A valuable recent edition of the Journal of School Choice focused entirely on research around homeschooling, aiming to add useful data and rigorous analysis to this little-studied education sector. The work published in that edition gives us a new appreciation for homeschooling but also illustrates how much we still need to learn. It is as much about refining the research process as it teasing out the findings. We at Fordham have already reviewed two of the reports in that issue, and here is another report, in which analysts test some interesting strategies to identify data on homeschooling from surveys asking parents about other aspects of their children’s education.
Missouri does not live up to its famous nickname in at least one regard: The Show Me State is one of twenty-nine states that do not require homeschooling to be reported by parents to any agency. Amy Shelton and Collin Hitt, two Saint Louis University researchers, recently tested three approaches to estimating homeschool enrollment in Missouri using publicly available datasets.
Their first approach uses data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) from 2008 to 2023. ACS samples households continuously throughout the country and uses those responses to estimate the demographics and socioeconomic conditions of the entire population, broken down at the state and community levels. Among the education-related questions, ACS asks respondents to indicate school type and grade (if applicable) for each person in the household, and reports the results in three bands—ages 5–9, 10–14, and 15–17.
Shelton and Hitt compare the population of school-age children in Missouri to the totals in the three age bands reported by ACS to arrive at an annual estimate of the number and percentage of school-age children enrolled in each type of school. This approach is a start, but it is far from definitive for two reasons. First, because the ACS education categories are “public school,” “private school, homeschool,” and “has not attended in the last three months.” It is entirely plausible that homeschool families might choose either “has not attended” or “homeschool” as an option for their children on this survey, obscuring the true numbers of homeschoolers in both categories. Second, compulsory education in Missouri begins at age seven, leaving a swath of five- and six-year-olds who could be artificially inflating the “has not attended” numbers.
The analysts’ second approach compares the ACS data to two other sources, looking to eliminate as many verified private and public school students from the ACS categories as possible. Private school enrollment data come from the Private School Universe Survey (PSS) administered every other year to private-school leaders across the country by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), and public school numbers come from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
The analysts clean both sets of data to match ACS as closely as possible, including estimating numbers for the out-years when PSS was not administered. Both are analyzed looking for trends—decreases and increases in students in public and private schools, but decreases in particular—that could equate to changes in enrollment within the three ACS school type categories. Shelton and Hitt zero in on an observed decrease of 16,000 students attending public schools between the 2019–20 and 2021–22 school years—that is, through the first years of the coronavirus pandemic, when enrollment patterns shifted nationwide. Private school enrollment in Missouri increased by approximately 1,800 students in the same time period, but that only accounts for 11 percent of the net public-school decrease. This suggests that the majority of the increase also observed in ACS’s “private school, homeschool” category over that time is due to increased homeschooling participation in Missouri. However, despite heroic attempts to align the three datasets, both the lowest (ages 5–9) and the highest (15–17) age bands likely suffer from noisy data based on Missouri’s specific K–12 framework, as noted above.
The third analytical approach utilizes data from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey (HPS), which began in April 2020 to examine trends in the experiences of American families during the pandemic and beyond. The first waves of the HPS asked respondents if, at any time during February 2020, any children in the household were enrolled in a public or private school or educated in a homeschool setting in kindergarten through twelfth grade. Subsequent surveys asked the same question regarding the 2020–21, 2021–22, 2022–23, and 2023–24 school years. Importantly, public and private school enrollment are grouped as one response category on the HPS, while homeschool is offered as second, standalone category of school enrollment—that is, formal schooling versus homeschooling.
They pool these results along with Missouri-specific household surveys conducted by St. Louis University’s PRiME Center research hub in 2021 and again in 2024, concluding that approximately 7.26 percent of Missouri’s school-age children were homeschooled in fall 2021, including 6.92 percent of children in grades 4–8 (once again, the most accurate age/grade bands due to data misalignment). Those numbers increased to 10.49 percent of all Missouri school-age children and 9.9 percent of fourth through eighth graders when parents were polled in 2024.
Putting all of this together, Shelton and Hitt conclude that, in 2024, approximately 61,000 Missouri children ages 5–17 were homeschooled, a substantial increase from 37,000 children in 2020. Put into perspective: That is roughly equal to the public school enrollments in St. Louis City and Kansas City combined. It also confirms for them, as accurately as existing data will allow, that the anecdotal pandemic-era boost in homeschooling indeed occurred in Missouri and persisted beyond the restoration of “schooling as usual” in the state.
The authors recommend that state leaders interested in supporting families take note of these findings and craft policies according to the true state of play in education, which appears to be different than most policymakers and pundits believe it is. Additionally, Shelton and Hitt urge researchers in other states to replicate their work. ACS, NCES, and HPS data are available for every state, and the statewide polling that the PRiME Center conducted—which put all of the other Missouri datasets into focus—can be done simply and inexpensively in other states. It’s a huge step forward for homeschooling research.
SOURCE: Amy Shelton and Collin Hitt, “Taking Attendance: Estimating Homeschooling Populations in States without Official Homeschool Data – a Pilot Analysis in Missouri,” Journal of School Choice (December 2024).
