The Importance and Relevance of Home Education: Global Trends and Insights from the United States

• In Event: Research insights from the Global Education Monitoring Report Fellowship program

Proposal

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) reckons that about 850,000 American children were homeschooled in 1999, while almost two million (about 3.4%) school-age children were homeschooled in 2016. According to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey, 11.1% of households with school-age children reported homeschooling in fall 2020, up from 5.4% of U.S. households reported in spring 2020.

Homeschooling, also known as home education, is often used to describe an alternative way of education as different from the education at traditional schools. This educational phenomenon was salient before the pandemic and became irresistible in the wake of new technology and the ongoing Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.
Present-day home education contains a variety of arrangements, such as the one supplemented by a private tutor or a learning group, the one supplemented by the assistance of online learning, the one supplemented by part-time enrollment in a traditional school, as well as home education that is fully parent-delivered (Cheng and Hamlin, 2021).

This study aims to examine this global issue in light of school closures during the pandemic by introducing the scope, the debates, and the policy issues related to American home education. The study attempts to answer three primary sets of questions: Who are home-educated children, and how many children are studying at home? How well have these home-educated children been doing academically, using American cases, for example? What kind of family background do American home-educated children come from, and how many cultural capitals have these children’s families acquired, compared with traditionally schooled ones?

The research mainly seeks help from the UNESCO Profiles Enhancing Education Reviews (PEER) research, the American National Household Education Study (NHES) data, and insights that have emerged from the academic world and non-profit organizations in the United States and selected countries. In this report, the author first explored the legal status of homeschooling, the number of a family with home-educated children, and the motivation of why families chose home education. Second, the author summarized the approaches and results researchers used to measure home-educated and traditionally schooled learning outcomes from empirical studies. Third, the author analyzed the American National Household Education Study data and compared the profiles of home-educated children with their traditionally educated peers to give a complete picture of the recent home education phenomenon in the United States. In addition, the author discussed how related non-state factors and learning technology acted in American homeschooling movements in the past few decades. The author finally shared education policy implications that could transfer to other education systems with families who will choose education at home.

Author

• Danqing Yin, University of Kansas