Last Wednesday I wrote that we need data about the number or percentage of elementary school students no longer attending public schools. Today comes a Bari Weiss article at Substack which has some numbers to talk about.
The number of kids going to school at home nationwide has doubled over the past two years. In 2019, there were about 2.5 million students learning at home. Today there are nearly 5 million. That means more than 11 percent of American households are educating their children outside of traditional schools.
The homeschooling trend cuts across geographic, political, and racial lines: Black, Latino and Asian families are even likelier than white ones to educate their children at home.
Weiss provides some of the needed data, but mostly about homeschooling. Private schooling will also absorb some of those leaving public schools, and I don’t have data about their enrollments yet. Still, my conclusion of last Wednesday looks more prescient today.
Do you suppose that, looking back, we will conclude the Covid pandemic marked the beginning of the end of broadly attended public schools? And the beginning of their evolution into being "educators of the remnant" of poor and difficult children as they've long been in the South.
