Homeschool movement thrives post-Covid

By Michael Ashcraft –

After Covid, the number of homeschooling students has doubled, as parents react against government overreach, the teaching of transgender ideology and racially divisive economic theory.

“We find right now in our public schools more emphasis on teaching critical race theory than we have teaching critical math theory,” says Ben Carson, former White House secretary of housing and urban development on Vice News.

Before the pandemic, a mere three percent of American children were home-schooled. In the first year of Covid, that number doubled – and most never returned to public schools after Covid, Vice News reported. The Wall Street Journal reported that public schools have lost one million students nationwide.

Third grader Reagan Webster was part of the exodus. “I like it a lot more because we get to do a lot of adventures,” she says of her new homeschool group that teaches some days at a nearby lake. “At my other school, they made you wear masks all the time.”

Homeschooling is an alternative way of K-12. Instead of having a certified teacher, Mom or Dad teaches the children the three R’s (reading, writing and ‘rithmetic) as well as history, music, art and just about any other class offered by the public schools.

Homeschoolers team up in consortiums to cover weak spots (if one mom is strong on math and another on grammar, they might meet at a local church and swap subjects). Homeschoolers even band together to form sports teams that compete against regular schools.

They are usually tested according to state requirements and must fulfill the hours of study per year. And the statistics prove that the homeschooled children are crushing it.

According to the National Home Education Research Institute’s 2016 report, homeschooled kids scored 15-30% higher on standardized tests. Who is more likely to graduate college? According to an NHERI analysis, 67% of homeschooled students graduated college compared to 59% of public-school students.

Homeschoolers avoid bullying, drugs and other bad influences.

Still, critics cite the lack of academic credentials among parents as troubling.

Ryan Spitz founded the California Adventure Academy of Redding, CA, in the Fall of 2022, to foster cooperation among homeschooling parents. He supplements traditional classes with wilderness survival skills like fishing, camping, paddling, and camping – as well as self-defense, boxing and jiu jitsu.

“It takes all these skills to raise up and unleash your powerful child,” Ryan says. “I’ve created a support structure to homeschooling parents. This is parents taking back control over the raising of their kids. What they are teaching in public schools about sex, especially anal sex, my third-grade daughter doesn’t need to learn.”

The mass migration towards homeschooling was started with school shutdowns, forced vaccinations, mandatory masking, social distancing, and plexiglass barriers – all of which were mandated to varying degrees by school boards around the country.

Those restrictions – touted as health safety – devastatingly dumbed down the current slew of students, who found it much easier to not pay attention via zoom. Two-thirds of Texas third graders tested below their grade level in math in 2021, according to a Unicef study. As a whole, the deficiencies in literacy and math are now “nearly insurmountable,” the study concludes.

“People homeschool for faith-based reasons and because they don’t want their children to get indoctrinated with certain ideas,” says one mom from the group Florida Moms for Homeschooling. “We are just for parents’ rights.”

Eighty percent of homeschoolers fear the public-school environment for their kids, according to Admissionsly.

“We need to recognize that political correctness which has morphed into wokeness is antithetical to liberty and freedom of speech,” Ben Carson told homeschoolers at a convention in Orlando. “I’m very glad to see alternatives to the public schools.”

Homeschooling got a major boost in the 1980s with the formation of the Homeschool Legal Defense Association which fought to restore parents’ rights to educate their own children. Prior to that, most states treated homeschooling as no schooling and didn’t award or validate diplomas.

Today, 16 states have no curriculum requirements, and 32 states have no mandatory testing restricting homeschoolers – considered a win for the homeschoolers who view government regulation as part of the problem of the state education system.

But the recent surge of homeschooling has come from anti-vaxxers and people opposed to normalizing aberrant sex practices and force-feeding radical ideology like CRT, which sees racism everywhere. Some say CRT teaches kids of color to not try to succeed because “institutional racism” won’t let them.

“Critical race theory is a grave threat to the American way of life,” says Chris Rufo, who sues to stop CRT being taught in schools. “It divides Americans by race and traffics in the pernicious concepts of race essentialism, racial stereotyping, and race-based segregation—all under a false pursuit of ‘social justice.'”

According to Census data, African American homeschoolers constitute one of the fastest growing segments in the community. It jumped 500 percent. Some black parents want to shield their children from racism.

Amber Johnston leads a co-op for black homeschoolers that has swelled to 260 kids. “I just want my kids to have some books with blacks in them,” says Amber, who is Christian and starts every teaching day with prayer. “The thought that somebody would look at my children and think of them as ‘less than’ is crushing.”

Forty-one percent of homeschoolers are non-white, according to NHERI.

Whatever the reason they opt for homeschooling, African American children get better results from homeschooling than from public schools.

“The home-educated typically score 15 to 30 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests,” says a 2015 study conducted by Dr. Bryan Ray in the Journal of School Choice.

Homeschooling faces strong opposition from the powerful public school teachers’ unions because many states have enacted legislation to allocate tax money to parents that otherwise would have gone to the public schools. As a rule, public schools promote getting more money as the only way to fix its woes while they continue to deliver substandard results.

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Michael Ashcraft teaches at the Lighthouse Christian Academy in Santa Monica, CA.