Morning Wire XX
[0] Just a few years ago, homeschooling was seen as somewhat fringe, but COVID changed that almost overnight.
[1] Now, new data from the Census Bureau and the Associated Press suggest that the homeschooling boom may be here to stay.
[2] In this episode of Morning Wire, we look at why parents are flocking to homeschool, where homeschooling is growing fastest, and which demographics are hopping on the bandwagon.
[3] It's Sunday, May 15th, and this is Morning Wire.
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[12] What I think we're finding is that parents are discovering the joy of being able to say, wait a minute, my kids are unique.
[13] I'm looking for flexibility.
[14] Maybe my family has a unique schedule and we like to travel or we have special needs children or we have children that learn in unique ways.
[15] And rather than trying to fit them into a one -size -fits -all schedule and methodology, we can tailor the education to our schedule so that it works for our entire family.
[16] We can tailor the education to our kids' learning styles so that they can really flourish.
[17] That was actor and producer Kirk Cameron talking to Morning Wire about why his family started homeschooling during COVID, and he's far from alone.
[18] There's been a ground swell of families making a similar choice across the country over the past two years.
[19] Georgia, you've been following this very closely.
[20] What are some of the trends we're seeing?
[21] Well, in mid -April, the Associated Press released data collected from 18 states.
[22] That survey showed that the number of homeschooled students increased 63 % during the 2020 -to -2020 school year and then decreased by only 17 % this current school year.
[23] So in other words, a significant majority of the students who started homeschooling during the pandemic continued with it even as the schools opened back up.
[24] Do we have hard numbers on the percentage of students now in homeschool?
[25] The current numbers from 2022 haven't been released yet, and the AP didn't disclose how they calculated their percentages, but what we do know is that in the spring of 2020, during the peak of the lockdowns, that number was about 5 .4 % of American K -12 students.
[26] And by fall of 2020, that number was 11 .1.
[27] So more than doubling within six months.
[28] Yeah, that's a really fast spike.
[29] And And this new AP study is saying most of these kids stayed in homeschooling even more than a year later.
[30] Right, exactly.
[31] Eventually, I want to ask about the political angle, but first, do we have information about which states or cities saw the biggest increases?
[32] Right.
[33] The politics are definitely interesting.
[34] But to answer your question, yes, we do have 2021 numbers from the Census Bureau.
[35] In terms of the largest increase proportionally, Massachusetts and New York showed the most significant growth by far.
[36] Prior to COVID, Massachusetts had only 1 .5 percent students in homeschool.
[37] But by fall of 2021, that number was 12 .1%.
[38] New York started even lower at 1 .2%.
[39] That was the lowest in the country, and that increased to 10 .1 % in 2021.
[40] So both of those states saw an eightfold increase in just one year.
[41] That said, if you're looking at total increase by percentage, other states jumped even more.
[42] For example, Alaska went from 9 .6 to a whopping 27 % in one year.
[43] Florida jumped from 5 % to 18 .1%.
[44] Vermont went from 4 .1 % to 16 .9%.
[45] Now, just for context, the states with the highest rates of homeschooling as of October 2020 are Alaska at almost 28%, Oklahoma at 20%, Montana and Florida both have about 18%.
[46] And Vermont, West Virginia, and Georgia are at about 16 % each.
[47] Only two states saw decreases.
[48] That's Iowa and Kentucky.
[49] And both of those drops were extremely small.
[50] Iowa decreased by 0 .6 % and Kentucky dropped by 1 .2%.
[51] So consistently rises in some states really significant increases.
[52] Do we know what's driving the shift?
[53] Well, according to one expert I spoke to, a lot of families were curious about homeschool prior to the pandemic, and COVID just gave them that extra push to try it.
[54] Here's Carrie McDonald.
[55] She's a senior education fellow at the Foundation for Economic Education and an adjunct fellow at the Cato Institute.
[56] She also runs a website supporting homeschooling families.
[57] So before COVID, we were already seeing an increase in homeschooling and a lot of different varieties of homeschooling, hybrid homeschools for becoming more popular.
[58] Microschools, which are these sort of modern one -room schoolhouse models where you have multi -age groups of students and typically a hired teacher in a home or in a small commercial space learning together.
[59] Those were gaining in popularity prior to the pandemic.
[60] definitely the school closures and education disruption has accelerated parents' interest in homeschooling and in the ways in which homeschooling can be used to kind of personalize a child's education.
[61] And this is where the politics come in.
[62] The data on parent attitudes is very limited right now, but there's fairly strong evidence that politically conservative parents are largely driving this movement, though there are some very interesting caveats to that.
