How the Other Half Homeschools

Education A record number of American parents are finding that the most affordable “good school” is in their own home. Photo by Bill O'Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images Earlier this summer, while reading Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream by historian Dixie Dillon Lane, I wrote the following note in the margins: “Will opposition to homeschooling become a luxury belief domiciled among elites?” At the time, the note was just a hasty thought scribbled down with no particular examples of elite opposition sticking out in my mind. Then, on July 14, I’ve Had It podcast hosts Jennifer Welch and Angie Sullivan handed me such an example on a silver platter. “What I have absolutely f—ing had it with is watching some of the stupidest people I went to school with decide they’re qualified to homeschool their children,” a caller identified only as Ellie from Minnesota told Welch and Sullivan. “I can’t stand these morons attempting to homeschool their children when they probably shouldn’t have even had children to start with.” Welch and Sullivan reacted with laughter and grins. “I just think homeschooling is a bad idea from soup to nuts. I don’t care if you’re a nuclear physicist. I think it’s just f—ing weird as f— that you want your kids around you all day, every day,” Sullivan said. “America has a crazy Christian problem…. I’m talking about the freaks of the megachurch,” Welch said. “I’m talking about the ones that have schools that are these crazy indoctrination factories, hate academies, and then when that hit isn’t strong enough, then they go to homeschooling.” Welch and Sullivan rightly faced backlash for their comments. Although the progressive podcasters are from the heartland (Oklahoma City, to be exact), their views on homeschooling, rather than on, say, health care or transgenderism, may be what really separates them from normal Americans. They are elites. Welch appeared on The New Yorker Radio Hour with David Remnick in January. Welch and Sullivan donned evening gowns to receive a GLAAD Media Award from Laverne Cox in March. Middle-class Americans increasingly approve of and practice homeschooling, while laptop liberals like Welch and Sullivan are turning it into a punchline, falling out of step with normal people’s experiences. Who are today’s homeschoolers, and how did the practice become so widespread? (More than 5 percent of American children are now homeschooled.) Lane’s Skipping School answers those questions and many others. Lane, herself a homeschooling mother, reports from inside the movement but doesn’t let that color her conclusions. In some ways, Skipping School is a response to “irresponsible research and reporting” on homeschooling post-2020, but Lane doesn’t present a one-sided case. She carefully sifts through survey data, legal cases, and personal stories to present a portrait of homeschooling that shows its growing place in the American mainstream. Lane writes of early homeschoolers in the mid-20th century, when education experts’ influence was waxing and parental control was waning, that in “taking the shocking step of removing their children from school, [parents] were in fact acting in a characteristically American manner, privileging independence over state authority. These innovators foreshadowed a new American paradox: a nation plagued by distrust yet booming with consolidation.” Welch and Sullivan might be surprised to learn that homeschooling is a racially diverse movement (in 2016, less than 60 percent of homeschoolers reported as white). Parents choose to homeschool for a variety of overlapping reasons, with religious motivation being just one factor. “We can say with some confidence that… the overall motivation of homeschoolers as a group was almost certainly not primarily religious and has grown to be less so over time,” Lane concludes after digging into survey data from the National Household Education Surveys Program. Lane begins Skipping School with accounts of homeschooling’s early days in the 1950s, when the California mother Mary Turner was questioned in court for homeschooling her children. Mary and William Turner were middle-class, educated, and patriotic, yet a judge ordered their children to return to the schoolhouse. Homeschoolers in many states remained under the radar until roughly 1990, when “the playgroups and associations that families had initiated… transformed into a publicly recognized social movement.” Homeschoolers now had groups like the Home School Legal Defense Association, founded in 1983, to back them up. By 2010, homeschooling was part of the mainstream. Lane writes, “It is both practiced by enough Americans and accepted by enough Americans to be considered a minor norm within the larger American landscape.” Woven throughout the book but never pushed to the forefront is the importance of socioeconomic factors in families’ education decisions. Moms often discuss online whether it’s a privilege or a sacrifice to be a stay-at-home mother. Homeschoolers are caught up in a similar debate. Lane reports that “the income levels of homeschooling families were spread across the socioeconomic spectrum, on