National Center for Education Statistics
A new survey of parents with school-aged children estimates the number of homeschooled children ages 5 to 17 nearly doubled from 850,000 students in 1999 to 1.5 million in 2007. The homeschooling rate grew from 1.7 percent of the total school-aged population in 1999 to 2.2 percent in 2003, rising to 2.7 percent in 2007. Researchers interviewed the parents of 10,681 students, 290 of whom were homeschooled, to generate an estimated figure for the entire nation.
The study, conducted by the National Household Education Surveys Program for the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, listed parents’ top three reasons for homeschooling their children as “concern about the school environment; to provide religious or moral instruction; and dissatisfaction with the academic instruction available at other schools.” Free, 4 pages. (202) 502-7491, http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009030.pdf.
