As homeschooling numbers rose following the COVID-19 pandemic, nontraditional education such as hybrid homeschooling was reported as a desirable option by parents. This dissertation examines the academic outcomes of homeschool and hybrid homeschool students in Georgia following the rise of post-COVID nontraditional education. Hybrid homeschooling,…

Parent-led, home-based education, or homeschooling, has grown rapidly over recent decades with participation rates increasing more than 100-fold to now nearly one in 25 students nationwide in the United States. However, the research base has not grown correspondingly, and homeschoolers remain understudied. We systematically surveyed a population…

The Kansas Graduate and Dropout Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of how the Kansas State Department of Education (KSDE) calculates and reports the Adjusted Cohort Graduation and Annual Dropout Rates. Sections include: (1) Introduction; (2) Terminology; (3) Data Sources; (4) Graduation Calculations; (5) Dropout Calculation; and (6)…

This study uses three nationally representative data sets of U.S. school-aged children who are currently homeschooled and two nationally representative data sets of U.S. adults who have ever been homeschooled to empirically document the amount of time homeschooled individuals are homeschooled, how much time they spend in public- or private-school…

School choice is spreading across the U.S. at the same time that scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) are stagnant. We examine the association between education freedom and 8th grade student NAEP score levels and gains in states in 2019. We construct the 2019 Education Freedom Index as a composite measure of the…

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…

We used data from the U.S. Census Bureau's Household Pulse Survey to examine homeschool participation at the national and state levels and compare it to participation estimates from other surveys. The Household Pulse Survey also provides demographic information about the survey respondents. Specifically, we examined respondent characteristics of…

One schooling sector that had been growing before the pandemic, hybrid schools, in which students attend physical classes fewer than five days per week and are homeschooled on the other days, has seen recent continued growth. One factor that has not been explored is the commuting patterns families follow to use these schools. Whether families…

Private school choice programs are publicly-funded programs that provide families with funding to attend a private school of their choice. Since 2021, 15 states have enacted or expanded choice legislation, even making homeschoolers eligible to participate. However, homeschoolers are often reluctant to participate due to proposed regulations. We…

The school-choice landscape in the United States is undergoing a rapid transformation, as states increasingly enact a new form of vouchers called Education Savings Accounts (ESAs). Unlike earlier voucher programs, which generally allowed subsidies only for private school tuition, ESAs represent a radically expansive--and potentially very…

School safety has been widely studied from the perspectives of administrators, teachers, and students in traditional education settings. However, parents' perceptions of school safety have been largely overlooked. Moreover, it is unknown how homeschool parents conceptualize safety in educational settings despite school safety being a known…

This is the executive summary for the report "Roll Call: A Landscape Review of the Students, Financing, and performance of Milwaukee's K-12 Schools." The report takes stock of the changes that have occurred in the city's overall "system" of schools, including student enrollment and demographics, financing, and outcomes. Key…

This report arrives during a time of heightened scrutiny and civic engagement. While public attention is currently trained primarily on Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS), this research encompasses the whole of the city's education system, marking both commonalities and differences between different types of publicly funded schools. It highlights…