National Center for Education Statistics
July 2004
Everyone knows that home schooling has grown in recent years, but real data are famously hard to come by. So this latest issue brief from NCES is welcome. It concludes that about 1.1 million U.S students were home schooled in 2003, or 2.2 percent of the school age population - a 29 percent increase since 1999. The survey also takes a crack at discerning the reasons parents choose home schooling, and here the data are instructive: Just 30 percent of home schoolers cite religious or moral instruction as their primary reason, while close to half say they are concerned about either school environment or the academic quality of the schools their children would attend. Clearly, home schooling has become a choice option that springs from some of the same motivations as charters and vouchers. So can we please drop the religious nut jokes? (Jay Mathews of the Washington Post reached the same conclusion from his recent anecdotal survey.) To view this short research brief, click here.