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Two home-school students completing their work at home in Florida this fall. 

Photographer: Michael Adno for Bloomberg Businessweek
Businessweek
Feature


AMERICA’S CULTURE WARS HAVE LIBERAL PARENTS OPTING FOR HOME-SCHOOLING

In states where conservatives have overhauled curricula, parents on the other
side of the political spectrum are taking their kids out of school—dealing yet
another deep blow to public education.

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By Charley Locke
October 30, 2023 at 1:00 PM GMT+1
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Linda reached her breaking point when all the books were removed from her
daughter’s elementary school library. Ashley got there when her twins were
taught in sixth grade that Manifest Destiny referred to Native Americans who’d
decided to move away from their homelands. For Jessica, it happened after the
passage of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Act, often described as the
“Don’t Say Gay” bill. Kate made the decision when she and her husband learned
that teachers were being discouraged from using the word “slavery” in units
about US history. For Emily, it was when she found out her trans son wouldn’t be
able to use the boys’ bathroom.



None of these mothers had ever imagined they’d home-school their children, but
then their local public schools became unrecognizable to them. (Some of the
people in this story requested we use pseudonyms or only their first names, for
fear of repercussions.) Conservative state governments have been engaging in an
educational culture war, pushing curricula further to the right than at any
other time in recent history. The clear leader has been Florida, where Governor
Ron DeSantis has led an overhaul of the education system, shaping it to his
ideological vision: placing restrictions on many books and pedagogical matters
such as the teaching of race and gender; banning mask mandates during the
Covid-19 pandemic; forcing trans and nonbinary students to use bathrooms
corresponding to their biological sex; requiring parental signature for a
teacher to use a nickname or different pronouns for a student; and arming school
staff in response to shootings. His administration’s policies have weaponized
the conservative home-schooling community’s values and language—using phrases
such as “family choice,” a “parental bill of rights” and “indoctrination” (to
refer to teaching about historical wrongs perpetrated by White people)—pushing
liberal families out.

“I always thought home-schooling was for people who didn’t want their children
to be vaccinated or to learn accurate science,” says Lindsay Poveromo-Joly, who
lives in Coral Springs and started home-schooling her children in 2022 because
of book bans and changes to Florida curricula. “But it’s the opposite, and the
anti-vax free-for-all is what’s happening in the public schools.”

“There is an enduring and substantial increase in home-schooling that has
persisted into when in-person public school options reopened,” says Thomas Dee,
an economist at the Stanford Graduate School of Education who collaborated with
the Associated Press on a study of the recent exodus of students from public
school. There’s been an increase across the country; his analysis of the 22
jurisdictions (21 states and the District of Columbia) with available data found
that for every student who left public education for private school, nearly two
left to home-school.

Expand

A typical home-schooling day for one family in Florida.Photographer: Michael
Adno for Bloomberg Businessweek

The numbers are especially significant in states that already had a strong
tradition of home-schooling. In Florida, for example, about 106,000 students
were home-schooled in fall 2019; by fall 2021, when schools had reopened, the
number had swelled to more than 152,000. That increase has driven an ideological
shift among home-schooled families. Historically, the movement was predominantly
religious and right-leaning; in 2019, the most recent year for which federal
data are available, 59% of home-schooling parents selected religious instruction
as a factor in their choice, and three times as many were Republicans as
Democrats. A 2023 Washington Post poll found that only 34% of parents had
decided to home-school so they could offer religious instruction, and that
Republicans outnumbered Democrats by a narrower 2 to 1.

A survey from the National Home Education Research Institute found that families
of K-12 students home-schooled in the 2021-22 school year spent an average of
$600 per student annually, which would make home-schooling a $1.9 billion
industry. Overall, in the past year, they say there are 3.1 million kids being
home-schooled. “It’s been a very observable and marked shift,” says Tiffany
Petty, who founded Torchlight Curriculum, which offers literature-based secular
lessons. Demand for her materials more than doubled during the pandemic, she
estimates, and it continues to grow. Petty, who also runs a discussion group for
Torchlight users, says she’s seen an increase in parents asking about materials
for children with particular backgrounds: a neurodivergent daughter, a biracial
son.

