Public school enrollment losses post-pandemic cannot be fully attributed to changes in population, or shifts towards charter or private school enrollments, pointing to a rise in homeschooling among families. This trend raises questions about the motivations behind the increased interest in homeschooling. Targeted interviews reveal that these…

University-based homeschool physical education programs are one way to ensure homeschooled children have access to high-quality, standards-based opportunities to develop their physical literacy. These programs have traditionally been held on site at hosting institutions and were greatly impacted by the limitations imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic.…

COVID-19 once again revealed the inherent weaknesses in relying on classroom-based schooling and ICT to sustain learning, a danger already familiar from earlier man-made and natural disasters. A lack of textbooks and lack of guidance for caregivers to support home-based learning limited the effectiveness of efforts to provide continuity of…

Homeschooling was occasionally a subject of popular interest pre-COVID, when media reported horrific cases of child abuse under the guise of homeschooling, or when controversies erupted over efforts in state legislatures or local school boards to introduce very modest oversight measures. COVID made homeschooling something nearly every parent…

Lengthy school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic were challenging across the country. In cities like Detroit, where many students already were struggling, the difficulties for students and families were compounded. Bernita Bradley, a social entrepreneur and education-reform advocate, launched Engaged Detroit to help Black families interested…

Purpose: The purpose of this article is to describe a grassroots project to develop an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) system for a child who is learning to speak the Native American Lakota language. The project began as a part of a homeschool curriculum to address the foreign language requirement during the COVID-19 pandemic.…

This is a first-hand account of a head teacher's quest to bridge the digital divide in a school catchment of considerable disadvantage in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It describes the Microsoft Anytime Anywhere Learning project (AAL), which the school helped to pioneer in the UK. From this, the paper aims to provide some fresh perspectives on…

After a turbulent spring of COVID induced virtual learning, some traditional public schools in the U.S. are hesitant to reopen with face-to-face instruction in fall 2020. In response to this uncertainty, many parents are taking their childrens' education into their own hands. Some are banding together to create their own kind of school, with small…

Homeschooling is generally understood to mean that a child's education takes place exclusively at home--but homeschooling is a continuum, not an all-or-nothing choice. In a sense, everyone is "home-schooled," and the ways that families combine learning at home with attending school are many. Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, the…

Before the pandemic, Community Works in New Orleans, Louisiana ran large-group (100- to 200-student) after-school and out-of-school-time programs that integrated enrichment and academics for youth in grades K-8. When school buildings closed in March 2020, Community Works started offering more versatile programming options to meet the needs of…

America has a long history of small-school environments, such as one-room schoolhouses and homeschools. But in recent years, other models have developed, giving students more intimate settings for learning and enabling their families to play a larger role in their schooling. Microschools are a leading example of this growing sector that also…

Following the onset of the COVID 19 pandemic, the US Census Bureau (USCB) conducted regularly scheduled surveys to assess the impact that the virus had on American families. These showed that the number of adults/parents with children who were taught entirely in their homes doubled between the spring and fall 2020. Though millions of these…

Achieving prosperity for all Americans could not be more urgent. Although the United States remains the most prosperous nation on earth, millions of citizens are losing faith in the American dream of upward mobility, and in American-style capitalism itself. This crisis of confidence has widened the divide afflicting American politics and cries out…

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, historians -- along with archivists and other stakeholders -- began to initiate digital memory banks, inviting members of the public to upload personal stories, pictures, videos, or other material connected to the pandemic and its impact on everyday life. This article describes how platforms from Western and Central…

In the COVID-19 crisis, the science of learning has two different responsibilities: first, to offer guidance about how best to deal with the impact of the current situation, including lockdown and home-schooling; and second, to consider bigger questions about what this large-scale educational experiment might mean for the future. The first part of…