Government schools are known for their terrible learning environments and overall burden to taxpayers. As a result, parents have looked to other alternatives for advancing their children’s education.
Enter homeschooling.
According to an October report from EdChoice titled “2019 Schooling in America,” the number of parents who would opt for homeschooling are at an “all-time high.” In more concrete numbers, 15 percent of parents would prefer to home school their kids instead of putting them through other educational alternatives such as private, public, or charter schools. To put things in perspective, this figure was only 5 percent in 2012, demonstrating signs of considerable growth.
Parents cited “safety, drugs, violence, bullying, academics, curriculum, discipline, standard” as the reason for getting their children out of public schools. A solid majority of Americans, 56 percent, believe public education is going the wrong way. Only a third believe it is going in the right direction.
82 percent of children are enrolled in traditional government schools, while another 5 percent are attend government-funded charter schools.
Recent information from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) showed that the number of families homeschooling doubled between 1999 and 2016. The National Home Education Research Institute, argued that the government’s data may actually be underestimating the number of homeschooling families. Some states don’t track or register these families.
After analyzing 16 states from all four major regions of America, the NHERI found that home education increased by an average of 25 percent in those states between 2012 and 2016. In contrast, the school-age population in that period only grew by 2 percent.
“If the data from these states are representative of what happened in other states during those four years, then homeschooling is continuing to grow in both absolute numbers and as a portion of the overall school-age population,” NHERI observed. It estimated that approximately 2.5 million American children are being home-schooled.
In Virginia’s case, the number of homeschooled students increased by 20 percent in the last five years, according to a Virginia Department of Education report. Overall, homeschoolers represent 3 percent of Virginia’s student body in the present.
For liberty conservatives to have a solid future, they must be ready to promote alternative education methods like homeschooling. Public schools serve to indoctrinate and dumb down children on a massive scale. Additionally, the Left is generally in full control of the educational bureaucracy, which makes the system even more corrupt.
If we want to advance our freedoms and beat back the growth of government, rolling back public education is no longer optional.
