The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has lo//ng reported on public and private school enrollments. But it is only since the late 1990s that NCES has collected information on homeschooling, after the expansion of its National Household Education Surveys Program (NHES) to address this topic. The past two decades have also seen growth…

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…

There are many different schooling options, but not all educational choice programs are created equal. Public charter schools and public-to-public transfers, for example, have provided options within the traditional system, but those programs leave many schooling types off-limits for families. EdChoice's goal as the nation's oldest school choice…

Education improvement has become a national imperative. Low graduation rates, standardized test failures, and overall success rates falling significantly behind in global competition have forced the dialogue towards alternatives to public education (Stewart, 2012). As the United States continues to trail other countries in educational success, it…

The COVID-19 pandemic drastically disrupted the functioning of U.S. public schools, potentially changing the relative appeal of alternatives such as homeschooling and private schools. Using longitudinal student-level administrative data from Michigan and nationally representative data from the Census Household Pulse Survey, we show how the…

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…

It can be difficult to know precisely what, when, and how the nation's homeschooled students are learning. After all, privacy and the freedom to explore education as families see fit, with limited government oversight, is a defining feature. But the best evidence indicates that homeschooled students are far from isolated. By looking at a recent…

With an alchemical verve, educators have been shaping the very direction of students' lives since time immemorial. With millions of teachers currently serving in the Tk-12 sector and millions more serving in higher education spaces, the need for quality educator development is essential. For Tk-12 educators, while there are teacher preparation…

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…

Cowen Institute polls provide insights into how parents and guardians view New Orleans' uniquely decentralized K-12 public education system. This is the first of two briefs on the 2024-2025 poll, which is based on polling conducted in the fall of 2024. The survey polled 1,000 public and private school parents and guardians in Orleans Parish, as…

In this article, I address the relation between children's authentic identity development and homeschooling. I show the limitations of claims that homeschooling protects children's authenticity. I argue that the aim of homeschooling is the reproduction of parental beliefs and culture, which is inimical to the development of authentic children's…

Over the past 50 years, homeschooling has grown from a fringe act to a widely accepted education model reflective of a diverse American population. Many parents choose homeschooling to avoid the constraints of the conventional classroom and to embrace education in a broader, often more pluralistic way. According to the National Center for…

Homeschooling, where parents take on the prime responsibility for their children's education, is a growing phenomenon in Australia. Homeschooling is different from distance education or the education at home that has taken place in the COVID-19 pandemic in that the parents make all the decisions about their children's education, including…

Background: The coronavirus pandemic has affected education worldwide. Estonian schools moved to distance learning on March 16. Objectives: This paper outlines the stages of unexpected and temporary changes affecting different stakeholders based on activity and content of the messages in the Facebook group 'Homeschooling with technology'. Also the…

This paper presents findings from a study undertaken in Wales on the safeguarding of children educated at home. Findings revealed that just under a third of home educators had children with additional learning needs who were removed from school due to what parents reported as negative experiences. These experiences included the suitability of a…