Home schooling has become America’s fastest-growing form of education, according to a Washington Post analysis. This form of education, which largely has roots within evangelical Christian households, has grown into a broader movement, especially since the pandemic. Laura Meckler is national education writer at The Washington Post and is co-author of a series for The Post called “Homeschool Nation,” which takes an in-depth look at the surge in home schooling in the U.S. and motivations for its rise, which include concerns over school shootings, curriculum ideologies and more. She joins WITHpod to discuss how this mode of education has evolved, the forces that have driven its growth, recent declines in public school enrollment, the increasing popularity of microschools and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript — please excuse any typos.
Laura Meckler: This is not a one-off decision. This is something that’s with you day in, day out. And you’re taking on an enormous amount of responsibility in terms of giving your kids a well-rounded education. It isn’t just about teaching them to read, which by the way, isn’t always that simple. It isn’t just about math. It’s, you know, about, hopefully, it’s the arts and it’s science and it’s history and it’s, you know, there’s everything that a school gives you. So I think that it does take a certain type of person to want to do this, and I guess there are more people like that than we realized.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host Chris Hayes. Well, I don’t know what tree we would describe ourselves in relation to the pandemic, post-ish pandemic. And you know, one of my abiding themes on this podcast is that the omnidirectional disruption of the pandemic is under-credited as a mono-causal theory for everything that’s happened afterwards. It’s staring us in the face and for some reason we want to like come up with a lot of reasons why things since then have been so dislocated and strange in so many ways.
One of the things I think that’s happened, and we’ve talked about this in the podcast, is the changes to work life, particularly for office workers, where we’ve seen people that did office work and had the kinds of jobs that lent themselves to remote work by and large have come back to the office, but not at the levels that they were beforehand. So you’re seeing a lot of hybrid stuff, people coming in three days a week. We’re seeing this in sort of like business district traffic, foot traffic, car traffic, public transit in major cities, right? People are not going to downtowns at the same level they used to.
So some has come back, but there’s also been a kind of permanent alteration in the work habits and the location of work and people’s relationship to commuting and remote work. In school, there’s something similar happening, though not quite as straightforward. So it’s not like hybrid remote schooling has persisted. It has not. It’s basically gone and I think personally for the best. It was, I think, a necessary and useful tool in the midst of the pandemic, but I think all the evidence we have subsequently shows that it’s not a great way to learn and certainly definitely not when compared to actually being in school.
But that disruption has produced after effects that have lasted. So it’s not quite apples to apples in the way that offices are using the same tools they used, which is remote work. But there is something that’s happened where if you look at public schooling in America, there’s an inflection point around the pandemic. First of all, public school enrollment around the country is down. People left public schools and they never came back. Again, it’s not a huge number, but it’s significant and you can see it on charts. Number two, truancy and chronic absenteeism are up. So there’s a fairly large group of kids who are missing lots of school at a level above what it was in 2019 pre-pandemic.
And the third trend that to me is in some ways the most interesting and it’s the topic of today’s conversation is homeschooling is up and it’s up quite a bit. And there was all kinds of reasons one might anticipate that homeschooling in America would skyrocket during the pandemic. Obviously, people were doing all kinds of triaging around their lives and trying to figure out how they’re going to make this work. And if you’re home all day and you’re remote working and you want to make sure your kids are getting education, like homeschooling might seem like an option that’s lying there on the table.
But I think you could also predict, okay, well, after the pandemic’s over, we’ll see it go back down, but it hasn’t. It has stayed at an elevated level and in fact is growing. And this boom in homeschooling and the transformation of what it means in terms of the transformation of public schooling in America was the topic of a fantastic series in “The Washington Post” called Homeschool Nation, which is all about homeschooling surge in the U.S. It provided deep reporting and anecdotal stuff, sort of qualitative research along with quantitative polling. Laura Meckler is the National Education Writer at “The Washington Post.” She’s one of the co-authors of that incredible series. She also wrote a book called “Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity.” And Laura Meckler, it’s great to have you on the program.
Laura Meckler: Thanks so much for having me.
Chris Hayes: Okay, so I guess let’s start at the beginning. Like at some level, you could say homeschooling is the original form of schooling, right? Like public education as a universal, both obligation and right, is an invention of industrial modernity. It sort of starts to come into effect in the 19th century. Massachusetts, if I’m not mistaken, is the first place that really institutionalizes it. It spreads throughout the country. Prior to that, to the extent that people were learning, they were learning at home, although the vast majority of people weren’t literate, right? But there was some antecedent way in which, if you read “Little House on the Prairie”, like they’ve got some reader school book in their house or something like that.
Laura Meckler: Yes, although I believe that the Little House kids actually did go to school.
Chris Hayes: They did. Yeah, they did go to school.
Laura Meckler: But yes. But that’s true. Of course, originally, you know, public schools were not just here at the moment of the dawn of time. That was something that was created and was spread and was actually considered quite an innovation and an improvement in the lives of children. So, yes, it isn’t something new, but the idea that it’s attractive to a large number of people, I think is new.
