Homeschooling is Growing
In today's world, it seems that almost any topic is open for debate. While I was gathering facts for this article, I was quite surprised to find some of the issues I thought were settled are actually still being openly discussed.
Most of this information comes straight from the homeschool, homeschooling, how to homeschol, homeschool is pros. Careful reading to the end virtually guarantees that you'll know what they know.
Homeschooling Is Growing Rapidly in Many States of the United States
Patricia Lines, a former Education Commission of the States staff member and now a federal Department of Education official, has estimated the homeschooled population from time to time. Her article "Estimating the Home Schooled Population," a working paper of the Department of Education published in October 1991, is the most thorough available on this subject. Her abstract said, "Curriculum suppliers, state departments of education, and home school leaders, are the sources used to estimate that between 248,500 and 353,500 school-aged children (K-12) were educated at home in the 1990-91 school year." Ms. Lines's working paper (OR 91-537) should be easily found in any library that subscribes to the ERIC microfiche series. The paper notes that many states have no official reporting requirement, leaving sales of homeschooling curricula or membership in homeschooling organizations as the main data for deriving estimates in those states.
Ms. Lines has now returned to the issue of the size of the homeschooling population in the United States. She has put together a new working paper, "Homeschoolers: Estimating Numbers and Growth" [link to a different Web site] on the number of homeschoolers in the United States, estimating, based on official state counts of homeschoolers, that "around 700,000 to 750,000" children were homeschooled in the 1995-1996 school year.
Those states that do have official reporting of the number of homeschoolers show steady increases year by year. Increase in the overall number of homeschoolers year by year is certain, but some families give up homeschooling for a time or even permanently, while more and more start. (Reasons for giving up homeschooling range from economic pressures causing both parents to work outside the home, in part to pay taxes for the government-operated schools, and barriers to homeschooler participation in school programs such as sports teams or musical groups unless the children enroll in the government-operated school.) This phenomenon of "churn" in the homeschooled population means that the issue of homeschoolers reentering the government-operated school system is an one of growing importance for policy makers, who must decide grade placement for homeschoolers entering age-graded schools, allocate "credits" toward graduation, or otherwise apply the bureaucratic regulations of the classroom school system to children who formerly learned outside it.
There's a lot to understand about homeschool, homeschooling, how to homeschol, homeschool is. We were able to provide you with some of the facts above, but there is still plenty more to write about in subsequent articles.
