H!
HelloHumans!
Episodes

Research

Homeschooling After the Pandemic: Scope, Motivations, and Trade-offs

Homeschooling in the U.S. has durably expanded since the pandemic, with participation roughly doubling from ~2.8% pre-pandemic to somewhere between 3.4% (NCES household surveys) and 6% (state administrative data) of K–12 students — and a second wave of growth in 2023–24 suggests the shift is structural, not crisis-driven. The core tension is not whether homeschooling has grown, but whether its apparent academic and social benefits reflect homeschooling itself or the advantages of the families most able to choose it — and whether that choice, aggregated across millions of families, quietly defunds and destabilizes public schools that disproportionately serve children who cannot leave. A largely invisible third problem cuts across both sides: the gendered labor costs absorbed almost entirely by mothers, the near-total absence of data from the Global South and East Asia, and the fact that for most of the world the "school vs. home" binary simply does not describe how children actually learn.

Sources (50)

Sign up to read the full research briefing

Sign up