Chris Hayes: So you have universal public schooling takes root and it grows throughout the 20th century and you know, we all anticipate it stretches to every part of the country. Even if you’ve got a one room schoolhouse in the furthest reaches, right. The people who opt out of that system in favor of homeschooling, particularly I think in this 60s, 70s, 80s, let’s say. My understanding from your reporting and what I’ve read is it is primarily evangelical Christians who want something different for their kids than what either private parochial school or public school can provide.
Laura Meckler: Absolutely, this movement was definitely driven by religious people, by fundamentalist Christians for the most part. They’re the people who worked hard to make it legal. I mean, homeschooling wasn’t even legal in the country, you know, 40 years ago, and they worked hard to pass laws that both sort of allowed it to happen. And then when there were regulations put on it to getting rid of those regulations, they’re the drivers behind all of this. And in fact, we know from surveys done by the federal government that in 2012, almost two in three homeschool families said that one of the reasons they were doing it or a primary reason they were doing it was for religious reasons.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, so let’s talk about that legal landscape, which is really interesting, an interesting part of the story. Obviously, universal public schooling comes with a sort of concomitant responsibility, which is mandatory schooling, right? Like you can’t keep your kids out of school. You got to enroll them. And in order to basically opt out of that system, evangelical Christians and the Christian homeschooling movement kind of had to go state by state, lobbying to say, you have to pass laws that let us do this.
Laura Meckler: Exactly, because before that, if you didn’t show up at school, you were truant. And, of course, those laws are there to protect children. You know, they’ve got rights.
Chris Hayes: Yes, yeah, it’s important.
Laura Meckler: I mean the government is saying they’re not trying to crack down on people. They’re trying to actually provide something to children, to say you deserve an education and your parents have to allow you to have one. So yes, before these laws changed, you were required to be at school. And it was through this, a lot of work on the state legislative level, that groups like the Home School Legal Defense Association, primarily that group went and lobbied and got homeschooling made legal.
And initially it was legal, but there were strings attached. For instance, you had to have certain qualifications on the part of the parent, in order you had to maybe have a high school degree or maybe even a college degree in some cases. There were testing requirements. You had to show that you were learning something. So there were a lot of rules around it and slowly those rules have gone away.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I want to talk about that too, right? So if you said, and obviously, you know, Mary Baker, I know who you know the (ph) history of Christian science in this country, not withstanding, if you said that I’m going to do home doctoring, right, like we’re just doing home doctoring here. Your first thought would be like, okay, do you have training in that? Can you do the things necessary? Obviously there’s a set of both training necessary to be a doctor and regulations around hospitals and healthcare, right? And those things go together to make sure that patients are protected. And if you said, I’m opting out of that system and I’m just going to provide the medical care, I think anyone’s first thought would be like, okay, can you do it?
So that’s the first thought I think we all have with homeschooling, right, is, okay, you want to teach your kids, but you know, teaching is different than parenting, and it’s a specialized set of skills. I’m a parent. I have three kids. I think I’m a pretty good parent, if I do say so myself, but I don’t know how good a teacher I would be. So I guess the question is like, talk a little bit about that landscape, right? That sort of tug of war around like what should the standards be if you say, I’m going to homeschool? And how should the state make sure that the kid is getting an adequate education while, you know, respecting the parental right to do so?
Laura Meckler: Well, I think different people have very different answers to that question. I mean, there are some people who would say, you know, this is parents know what’s good for their kids and they’re perfectly capable of making those decisions. They want what’s best for their kids and, you know, butt out essentially. Now there are other people who say no, in fact, just like the same argument that might be made for medicine, that education is important to children’s futures and really, you know, will set the course of their lives and that the state has an interest in protecting those kids, even protecting them maybe even from their parents, which is somewhat of a controversial notion, especially in a time when we hear so much about parents’ rights —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Laura Meckler: — and that sort of thing. So I think the answer to that question of what’s the appropriate level of regulation really varies. But what we can say is that what the consensus seems to have been across the country, which is that in a lot of this country, the answer is it’s up to the parents. I mean, there are 11 states where you don’t even have to inform that your school district or the state that you are homeschooling, much less meet any particular criteria or regulations. There are only a handful of places where testing is required.
Chris Hayes: Really?
Laura Meckler: So yeah, you know, it is a pretty loose regulatory situation right now.
Chris Hayes: Wow. So in 11 states, they’re just like, you don’t even have to say anything and then in other states. And this is the product of lobbying, right? I mean, this was this interest group that wanted to do this and has strong views about sort of parental sovereignty, for lack of a better term, over their kids’ education such that they think the optimal amount of regulation is basically zero and that if you want to homeschool your kid, then the state butts out and you teach them what you want to teach them. Are there other places where there are standards or some kind of oversight to make sure that the kid is getting educated?
Laura Meckler: Yeah, there’s a range. I mean, there’s a range of regulations. In some places, for instance, there are rules about what you’re supposed to be teaching them. You know, there are certain subjects you need to cover, although there’s almost no enforcement of these rules. There are places where you aren’t required to take a test, but you might be required to submit a portfolio of work. So, show your someone with the school district what you have produced over that year, or in some cases have it available, but you’re not actually required to show it to anybody. So, in some cases there are sort of rules on the books, but in terms of how much they’re enforced, that’s kind of a separate question. You know, there is a range, but it’s pretty loose.
