Introduction and Purpose
Parent-directed home-based education (homeschooling) was the norm before 1900 in the United States but had nearly gone extinct by the 1970s (Ray, 2021a). During the 1980s and 1990s, the homeschool population grew very rapidly. Many want to know now, how many kids are homeschooled today?
Lines (1991) estimated that there were some 13,000 homeschool students in the late 1970s in the United States. The United States Department of Education (USDE) (2021c) reported that about 3.3% of school-age children (“5- to 17-year-olds,” p. 58), or 1.690 million, were homeschooled by the spring of 2016, and found that this
was not significantly different from their estimate that 3.4% of school-age children were homeschooled four years earlier. [note 1] However, using different methods, Ray (2021b) estimated that there were over two million K-12 homeschool students during the spring of 2016, and then estimated 2.6 million during March of 2020 (Ray, 2021b).
The United States Census Bureau (USCB) (2021b) reported that the number of households with school-age homeschool children doubled from March of 2020 to March of 2021 (from 5.4% to 11.1%). The USCB was careful to explain the many limitations of their sampling and some nuances built into their estimates. For example, the unit
of analysis was adults, not households (but then the USCB weighted data by household). The response rates to their surveys were very low and the wording of questions was changed during different weeks of the survey. Third, the USCB found (in their Table 1) that there was no significant difference in “homeschooling rates of households by states” between spring of 2020 and fall of 2021 in 23 of the 50 states and the District of Columbia. In addition, the USCB report was built on the number of
adults living with a homeschool student and not the number of homeschool students in each household. To this author’s knowledge, the Census Bureau has not published an estimate of the number of homeschool students during 2020-2021 as of the publication of this paper.
Various authors have given estimates of the U.S. homeschool population size during the 2020-2021 school year (e.g., McDonald, 2021). Some estimates have put the number at 5.0 million or more. This author reported an estimate of 4.5 to 5.0 million (Ray, 2021b, July 1, 2021); however, more relevant data have emerged since,
thus motivating the present analysis.
. . . . . [continue research article] And
please see comments below.
--Brian D. Ray, Ph.D.
National Home Education Research Institute
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