Homeschooling Keeps Growing, but What Counts as Homeschooling?

More families than ever are teaching their children outside a traditional school. The harder question is what, exactly, they are doing — and whether the rules written for homeschooling still fit. A new report sheds light on the issue.

There was a time when the categories were simple. A child went to public school, went to private school, or was homeschooled at the family kitchen table. Today those bright lines are fading.

Homeschooling has grown, and so has its visibility. That attention has brought scrutiny and fresh calls for regulation. But those calls rest on an assumption that is getting harder to defend: that everyone agrees on what homeschooling is.

Increasingly, they don’t. The way families actually homeschool has drifted away from how state policies define it. That gap confuses parents, muddies the data, and makes it harder for lawmakers to write rules that work. A single, tidy definition is appealing. The reality policymakers face is an educational practice that refuses to fit one.

Growing against the tide

Homeschooling keeps expanding across the United States as more families choose a personalized path for their children. That growth is happening even as public and private schools lose students, a decline driven largely by falling birth rates.

Angela Watson, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University Homeschool Lab, a national research center, has spent several years tracking those numbers. Her lab’s newest findings show homeschooling grew again in the 2025–26 school year, though more slowly than in previous years.

“To some degree, this is unsurprising,” Watson said. “The number of children in the United States is declining, and enrollment in public and private schools is declining. But slower homeschool growth is still remarkable when compared to flat or declining numbers in other sectors.”

In some places, the numbers hit new highs. According to Watson’s analysis, six states reported their largest homeschooling populations ever last school year: Arkansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota and Wisconsin.

Beyond the kitchen table

Watson’s latest work looks past the head count to a deeper question. In a new academic paper written with Johns Hopkins colleague Christy Batts, she examines how the meaning of homeschooling has stretched, and how differently it is practiced from one family to the next.

The picture they describe looks little like the stereotype. The traditional kitchen-table model, with a parent teaching all of the children at home year after year, is now much more the exception than the rule, the researchers found.

Instead, many families use homeschooling more flexibly. Some choose it for a short stretch rather than a child’s entire education. Others homeschool one child while that child’s siblings stay in a conventional school.

Counting what you can’t define

That flexibility is good news for families who want options. It is a headache for anyone trying to measure the trend or regulate it.

When a child can move in and out of homeschooling, or when one household mixes homeschooling with traditional enrollment, simple questions get complicated. Who counts as a homeschooler, and for how long? Watson and Batts argue that these blurred categories create real challenges for data collection, with ripple effects for policy.

Those challenges arrive just as lawmakers are paying closer attention. Any new rule has to start by deciding what it is regulating. As the Johns Hopkins research suggests, that may be the hardest part.

Homeschooling, it turns out, is no longer one thing. For the families who choose it, that is much of the appeal. For the policymakers watching it grow, it is the central puzzle.

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Wayne Creed

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