Chris Hayes: I’m going to ask a question here, you may not know the answer to, which is fine. It’s a little off the beaten path, but I’ll ask it anyway, and if not, but there’s an interesting sociological aspect to this in terms of like the nature of evangelical Christianity as a movement, because in my own personal, somewhat parochial, and I mean that as a play on words experience, as someone who’s raised Catholic in New York City, and who’s, you know, my dad was a Jesuit seminarian and he went to Catholic school and his father went to Catholic school, and all his siblings went to Catholic school.
Like, obviously there had been options for people that are religiously devout and don’t want to go to public school for many, many years, right? So it’s not like it’s the public school. It’s the godless public school or nothing. Like there is a very active system of religious schools that exist in this country across different denominations. There’s a Muslim school in my neighborhood. There are Jewish schools. There are Catholic schools. There are Episcopal schools. I guess the question is like, why homeschooling rather than school building? Right.
Like, there’s an unmet need here for these people. Is it that they’re geographically disparate? Is it that there’s not the same institutions? Is it that the mega churches they’re going to don’t want to get into schooling? Like it’s just an interesting thing to me to go the homeschooling route as opposed to the, let’s build our own parochial schools.
Laura Meckler: Right. Well, I mean, I think there’s a variety of things. First of all, those private schools do cost money. So as a family, I don’t know if that’s necessarily the driver —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Laura Meckler: — but we should note that it’s not like you can just show up at a private school. Obviously there’s a range of costs, but still. And I think for a lot of homeschool parents, they want to be involved with their children’s education. They don’t just want to send their kids away. They view the family as the core unit and they want —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Laura Meckler: — to spend time with their children, you know, and really personally shape that. So there is a different orientation towards what is good. And then there are also some secular reasons why some people reject school. And this can be applied to public school, but it also could apply to private schools, such as concerns about bullying, concerns about school shootings, concerns about just the general atmosphere in school. So, you know, we usually hear about those things in terms of public schools, but some of that applies to private schools as well. So, I think that there is —
Chris Hayes: Sure.
Laura Meckler: — just some cases, parents of children with disabilities, and they feel like the schools are not properly serving them.
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Laura Meckler: Now you might think on one hand, well, if your kid has disabilities, you need the professionals more than ever. But another way of looking at that is that, you know, they’re getting overlooked, they’re not getting the services that they need and I care about this kid. This is the only kid I care about and I’m going to focus on this kid.
Chris Hayes: So you’ve got this movement. It’s largely the sort of vanguard of this movement sort of in the 80s and 90s and sort of 20, 30 years ago is Christian evangelicals. They’re organized and they’re organized enough that they’re actually going to state houses to create the regulatory conditions in which they can homeschool. So you’ve got the sort of will to homeschool. You’ve got the sort of legal ability to homeschool, right, as the laws change. And then the third ingredient seems to me is just like, okay, it’s day one of school. Go to it. What are you going to do?
And, you know, one of the things that shows up, that’s in your reporting is about the growth of the universe of technical tools for homeschooling, the community of homeschooling pre-internet and then obviously the internet is a huge booster that. Talk a little bit about how this kind of community and network gets built up such that if you are the kind of parents going to homeschool, you’re not just like literally inventing education, you know, a curriculum out of total thin air for a second grader.
Laura Meckler: Oh, yeah. No, very few people are inventing this themselves. There are all sorts of resources. I went to a homeschool convention in California earlier this year and I was just, you know, walking the hallways of the exhibit hall and blown away by the number of big and small companies that were offering their services to homeschool families. For a long time, I mean, there’s always been curriculum that you could buy off the shelf. And that’s true both sort of old paper and pencil curriculum and also online curriculum today. There are also homeschooling co-ops where you get together with other families and, hey, maybe I’m really good at writing and you’re really good at science and, you know, we’re each going to teach our subject to a small group of kids sort of in this sort of informal school-like situation, but driven by the parents.
And then in more recent years, there has been a lot of new innovations pop up. In some cases, the parents aren’t involved at all. These options that exist sort of in a messy middle, somewhere between school and home, things like micro schools and hybrid schools. So I visited a micro school in New Hampshire, which is part of a company called Prenda. And you literally drop your kid off at this, quote/unquote, “microschool” for the entire day —
Chris Hayes: Whoa.
Laura Meckler: — four and a half days a week. You can be there if you like. Now the person who’s in charge there is not called a teacher. They have no training in education necessarily. They might, but they don’t have to. And they are a guide and their job is to help you often with your online work. So you’re doing an online math program or an online reading program. But the person I observed, they’re actually doing some teaching as well. You know, they’re leading this group of kids, of multi-age kids in various activities and learning and writing projects. And, you know, none of this is regulated or overseen in any way. And the people running it don’t necessarily have to have any training whatsoever. And the parents can work full time.
Chris Hayes: This sounds like regulatory arbitrage. I mean, this sounds like a bank being like, we’re not doing home loans. We’re providing liquidity for real estate asset prices in a peer to peer network. And it’s like, well, you’re giving home loans. Like at that point, look, if mom or dad are at home with their kid and they are, you know, using this curriculum or they’re even doing stuff online, like, if you’re dropping your kid off at a school by another name, but it doesn’t have to submit to the same regulatory oversight that like, another school would, that seems like questionable.
