ABSTRACT
Over the course of two decades, homeschooling in the United States has evolved from an isolated and underground practice into an organized, visible, and confident movement. Once expressly forbidden in many parts of the country, homeschooling was legalized in all fifty states by 1993. Ten years later, according to U.S. Department of Education estimates, approximately 1.1 million children were receiving at least a portion of their education at home (NCES 2004). Advocates at the National Home Education Research Institute claim numbers up to twice as large, but even the more conservative figure constitutes a remarkable 2.2 percent of the nation’s school-aged population. These numerical gains, while impressive, do not fully capture the significance of the homeschooling phenomenon. In addition to growing a base of dedicated, often fervent practitioners, the homeschooling movement has developed a substantial organizational infrastructure. The emergence of professional advocacy groups, specialized publishers, and even institutions of higher education, to say nothing of thousands of informal local support groups, signals the institutionalization of homeschooling in the landscape of US educational choice (Stevens 2001). Finally, the movement’s ‘coming of age’ is evident in its growing acceptance among non-practitioners. While a majority of Americans surveyed in 2001 still disapproved of homeschooling, 41 percent considered it ‘good for the nation’—up from only 16 percent in 1985 (Gallup 1985; Rose and Gallup 2001). Congressional declarations of ‘National Home Education Week’ in both 1999 and 2000 cast a positive light on the practice, while growing attention from major media have nudged it towards the cultural mainstream. As if to confirm homeschooling’s arrival, critics now describe it as a serious threat to common schooling—alongside voucher programs, curricular opt-outs and other forms of educational privatization (Apple 2001; Bivins 2003; Lubienski 2000; Reich 2002; Riegel 2001).
