America's Elites Deserve an "F" For Their Take on Homeschooling

In July, Angie Sullivan, co-host of the popular podcast, I’ve Had It, decided to tell her audience she’d had enough of homeschooling. Per Sullivan: “I think it’s just f***ing weird...that you want your kids around you all day, every day and all night.” She went on to say: “I don’t trust somebody that wants to be with their kids 24/7. I think a lot of dumb people do it because it’s just easier.” 

But is homeschooling still weird? In a new book, Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How it Went Mainstream, historian Dixie Dillon Lane makes a compelling case that homeschooling in the United States has moved into the mainstream. Once a quasi-illegal (or actually illegal) educational method relegated to the fringes, homeschooling is now almost … ordinary. While numbers vary, the National Home Education Research Institute estimates that in 2025, there were around 3.4 million homeschooled students in the United States, making up approximately 6.3% of the school-aged population. The adoption of “Education Savings Accounts” in many states—which often allow homeschool parents to use state funding to pay for approved educational expenses—promises to further fuel the growth in American homeschooling. 

Lane and I aren't the only ones to point out that homeschooling is now mainstream. In reaction to Sullivan's comments, Angela R. Watson, an associate research professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Education, recently noted in The Hill: "The data show that homeschooling is no longer a fringe practice," Watson writes. "The honest answer to who homeschools in America is a lot of different people, for a lot of different reasons, with a lot of different results."

Nevertheless, despite the growing popularity of homeschooling, America's cultural elites still seem to be struggling to understand this phenomenon. Why do most people homeschool? What are the benefits? What are the pitfalls? 

A Brief History

In her comprehensive but approachable book, Lane traces the history of American homeschooling, drawing on research she began in writing her PhD thesis and that she has expanded upon in the years since. Lane, a homeschooling mother herself, takes a both scholarly and personal interest in the topic, which she approaches with nuance and care. Homeschooling, she notes, is seen as a new activity, but it is actually rooted in one of the oldest principles of American education: the right of parents to shape their children’s education. 

Prior to the 1950s, while American parents generally obeyed compulsory schooling laws and sent their children to local schools, they still retained significant control over their children’s education. Education was largely shaped at the local level, with significant input by parents via school boards, Parent Teacher Associations, and the like. This all changed in the 1950s, when the federal government began to play a major role in public K-12 schools. Per Lane, this change was caused by a “pressing fear that without a nationally overseen education, the next generation of Americans would not be able to defeat the Communists as their parents had defeated the Nazis.” 

Today, homeschooling is not a novel activity taking place on the fringes of society: as Lane shows, it's mainstream—and a reversion to an older vision of educating children.

This shift towards national standards had many benefits, including a new American competitiveness in space exploration and advanced manufacturing. However, it also had many downsides. Prominent among them is that American parents increasingly lost control over their children’s education. On both sides of the political aisle, reformers argued for returning the locus of control to parents. On the progressive front, John Holt, a former teacher disillusioned with institutional schooling, wrote several influential books criticizing formal schooling, and advocating that children would be better served by learning at home in a flexible environment tailored to their particular needs and interests. On the other side of the spectrum, Raymond and Dorothy Moore determined that “school was actively harmful to children” and that young children would be better off at home in the early years; playing, exploring, and growing in a warm family environment. 

As Lane points out, by the 1990s, homeschooling had become a movement. Only a few years earlier, homeschoolers had been forced to operate under the radar. For many years, their legal status was in dispute. Homeschooling parents could be investigated by the state, including for something as minor as a neighbor observing their children playing outside during school hours. In response, two homeschooling fathers—who were also attorneys—founded the Homeschool Legal Defense Association in 1983. HLDA was vital to the effort to make homeschooling clearly legal in all 50 states, and to allow parents to re-establish their right to primarily control their children’s education. 

A Diverse Movement

By 2020-2021, during the COVID pandemic, homeschooling hit the mainstream. Although many in the public see homeschooling as largely the province of white, evangelical conservatives determined to escape contemporary society, in reality, homeschoolers do not fit a specific mold. In the words of a California homeschool mom Lane interviewed for her book, “the more people get to know us, they realize we’re just normal people doing it.” Homeschoolers today are remarkably diverse, including in terms of their race, their religion, and their politics. 