Laura Meckler: So there are private schools that are not accredited and that’s essentially what this is —
Chris Hayes: I guess that’s true. Right. Right.
Laura Meckler: — is almost like a version of an unaccredited private school.
Chris Hayes: Right. Right. Right.
Laura Meckler: So they don’t call it that, but I think that it gets kind of close to that.
Chris Hayes: Fair enough, yeah.
Laura Meckler: So, you know, but it is sort of mind blowing when you think about the idea that somebody is technically homeschooled and a parent can work full time and not necessarily even see them much during the regular day. I talked to a mom who was a single mom of four kids and she has all of them in different programs. She’s not personally doing any of the teaching, but I think three of the four, are technically homeschoolers.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. This highlights another aspect of this and I think part of the reason why its roots were in a specific kind of sociological milieu of evangelical Christians, which is, you know, parents being able to do it. I mean, it’s one thing to want to homeschool your kid. It’s another to be able to actually do it. And what it means is that at least one of the parents isn’t working full time. And obviously that’s the case for millions of households across the country. But you know, my strong sense from reading your reporting and also reporting I’ve done in Christian evangelical circles is that the sort of early antecedents of this movement, you know, revolved around a sense of the domestic sphere in which mom was not working and was doing the schooling in this homeschooling movement. It was pretty co-terminate with certain like prescribed gender roles, at least in its inception in this movement.
Laura Meckler: Yeah, and I think that definitely is what old school homeschooling looked like for sure. I do think it’s changing over time —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Laura Meckler: — as there are more opportunities, there’s more work from home, so maybe somebody is working from home, but they’re able to, you know, arrange their hours so that they have a couple hours in the middle of the day —
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Laura Meckler: — to help with a kid with something and then the kid is doing other independent work. Maybe they’re at a ballet class in the afternoon or they’re at the co-op at one point, you know. So there’s a lot of cobbling together, different creative solutions. So it really has changed from that original sort of what we think of as homeschooling, which is mom at the kitchen table with her kids, you know, going over their math homework. So yes, things have changed, but I still think there are probably lots of families that are pretty similar to what you described just at the same time.
Chris Hayes: So you’ve made a number, I mean, I think the predicate for your great series is the fact that things have changed and that the pandemic was a huge forcing mechanism. And basically you’ve got the sort of regulatory groundwork is laid, right, by this pretty well organized group that says like, we want to do this and creates the conditions under which people can do it legally. You’ve got a kind of like social and technical and market created around this. And then the pandemic hits. So talk a little bit about the interplay between the pandemic and homeschooling and how that sort of forcing mechanism played out in the growth, the parents you’ve talked to who maybe first turned to it at that moment.
Laura Meckler: I think the pandemic played a role in a bunch of different ways. I think we should start out by acknowledging the fact that many parents who had involuntary school from home could not get their kids back into school fast enough. They were just like, you know, please. In fact, there was a —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Laura Meckler: — huge lobbying around reopening schools. But yeah, others felt differently. I think there was a group of parents for whom they had always thought about homeschooling. They were intrigued by it. And then the pandemic came along and they sort of had a chance to try it out and they liked it and they found their kids were doing well. So there’s that group of parents. You had a group of parents who were upset with the COVID policies of their schools and in both directions. Some who thought that the policies were too strict, they didn’t like the masking, for instance, mandatory masks, and some who thought that the policies were not strict enough. They were worried about their kids from a health point of view.
Chris Hayes: Oh, that’s interesting. Right.
Laura Meckler: So we had both sides. And now at the same time, concurrent with the pandemic, we had this rise of culture war politics in schools. And by the way, I should say that we know a lot of this because “The Post” did a big poll of homeschooled families, which is the first survey that we know of that’s really looked at scientifically at the motivations behind homeschooling. The federal government does these surveys, but they haven’t done one since 2019. So we were able to look at sort of how things have changed. And one of the things that we found was that politics plays a role as well.
There were about half of the families said that their schools were overly influenced by liberal views. So these are conservatives upset that their schools are essentially too woke. And then on the other hand, you have about a quarter, so not as many, of parents who feel like their schools are overly influenced by conservative influences. So you essentially have people who are like upset by some of these laws that have been passed in certain states and feel like, you know, I’ve talked to parents who said they’re not teaching history properly, they’re whitewashing everything and they want to do a better job themselves.
So you have these cross-cutting interests. And our poll also found that the sort of pre-pandemic group was much more conservative. And now the post-pandemic group is much more evenly balanced. So we’re getting a much more diverse group of homeschoolers.
Chris Hayes: See, this is really interesting, right? Because I think it was so associated both in people’s mind and also as practice with sort of conservative Christians. And then you’ve got this, you know, the pandemic. This is one of the most interesting top lines from your surveys that people are coming into the tent from all sort of different places, including like those two things which are worth talking about. I’m in upstate where I think schools are opening too quickly and they’re not safe and I want to keep my kid home, which I feel like is a part of the parenting public that just never got interviewed or talked about.
