Homeschooling in the United States:Trends and Characteristics

New Institutions

Perhaps the largest impact of home schoolers has been the concomitant entry of new educational organizations into the field. Many private organizations and enterprises have entered the K-12 distance education field with their sights set on home schoolers as a primary audience (Hill 2000).

The State of Florida has developed an extensive set of courses that can be taken over the Internet for high school credit by home schoolers and others who choose to use this resource, and Illinois is developing a similar program (Carothers 2000, Trotter 2001).Meanwhile several for-profit ventures have entered the field, offering courses and, in one case, accredited diplomas over the Internet (Trotter 1999, Walsh 2001).

If home schooling continues to grow, demand will grow for the types of services that are starting to be offered by public schools and distance education providers. A result will be pressure on schools to design school curricula that allow students and parents to pick and choose what they like. According to some observers, another result will be the creation of new schools and school-like institutions built around the common needs and concerns of home-schooling families (Hill 2000).

Despite these broad impacts there have been few attempts to examine the characteristics of home schoolers and their households in the U.S. The few studies that have been conducted have relied on highly selective samples (Rudner 1999, Welner & Welner 1999) or have examined selective issues without giving a thorough overview of the home-schooled population (Smith & Sikkink 1999). The main exception is an especially careful attempt by researchers associated with the U.S. Department of Education to reconcile results from two major national surveys measuring the home school population (Henke et al. 2000). Unfortunately, the authors of this publication did not have available to them additional survey data that shed light on the prevalence of home schooling.

In sum, despite the importance of the topic, we are left without basic information on the nature of home schooling in the United States. How many children are home-schooled? Is that number increasing? What are the social, demographic and geographic characteristics of households that engage in home schooling? Is home schooling concentrated among rural families? In what regions of the country is it most prevalent? What motivations do parents cite for choosing home schooling -- religion, concerns about school quality, or other motivations? What are the barriers that keep them from using other forms of education that meet some or all of these concerns -- cost of private schools, disaffection from schools in general or other barriers?