[63] First off, when you look at where homeschooling is broadly more popular and where it's growing the fastest, it skews heavily towards red states.
[64] There are some outliers, but when you rank all 50 states, the pattern is extremely clear.
[65] And that's not completely surprising.
[66] We've obviously reported a lot about controversial curriculum in schools, and it tends to be conservative -leaning parents who complain that their values are being undermined in public schools.
[67] One homeschool mom I spoke to who lives in a suburb outside of Austin, Texas, brought up her concerns about the school's messaging on gender.
[68] We honestly thought being in Austin, the Round Rock schools are kind of more suburb.
[69] You know, we thought it might be several more years before this came into play.
[70] And then in the 2021 -22 school year, the second day of school, I think they pulled all the incoming fifth graders into the library and had them declare their pronouns.
[71] And over the summer, four of the, my husband and I did the math, and it seemed, I bet there's about 80 fifth graders.
[72] And it seemed, and four young girls had decided either to transition to non -binary or declare they were boys.
[73] And we were like, that was about 10 % of the girls in one summer of incoming 10 -year -olds.
[74] So what's behind the surge in states like Massachusetts and New York?
[75] Right.
[76] It's interesting.
[77] So blue states were.
[78] a mixed bag.
[79] For example, California had some of the strictest COVID policies, but they saw virtually zero increase in homeschooling, whereas Massachusetts and New York also had extremely strict policies, but they saw large jumps in homeschooling.
[80] One quick caveat about California, though, California's public schools lost more than 160 ,000 students during the pandemic, mostly from the younger grades.
[81] That was the largest drop in two decades.
[82] I expect it won't be until the next census that we get a full picture of where those kids went.
[83] So in other words, the jury is still kind of out on California.
[84] Got it.
[85] That said, we do have really good information about Massachusetts in New York.
[86] I spoke to a homeschool advocate in Massachusetts named Otis Sali.
[87] She says the families she works with in Boston consistently cited mask mandates and vaccination policies as reasons for starting homeschool.
[88] She says, some are religious, though not all, and the majority are politically conservative.
[89] That said, most of the homeschool parents I spoke to aren't really politically active.
[90] For example, one mom I spoke to in Wellesley, Massachusetts, said that while she leans conservative, her decision was really more about carving out a custom curriculum for her daughter that her daughter would find engaging and meaningful.
[91] She wanted the best option for her daughter academically, and in that case, she found it was homeschool.
[92] In the case of Massachusetts and New York, we actually have even more granular data that's really interesting.
[93] The data suggests that the homeschooling surge in these states actually occurred in urban centers.
[94] for example, New York City, Newark, Boston, Cambridge, and Newton.
[95] That's really surprising.
[96] Yes.
[97] So for context, those are deep blue, very affluent communities.
[98] And one cultural explanation for this is that these parents were already very hands -on when it came to their kids' education, and homeschool may have just felt like a better option compared to remote learning.
[99] And they ended up liking it.
[100] Right, exactly.
[101] A lot of these parents in more affluent areas joined up in homeschooling pods and sometimes micro -schools, and they had a really great experience with that.
[102] So they just continued when the schools reopened.
[103] Now, one interesting trend in homeschooling is micro schools, which is basically where small homeschooling pods link up with other pods and they rent space and hire teachers.
[104] It's basically like a private school, but much less expensive and a lot more communal.
[105] Here's Carrie MacDonald describing that.
[106] So one of the most exciting things to come out of the past couple of years of education disruption is a real growth in education entrepreneurship.
[107] And what I've seen really over the past year is some of these pandemic podcasts.
[108] turning into full -fledged microschools where educators or parents lease a building and, you know, advertise their services and end up with, you know, 50 or more students.
[109] In many cases, they also hired outside educators to come in and do that as well.
[110] With the established microschools, there is a whole cadre of educators that are coming into these microschools.
[111] And they came into this micro school, you know, really excited to be a part of a new community and the founder of this particular micro -school, Jill Perez, said that, you know, these are my thinking teachers.
[112] These are the ones who are questioning and considering other ways of learning and doing.
[113] And so she's really excited about what's happening there.
[114] They're not necessarily getting the same salary that they would in a district school, but they are making up for it in terms of the creativity they're able to express and the flexibility in their work schedule.
[115] And microschools are just one example, but there's a huge amount of creativity in the education space right now.
[116] Modern homeschooling often involves getting out in the community, visiting museums with other families and doing hands -on learning.
[117] One family I spoke to does a hybrid model where they send their kids to a farm school a couple days a week.