Like so much of the reporting was about people wanting to go back to schools. And then it was like, well, there’s the teachers union on the other side or there’s this or that interest on the other side of it. But then there were a lot of parents who were like, I don’t think it’s safe to go back to school. And it’s interesting to me that that’s a significant portion of people that find their way to homeschooling in this moment.
Laura Meckler: Yes, that is a significant portion. And it’s in some cases the kids themselves have some sort of medical situation or they’re living with somebody —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Laura Meckler: — who has a medical situation or they’re just very, very cautious. I mean, there are people. So I talked to somebody whose kid has a severe peanut allergy and she was worried because they were eating lunch in the classrooms. And if somebody has a peanut butter sandwich in that classroom, that could be really dangerous to her kid. And she wasn’t convinced that the school was doing enough to make sure that they were going to keep her, I believe it was her daughter, you know, safe from that sort of thing. You know, peanut allergy doesn’t directly relate to COVID, but you can see how it all kind of follows. There is just sort of this diversity of opinions, and a diversity of motivations, I should say.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
(ADVERTISEMENT)
Chris Hayes: And let’s talk about the political part of it too. I mean, there’s a racial diversity aspect of this as well. One of the things that you guys document is that homeschooling has become more racially diverse. Talk about what the numbers say and if you have sort of reporting experience in talking to people who are non-white who have found their way to homeschooling.
Laura Meckler: Yeah, so it definitely has become more racially diverse. We specifically were able to document in the poll a rise in Latino homeschooling. So they were a larger share of the group. There’s been a lot, which has gotten a lot less attention actually than black homeschooling has. Now, homeschooling among black families has grown, but our poll did not find that it grew faster than other forms of it, so other racial groups. But yes —
Chris Hayes: Got you.
Laura Meckler: — I did some reporting in Detroit with a group called Engage Detroit, which is a black homeschool co-op in the city. And, you know, there are all sorts of parents there who felt like their public school was not serving them well. I mean, they felt like, and the person who runs it is very, very blunt about the fact that she thinks that Detroit public schools and other school districts in the area are just not serving those families and that the parents can do a better job.
So, you know, and if you ask questions about, well, you know, how do they know what to do or what are they going to do or how are they going to make this work and et cetera. I mean, the response that usually comes back from her and from many other homeschool advocates is, well, look at the public schools. Look how many people are failing there. How can you say this won’t work? Now, in the case of Engage Detroit, they offer it actually with the help of a lot of private philanthropy money, much of it funded by the school choice interest, I should say. There’s a lot of school choice money that is going into this area.
Chris Hayes: I’m sure. Yes.
Laura Meckler: But they’ve gotten a lot of grants. And one of the things they’ve used that money for is to hire coaches so that if you’re starting out on homeschooling, I mean, personally, if I was starting out on homeschooling, I don’t think I would have a clue how to begin. And I have enough trouble, you know, with my kids helping them with their homework.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Laura Meckler: But there’s a coach who you meet with and who helps you figure out how to choose a curriculum, you know, how to organize your day. And you get to meet with that person, you know, as you’re setting things up in the early weeks. So that’s one of the things that they do at Engage Detroit. And, you know, they’ve been growing like gangbusters since the pandemic. Started with just a handful of families and now they have well over a hundred.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, let’s talk about that, the school choice funding here. I mean, there’s an obvious political valence and prehistory here, right? Public schooling is one of the sort of central public and universally accessible public goods that the U.S. has. Other countries have a whole bunch of them. They have universal daycare. They have universal healthcare, like the National Health Service in the U.K. and different versions. We don’t have those things. We have a smaller public sphere in that sense, particularly in social services and universal public amenities than other OECD countries, but public schooling we have. And everyone in every kid in every place in America from the most remote village in Alaska to, you know, the metropolis of Manhattan, right, has a spot at a public school that their tax dollars pay for and is part of the social compact.
And people who don’t like that for ideological reasons, either from a grand vision that public goods are bad or inferior products or the market competition should be in place in those or the institutions that are empowered by public schooling. There’s lots of people in the school choice moment and other places that basically think public schooling is bad and want to sort of see it undone, particularly unraveled as this sort of universal good that everyone is participating in. And to your point, it seems like they have been very focused on homeschooling as a site of growth for that.
Laura Meckler: Yeah. I mean, they would describe it as everybody should have a right to an education, but you should be able to choose which education you want. You should have your tax money go toward whatever your choice is, whether it be homeschooling or whether it be, you know, private school or what have you. It’s very interesting. A whole bunch of states are passing these educational savings accounts, which are straight up vouchers. You know, for a long time, the school choice movement sort of did vouchers in a roundabout way through these tax credits and scholarship programs. And now they’re just straight up vouchers where you can get, you know, as thousands of dollars, $8,000, $9,000 a year to spend on your child’s education and in many of those states that homeschooling qualifies. So, you know, we’re talking about a pretty substantial amount of money.
Chris Hayes: And that’s just direct government subsidy.
Laura Meckler: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that’s like the government is like, here’s the money.
Laura Meckler: Right. It’s the money the state would have given to your public school, your local school district —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Laura Meckler: — is instead going directly to the parent. Now, the interesting wrinkle here is that the original homeschoolers are very uncomfortable with this. They don’t want any regulation and they figure, you know, if you get money, regulation isn’t going to be far behind, which I think is —
Chris Hayes: Interesting.
