Number of San Diego Kids Homeschooled Has Nearly Doubled Since 2017

Nicole Holderman had always planned on transitioning her kids to homeschooling but wanted to wait until they were older. Part of Holderman’s beef with the school system was cultural. She felt much of what was taught in what she calls “government schools,” didn’t align with her family’s Christian or political values.  

Then, the pandemic hit. Holderman said her school district revoked vaccine exemptions she had secured for her children during the pandemic. That was the final straw for she and her husband. The experience of distance learning of the pandemic served as a trial run and it showed them they were perfectly capable of managing their children’s education. It also had the added benefit of allowing them to more closely align their children’s education with their values. 

“In government schools, kids are told what happened, they’re told what to believe and they’re told what to memorize. But in homeschooling, we have the ability to teach our children how to learn and how to critically think,” Holderman said. 

Though the reasons for choosing to homeschool children vary widely, Holderman isn’t alone. According to data gathered by The Washington Post, the number of children being homeschooled in the United States has increased by about 50 percent since the 2017-18 school year. But locally, that increase was even higher. The number of children homeschooled shot up a whopping 150 percent in the 2020-21 school year.  

That huge jump is understandable. When schools shut down in the wake of the spread of Covid, many parents were confronted with a taste of what homeschooling looks like. The numbers crept down slightly last year, but the number of children who are homeschooled is still nearly double what it was five years ago. The durability of that surge seems to indicate that homeschooling, long a contentious topic in education circles, may be here to stay. 

Over the past five years, public school enrollment locally has also dropped by about 6 percent.  

Still, the total number of homeschooled children remains a very small part of the whole. Five years ago, homeschooled children accounted for just under half a percent. Last year they made up just under one percent. According to both the Post and local homeschooling advocates, however, the 88 percent increase over the past five years is likely an undercount.  

That’s because gathering data about homeschooled children in California can be exceedingly difficult. California parents interested in homeschooling their children are required to file a Private School Affidavit. The state uses the affidavits to keep track of how many private schools exist, and also exempt children from public school. There are a variety of requirements of private school instruction, like the option for students to study subjects like math, English and social sciences, and that instructors be capable of teaching students. But even those requirements are loose, as instructors are not required to receive any form of credentialing or training. 

So, what the Post did was count all California private schools with fewer than six students as homeschools. It’s an imperfect distinction, but the best data they could find, the researchers wrote. 

The Post did not include the number of children enrolled in charter schools that facilitate homeschooling. Sara Shields, who runs the San Diego County-based Homeschool Collective, said that’s likely to mean the numbers only represent a fraction of total parents homeschooling. The majority of parents she’s connected with go that route. 

The public charter option is popular because the money allotted to each child by the state follows them, which allows parents to spend that money on things like approved curriculum or enrichment activities like tutors, guitar lessons or Muay Thai training. 

Some non-classroom-based charter schools have even allowed public money to be spent on Disneyland passes or Medieval Times.  

Shields’ work revolves around building community and sharing educational resources for homeschooling parents. She said some of the stigma of homeschooling melted away during the pandemic. That has allowed parents to experiment with new ways to teach their children. Shields’ family, for example, uses a form of homeschooling called child-led unschooling, where children help guide parents toward what interests them.

While parents choose to homeschool for a variety of reasons, Shields thinks dissatisfaction with what schools were teaching children played a role for many.  

“I think some of the parents who are kind of more awake and aware and observant, saw (what schools teach) and were like, ‘Whoa, I don’t want my children to be exposed to this. I want to control what they’re being exposed to,’” Shields said. 

Gina Riley, the program leader of the adolescent special education program at Hunter College, has studied homeschooling for years. She said that the pandemic-era rise in homeschooling is partially due to precisely what Shields described and Holderman experienced – exposure to the concept. 

“When the pandemic happened, people got a taste of what it was to homeschool, and I think there’s been a rise because they kind of liked it,” Riley said. “People really saw a way to integrate schooling their child with their everyday life,” she said. 

In the decades prior to the pandemic, homeschooling was dominated by White parents who chose to homeschool for religious reasons, Riley said. But in recent years it’s gone more mainstream. Riley’s seen a significant diversification in the kinds of people who homeschool, both when it comes to race and income level.  

She also said the reasons they’ve chosen to do so are no longer as uniform as they used to be. Those have ranged from wanting to give children with special needs more flexibility to dissatisfaction with districts or curricula that parents like Holderman expressed. 

Riley said part of what’s enabled the increase may be an increase in remote or hybrid work options for parents. Although the data hasn’t caught up, that might have led to a corresponding increase in alternatives to in-person schooling, like virtual or HyFlex instruction, which give students more options when it comes to how instruction is delivered. 

Because of this new paradigm, Riley thinks it’s unlikely that homeschooling will be ushered back into the shadows. It also may force further changes in public schools, which are still bound by the realities of funding by enrollment and average daily attendance. 

“Education really hasn’t changed that much since 1930. You look at pictures and you still see the same kinds of classrooms. You might see some different furniture and laptops around. But the structure of school is basically the same,” Riley said. “I think this might be a call for schools to really look at the structure of the school and think about how they can be more flexible, not only in terms of timing, but also within curriculum,” she said. 

Her confidence is buoyed by the fact that research shows that many homeschool students fare well, or even better, than their peers in public schools. Still, not everyone’s sold on the promise of homeschooling.  

Elizabeth Bartholet, a public interest professor of law emeritus at Harvard, has for years been skeptical about homeschooling.  

She told the Harvard Magazine in 2020 that the unregulated nature of homeschooling in many states poses a risk to children, not only because of the potential for child abuse to go undetected but because the untested quality of instruction may not guarantee children their right to a “meaningful education.”  

But for Holderman, there’s no looking back. Even if the laws relating to vaccines were repealed, she said her family has no interest in sending their children back to public schools. The benefits she feels they’ve found with homeschooling are too great, as are the downsides of public schools. 

“We are just not willing to partner with the government for our kids’ upbringing. There’s so much indoctrination around kids in school these days that doesn’t align with our values. School’s not just about learning your ‘one, two threes’ and ‘A, B, C’s’ anymore, it’s about creating a liberal indoctrination of children,” Holderman said.