average only slightly less wealthy than the national average.” She doesn’t dig into why homeschoolers are less wealthy on average—could it be that mothers are doing unpaid work as their children’s teachers rather than earning income? Perhaps that’s only one piece of the puzzle. But it surely undercuts the narrative that all homeschool mothers (and mothers who don’t earn income) sit on a pedestal of privilege. Some homeschool families would probably opt for private schools if it were within their means. Lane, who has taught at Christendom College, traces the roots of Catholic homeschooling to the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s. Parochial school tuition became more expensive, pricing out many Catholic families, and some of those same families also became concerned about the “Catholicity” of Catholic schools. By the 2024–25 academic year, there were roughly twice as many homeschool students as Catholic school students, according to a February study from the National Home Education Research Institute. Lane says that it was never inevitable that the nascent homeschooling movement would survive its under-the-radar days. Yet many Americans today know homeschooling families or even are themselves homeschoolers. Could economics play more of a role in this phenomenon than we realize? In a viral Substack article titled “Young Adults Are Poor Despite Every Metric Which Suggests Otherwise,” the self-identified legacy advisor Johann Kurtz writes that young Americans now need “extraordinary income” to obtain what previous generations took for granted, namely a spouse, house, children, good school, and good neighbors. A record number of American parents are finding that the most affordable “good school” is in their own home. Parents are continuing to homeschool because it works academically. Looking at homeschoolers’ ACT scores, Lane describes 21st century homeschooling as “academically promising (at a minimum, as effective as public schooling).” Meanwhile, data on public school students’ performance are a mixed bag, if even that. But the era of the tiger mom is over; the MAHA mom is ascendant. And the MAHA mom and homeschool mom are merging, as one Idaho mother demonstrated in a video declaring “WE HOMESCHOOL FOR HEALTH,” adding, “7-8 hours indoors in a typical school environment is detrimental to my kids’ health and development. That’s my why. What’s yours?” She’s not alone. “A majority of parents place less of a premium on their children’s academic success than their mental well-being,” reads a 2023 report from EducationWeek. But can homeschooling maintain out-group approval without high test scores to make the case for its existence? Americans like numbers, the bigger the better. But aggregate data will never be able to tell stories like that of a homeschool student with learning disabilities who, through special parent attention, achieves academic success that won’t show up as an outlier on any chart but represents great individual improvement. Perhaps the MAHA homeschool mom can shift the terms of the debate, especially as researchers uncover just how backwards traditional schooling practices are when it comes to the health and success of our kids. It’s wonderful that parents with few options to effectively educate their children can turn to homeschooling. But what does it say about our society that so many have to? Lane described midcentury America as “a nation plagued by distrust yet booming with consolidation,” and that description still holds true today. One word that comes up over and over again in Skipping School is “postinstitutional,” which Lane associates with a public that is “highly individualized but also increasingly integrated with institutions and wider communities.” Homeschooling has developed “from an anti-institutional movement into a postinstitutional one,” she writes. Subscribe Today Get daily emails in your inbox Countless conservative scholars have written about institutional failure regarding everything from elite universities to Congress. The failure of so many public schools to provide a safe environment and decent education for future citizens may be the greatest failure of all, and one that costs not just parents but society at large. A few decades ago, sending your child to the local public school for kindergarten was a frictionless decision. Now, parents concerned about everything from AI reading apps to cross-dressing teachers are diverting time away from other pursuits just to find an adequate place for their children to learn the ABCs. Sometimes inefficiency is worth it, but it’s mighty inefficient for so many conservative families to have to figure out how to run their own personal elementary schools. That’s why so many homeschooling families seem to be reinventing the one-room schoolhouse from first principles. (Of course, one-room schoolhouse sounds too Little House on the Prairie, so “microschool” is the preferred term.) Modernity has revealed that many institutions are fake at best and evil at worst. Families can just band together to reinvent schooling. Such self-sufficiency is a characteristically American trait, and one that I hope will help education in America get back on track.