Laura Meckler: — a not unreasonable way of thinking about it. And so some of them have resisted it and the politics of this get a little complicated. But nonetheless, there are a number of states where homeschoolers can get money and this is very much being driven by the school choice movement. And as well, also charitable giving, a bunch of charitable money in there as well.
Chris Hayes: The school choice movement calls themselves the school choice movement and it’s good to call people below what they call themselves. Other people would say they’re the anti-public education movement or have a more sort of insidious vision of all this. But it’s interesting that I want to just linger on that ideological tension there for a second, which is a fascinating one to me, that there is a lot of money in this country on behalf of people that want to move to a model in which rather than this sort of universal public good, right, every people go to public school or they can opt out and go to private school.
There’s this sort of portable individual voucherized system where the tax dollar just attaches to the kid and then you can take that tax money and rather than putting them into the public good system of the public school, you can take it and pay that to a private entity, a private school, right? So, it’s essentially a voucher. And there’s different places that we use that kind of policy tool. And there’s people who’ve wanted to do that to public education for decades. But what you’re saying is there’s a little ideological tension between that part of the movement that sees this as kind of a wedge to opening up towards school choice and vouchers and the kind of like off the grid version of homeschooling, which is like, we don’t want anything to do with the state for whatever reason, you leave us alone and you stay over there and view a sort of encroaching entanglement if those two things come together.
Laura Meckler: Exactly. That’s exactly right. And in fact, in some states, there are two ways you can homeschool. You can either homeschool under the homeschool statue, or you can educate your kids at home through the educational savings account. And you are bureaucratically —
Chris Hayes: Now that’s fascinating.
Laura Meckler: — you’re in one bucket or the other, but either way, it’s kind of the same.
Chris Hayes: Fascinating.
Laura Meckler: But one way you get a big check from the state and the other you get to say that you’re separate from the state. And in fact, like for instance, in Florida, if you do take the money, you are actually subject to having to take some standardized tests. So they’re not wrong, that money sometimes comes with strings attached. So you have a choice. But I think there are a lot of parents out there who especially as we talked about how the fact that we’re seeing a diversification of the people doing this, there are parents who are less ideologically averse to regulation and more interested in thousands of dollars and are going to happily take that money.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, right. I mean, that’s why the people that want this model to grow are pushing for exactly that. You know, if you’re going to undertake this, in the vast majority of cases, some deep ideological commitment, whether that’s a religious commitment or a secular deep ideological commitment to undertake this, because it is almost by definition a thing most people don’t do, and is going to be almost certainly kind of more work and effort than sending your kid to the local public school.
Laura Meckler: Well, it also may be. I mean, just to broaden the thinking on this, it may be that your kid is really struggling. Let’s say your kid is being bullied at school.
Chris Hayes: Right, right, right.
Laura Meckler: And it’s just miserable. And you might in fact decide, you know, we’re going to try this for a couple of years. We’re going to say, get through middle school, and then we’re going to go back to in high school. And in fact, one other finding in our poll was that the new homeschoolers were much more open to potentially going back to public school in the future or they’re more likely to go back and forth. They just don’t have quite the same, as you were saying, ideological commitment. So, it’s more diverse in that respect too.
Chris Hayes: That’s really interesting, right? So if you’re dealing with a kid who’s just having a hard time in school for whatever reason, and now in a way, because of the growth of this model, because it might feel more tangible, because there’s different avenues you can find yourself to it, it pops up, right? And you’re like, what are we going to do? Can we move to another public school? Can we send him or her to a private school? Like this is now an option sort of on the table in some ways for a parent who finds himself in that position that it might not have been before.
Laura Meckler: Yes, exactly. And I mean, I met this one family at that microschool in New Hampshire where, you know, she had twins at the school. Her daughter was, you know, pretty typically developing, but the son was on the autism spectrum, had been mercilessly bullied at school. You know, when he shows up at this microschool, like often wearing this banana costume, like he feels better wearing this banana costume. And he was wearing the banana costume the day I was there. And nobody, you know, one thing I’ll say about this microschool I visited, while I’m not necessarily convinced the academics were amazing, I don’t know, maybe I don’t know enough to say one way or another, but it did seem like a very supportive environment where there was a lot of kindness —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Laura Meckler: — and people were supportive of each other, both the adults and the kids. So it was much smaller, obviously. So anyway, I mean, this stuff is complicated. There’s a lot there.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Laura Meckler: But I think the underlying all of this is the fact that we have all this new money coming in. By the way, another source of money is venture capital, which is funding a lot of these new options out there, like the Prenda Microschools I talked about, this CODS and Outschool, which is an online platform where you can take classes. So there’s all of this, unregulated, of course. There’s a lot of money coming in that way. So there’s just a lot of movement towards increasing this and, you know, in a very non-regulatory environment.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, I mean, there’s a ton of money. This is a huge growth area. I mean, I’ve learned this from your reporting, but like when you think about, you know, again, there’s a pecuniary interest of some who see the amount of money that goes in the public school system, which is a public good, and things like, well, there’s a lot of money there that could become private dollars that go through private channels. I mean, there’s tens of millions of school children in America, right? Like, this is one of the things that like, we as a society spend the most money on.
