Homeschooling is now more than just a thing. It’s now a big thing and it’s growing faster and larger than some folks probably ever imagined.
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, many parents had to turn to remote learning via their local school district or private school as in-person classroom instruction shutdown.
However, when it was time for children to go back to school this fall, some reports indicate hundreds of thousands of parents across the nation decided to keep their kids at home. As a result, the number of children being homeschooled has doubled just in the past two years.
Numbers do not lie. The National Home Education Research Institute says two years ago, there were approximately 2.5 million students being homeschooled. Today, that number is now at nearly 5 million.
***Please sign up for CBN Newsletters and download the CBN News app to ensure you keep receiving the latest news from a distinctly Christian perspective.***
As CBN News reported, a U.S. Census Bureau report found that homeschooling doubled during COVID, including a jump in Black families switching to home education for the first time.
The surge was reported in March, revealing that the rate of families homeschooling their children increased to 11 percent by September 2020, doubling from 5.4 percent six months earlier.
The reasons are many. Some parents want their kids to learn from a faith-based curriculum while others believe their local schools have problems with indoctrination on issues like Critical Race Theory.
A common theme for a number of parents is that their kids performed well while homeschooling and they don’t want to change that.
Yvonne Bunn, director of homeschool support and government affairs with Home Educators Association of Virginia, told CBN News homeschooling continues to grow.
“In Virginia alone, we have seen over a 48 percent increase in homeschoolers for the last school year. We went from 44,000 to 65,000 homeschoolers,” she said. “Lots of parents have done this and say their child has done so much better or they’re not being bullied.”
Bunn also noted that parents who work from home are eager to keep their kids in homeschooling.
“I do think a lot of parents are going to continue homeschool. They’re not happy with what’s going on,” she said. “Parents are wanting to move in the direction of doing something else … even the parents who work. We’ve been amazed by the number who want to continue to work from home so they can continue to teach their children.”
And many parents are deciding to stay home to work. The latest research trends reveal many mothers have decided not to go back to work, according to conservative radio host Erick Erickson. These moms are contributing to the family income in other ways like selling items online.
Erickson also points to COVID-19 and how it has changed everything.
“The virus, the fallout from the virus, and the government’s response to the virus has caused an upending of the American way of life,” he noted. “We have a labor shortage in this country. We’ve got a surplus of jobs and not enough people to fill them right now in the country. Some of it has to do with extended unemployment, but not all of it.”
“Some of it is families realized in the pandemic under lockdown that they are perfectly fine living on one income,” Erickson continued. “They made cutbacks and are okay. Many families decided their kids are better off not in the woke public school system and opted for private school, homeschooling, or a homeschool alliance.”
The remainder of this article is available in its entirety at CBN
