THE REVOLUTION IS HERE; IT IS NOW: “Home schooling exploded among Black, Asian and Latino students. But it wasn’t just the pandemic.”
As the new school year approaches, millions of parents are eager to deliver their children back to teachers and put remote schooling — which wrought anger, frustration and financial turmoil for parents who needed to return to work — behind them. But for other parents, particularly parents of color, the pandemic and last summer’s national reckoning over race prompted them to pull their children from traditional schools entirely, moves that helped fuel an explosion in popularity of home schooling.
The percentage of schoolchildren in home-school has nearly tripled since mid-2019. By May of this year, the U.S. Census Bureau found more than one out of every 12 students were being home-schooled.
Even more remarkable are where those gains came from: Even though home schooling has often been considered the domain of religious White families, the most significant increases were seen among Black, Latino and Asian households.