If it wasn’t the Covid closures, maybe it was the recording of a contentious school board meetingthat went viral. Or a TikTok video posted by a woke teacher. Or perhaps the relentless reports of declining academic standards. Given the heated discourse around almost every aspect of public education, it’s hardly surprising that more and more families are opting out. According to the Census Experimental Household Pulse survey, in the last three years, the families of 1.8 million children made the switch, totaling 4.3 million American children homeschooled in 2022. The growth is steady and expected to continue. But glib calls to jump ship gloss over some persistent challenges inherent in homeschooling.
I discovered these challenges firsthand thirteen years ago when my family moved from Brooklyn to rural upstate New York and began homeschooling our kids, then six and eleven. We were less motivated by school board battles or declining academic standards than a general dissatisfaction with the one-size-fits-all classroom model. In Brooklyn, my kids had gone to a lively, sought-after public school that emphasized project-based learning within an otherwise traditional classroom. Even that school had been a poor fit for my quirky older child. I thought he was neither nurtured to his full potential nor assisted in his difficulties coping with the rhythms of the school day. My younger child was sociable, poised, and academically adept, which meant she was often ignored by teachers and partnered with difficult kids to keep them focused. The fault, I thought, lay not in the choice of teachers or curriculum, but in the very concept of assembly-line education for children, a common complaint of homeschooling enthusiasts. Coloring my opinion was the memory of my own uninspiring school years. We were ready for something different. We jumped in.