For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching
Katy Rose works with students at her home-based microschool in Goffstown, N.H.
GOFFSTOWN, N.H. — Parents pull around the circular driveway to drop their children off in the morning. Students climb the steps and hang their backpacks on hooks. Katy Rose greets her charges and sends them into a classroom festooned with artwork, where they open their laptops and begin working through math problems.
But Rose is not a teacher, and this is not a school. Every child here is a home-schooler.
Rose, a registered nurse, had never studied or worked in education before starting her own “microschool,” where her title is “guide” for students who study math and reading online and depend on her for many other subjects.
Her program is part of a company called Prenda, which last year served about 2,000 students across several states. It connects home-school families with microschool leaders who host students, often in their homes. It’s like Airbnb for education, says Prenda’s CEO, because its website allows customers — in this case, parents — to enter their criteria, search and make a match.
An explosion of new options, including Prenda, has transformed home schooling in America. Demand is surging: Hundreds of thousands of children have begun home schooling in the last three years, an unprecedented spike that generated a huge new market. In New Hampshire, for instance, the number of home-schoolers doubled during the pandemic, and even today it remains 40 percent above pre-covid totals.
For many years, home schooling has conjured images of parents and children working together at the kitchen table. The new world of home schooling often looks very different: pods, co-ops, microschools and hybrid schools, often outside the home, as well as real-time and recorded virtual instruction. For a growing number of students, education now exists somewhere on a continuum between school and home, in person and online, professional and amateur.
Microschools sometimes provide all-day supervision, allowing parents to work full time while sending their children to “home school.” Hybrid schools let students split their days between school and home. Co-ops, once entirely parent run, might employ a professional educator.
Many parents still take the lead in teaching their children. Many rely on family co-ops, in which a mom in one family might teach science while a dad in another leads a photography class. Families also tap into existing community resources such as YMCAs, art studios and nature centers.
But new financial and ideological forces have revolutionized the broader home-school landscape.
The most powerful may be government. About a dozen states allow families to use taxpayer funds for home-school expenses. Education Savings Accounts, or ESAs, direct thousands of dollars to families that opt out of public school, whether the destination is a private school or their own homes.
Support comes, too, from the nonprofit sector. School-choice advocates are directing millions of dollars in charitable giving toward home-school organizations — a convergence of two powerful but traditionally separate movements.
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It would be an honour to patiently teach kids the 3R’s and good living skills and have real fun doing it here in Chinada! So many more innocent kids deserve to remain so despite the evil government-run indoctrination camps we used to call Schools.