Ten-year-old Hugo Beatty is stomping up a dusty hiking trail in Simi Valley, when he and his friend, 5-year-old Oliver Davis, stumble upon a mound of dirt covered in insects. They start to investigate.
“Are they wasps?” Davis asks, crouching down to examine.
“Definitely not,” Beatty says. “They might be worker ants.”
It’s a Thursday morning, and for these boys, the start of a regular school day. Beatty and Davis are homeschooled, and exploring the outdoors during school hours is part of their routine. Twice a week, they participate in an outdoor enrichment program called Children’s Forest School.
Today, homeschooling is the fastest-growing model of schooling in the country, according to school district data analyzed by the Washington Post. Between the 2017-2018 academic year and 2022-2023, homeschool growth far exceeded growth in both public and private school enrollment.
The leap to homeschooling was particularly pronounced in California. Homeschool enrollment in the state jumped by 78% from the five-year period before the pandemic, and in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the jump was 89%.
Children’s Forest School Co-founder Madlen Sarkisyan, a homeschooling parent herself, describes the learning that takes place in her program as “organic” and “child-driven,” as opposed to “teacher-directed” with “a curriculum we have to follow.”
She says it’s a myth that homeschooled kids are home all day.
“There's a lot of rich opportunities for kids,” she says. “Knowing there's these kinds of programs available for children who might have a difficult time sitting in a classroom, children who might have a difficult time focusing, or who need to spend more time outdoors at a pace that's more natural to their own natural rhythm – I think is a really great thing for learners today.”
Sarkisyan’s 9-year-old son, Orson, attends her Children’s Forest School, learns reading and math at home, participates in a weekly science pod, and takes a skateboarding class.
Children’s Forest School Co-founder Madlen Sarkisyan reads a story to homeschooled kids in a Simi Valley park. Photo by Robin Estrin.
Before the pandemic, “a simple majority was homeschooling predominantly for faith reasons, or ideological reasons of aversion to public schooling,” says James Dwyer, professor at William and Mary Law School and co-author of Homeschooling: The History and Philosophy of a Controversial Practice.
But post-pandemic, the demographics of homeschool families have begun to change. Data suggests that the movement is less religious today than in previous decades, and more diverse.
Dwyer says that when the pandemic shuttered schools for millions of families, the experience of learning from home was normalized. “A lot of people across the political spectrum and faith spectrum, who maybe never considered it, or were afraid to try, saw it as a fringe thing to do – but then all of a sudden everybody was doing it so they got the experience.”
Sarkisyan is part of a new wave of teach-at-home families.
“We’re not all anti-vaxxers. We're not all the religious Bible Belt,” she says of her homeschool community. “It looks so different for every family.”
Before the pandemic, Sarkisyan was a preschool teacher in a traditional classroom. She didn’t know any homeschool families and, she admits, she made assumptions.
“Oh, it must be the extremists, the people who are really religious,” she says. “I had a lot of biases about what I assumed homeschooling was, and like, ‘Why wouldn't you have your child in a classroom? Why wouldn't you have them socializing with peers?'”
But once classrooms moved to Zoom, she quickly realized virtual learning wouldn’t work for her as a teacher, or for her son as a kindergartner in a private school.
“As a family, we had to make a decision,” she says. “Do we want to continue to pay tuition, first of all, to continue to do remote learning, which is not working for him? Or do we homeschool?”
Sarkisyan was not alone.
During the pandemic, Homeschool Association of California volunteer and consultant Jamie Heston shepherded hundreds of homeschool-curious families through the transition from traditional schools.
She says a lot of families were pushed into the decision by virtual learning. When parents got a front-row seat to their childs’ education, not all of them liked what they saw.
Heston heard from families who were upset by the quality of teaching, or, she says, families didn’t like “what's being taught.”
That was the experience Covina mother Monique White had with her 5-year-old son during the pandemic school closure. She says her son was only in a remote learning environment with a teacher for about a half-hour twice a week.
“It scrambled my brain to see how little work actually came in,” she says. “My mind immediately went to: What is he doing there all day?”
Further, White’s son is on the autism spectrum, and White says the special education services he was receiving all but disappeared when school shut down.
“There was nothing,” says White, recalling the school's offering of one 10-minute individual session with her son, once a week. “How are you going to have a transitional kindergartener for 10 minutes? It takes them 10 minutes to log on and log off. I was irate.”
But homeschool enrollment didn’t just spike because parents were unhappy. Heston says some saw a real upside to teaching their kids at home during the pandemic, and wanted to continue.
Families discovered that learning could happen in nature, at museums, or on YouTube. Parents saw their kid’s interest get sparked. “That was also a driver,” Heston says. “Like, wow, when we're not just sitting for six hours in front of a camera on the computer, we can actually do some really substantive learning.”
San Dimas parent Naomi Bjornstad says her two kids have thrived since they started homeschooling. “We really have grown accustomed to the life that we have started with homeschooling,” she says. “We have a very flexible schedule.”
Bjornstad works full-time as a physician’s assistant, mostly at night, and teaches her kids the basics like math, reading, and history during the day. They take private classes in art and science. She says the family has traveled to a dozen states for learning experiences, and that socially, her kids are fine. They play sports. Her daughter’s in Girl Scouts.
Now, Bjornstad says, her seventh-grade daughter wants to go to a private school for high school. But she’s doing so well academically that Bjornstad is nervous to send her.
“My kids now are almost advanced after a year of being intensively homeschooled, and I didn't want to put them in a situation where they were going to be bored, or where they weren't going to continue advancing in the same way that they were,” Bjornstad says.
California requires minimal oversight
Despite the fact that homeschooling is now the fastest-growing model of education in the country, the boom hasn’t resulted in any additional oversight of what or how much kids are learning.
To homeschool a child in California, a parent has several options. “I categorize them into public or private,” says Jamie Heston of the Homeschool Association of California. The so-called “public” way allows parents to enroll their children in a homeschool charter school. Doing so allows parents to access stipends from the state to pay for approved curriculum, materials, and enrichment programs.
To homeschool the “private” way, parents must file an affidavit with the state each year, releasing the child from compulsory state education laws and essentially establishing a tiny private school.
“The record keeping is really, really minimal,” says Heston. Home educators must keep attendance and immunization records, and maintain a list of subjects the school offers and the teacher’s qualifications. But reporting these records to the state is not required.
James Dwyer, who has written about homeschool children who have suffered abuse, neglect, and educational deprivation, says policymakers should consider regulations.
“I don't think there is any good argument for leaving that sector of schooling entirely unregulated as it is now,” he says. He suggests background checks for parents and a semi-annual meeting with a school official to ensure the child’s physical and mental well-being, and to present academic results.
“It doesn't need to be confrontational, it doesn't need to be straight-jacketing, [and] it doesn't need to destroy the kind of homeschooling that people want to do,” he says.
There are currently no bills in the state legislature to regulate homeschooling – and Dwyer says there’s very little political appetite to change that.