If you started to take 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent, you’re talking about billions and billions and billions and billions of dollars that would now be flowing through new private entities that would be, you know, making profits off money that they had no chance of making a profit off before.
Laura Meckler: Yeah, and I think we should acknowledge the fact that when students leave the public system, they take their dollars with them, whether the parents get that money or not. If enrollment falls, funding falls for the school district.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Laura Meckler: And because it’s all based on peer pupil funding, and that does eat away at that district’s ability to serve, and of course, public schools are still serving the vast majority of kids, and when they have less money to do so, then that’s harder for them to make programming work, make sure that they’re serving all kids who need it. I mean, the public system is always going to be, as you said at the beginning of this conversation, the public system is the one that’s there for everybody that you can count on. So, to the extent that it gets undermined financially, there are implications that, you know, some people are really worried about.
I’ll also say another point that we addressed in a recent piece that we did that tried to look at exactly how much homeschooling was increasing. We did a district by district analysis around the country to get at these numbers. And one thing we talked about in this story was the fact that public schools aren’t also sort of a community good. Like it’s a place that serves as the center of a neighborhood —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Laura Meckler: — center of a community. It’s the place where, you know, as one person pulled, as I think a teachers union official said, you know, when there was flooding, those public schools opened their door to people who were displaced. You know, it’s the place where the community comes together for the Friday night football game or the high school play. And, you know, that’s not going away, but there is a public good to that when we splinter and, you know, I’m off with my homeschool co-op. It’s different.
Laura Meckler: Yeah, and I think there’s also a sort of interesting tension between sort of the individual and the collective, you know, inherent in the whole, you know, project of public universal schooling. There’s a sort of left-wing critique, which there’s less of this now. I think there was more of this in the 1960s, particularly the Pink Floyd, we don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control, but the idea of like unschooling and the idea of like, you know, that schools are basically these sort of like conformism factories that produce future little workers for the industrial assembly line.
And then, you know, there’s a right-wing version, which is that, you know, this is the godless secular bureaucratic ethos of teachers unions. And I think that’s been a more powerful and enduring ideological tendency in American life and I think it’s probably closer to the growth of it. But I guess one thing I think of is like, you know, I think it’s good for kids to be with other kids. And like to socialize and to socialize across difference and boundaries. Now, that’s an ideal thing and American schools are incredibly segregated. In fact, they’d be re-segregating for literally decades.
So, it’s not like that idealized version is the real world, but as a model, there’s some part of me that’s like, if I could wave a magic wand, would I want every kid being homeschooled? And I think my answer is like a strong no. But I’m just speaking my own ideological tendencies here.
Laura Meckler: Yeah, well, I mean, there are obviously millions of parents who would agree with you on that. You know, I mean, there are plenty of parents who don’t have the inclination, skills, time, money, you know, the list goes on and on to homeschool.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Laura Meckler: And I don’t anticipate that that will change.
Chris Hayes: Wherewithal or motivation.
Laura Meckler: Yes, right, exactly. But yes, there is no question that our schools are polarized and they are segregated and people do cluster with people like themselves. But when you’re looking at homeschooling, that’s true in a supercharged way because you actually may have socialization because there are a lot of homeschoolers participate in co-ops. But what those co-ops typically look like —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Laura Meckler: — is like you really are joining with other families who are really lined up with you.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Laura Meckler: It’s very curated and hand chosen. So you’re not going to run into somebody with a different point of view. Now you could argue, what are your chances of doing that in most of American public schools? You know, that’s debatable, but more so than a homeschool co-op, I would guess.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
(ADVERTISEMENT)
Chris Hayes: Well, the experts you talk to and the people, obviously there’s people from all different perspectives. There’s people who sort of are at the kind of big lobbying ideological level that want to, you know, see this grow for reasons. There’s people who are the parents. There’s people in the industry who like, obviously, COVID was a huge shock and the best we could tell it pushed a bunch of people into this mode that has not subsided. But I guess the question is like, what did they say? Like if I’m getting a deck from a VC in this space, like, what are they projecting for the growth of homeschooling in America? Or what is their optimistic scenario?
Laura Meckler: Yeah, well, I don’t know if we really necessarily have any venture capitalists who are really fully focused in that direction. I think that because a lot of them —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Laura Meckler: — they’re funding various different flavors of this that apply to lots of different types of people.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Laura Meckler: But having said that, you know, I think this is actually an outstanding question, because what we saw was that during the pandemic, homeschooling shot up. And then in the two years since then, it has come back down a little bit, but it’s still well above where it was pre-pandemic. So our numbers, which is based on data that we collected from 32 states, show that homeschooling last year was 51 percent higher than it was in the 2017-18 school year. So, you know, substantial, which makes it the fastest growing form of education, you know, by far, especially when public schooling is falling and, you know, private schooling is going up a little bit. So, you know, will it continue to fall in subsequent years? I mean, I think we don’t know. It could, but my guess is that we’re going to see it stabilized somewhere closer to where it is now.
