my next question to Peter, but what prompted you to choose to homeschool your children?

Dylan: There's a couple of things. First of all, when our eldest was four or five, and the conversation in the playground was becoming a little stressful surrounding which preschool, which program they were going to go into, and like the lotteries and all that. It was just, I had an adverse reaction to that, and so we sought other avenues and discovered a place in the East Village called the ROC, Resource and Outreach Center for homeschool families.

We plugged into a chess class and a karate class there. One of the parents after that first semester asked if we wanted to start meeting a little more regularly with a couple other families, and got some space at a church basement, and that group grew to 8, 10 families, meeting twice a week. We've largely stayed connected to those families in different iterations, but the community in New York is huge, and it's been great socially. We've met some incredible people, and the kids have just had a fantastic experience.

Brigid Bergin: Dylan, thank you so much for calling and for sharing that. I'm glad that it's been a great experience for your family.

Peter, connects directly to your survey because you also asked parents why they made that choice, any reactions to that caller and what else did you find in your research?

Peter Jamison: Yes. It's interesting because in some ways, the caller's experience is a typical one. The largest reason that parents gave to us as far as the primary reasons for why they're homeschooling their children in our survey was, and this is a vague term, so bear with me as I unpack it a little bit, but it's concerned about the school environment. 74% of homeschool parents cite that as a reason.

Clearly, this is a case of not only whatever the attractions might be from homeschooling, but to some degree a question of repulsion from things in the traditional school setting that parents don't like. Now the reasons for this have changed a little bit over time, and there are a number of things that parents cited in our survey that I think are reflective of some of the current challenges facing public schools as well as some of our current cultural and political environment.

62% of homeschool parents cite a concern about school shootings. 58% cite a concern about bullying. One thing we've heard from a lot of parents we've spoken to is that they feel like especially their local public schools were ill-equipped to deal with their child's special needs. You have parents frustrated with how a school is implementing a kid's IEP or they're not kind of giving them the services that they feel are appropriate for them.

One interesting finding here from our survey is that about 3 in 10 homeschool parents say their child has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which is twice the rate of parents in the general population. On the political front specifically, and I think this is something that is very much one of the new elements of kind of the motivational landscape of homeschooling, 46% of parents say they believe that their local public schools are too influenced by liberal viewpoints. This is the type of rallying cry that we've all become very familiar with. What many people call the school culture wars, organizations such as Moms for Liberty, which are decrying what they perceive to be a liberal bias in public education.

Another interesting finding, and this is something I think that really would've come as a shock to people studying homeschooling a decade ago, is that 26%, basically, 1 in 4 homeschool parents now say they believe that local public schools are too influenced by conservative viewpoints. That was a big reason for why they chose to homeschool their kids. Based on our reporting, the people we've spoken to, what this seems to be representing is families in states like Florida or other places that are enacting legislation to curtail or to shape what can be taught about subjects like gender, sexual identity, race, and their liberal parents pulling their kids out of schools that are now affected by those laws because they don't want them exposed to that kind of academic environment.

Brigid Bergin: Peter, there's a question that a listener texted to us, that maybe you can address in terms of what you found in how the population of people who are homeschooling has changed. This listener texted, "Please discuss the privilege associated with being able to homeschool in terms of income." Did you find that part of what the decision factor was based on people who had the ability to afford to homeschool?

Peter Jamison: Yes, this is a really excellent point, and the logistical challenges that are involved in educating a child, let alone multiple children at home, really can't be overstated. While this is not something we specifically explored quantitatively in our polling, a lot of the families we spoke to there tends to be one parent who's not working full-time. That's just the reality.

However, I think again, if we compare this to the trends in homeschooling in the past, it's not so much the case anymore that homeschoolers are so dominated by, again, when you were looking at conservative Christian families homeschooling, often you would have a father working full-time and a mother being the full-time home educator. We've spoken to a lot of single parents who are homeschooling now.

One thing that has made this possible, and this is another thing that's sort of a new feature of homeschooling in America now, is just the enormous number of options for education done by people who aren't actually the parents, and your previous caller alluded to this a little bit as well, that there are now online programs. They're parents who can just sit a kid down in front of a computer and have them learn virtually.

