Almost one in four American public-school families are expecting not to send their children back to government schools after they re-open from the coronavirus shutdown, according to the results of a shocking new survey on educational choices and COVID-19.
A staggering 15 percent of public-school families said they would choose homeschooling going forward, potentially quadrupling or even nearly quintupling the homeschool population if the results are accurate. Across America, that would translate to about 7.5 million new homeschoolers on top of the estimated 2 to 3 million already educated at home.
Another 3 percent of the 1330 families who responded to the survey expect to use virtual schools, which have become popular with some parents amid the coronavirus hysteria. About 2 percent of families surveyed said they would be opting for private-school options instead.
Of the traditional public-school families surveyed, a full 23 percent said they would be leaving government education if and when schools open up next year. Already, about 15 percent of children are either homeschooled or educated in private schools.
The new survey was done by education expert Corey DeAngelis, who serves as the director of school choice at the libertarian Reason Foundation, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and the executive director of the Educational Freedom Institute.
His poll asked parents what type of school their youngest child attended before the COVID-19 shutdown, and what type of school the child would attend after the coronavirus lockdown ends.
However, DeAngelis cautioned that the sample was not necessarily representative. “The parents who selected into this survey could be the most likely to switch out of brick-and-mortar schools,” he said. “These results are therefore likely upper bound estimates of the actual transfers that will occur.”
Still, the results are interesting and potentially hugely important, he said. “Although the sample is not representative of all families, this is the first quantitative evidence we have estimating the amount of switching between sectors,” DeAngelis added. “The expected losses to brick-and-mortar schools are larger than I expected, even for this nonrandom sample.”
The Newman Report recently highlighted the case of a California mother who saw an email inviting her middle school child to participate in a “private,” “invite only” so-called “LGBTQ+ Web Hangout” for “youth” featuring adult homosexuals and transgenders. She decided not to send her child back to the school for obvious reasons.
Over at The New American, for a recent cover story headlined “Coronavirus Opens Eyes to Homeschooling,” this writer interviewed a concerned mother who was shocked at the material being sent home for the student. She, too, decided to pull her child from government school.
However, despite the good news for advocates of liberating children from government schools, there is a potential risk to this, too. At least one analyst, Professor Eric Wearne with the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University, suggested that coronavirus-related economic hardships might cause some parents whose children are in private school to switch to governments schools instead.
Despite the hardships and other problems, the coronavirus represents a historic opportunity for parents to see the benefits of home education and scrutinize the so-called “education” their children are receiving from government schools. That is a good thing.
With enough work, it is possible that millions of children could be liberated permanently from government “education” once this is all done. Now is the time to rescue as many of America’s children as possible — before it’s too late. Get involved today.
This article originally appeared at FreedomProject Media and is reprinted here with permission.
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