Seattle City Wire

In a nation attempting to move beyond COVID-19-related restrictions placed on personal and professional lives, homeschooling has provided an answer for many parents who work from home.

According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, homeschooling increased from 5.4% in May 2020 to 11.1% by October 2020 in homes with school-age children, as cited by Discovery Institute's American Center for Transforming Education report by Dr. Keri Ingraham.

"The U.S. Census Bureau’s experimental Household Pulse Survey, the first data source to offer both a national and state-level look at the impact of COVID-19 on homeschooling rates, shows a substantial increase from last spring — when the pandemic took hold — to the start of the 2020-2021 school year," a Census Bureau report said. "Using a large, nationally representative sample of U.S. households, the survey shows homeschooling is notably higher than the national benchmarks and offers a glimpse of changes in homeschooling patterns during the pandemic."

Dr. Keri Ingraham | Discovery Institute

Ingraham said that the jump in homeschooling is also significant within the black community. 

"When isolated by demographic, the increase among black households leaped from 3.3% to 16.1% — a near five times increase," Ingraham said in her report.

The decision by parents to homeschool involves many factors, reports have found. One factor that may be surprising is parents not wanting the government telling them what, or how, to teach their children. 

"A lot of families do homeschooling specifically because they're avoiding any kind of entanglements with the government," Christopher Lubienski, a professor of education policy at Indiana University, told NPR. "Part of that is they don't want to respond to the government coming in and asking how they're educating their children. They see it as their right to fly under the radar."

Other factors for choosing homeschooling include health risks of the coronavirus, dissatisfaction with virtual learning, better homeschool programming than traditional schools and the ability of parents to have a say in their children's curriculum. 

The National Home Education Research Institute notes that homeschooled students score 15 to 30 percentile points higher on academic achievement tests than students who attend traditional schools, Ingraham stated. This is in part because education technologies have advanced and made teaching at home easier. 

Ingraham also said that parents have found one major benefit to homeschooling is that a student's time can be used more effectively, while remaining safer from the spread of COVID-19, as schools vacillate between in-person and online instruction and keep changing regulations. Homeschooling parents now, unlike ever before, can educate their students according to their own schedules, while better protecting their health at home.