There are also a lot of programs that have developed that have essentially evolved out of homeschooling co-ops, which were parent-run organizations where one parent might have an expertise in chemistry, or one parent might have a particular interest in teaching reading, and the families would come together a few times a week, and one parent would teach the children of other parents in this co-op.

Something very different is now happening homeschooling where you have the development of micro-schools, which are essentially an unregulated version of a small private school. These are parents who come together very often based on similar sort of ideology or similar political valence. They will hire a teacher to teach their kids. I think this is one of the questions of among many questions surrounding the regulation of homeschooling that policymakers will have to grapple with in the years ahead.

These environments are not subject to the accreditation process or the regulations of either traditional public or a traditional private school. Often are run by people who are not themselves certified professional educators. That's just to say that's another option. If parents don't want to be doing all the teaching themselves, there's now a number of different ways in which they can essentially outsource their kids' education while "still being homeschoolers."

Brigid Bergin: That's interesting. I want to read a few more of the text messages that have come in about reasons why people have opted to homeschool. Echoing some of what you've said, Peter, one listener writes, "I think a lot of people homeschool because schools are inadequate at accommodating neurodivergent kids." We have another listener who writes, "We homeschool because kids do not get enough time outside in public or private school. This is the number one reason." A couple different interesting reasons for why people homeschool.

Katherine in Ridgewood, New Jersey, welcome to WNYC. I think you have a question about the impact of homeschooling, correct?

Katherine: Yes, I do. This may be very a naive comment in a country that already is so polarized on so many levels, but if we move down a road of more homeschooling, and I recognize this also overlaps a bit with parental rights, where do we go in terms of having a common culture or common values or defining ourselves as a country? I'm just very curious about-- I know when I grew up, I learned a lot about our country and our values, and there was a commonality. What happens to that if we continue down a road of increased homeschooling?

Brigid Bergin: Katherine, thank you so much for your question. Peter, I know you did covered a lot of ground in your survey. I'm wondering to what extent you feel like this is reflecting of Americans trending maybe more towards an individualism versus community, or community wellbeing and this idea of a shared common culture.

Peter Jamison: Yes, I think that the rise in homeschooling to address your caller's point cannot be distinguished from these larger trends in our society right now. This idea of the shrinking of a shared political and cultural commons in America, homeschooling in many ways is the ultimate expression of retreat from what for many families has always traditionally been the shared public commons, which is their local elementary school, their local, middle, or high school. These were places, and my colleague Laura Meckler, who worked with me on this, she spoke to an educator in the state of Kentucky who made this point that public schools are not just places where people go for academic instruction, especially maybe in more remote or rural areas where there are a few other shared public institutions. There are places where families come together for football games, for music to celebrate their kids academic achievements. The example cited by this person in Kentucky was that public schools, they opened their doors as shelters when that state was really ravaged by flooding earlier this year.

If you cut away at that institution, which homeschooling inevitably does, whatever the motives of families are and whether their feelings towards the public schools are, public school funding in this country is tied to enrollment. It's just simple math that the more kids are homeschooled and not going to their local public school, that's going to result in diminished resources for the public schools, which then in turn, breeds the cycle of the school as perhaps not being able to serve their community in the way that families expect and then further people withdrawing from them to homeschool. I think the impact on the idea of a shared culture and a shared education is potentially quite profound.

Brigid Bergin: Peter, you started to touch on this, but this idea that some of these microschools and homeschooling in general is largely unregulated. What does that mean in practice?

Peter Jamison: Yes. In practice, what this means, and I'll again cite the work of my colleague Laura Meckler, who did a story about this earlier in our series on the rise of microschools is that you might have a situation where kids are coming together. For instance, she looked at one group in New Hampshire where the local microschool is actually essentially a franchise of a national organization that functions more or less like Airbnb for microschooling and homeschooling.

The adult who is overseeing this acts as, calls herself, and this is according to the company's language, a guide rather than a teacher. The kids are brought to this place by their parents. They're dropped off. They learn largely on computers. The guide is there to help the kids as they get stuck in different places in their academic progress. It's a very different environment despite the superficial similarities from a normal classroom of the kind that many people would envision.

Brigid Bergin: Let's go to Barbara in Mineola. Barbara, thanks for calling WNYC.

