COVID and the Destruction of the “Big Lie of Homeschooling”
They're not weird. They're from the future.
(This is the second of a four-post series. Click here to go to the first post.)
Let’s talk about COVID. More precisely, the response to COVID.
Under the pretext of dealing with a global pandemic, for a period varying between two weeks and twelve months, the ordinary lives of ordinary families were turned upside down.
Including the education of their kids. Especially the education of their kids.
I’ve previously written about COVID and its impact on education, but here’s another, simpler way to frame what happened:
In response to COVID, federal, state, and local governments – including school districts and their elected boards – turned every family in every neighborhood in every state in the entire nation into homeschoolers.
During the COVID response, everyone became a homeschooler.
While maybe 3% of kids were homeschooling at the time, the COVID lockdown forced the other 97% of us, generally against our will, into a mode of education that was totally unfamiliar to most of us.
But having gotten a taste of modern homeschooling, many never returned – and never will. The implications of this change are still working their way through education and American life, but as you ponder this reality, consider this fact:
During the year of the COVID lockdown, the number of Texas homeschool kids grew by more than 50%, and has continued to grow since. As a result, today there are more homeschoolers than private school and charter school students combined.
There are somewhere around 800,000 homeschoolers in Texas, while there are about 250,000 private school kids and 440,000 charter school students. The 800,000 estimate is likely biased low due to the reluctance of homeschool families to report their activities. As a result, the actual number may be even higher.
Taken together, about one in five Texas kids are being homeschooled or are in private or charter schools. In other words, over 20% are no longer in the traditional public school system.
The revolution is already in progress, and it is not being televised.
Every time I share Texas homeschool numbers with someone, I get a gasp followed by a look of abject fear, as if I were telling them of the zombie apocalypse.
I get it. In my (now long distant) youth, homeschooling was considered weird (like zombies). Everyone sent their kids to school (in 1970, somewhere between 98-99% of kids age 7 or older were enrolled) and in many states homeschooling was actually illegal. As a result, public perception of homeschooling has been negative, and homeschoolers were considered – in a literal sense – anti-social.
This widespread perception – that homeschooling is fundamentally anti-social – is what I refer to as the “Big Lie of Homeschooling.”
The reality of homeschooling today is almost always the opposite of anti-social. For most families, homeschool is not mom sitting at the breakfast table with her kids writing on a blackboard like a teacher in a traditional classroom, 6 hours a day. With the explosion of information available online and the lowering of communication barriers that came with social media, homeschooling is a rich, interactive, hybrid digital-analog, social activity.
You read that right. Today’s homeschooling is a highly social activity.
Moms connect via Facebook to form educational co-ops, share resources like specialized tutors and microschools, critique online curricula and assessment tools, coordinate activities like sports, art, and music groups, and a host of other activities that are part of building a vibrant community. Educators connect with moms and each other to build trusted networks, something especially needed when the virtual world is poisoned by aliases, filters, and phishing.
(An aside on a topic that may one day become a post of its own: I believe AI is going to make trusted, physical networks even more important and valuable than today. It will be trivial for some troll to generate a deep fake of you and make it say hateful things on TikTok. You will be appalled and defensive, but what can you do about it? To millions of virtual strangers around the world, you’ll forever be that racist demagogue spewing hateful invective. But not to the real people who know you. They’ll know you – the real you – because your kids play together in the park and y’all meet for coffee and share cookie recipes and talk about the state of the world. Those are the people you can count on. Those are the people you trust, and who trust you. Those are the people with whom we create true communities bound by love. Not money. Not power. Not influence. Love. And, no matter how powerful the technology, artificial intelligence will only ever generate artificial love, and that is not the love which is an essential ingredient of human happiness and societal flourishing. But I digress…)
For most moms – I’m going to focus on moms, but what follows applies to dads as well – this alternative educational lifestyle was completely unknown. Of course, this makes sense; after all, why would the average working mom have given any thought to homeschooling?
“My husband and I work hard to be able to afford a house in a nice neighborhood that is zoned to a good public school, and that’s where my kids go. They take the bus and then I go to work (and I have to work since it takes both of our incomes to pay the mortgage on a house in this neighborhood). Of course, I attend PTO meetings, participate in bake sales (although most of my stuff comes from HEB, given time constraints), go to football and basketball games, and all the stuff I’m supposed to do. Why should I care about homeschooling? Everybody thinks they are weirdos anyway.”
The COVID response, however, woke millions of parents from their educational slumber.
The awakening came in three waves:
The Lockdown. During the first month, moms had to figure out how to keep their kids engaged. Many discovered that there were online programs that were not only engaging, but downright educational! Their kids enjoyed them, and a relatively small amount of these programs, together with indoor and outdoor playtime, could produce both happiness and cognitive development in kids who were otherwise isolated from the world. They also discovered homeschool groups on social media, and found that homeschoolers were enthusiastic about sharing their accumulated experience with those who were new to this world. So, having gotten their first taste of modern homeschooling against their will, some decided they would never go back to the old ways. These moms were the first wave of COVID homeschoolers.
Going Virtual. As schools began to re-open virtually, moms got a look inside the classroom by observing their kids real-time interacting with their teacher and classmates. For many moms, this was the eureka moment when they recognized that the school experience was very different from their expectations. It wasn’t the fact it was happening on Zoom; it was that there appeared to be very little real learning going on. A significant chunk of those moms then reverted back to what they did in the first month, letting their kids continue with online programs and unstructured play. They connected with other homeschool moms and began to see and explore the possibilities. These moms were the second wave of COVID homeschoolers.
Reopening Schools. When schools physically re-opened - in some cases, more than a year later - not every mom was ready to return to the status quo ante. Many had jobs where they could (and were even encouraged to) work from home, and sending kids back to school was not a foregone conclusion. Their kids, having tasted a bit of freedom, were not happy to return to school, particularly when their school felt like a Soviet prison hospital, with endless and often arbitrary rules made up each day by power-drunk apparatchiks and their local komsomol lackeys. (These rules were ostensibly imposed to “protect the kids” but in reality were for the adults, as the incidence of serious disease in children was negligible.) Some moms kept their kids at home while others, seeing their kids were not thriving back in school, started pulling them back out. These moms were the third wave of COVID homeschoolers.
All through the pandemic, moms connected with each other over social media. They told their stories, shared their insights, and encouraged each other to continue to do what they believed to be best for their kids.
Incessant accusations from cultural elites that homeschooling is anti-social and homeschoolers are weird lost their impact as moms talked to moms whose kids were thriving. Who are you going to believe: your “betters” or your own eyes?
And while we’re at it, who is the weird one? The childless PhD educator with green hair and multiple piercings screeching about the oppressive alienation disproportionately impacting the two-spirit community due to a transphobic devaluation of intersectionality? Or the member of a group of Facebook moms who are getting together for coffee at Peet’s to share math camp recommendations and summer vacation tips while their kids are in a session at a visual arts microschool next door?
For millions of families, COVID killed the Big Lie of Homeschooling.
But COVID also changed homeschooling. The surge of new families into the homeschool world created unprecedented demand for bespoke education. This demand, in turn, led to creation of new and innovative supply, sparking a quiet education revolution and forever changing the politics of education.
That revolution is now burning bright and growing hotter by the day.
And its fuel is the nationwide expansion of ESAs.