Data show that the number of homeschooling families in America is growing, and is similar in size now to the private and charter school sectors. Researching the topic is difficult because there is no centralized “sector” per se, but available evidence also strongly suggests that homeschool families are more diverse today than in the past. Credit for a trove of recent research in this area goes to Johns Hopkins senior research fellow (and former Fordham EEPS scholar) Angela Watson. She is back again, with Kennesaw State University’s Matthew Lee, continuing to dig into troves of data to further sharpen the picture of modern homeschooling from as many angles as possible.
Watson and Lee’s analysis, published in a new working paper, uses data from a nationally representative sample of parents, collected in partnership with the Indiana non-profit organization EdChoice and the polling firm Morning Consult during the spring of 2024. Nearly 3,200 parents completed the survey, accounting for over 5,160 school-aged children. Approximately 250 parents reported homeschooling one or more of their children. This is comparable to parents reporting students in private schools (288) and in non-traditional public options such as charters or intradistrict open enrollment (320).
A quick look at demographic data reiterate the diversity of today’s homeschooling sector. While 69 percent of homeschool parents are White (relative to 56 percent of all parents in the sample), a substantial proportion of Hispanic (15 percent vs. 22 percent) and Black families (10 percent vs. 12 percent) also report homeschooling their children. Homeschool families are less likely to live in urban settings (24 percent vs. 33 percent of all parents in the sample) and more likely to live in rural settings (25 percent vs. 15 percent), which is part of the more-traditional picture of homeschoolers. However, a similar proportion of suburban (41 percent of homeschoolers vs. 43 percent overall) and small-town families (11 percent vs. 9 percent) also choose homeschooling. Homeschool parents are more likely to report being Republicans (44 percent vs. 36 percent overall) and conservative (43 percent vs. 32 percent). Yet a substantial proportion of homeschooling parents identify as Democrats (29 percent), independents (27 percent), liberals (25 percent), and moderates (32 percent). There are more comparisons in the paper, but this is a good illustration to start.
Most homeschooled students were reported as learning full-time at home (71 percent), while 18 percent are in a cooperative setting, 8 percent in a hybrid school, and 3 percent reported in some undefined “other” type of setting. They are generally equally distributed across all grades, with some higher concentrations in transitional grades like 7th and 9th grade (middle-to-high school), as well as 11th grade (nearing graduation). Interestingly, more than one-third of families with at least one homeschooled child also have a student enrolled in a traditional district school. Another 9 percent of homeschoolers have a child in a charter school. In a recent interview, Watson called this finding a “big deal,” as it is solid evidence that the choice to homeschool is not the wholesale rejection of the institutions of public or private education that it was historically thought to be. Different students have different needs, and the widespread school closures of 2020 and 2021 both brought this fact to the fore and gave parents from all walks of life the permission (or determination) needed to branch out and find the best fit for their own young learners.
Additionally, Watson and Lee embedded a fully randomized conjoint experiment into their survey. In such an experiment, respondents are presented with consecutive sets of hypothetical options with randomly assigned attributes and asked to select their preferred option within the set. This version presented parents with six sets of twelve hypothetical high school graduates and asked them to identify which they thought was the most “successful” graduate within each set. They used this method to sample parent perspectives on five components of student success: standardized test scores, college matriculation, civic outcomes, academic skills, and religiosity. Students with strong test score performance (“average” or “above average” scores) were seen by all parents—homeschool and non-homeschool alike—as the most successful graduates overall, with students who had been accepted to “prestigious colleges” next, followed by those with “active community involvement” and those who had been accepted to a plain vanilla “college or university.” Students with average academic skills (such as literacy and numeracy), as well as minimal religious involvement, were rated at the lowest end of the success scale by all parents. The only factors homeschool parents rated differently from non-homeschool parents was in placing less emphasis on admission to a prestigious college and in rating even further down graduates who were not active in religion. The variation was statistically significant for these two factors, but small in magnitude.
Like most of Angela Watson’s recent research into modern homeschooling, this report seems more like baseline setting than breaking new ground. But creating that foundational understanding—what, where, how, and why families choose to homeschool some or all of their children—is an important act of “newness” in itself. Revamping tired stereotypes of religiously-motivated rural White families with an aversion to any institutional education trappings—especially in the post-pandemic world where homeschooling is more appealing and achievable than ever—allows for a clarified picture of who is in the “sector” and why they chose it. Not to mention the fact that, despite their choices outside of a traditional educational system, homeschoolers seem to want similar outcomes for students from their participation. These are the data we seek in all other education sectors, and this work will help put homeschooling research onto equal footing with options like charter and private schools. It’s invaluable.
SOURCE: Angela R. Watson and Matthew H. Lee, “Who Homeschools and What Does ‘Success’ Mean to Them? Experimental Evidence from a National Sample,” Harvard Kennedy School working paper (June 2025).