Chris Hayes: One last thing that I thought that really stuck out to me in your polling was they talked about needs of their students and I think it obviously, like, my general feeling about parenting is like, I don’t really judge other parents for what they do with their kids by and large. Parenting is difficult and people make decisions about what to do with their kids. Obviously that has its limits. But one of the things I saw was people talking about school shootings in your survey as one of the things that we’re thinking about when they were doing homeschooling. I wonder if you could talk more about that because it struck me as like just incredibly dystopian, the notion that this form of very high salience, ritualized American slaughter would frighten people to retreat from the public sphere out of like a sense of physical safety, which is just such a terrible social failing at such a deep level and so upsetting to me. And I’m just curious. It definitely showed up in the polling that you guys did.
Laura Meckler: It absolutely did. I mean, we actually have the number here, 62 percent of parents who are homeschooling said that school shootings was one of their motivations. So, that I think is a pretty substantial number. Just anecdotally, we did a call out to readers to tell us their homeschooling stories and I read through a lot of those responses and it kept just coming up over and over in many of the interviews I did. Even if it wasn’t the main reason, it was often a secondary reason. It is something people are really scared about.
And again, now super anecdotally, I actually have a friend who has young children, they’re too young for school right now. And she read some of our stories and actually told me that she had been talking with some of her friends, but well maybe they could form their own little, essentially like microschool, a pod, and because they’re all so scared to send their kids to school, which I think is incredibly sad, you know, and obviously a very sad commentary on the state of affairs that the only solution to this might be to withdraw from a place that has actually served our country very well over many years. So I have to say, when I started this reporting, this was not on my personal radar. It was not something that I thought we were going to be writing about.
Chris Hayes: I was shocked to see it in that survey data and I had the same feel. I mean, I feel complicated about this because I really don’t want to dismiss anyone’s fears because, you know, school shootings happen in America. It’s sort of a uniquely American thing and it’s like one of the most ghastly things that happens in our society. I cover them. So I know when they happen and they’re awful, and not all of them get covered. A bunch of them happen in schools, in neighborhoods that are very low income where violence is sort of treated as more endemic and aren’t the sort of big shocking national stories.
And, you know, there’s a sort of weird categorization where if it’s like one mass shooter at a school, that’s in a different category than like, some sort of like beef between people and shooting in school. But like if there’s bullets going off in your school, it’s bullets going off in your school. All of that said, in a statistical sense, of the risks that a child faces in the world, like cars are way more dangerous things than school. And so, you know, it’s just something to think about when you think about what, you know, what the numbers tell us about relative risks. And so it’s striking to me to see this show up in 62 percent of survey respondents when I think about what the numbers are and what —
Laura Meckler: Right.
Chris Hayes: — you know, how close that risk is —
Laura Meckler: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: — in a sort of mathematical sense.
Laura Meckler: I mean, and I do wonder if that’s the sole motivation for anyone. I don’t know if somebody would do it if that was their only reason, but you know, at the same time, I think it just speaks —
Chris Hayes: It’s there. It’s in their head. Like, it’s —
Laura Meckler: — it’s there. It’s in their head.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Laura Meckler: And I think it speaks to the sense of hopelessness around this question, you know, of like not feeling —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Laura Meckler: — like it’s going to get better. And I understand that.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Laura Meckler: I understand why people would feel that way.
Chris Hayes: Totally. Oh my God, yes.
Laura Meckler: And even though it’s easy to say like, oh, it doesn’t, you know, the chances of it happening at any given school is obviously very small. So, you know, I think we all need to keep that in mind and, you know, be able to go on with our days. But, you know, then you read about the next shooting and like —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Laura Meckler: — would either of us be surprised if we looked at our phones right now, right when this interview ended and saw that there was one. No, we probably wouldn’t be surprised. And so, and then the parents in that school would say, well, we never thought it would happen here. And then, you know, it did. So, it’s so emotional for people and it’s so raw that I understand why they react the way they do.
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Laura Meckler: But homeschooling is a pretty, I would say, somewhat extreme response to that because this is not a one-off decision. This is something that’s with you day in, day out. And you’re taking on —
Chris Hayes: That’s right.
Laura Meckler: — an enormous amount of responsibility in terms of giving your kids a well-rounded education. It isn’t just about teaching them to read, which by the way, isn’t always that simple. It isn’t just about math. Hopefully, it’s the arts and it’s science and it’s history and, you know, there’s everything that a school gives you. So I think that it does take a certain type of person to want to do this and I guess there are more people like that than we realized.
Chris Hayes: Laura Meckler is the National Education Writer at “The Washington Post.” She’s one of the co-authors of a fantastic series “The Washington Post” has been doing called Homeschool Nation about the growth in homeschooling in the United States. She’s also author of “Dream Town: Shaker Heights and the Quest for Racial Equity.” Laura, that was fantastic. Thank you so much.
Laura Meckler: Thank you so much for having me. This was a great conversation.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Laura Meckler and definitely check out her series at “The Washington Post”. You can e-mail us at withpod@gmail.com, get in touch with us on X using the hashtag #WITHpod, the site formerly known as Twitter, which I have to say I’m using less and less. You can follow us on TikTok by searching for WITHpod. You can also follow me on threads @chrislhayes or on Bluesky where I’m also chrislhayes. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.
“Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia, engineered by Bob Mallory and featuring music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to NBCNews.com/whyisthishappening?