Last week, the US Department of Education released the Parent and Family Involvement Survey, which describes the state of homeschooling between 2012 and 2016. Homeschooled students don’t often get much attention from the policy world, but given that about 1.7 million students are homeschooled — more than triple the number of voucher and tax credit scholarship students combined — it’s worth examining what the survey can tell us about how homeschooling has changed over time. This year’s survey included three important takeaways. 

One, the total number of homeschoolers appears to have
dropped for the first time in twenty years, from 1.8 to 1.7 million between
2012 and 2016. That drop itself isn’t statistically significant, meaning there
was no measureable change between these two years, but that lack of change is
clearly important when you examine the trend over time.

For over a decade prior to 2012, homeschooling numbers were surging, doubling between 1999 and 2012. But that momentum seems to have stalled out. Whether this pattern is a hitch in growth, a plateau, or the beginning of a decline will take another round of data, but it’s certainly the first drop we have seen this century. While a number of demographics are homeschooling less, the biggest declines seem to be among white and rural families.

Two, homeschooling is growing more racially diverse. While whites
are still a majority of homeschoolers (59 percent), they make up 10 percentage
points less of the total than in 2012 (69 percent), a difference that is large,
but not statistically significant.  On the other hand, Hispanics showed a statistically
significant surge from 15 percent of total homeschoolers in 2012 to 26 percent.

Three, it’s possible that homeschooling is becoming less
religiously motivated. From 2012 to 2016, there was a 13 point drop (from 64
percent to 51 percent) in parents who homeschool because they find it important “to provide religious
instruction.” Similarly, the percent of parents who homeschool because it was important to “provide moral instruction”
dropped from 77 percent to 67 percent. For both of these, the percentage of
parents offering them as the “most
important” reason stayed flat. Now, the percentages of other reasons that
were important also went down since 2012, so it’s possible that parents are
naming fewer important reasons in general. One change does stand out: The
percentage reporting the most important reason to homeschool was concern about
the environments in other schools jumped from 25 to 34 percent.

What to make of all this? To begin, we should keep a close watch on whether these trends hold up over time, or whether they’re an aberration. Should the numbers hold up, they could portend a version of homeschooling that’s considerably smaller, less white, and less religious. Those would all be a sea change from the homeschooling we’ve known for the past twenty years. Time will tell if that actually happens.

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