It can’t happen fast enough, but the trend is moving in the right direction, and moving very quickly.

Homeschooling is taking off. And it’s no wonder: the public schools are an ideological and academic disaster in most places, and private schools have been veering far Left at a disturbing pace.

Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, a Washington Post analysis shows.

The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at… pic.twitter.com/DSBDsnXbn8

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 31, 2023

As disturbing as recent trends have been in K-12 education, I suspect that what has pushed parents out of the public school system is something much more basic than intellectual trends or abstract statistics that most parents don’t think apply to their own kids or their schools: public schools abandoned children during the pandemic, and their kids haven’t recovered.

The resulting analysis — which includes home-school registration figures for nearly 7,000 individual school districts — is the most detailed look to date at growth in American home schooling.

Look up numbers in your district with our tool: https://t.co/oQ3n4hvaF8

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) October 31, 2023

Home schooling has become — by a wide margin — America’s fastest-growing form of education, as families from Upper Manhattan to Eastern Kentucky embrace a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological fringe, a Washington Post analysis shows.

The analysis — based on data The Post collected for thousands of school districts across the country — reveals that a dramatic rise in home schooling at the onset of the pandemic has largely sustained itself through the 2022-23 academic year, defying predictions that most families would return to schools that have dispensed with mask mandates and other covid-19 restrictions.

The growth demonstrates home schooling’s arrival as a mainstay of the American educational system, with its impact — on society, on public schools and, above all, on hundreds of thousands of children now learning outside a conventional academic setting — only beginning to be felt.

Nobody knows exactly how many students are being homeschooled because the statistics keeping varies widely by state, but in those states where the numbers are kept the increase in kids being taken out of traditional schools and being educated at home is mind-blowing.

Teachers unions: Why is everyone suddenly so skeptical of us?

Also teachers unions: https://t.co/T8rIM23FOU pic.twitter.com/h6yh3cYi67

— Illinois Policy (@illinoispolicy) October 31, 2023

Public schools have declined in enrollment by 4% in recent years, and private schools have seen their enrollment increase by 7%. Nothing shocking there, as parents got fed up with public schools.

But homeschooling increases–don’t forget, the absolute numbers are still pretty low compared to traditional schools–total more than 50%.

That’s not a fluke. It’s a trend.

In states with comparable enrollment figures, the number of home-schooled students increased 51 percent over the past six school years, far outpacing the 7 percent growth in private school enrollment. Public school enrollment dropped 4 percent in those states over the same period, a decline partly attributable to home schooling.

Home schooling’s surging popularity crosses every measurable line of politics, geography and demographics. The number of home-schooled kids has increased 373 percent over the past six years in the small city of Anderson, S.C.; it also increased 358 percent in a school district in the Bronx.

In 390 districts included in The Post’s analysis, there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year, the most recent for which district-level federal enrollment data are available. That’s roughly quadruple the number of districts that had rates that high in 2017-2018, signifying a sea change in how many communities educate their children and an urgent challenge for a public education system that faced dwindling enrollment even before the pandemic.

Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth. In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling early in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increases were similar regardless of school performance.

That last point, while disappointing, is hardly surprising. High performing districts will tend to be so at least partly because the parents are very demanding. Low performing school districts will likely have a less demanding clientele on average. The parents in better school districts were therefore more likely to abandon the public schools during COVID because they knew their kids were falling behind.

That’s not to say that parents in failing schools don’t care; many do. It’s a matter of proportion.

Based on that figure and the growth since then in states that track home schooling, The Post estimates that there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data.

By comparison, there are fewer than 1.7 million in Catholic schools, according to the National Catholic Educational Association. About 3.7 million students attended charter schools in the fall of 2021, according to the most recent federal data.

It is a remarkable expansion for a form of instruction that 40 years ago was still considered illegal in much of the country.

Homeschooling will, in my experience, lead to far better educational outcomes than even private schools. Even parents without much formal education will often provide excellent educations using the curricula available, and in most cases have access to support groups of parents in similar situations. They pool expertise, and are able to give individualized instruction.

Homeschooling parents I have spoken to are often shocked at how little teaching is required to exceed the knowledge imparted by traditional schools, leading them to believe that vast amounts of time are wasted in traditional schools.

Both research and observation show that homeschool kids perform better academically than those in traditional schools. Often by substantial margins. And the argument that homeschooled kids are missing out on the social benefits of schools doesn’t hold up.

Homeschooling’s big downside is the obvious: it requires parental time and commitment. It is tremendously difficult for many American families to make it fit into their lives without huge sacrifices.

Still, this story makes one thing crystal clear: more and more parents are waking up to how badly the public schools are failing, and taking matters into their own hands. This can be nothing but a good thing.

Teachers’ unions are surely taking note, though, and are likely to step up their efforts to step on this movement. We can’t let them.