To give just one example, not all homeschoolers are Christian. Political commentator and homeschooling mother of six, Bethany Mandel, has written on her Substack, The Mom Wars, about her experience as “a go-to resource in my Jewish community for families who are considering homeschooling.” In my own work researching families with a stay-at-home parent, I’ve spoken to homeschoolers who are Muslim, or who particularly want their children to be bi-lingual, or who see the value of handing down particular religious or cultural traditions at home.

Homeschoolers today are remarkably diverse.

Lane has also interviewed families who homeschool because they have a child with special needs. These parents believe their children will be better served at home than struggling with navigating the often-Byzantine special education system in US public schools. Lane also spoke with black parents who decided to homeschool because the local schools are bad, or because of concerns about racism (or both). 

Circling back to the "I've Had It" podcast, at one point during her rant about homeschoolers, co-host Jennifer Welch claimed: “This is trickle-down stupidity. This is MAGA on steroids. This is MAHA. This is tradwife.”

Clearly, she could do with some updated information on who homeschoolers actually are. While many parents who homeschool are the kind of Trump voters Ms. Welch despises, many others are progressive liberals. A survey by EdChoice, for example, found that “Among homeschooling parents, one in four identifies as a liberal Democrat.” Dr. Watson at Johns Hopkins similarly finds homeschoolers do not fit a "caricature" but are very diverse.

In many ways, as Lane points out, homeschooling in 2026 is not anti-institutional. Instead, it is supra institutional or institution-adjacent. Many homeschoolers will— when permitted—take classes at local schools, enroll in local rec sports teams, or send their kids to Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts. Some fascinating statistics suggest that rather than heading for the hills to live in sheltered bunkers, homeschoolers are in many ways more socially integrated than their peers. According to the National Institute of Education Sciences, homeschoolers were more likely than those in institutional schools to visit a library, go to a book store, go to a museum or art gallery, or go to an aquarium/zoo. Like the earliest American colonists, homeschoolers in 2026 believe in centering the responsibility for their children’s education at home with Mom and Dad, while still flexibly using the educational and cultural institutions around them as optional tools (rather than requirements). In many ways modern homeschooling is not a novel activity taking place on the fringes of society: instead, as Lane shows, it is mainstream—and a reversion to an older vision of educating children.

Unfortunately, as Sullivan and Welch's rant shows us, many of America's cultural elites are still getting an “F” on understanding homeschoolers today. In a follow-up episode with Don Lemon, Sullivan said “homeschooling is because they think that schools are evil” and that homeschooling is part of the "fascist project.” Lemon agreed: “There’s a reason they don’t send their kids to school.” Lemon then brought his two-year old niece on camera and said he hopes she is never homeschooled so she is “exposed to life” and doesn’t end up becoming “unaware of what life is like.” 

A New Reality

The people unaware of what “life is like” on the homeschool issue, I’m sorry to say, are Sullivan, Welch, and Lemon. In their attacks on homeschoolers, they’ve displayed the same bias and lack of curiosity about the world that they ascribe to the homeschool movement. Rather than being entirely composed of people like The Duggars of reality TV fame, homeschoolers today are a diverse set of families, engaged in very different methods of home education that are sparking rapid change and creativity in institutional schools. To give just one example, the Classical Learning Test, an alternative to the SAT created by Jeremy Tate, has gained mainstream acceptance in numerous states. It is fair to say that this innovation in academic testing would never have happened without the interest and support of homeschoolers. No matter where a child goes to school in the next few decades, he or she will probably encounter both homeschooling families and educational changes sparked by the homeschool movement.

Lane’s book will be of deep interest to homeschoolers and others curious about the history of American education. The people I most wish would read it, however, are elites like Sullivan and Welch and other fierce critics of homeschooling. They’ll find homeschooling has gone mainstream without either the notice or support of many of our cultural elites. A major challenge for American society today is adjusting to a world in which homeschoolers are no longer confined to the shadows but rather participating fully in American public life. Lane’s carefully researched, yet accessible new book is invaluable in helping us all catch up to this new reality: homeschooling is no longer weird.

Ivana Greco is a homemaker and homeschooling mother of four, as well as a Senior Fellow at Capita.

Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the Institute for Family Studies.

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