Giving Compass' Take:

• Nat Malkus and RJ Martin examine 2019's Parent and Family Involvement Survey which included three important takeaways regarding homeschooling. 

• What can these trends tell us about the future of homeschooling? How does this affect the education system as a whole?

• Here are five advantages of homeschooling. 

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.

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.

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.

Read the full article about homeschooling by Nat Malkus and RJ Martin at AEI.