[118] So what do we know about the demographics of homeschoolers?
[119] Yeah, there's actually some really interesting data about the racial mix of students joining homeschool.
[120] The stereotype, of course, is white, middle class, and religious, or sometimes white, middle class hippies, but that really changed in 2020.
[121] One really interesting data point is that black families saw the largest jump of any racial group by a very significant margin, actually.
[122] Black student enrollment in homeschool increased nearly fivefold, and now black families have overtaken every other racial group to have the highest homeschooling rate at 16 .1%.
[123] They're followed by Hispanics at 12 .1%, whites at 9 .7, and Asians at 8 .8.
[124] So from that data, we can infer that Black families, and to a lesser extent, Hispanic families are particularly dissatisfied with their current public school options.
[125] What do we know about the reasons those groups are drawn to homeschooling?
[126] Yeah, that's actually been studied.
[127] Amma Mazama is an associate professor of African American Studies at Temple University, and she's also a homeschool mom.
[128] She studied the rise of homeschool among black families that really took off around 2016.
[129] So here's what she had to say about why so many black families are gravitating towards homeschool.
[130] Black people now turn away from schools and decide they're going to keep their children home.
[131] So the question, of course, is why?
[132] And I found, after going around the country and asking 74 African -American homeschooling families, why are you doing this, I found that we shared a common narrative, and which is basically that we're trying to protect black children from the ill effects of racism, as it manifests itself in schools, whether it is the curriculum, that makes us irrelevant, invisible, or misrepresenters, that makes us really know nothing about ourselves as African people, that makes us even hate ourselves as African people and despise Africa because of the way Africa is presented to us in the classroom or not presented to us in the classroom.
[133] And I found that many African -American parents who keep their children home said, and that was very central, that for them to be true, educated, you must know about yourself.
[134] If you don't know anything about your land of ancestry, if you don't know anything about your history, then you are not educated.
[135] Other black homeschool moms online have expressed concern about the way black people are presented in mainstream schooling.
[136] They say they want their kids to learn African history in a broader context that starts earlier and includes positive elements of African history rather than an exclusive focus on slavery.
[137] And to meet this growing demographic niche, there now actually a variety of afrocentric home curricula that parents can choose from.
[138] Some are Christian base and others are secular.
[139] And the interesting thing about the black homeschool demographic is it's very diverse politically and religiously.
[140] The thing that brings these families together, whether they're religious conservatives or secular left wing or somewhere in between, is that they don't like the dominant narrative around race and schools.
[141] They want their kids to have a positive sense of identity and they think that the public school curriculum is undermining that.
[142] So that same Texas homeschool mom we heard from earlier has two adoptive children who are black and one child who's white.
[143] Here's what she had to say about raising a mixed race family.
[144] We're an adoptive family and we're an interracial family and, you know, it's a sensitive topic in our home and we talk about race a lot.
[145] We talk about a lot of the issues that had gone down over the last few years and a lot of historical things.
[146] And it's a topic we don't shy away from at all in our house.
[147] But also, we weren't exactly sure.
[148] how each individual teacher was going to handle critical race theory or their own opinions about race and coming into our home and sending our white son and our African -American daughter into the same school where they may or may not come home with different ideas about each other and thinking that possibly one of them is a forever victim and one of them.
[149] So forever oppressor, we were like, yeah, we, when they've never had that language before for one another, So, you know, a lot of white parents maybe don't see how, when you teach history and slavery to your white children, they learn it as history, they learn it as fact, but they don't take it in the way that an African -American child does.
[150] And so our daughter ended up asking us, wait, you know, as we went through the same things and had the same conversation with her, wait, will I ever be a slave?
[151] You know, she takes it in differently.
[152] It's different.
[153] It lands on her differently.
[154] And so just not knowing how people were going to friends.
[155] those conversations and how much critical racer was even going to come into play in their elementary school.
[156] So for a variety of reasons, parents are having concerns about the way schools are approaching certain issues, and they see homeschooling as a way to avoid what they consider a highly politicized environment in the public school system.
[157] Do we expect these trends to continue going forward?
[158] You know, that's hard to say, but the most recent household pulse survey conducted by the Census Bureau just concluded on May 9th.
[159] So hopefully we're going to get some new numbers soon.
[160] All right.
[161] Well, you'll have to update us when that happens.
[162] Thanks so much for reporting.
[163] Yeah, absolutely.
[164] That's all the time we've got this morning.
[165] Thanks for waking up with us.
[166] We'll be back tomorrow with the news you need to know.