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Renewed concern about COVID-19 appears to be driving another increase in home schooling, according to the Texas Home School Coalition.
The THSC released a report on received phone call and email volume, saying the volume doubled in the last full week of July, jumping from 536 the week before to 1,016 as families prepared for school. The following week, the call and email volume rose again to 1,232, according to the release.
This latest number represents an all-time high that exceeds the enormous call and email volume for THSC from the fall of 2020, when COVID-19 school restrictions dominated the news and the number of home schooling families in Texas nearly tripled from 4.5 to 12.3% by October of that year, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Texas Home School Coalition President Tim Lambert
| Texas Home School Coalition
THSC President Tim Lambert said the largest surge in home schooling in history occurred in 2020.
“It appears that renewed concern about COVID-19 may be about to replicate a similar trend for 2021,” Lambert said in a release. “We are also seeing thousands of families decide to continue home schooling because of how well it has worked for their family. Our team is here to welcome these new families into home schooling and help them with everything they need to be successful.”
The biggest increase was in minority families leaving the public school system, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report. The number of home schooling black families rose from 3.3% to 16.1%, and that sharp uptick could occur again due to COVID-19.
However, home school starts in Texas were steadily rising before the pandemic.
Analysis of data from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) showed between 1997 and 2019, students withdrawing from public schools for home schooling in the state increased 228%. Comparatively, public school enrollment grew at a slower rate over the same period (41%), as previously reported by the Education Daily Wire.
Texas Home School Coalition Director of Public Policy Jeremy Newman told Houston Daily there are indications of an increase in home schooling that they follow.
“There are several indicators we will be watching,” Newman said. “The one that is the most trackable in real-time is our call and email volume. In the fall of 2020 when home schooling in Texas tripled, we had the same experience we are having now. As we reached the end of July and beginning of August this year, our weekly call and email from families interested in home schooling volume went from approximately 500 to more than 1,200, the highest it's ever been, even compared to 2020 highs.
“That indicates to us that we are about to see another wave similar to what happened in 2020,” Newman said. “The second metric we will be watching, which will lag a month or two behind, will be the number of families who disenroll from public school. We have an automatic school withdrawal tool on our website that many families use, and we use that to try and track the growth trend. The TEA measures school enrollment at the end of October as well.”
In addition, he said the U.S. Census Bureau is expected to continue releasing survey data on home schooling in the coming months.
“The early data from our call and email volume indicates another significant boost,” Newman said. “As the other numbers that I mentioned become available, we will get a better idea of exactly how big it is.”
Why are more parents choosing to home-school? Newman offered some reasons.
“Traditionally, families say they chose to home school because of 1. Concern about the public school environment. 2. Dissatisfaction with the public school academics. 3. A desire to provide moral and religious instruction or 4. Because they have a special needs student who needs very specific types of instruction,” he said. “Those are the most common reasons. For COVID, the initial decision for most people is driven by 1. Concern about getting the virus 2. Concern with the onerous requirements they would have to comply with and the uncertainty that causes in the public school as a stable form of education.
“In other words, people are looking for stability and flexibility and they feel they can find it in home schooling. Once the family begins home schooling, the four traditional reasons that I mentioned above seem to be the same reasons that a COVID home-school family chooses to stay in home schooling. They may come because of COVID, but they stay for the same reasons that people normally come to home schooling.”
Home schooling isn't a new idea, but for many it falls into the “innovative” category in modern K-12 education.
“The reason for this is that, even if home schooling is not new, it is so flexible that you can integrate new ideas and opportunities into it easily,” Newman said. “For example, online education is relatively new in the grand scheme of things. Home-school families can easily integrate online courses to whatever degree they want to. If someone loses a job, loses a house, loses a car, gets sick, or any other type of crisis that families may go through on a regular basis, home schooling offers them a tool where they can adjust their schedule as necessary to accommodate that new need. Because of that, it is easy for individual families to innovate for themselves using home schooling.”
People are looking at options and are open to educational innovation, he said.
“As I mentioned above, home schooling is simultaneously so flexible and so stable compared to other educational options that it allows individual families to innovate according to their unique needs,” Newman said. “People think of innovation in education as if bureaucrats and lobbyists are the only ones who can do it and that, once they come up with something new, they will pass a rule or a law that allows everyone else to benefit from their innovation. In home schooling, we flip that idea on its head.
“The family is the one that innovates. You just have to empower them to be able to do it and they will. In Texas, we have 5.5 million unique students with a diverse set of backgrounds and a diverse set of needs,” he said. “It would be lunacy for us to believe that such a diverse set of needs could be met with anything other than a diverse set of solutions. If you empower families to create those solutions, they do it, and they do it well. The reason home schooling is leading the way in terms of educational innovation is that it relies on the innovation of millions of individual families to craft solutions that meet millions of individual needs. In contrast, traditional forms of education rely on the innovation of a handful of experts who are trying valiantly to meet those 5.5 million unique needs but are offering only a few solutions to do it with. Naturally, they are completely buried by the mathematical impossibility of that task.”
A study commissioned by Time4Learning recently measured the 2021-22 schooling choices of families opting to home-school since January 2020. The survey reported that 72.2% of families who home-schooled during COVID-19 plan to continue home schooling this fall.
According to a U.S. Census Bureau report, the percentage of Texas home-schooled children almost tripled in 2020, from 4.5% last spring, to 12.3% by fall 2020. According to the report, by fall of 2020 more than 1 in 10 U.S. and Texas households with school-aged children reported home schooling. The Census Bureau ensured responses indicated true home schooling rather than virtual learning through a public or private school.
Newman said as the pandemic finally recedes, the rise in home schooling could slow.
“I expect that it will to some degree, but what we are hearing from families indicates that a significant portion of families, maybe even a strong majority, will stay in home schooling for the reasons mentioned above,” he said. “Home schooling was already the fastest-growing form of education in America before COVID because of the unique combination of flexibility and stability that it offers. Even if some people decide to go back to public school, the boost that we've seen in home schooling overall will be here to stay.”
Newman said families need to examine their options to decide what is best for their children.
“I would say that if a family is interested in home schooling that they should realize that they don't have to commit to a five-year plan or a 10-year plan for their student,” he said. “It's OK to try it and see if it works. The whole theory of home schooling is that you will adjust your plan as you go to meet the needs of your family and your student. If you try it and you thoughtfully experiment about the best way to do it, you will not break your child and you may find a solution that meets needs your family had even before the pandemic.”