NCES HOMESCHOOLING DATA: 2012 Complete Report

Record: Jeremy Redford, Danielle Battle, Stacey Bielick, and Sarah Grady, Homeschooling in the United States: 2012, (NCES 2016-096) (U.S. Department of Education: Washington, D.C., 2016) [Available Here]

Introduction: Every four or five years, the National Household Education Survey developed by the National Center for Education Statistics includes questions about homeschooling. This survey provides us with the best information available about homeschooling because it is consists of a representative, randomized sample of the entire American population. In 2013, we summarized some preliminary findings from this 2012 data-set; however, we now have the complete findings at our disposal. As I summarize this article, I will be making frequent reference to the previous survey from 2007, which we summarized here.

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HOME IS WHERE THE SCHOOL IS: Do Homeschooling Laws Increase Homeschooling?

Record: Rachana Bhatt, “Home is Where the School Is: The Impact of Homeschool Legislation on School Choice” in Journal of School Choice 8, no. 2 (2014): 192-212. [Abstract Here]

Summary:  Bhatt, an economics professor at Georgia State University, here presents a sophisticated statistical model to try to determine the degree to which a State’s passage of an explicit law granting homeschooling rights to parents increases the tendency for parents to choose homeschooling.

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The 2013 NCES Homeschooling Data

Every four years the National Center for Education Statistics’ enormous National Household Education Survey includes questions about homeschooling.  The results of the latest round of homeschooling questions (from the 2011 survey) were released in August of 2013.  This massive survey (n=17,563) provides us with the best data by far on homeschooling, consisting as it does of a representative sample of the entire population of the United States.  You can read the preliminary results in tables 7 and 8 of the latest survey here.

Five years ago I summarized what previous rounds of the NCES survey had uncovered about homeschooling.  Here I will update that summary, incorporating the newer data.

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All the Available State Homeschooling Data, 2011

About 2 and a half years ago I posted all the available data provided by the various states that keep records on homeschooling enrollment figures (I recognize that some homeschoolers don’t like the term “enrollment,” but for the states that’s what this is).  I explained then that this information is notoriously unreliable for at least three reasons:  1. data collection is haphazard, varying widely by state, by district within a state, and from year-to-year, 2. the figures provided by some states don’t account for homeschoolers who may choose to do so by, say, registering as private schools, and 3. some homeschoolers simply refuse to register with the state and hence are not included in these tallies.

Despite these shortcomings I was interested at the time in this statewide data because of a discrepancy I was noting between my own subjective impressions of a slowing down of homeschooling growth here in Pennsylvania even as the National Center for Education Statistics had just come out with their latest estimates showing a dramatic increase in homeschooling nationwide since 2003.

My first effort to generalize from this state data led me to conclude that as of 2007, eight states were seeing growth, six were basically flat, and three were seeing declines.  I also noted that for the most part the states that were seeing growth were “Red,” or Republican-leaning states, and those that were either holding steady or declining were mostly “Blue,” or Democrat-leaning.

Well, now that two more years have passed, what has happened? 

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More Homeschool Coverage in Popular Outlets

Continuing the theme of last week’s post, here follows a round-up of more recent treatments of homeschooling in the mainstream press.

First, here is a human-interest piece from the New Yorker about homeschooled child actors.   

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The Full 2007 NCES Data!

A couple of months ago I noted with great excitement and not a little perplexity the release of new NCES data on homeschooling numbers.  Well, now NCES has released its 2009 “Condition of Education” report, and indicator 6 (pp. 14-15) gives us the full NCES data on homeschooling.  Read it here.  A few of the highlights: 

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At Last! All State Homeschool Data in One Place!

Several months ago, just prior to the new NCES data that was released, I posted enrollment data from six states that suggested a levelling off of homeschool growth.

Then, only a few weeks later, NCES came out with data that suggested continued dramatic growth in homeschooling!

Now, finally, I’ve got all of the available state data in one place, accompanied by convenient graphs that make trends very easy to observe, followed by references for where it all came from.  The final product was too complicated to post in the normal manner, so my handy workstudy student Philip Martin helped me put it together into a PDF.

Here it is: Home School Data

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Breaking News! New NCES Homeschool Data!

Just in time for Christmas, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) has finally released its latest figures on homeschooling – the gift at the top of any homeschool researcher’s list!  This is a big deal.  If you’ve read much homeschooling literature you’ve seen NCES’ 2003 data used over and over, because it’s the best we’ve got for estimating the national population of homeschoolers.  In 2003 NCES estimated that 1.1 million children were being homeschooled (2.2% of school-age children).  The new estimate for 2007 is 1.5 million (2.9%).  This is a 36% increase in four years. 

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