As a recent edition of the Journal of School Choice makes abundantly clear, modern homeschooling has changed from the traditional—perhaps even stereotypical—model of the past. Equally important: The reasons families opt for homeschooling also appear to be changing. Surveys are finding that, rather than faith or even academics, concerns about school safety are key motivators. But what exactly does this mean? New research, also from that journal edition, aims to provide details on the specific issues driving parents to embrace homeschooling today.
The research team starts with a quantitative analysis, whose findings are further illuminated via qualitative means. Quantitative data come from a long-running survey program administered by Morning Consult and the education policy nonprofit EdChoice. The program has, since January 2020, conducted monthly and nationally representative surveys of American adults on a range of issues and trends about “K–12 education ecosystems.” Among other questions, these surveys ask parents to identify the school type their children attend (options include public district, public charter, private, and homeschool). EdChoice publishes regular high-level reports on the results, but this research uses raw, individualized responses from June 2022 through March 2024. The survey began including questions on parent perceptions of school safety in June 2022, hence the specific start date. The full sample comprises 26,708 respondents who were parents with at least one child enrolled in kindergarten through twelfth grades. Among these parents, 20,057 identified themselves as having at least one child enrolled in a public school within their assigned school district, 3,052 with at least one child in private school, 2,124 with homeschooled students, 1,521 with charter school students, and 2,051 with at least one child enrolled in a public school outside their assigned district. These subcategories are not nationally representative, which is important to the findings.
The researchers obtain the qualitative data via focus groups held virtually in April 2024 with a total of thirteen participants. All were located in the same unnamed large urban metropolitan region of the southeastern United States and all had homeschooled their child (or children) for multiple years. However, only two parents had exclusively homeschooled, with the rest indicating a mix of public and private schooling. It is unclear whether any focus group participants were part of the survey sample; but as they were all recruited independently of the survey, likely not.
Quantitative findings first: Nearly half (48 percent) of the homeschooling parents surveyed selected “safe environment” as one of their three most important reasons for choosing that mode of education for their child. This number matches that of private school parents, but is nearly twice the rate of in-district public school parents who named a safe environment as a top-three reason for choosing that school type. It also is significantly larger than the number for charter school parents and out-of-district public school peers. Homeschooling parents also strongly cited individual/one-on-one attention as a factor in choosing that school type, far exceeding the rate of parents in any other school type. In deeper/more-specific responses, homeschool parents indicated less concern with physical safety (bullying, school shootings, etc.) than their peers in other sectors, but more concern with mental health and wellbeing safety issues (such as stress and anxiety), as well as what could be termed “academic deprivation.” Parents who reported having switched a child from another school type into homeschooling overwhelming cited excessive stress, bullying, and academic needs not being met—almost equally—as the primary reason for the switch. Switchers into/between non-homeschooling options cited a larger and more diffuse list of primary reasons for their switch.
The qualitative findings shed further light on parental concerns about safety. Even if they don’t have recent experience with formal education in school buildings or direct experience with physical violence occurring in them, all homeschool parents interviewed for the focus groups were well aware that events such as in-school fights, student bullying, and online threats occur. By their personal estimates, negative events are more likely to happen in those congregant settings than in smaller and more controlled settings such as meet-ups in a park or a fellow homeschooling family’s home—although participants did recall some instances of threats within such groups. The control aspect was a common refrain among parents, covering numerous areas of children’s educational experience. For one example, homeschool parents appreciated that a larger ratio of adults to children was likely to be present at any kind of student gathering than would be typical of a public or private school, thus providing a strong deterrent to misbehavior or violence. For another example, meeting special learning needs was fully in the control of homeschool parents, many of whom recounted numerous failings by public and private schools in carrying out individualized education programs. The desire for “student safety” was ubiquitous among focus group participants but was revealed as a wide-ranging and highly-personal term without common definition.
The researchers cite a few important limitations to their work, including the over-representation of students with special educational needs in both the quantitative and qualitative data, the over-representation of urban families, and the possibility that students’ perceptions of various school settings differ from their parents’ perceptions. However, it seems very clear that what is driving changes comes from experiences in and perceptions of formal schooling environments. Families are not moving toward some homeschooling paradise—but away from public and private schools whose environments are seen as uncontrolled and unsafe, no matter how those terms are defined.
SOURCE: Christy Batts, John Kristof, and Kelsie Yohe, “‘That Percentage of Safer’: A Mixed-Methods Analysis of Homeschool Parents’ Perspectives of School Safety,” Journal of School Choice (December 2024).
