Homeschooling Exploding in America Post-COVID, Especially in Florida: Report

TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA — The government’s COVID policies helped fuel an already burgeoning homeschooling movement in America – resulting in “an unprecedented period of growth in American homeschooling,” according to a new report.

Analysis published this week by the Washington Post reviewed data from thousands of school districts, beginning with the start of the 2017-2018 school year, and found that: “Homeschooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education.”

The report also shows Florida has more homeschoolers than any other state in America. Nine of the ten school districts with the most homeschooled children are in the Sunshine State. Hillsborough County, the seventh largest school district in America, led all school districts with over 10,680 homeschoolers. The county has seen a 74 percent growth in homeschooling since 2017.

Homeschooling is likely to only grow in Florida now that the state’s newly minted universal school choice program offers homeschooling parents $8,000 per child.

Governor Ron DeSantis championed the state’s school choice legislation and has been an ally to parents who choose to educate their children at home. In May, the governor spoke at the Florida Homeschooling Convention in Orlando.

“What we’re doing is taking education into our own hands as Floridians,” DeSantis said. “And you’re doing it as parents in the homeschool movement. We’re doing it in Tallahassee as governor and our Legislature to say, ‘Education is something we’ve got to get right. You cannot have a society in which the education [system] just totally collapses into a lot of these side issues.”

Nationwide, the Post reported that the number of home-schooled students increased 51 percent over the past six school years, far outpacing the 7 percent growth in private school enrollment. Meanwhile public school enrollment dropped 4 percent during that same time period. 

Additionally, the increase in homeschooling crossed every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics.

“There was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year, the most recent for which district-level federal enrollment data are available,” the paper notes. 

“That’s roughly quadruple the number of districts that had rates that high in 2017-2018, signifying a sea change in how many communities educate their children and an urgent challenge for a public education system that faced dwindling enrollment even before the pandemic.”