Barbara: Oh, thank you. I just wanted to share that I am a retired homeschool teacher. One of the reasons that most of the parents I served did not want their children attending public or private schools was safety. We all know what's going on with campus shooters, and it's also the bullying because there's just so many people that work at the school that can deal with the bully. It takes a long, drawn-out process. The most important reason was the avoidance of standardized testing because there is so much hype in the schools, and the pressure and the drill and kill for these tests, and some children just don't test well, but they have a beautiful portfolio, which is what they use in European countries. They don't have standardized testing.

In our system, I cannot say to a principal, but you can't fail this child because look, this child has done all these beautiful projects and clearly understands the material, because it's all about the standardized testing. I just wanted to share that as well.

Brigid Bergin: Barbara, thank you for that comment and your experience. She also prompts me to think about another listener texted to ask us since perhaps there are not standardized tests in the actual homeschool environment, there still are standardized tests that potentially colleges and universities rely on, the SATs, for admission. Is there any data about how students who are homeschoolers have done on those types of standardized tests? The SATs, things that may be crucial to their acceptance to the next phase of their education?

Peter Jamison: This is a very hotly debated area of research on homeschooling. Again, I expect this is something that we'll see more work on. The short answer is that there's very little credible data comparing the performance of homeschoolers to students who receive a traditional education, either in public or private schools.

You see a lot of studies cited by homeschooling advocates, and families are very happy with their homeschooling experience, purporting to show that homeschoolers outperform their public school counterparts. Objective scholars who look at these studies, though, tend to dismiss them for various methodological flaws, among the largest of which is simply selection bias.

If you think about it, we simply have no visibility of huge numbers of homeschooled children in the United States. There are 11 states in this country where you're not even required to tell anyone if you're homeschooling your kid, let alone submit them to any form of testing or regulation. When studies are done, looking at homeschoolers' performance in college compared to kids who, for instance, may have attended traditional public school, you're already dealing with a self-selected sample of homeschoolers who, by definition, did well and had some level of success. That's why they're now attending a four-year university, for example.

This is actually something else we're going to be exploring in our reporting in the remainder of the year. It's very difficult to make broad statements at this point on how homeschoolers compare either in terms of their academic achievements or their subsequent professional outcomes in life to children who go through more traditional education.

Brigid Bergin: We have one more caller that I think we can fit in who I think has a perspective on this very issue, Doris in Monmouth County. Doris, thanks for calling WNYC.

Doris: Yes. What I think about to say is actually, in my own experience, we've got a local nature program here that I was involved in for a while. Perhaps 40% of the kids who attended were far more knowledgeable and far more intellectually sophisticated than their compatriots in the local public schools.

Plus, it seems to me, if you look at things like the National Spelling Bee, it seems that each and every single year, winners are homeschooled. I think it warrants a deeper look into the advantages on so many different levels: scientifically, intellectually, psychologically, it seems that these kids are exceeding their equals from the public schools.

Brigid Bergin: Doris, thank you for your call and your comments. Peter, any reaction to that? It sounds like Doris was speaking to the very controversial information or position that there is not enough to evaluate at this point.

Peter Jamison: Yes. Again, these are the types of anecdotes that you often hear trotted out by people who favor homeschooling or who are homeschooling advocates. I would just point out again, these are anecdotes, and I could offer some other anecdotes to give a fuller picture of homeschoolers' experiences. I've spoken directly to and heard by e-mail from many people at this point in the reporting of this series who feel that they were essentially robbed of their future by their parents' decision to homeschool.

The first story we did in this series was a profile I did of two former homeschooled children, now adults, Christina and Aaron Beale in Loudoun County, Virginia, who really came out of the white-hot center of the conservative Christian homeschooling movement, and have come to totally reject that movement. They ended up sending their children to their local public school. Both of them felt in different ways that the home education they received from their parents blunted both their intellectual development and their future professional opportunities.

This is why, again, I think the question of credible, objective research on outcomes for homeschoolers as opposed to kids from other types of schooling is important because when you're dealing in the field of anecdote, yes, you can point to the National Spelling Bee winners. You could also point to adults who feel like their life prospects were essentially robbed from them by homeschooling.

Brigid Bergin: Peter, just absolutely fascinating reporting and so much more to unpack here. Congratulations to you and your colleagues, and thank you for your work. We're going to have to leave it there for now. Peter Jamison is enterprise reporter at The Washington Post, and has been working on the project Homeschool Nation. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Peter Jamison: Thanks for having me.

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