This summary captures the current thinking on homeschool policy as expressed by a diverse group of homeschool policy stakeholders at a recent convening. Key topics discussed include the purpose of education, the regulation and support of homeschooling, and issues with access to needed resources.

Does empirical evidence or ideology most influence homeschooling policy? It depends. Where empirical research and social experience abound, regulations seem less restrictive but where there is less data or experience policies seem more restrictive and ideologically driven. By comparing Europe and the United States with a look at South Africa,…

Stewart and McCracken at the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE) present a rebuttal to our article where their main critique is regarding our study's ideological roots. In this rejoinder to Stewart and McCracken, we highlight three things: (1) the takeaways from our study are robust to the criticism of CRHE; (2) our survey instrument…

Despite upwards of 100,000 gifted students possibly being educated at home, research regarding this population is limited. The literature on gifted homeschooling includes topics such as motivations for homeschooling, modalities of instruction, and student achievement and social-emotional wellness. Recommendations for expanding the literature and…

This article theorizes how crises and markets shape the responses of consumers and producer organizations. We advance four propositions: 1) if a crisis requires major revisions in operational rules, less-exit sensitive (i.e., monopoly-like) organizations shall revise to aggregate preferences of organized producers; and more-exit sensitive…

Safety remains a key concern for parents and education policy makers. Homeschooling opponents argue that child abusers use homeschooling to isolate and harm their children while public school teachers and administrators, as mandatory reporters, reduce child maltreatment. Supporters of homeschooling argue that public schools expose children to…

Home education is becoming an important issue for education policy in almost every country across Europe. It should also be of potential interest to the geography of education which, however, has remained the domain of research to educational studies. Consequently, no studies currently compare the individual aspects of home education by looking…

The confusing variations of terminology that connect "home" with instruction warrant special care in relation to students with disabilities. The underlying core of these varying terms amounts to three distinct placement options in relation to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), here identified as homebound…

Schooling has been a site of harm for Indigenous people in settler colonial contexts, as a tool of dispossession, assimilation and separation from country and kin. However, schools have simultaneously been sites to work against this and build alternatives to settler colonial systems that nourish Indigenous futures. This article centers the…

Recent headlines describing the national drop in public school enrollment suggest that this is a shocking crisis brought on or worsened by the pandemic. However, Abbie Cohen argues that the current enrollment decline should not be a surprise. The underlying causes have festered for decades. Among these causes is the tension between the different…

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic led to enormous societal changes worldwide and touched many different areas of daily life. One of the most serious restrictions to contain the pandemic was the closure of schools and kindergartens. Particularly in countries with comparatively low levels of digitalization in schools, this situation opened up…

Across OECD countries, education choice is proliferating as parents seek and governments permit choice both inside and outside public education systems. The movement of students out of the common public school, however, varies significantly across jurisdictions and sociodemographic characteristics such as race and class. This variation in…

Not all parents across England are happy about sending their children back to school, following the lifting of lockdown measures in March 2021. Our qualitative research, listening to accounts from eighty-five such families, finds that these concerns stem from COVID-related anxiety, most commonly linked to protecting members of the household at…

Homeschooling has witnessed an upsurge in the United States since the movement for school choice gained momentum in the 1990s. Most research on homeschooling has been on non-representative samples of median-income white Americans, making it difficult for policymakers to accept its reliability. In addition, homeschoolers now include other ethnic…

This study reports the results of a survey conducted with a set of "hybrid homeschool" leaders (principals or directors) from around the United States who were asked to describe (1) how their families categorize themselves (as homeschoolers, or as members of private schools); (2) the ways in which their schools operate in terms of…