A small fraction of California students do not attend school at all, in a conventional sense.

What is homeschooling?

Homeschooled children participate in an educational program that is coordinated by their parents. Most homeschool programs make significant use of online resources.

School attendance is compulsory, so families must meet some requirements to legally pull their children out of school. The Homeschooling Association of California advises families about how to establish their own private school or how to affiliate with a Private Satellite Program (PSP).

Why do families choose homeschool?

For many years, religious concerns dominated the demand for home schooling. In a 2011-12 survey, 17% of parents of homeschooled children cited religion as their top reason for choosing to teach their child at home.

The internet made it significantly easier for families to learn about homeschooling options, and even before the COVID-19 pandemic homeschooling was a growing movement. Computer-based instruction and online resources made learning at home an increasingly realistic option for more families and into higher grades.

The top reason parents cite for choosing homeschooling is "a concern about the environment" of other schools.

Prior to the pandemic, a nationwide survey by the US Department of Education estimated (in 2016) that about 3.3% of students were homeschooled. The survey found that at that time homeschoolers were students for whom traditional school was not working for a variety of reasons, including commute distances, bullying, or other safety concerns. The top reason that parents cited for choosing homeschooling was "a concern about the environment" of other schools.

The pandemic massively changed the meaning of school for everyone. Suddenly all students were homeschooling, and most schools were terrible at it. Interest in formal homeschooling skyrocketed. By fall 2021, EdSource estimated that nationwide homeschooling had soared to 11% of students based on affidavits filed to form schools (although filing was not mandatory).

Does homeschool work?

Skeptics of homeschooling usually raise two big questions: Are kids in home schools getting a good academic education, and are they socially competent? As of 2022, neither question could be answered with real data, because the pandemic had so deeply disrupted education for everyone.

Prior to the pandemic, homeschooled students tended to perform better than the national average on all kinds of measures for academic abilities, such as higher first-year of college GPA. However, the disproportionately high household income and parental academic attainment of homeschooled students may explain this pre-pandemic advantage.

Popular social media networks provided a space for homeschooled children to interact with others, which constitute much of the social interactions even for students with a traditional form of education.

What are virtual schools and are they good?

Even prior to the pandemic, a rapidly increasing number of homeschool students were enrolling in virtual schools organized under the California charter school law. Among other advantages, this approach was cheaper than private homeschooling that required parents to purchase curricula and supplies.

These pre-pandemic virtual schools enrolled significantly fewer minority, low-income, and English learning students than the national average. According to a report by the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado-Boulder, 501 virtual schools served 297,712 students across the country in 2017-18. Students attending virtual schools performed worse academically than the national average. For example, only about half of the high school students attending virtual schools graduated on time, compared to the 84% graduation rates across all schools.

Literature about the experience of virtual schooling is still limited. Virtual schools tend to lack transparency regarding their instructional model, nature of the curriculum, and the type and amount of support employed by those schools.

In 2013 the largest virtual school operator, K-12, a for-profit company using charter schools laws, came under intense criticism. California outlawed some activities of for-profit charter management companies in 2018, in large part because of financial and academic performance issues.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. The role of computers in learning is a far larger topic than home-based learning. The technology angle of this topic will be explored further in Lesson 6.6, in the section “The Right Stuff.”

The next lesson steps away from anything remotely "virtual." What does it take to hold a class together, in terms of discipline?

Updated July 2017, December 2018, August 2021, December 2021, November 2022.