Homeschooling on the rise

A US Department of Education report on homeschooling has just been released (based on a nationwide 2003 survey, so it's already out of date!). According to this random and representative sample, homeschooling has increased from 1.7% of K-12 students in 1999 to 2.2% in 2003. There were, in 2003, an estimated 1.1 million homeschooled children, a 29% increase over the 1999 number.

Parents were then asked which one of the applicable reasons they considered to be their most important reason for homeschooling—31 percent of homeschooled children had parents who cited concern about the environment of other schools, such as safety, drugs, or negative peer pressure, as the most important reason for homeschooling and 30 percent had parents who said the most important reason was to provide religious or moral instruction. While these were the two most common responses, another 16 percent of homeschooled students had parents who said dissatisfaction with the academic instruction available at other schools was their most important reason for homeschooling.

On an unrelated note, I've been over at the NEA and AFT websites trying to find out what they have to say about homeschooling, and what they have to say is: nada. The NEA site has one "leave teaching to the experts" column, written by a head custodian rather than a teacher, but that's it. Essentially, home education is totally ignored.