Expand

Petty, founder of Torchlight, in Bellingham, Washington.Photographer: Meron
Menghistab for Bloomberg Businessweek

Michelle Parrinello-Cason, who offers online classes and resources for
home-schoolers through her company Dayla Learning, has seen a steady increase in
demand for her courses since schools reopened in person, especially from
families who’ve come to home-schooling because of concerns about banned books,
the whitewashing of history curricula or an unsafe environment for LGBTQ
students. “There is absolutely an overrepresentation of children who are
nonbinary and transgender in my online classes, and it breaks my heart,” she
says. “I love having them, but they are, by and large, students who I believe
would have absolutely been thriving in a classroom situation if they felt
welcome and safe there.”

As conservative politicians bring the rhetoric and beliefs of the evangelical
right into mainstream classrooms, reshaping American public education, liberal
families are using the right’s hard-won home-schooling protections to give their
children a secular education in kitchens and living rooms across the country.
Their rationale goes beyond curriculum: In the absence of protections at school,
many of these new home-schooling parents have opted for a safe environment for
LGBTQ kids and those of color. But the growth of this extreme adaptation to
changing public school conditions comes at a huge cost, both for individual
families and America’s education system at large.



Home-schooling as we now think of it—primary and secondary teaching that takes
place outside of accredited schools, directed by parents—reemerged in the 1970s
as a liberal vision to free children from structured education. It quickly
became the territory of the religious right, largely in reaction to the
liberalization of public schools, which had been forced to integrate and end
formalized prayer. Evangelicals were spurred onward by Wisconsin v. Yoder, a
1972 Supreme Court ruling that protected parents’ religious right to be exempted
from some compulsory education laws. “As integration brought White and Black
students together, there was a White flight happening, as parents removed kids
from those schools in order to home-school,” says Mahala Stewart, a sociologist
who studies home-schooling at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Unlike the
earlier iteration of 19th century American home-schooling, when White fathers
largely led religious teaching in their homes, the resurgence in the 1960s and
1970s featured White women as the educators. “From civil rights on, it largely
became a White project taken on by mothers,” keeping those mothers home as many
White middle-class women were entering the workforce, Stewart says.


THE CULTURE WARS SPECIAL

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Over the ensuing decades, the religious right legitimized home-schooling, led by
groups such as the Home School Legal Defense Association, a Christian nonprofit
founded in 1983. It lobbied legislators to allow home-schooling with minimal
oversight and brought lawsuits against educational authorities on behalf of its
members. A left-wing version of home-schooling still existed, largely through
the “unschooling” movement, which focuses on a student’s interests rather than a
specific curriculum, but the majority of home-schoolers were being taught in a
conservative, fundamentalist context.

In 2020—as almost all schools went virtual, President Donald Trump cemented a
conservative supermajority on the US Supreme Court and school boards became
political hotbeds—far-right home-school advocates recognized their moment had
arrived. The following July, Michael Farris, the founding president and board
chairman of the HSLDA, explained on a phone call with donors that they had a
singular opportunity to take down public education. “The time is right,” he
said, according to a recording of the call excerpted this August by the
Washington Post. “Sometimes it does take a while for seeds to be planted and
germinate.”

Farris framed secular public school as a religion in its own right—and a
dangerous one at that—and his prescription of home-schooling with minimal
oversight as the reasonable solution has taken root. By 1993, he had styled
himself as the champion of “parents’ rights,” fighting against the “godless
monstrosity” and “values-indoctrination centers” of public schools. In March
2023 a federal “Parents Bill of Rights Act” passed the US House of
Representatives; parental rights measures have been proposed or passed in at
least 24 states, according to legislation tracking tool Quorum Analytics Inc.

Expand

Farris outside the Supreme Court in 2018.Photographer: J. Scott Applewhite/AP

As politicians co-opt the conservative rhetoric long used by the HSLDA, many
parents who previously supported public schools as a democratizing force are
being pushed into an uncomfortable position. They can send their children to
private school or opt for home-schooling, which comes with curricular freedom
and, increasingly, financial support from the state, led by conservative
lawmakers. In 2023, Republicans in at least 42 states proposed legislation for
tax-funded programs to help parents pay for nonpublic education, according to
Future Ed, an education policy think tank at Georgetown University’s McCourt
School of Public Policy. Arkansas, Florida and Utah all created or expanded
universal or almost-universal educational savings programs, meaning any family
in those states can apply for at-home education funding, regardless of their
income.

This expansion has forced some families to focus on the personal and turn away
from the political. “Changing the landscape so that public school is no longer
an important thing to fund and focus on—that concerns me,” Kate says. “I’m
contributing to it by pulling my kids out, but at the end of the day, I have to
make sure that my kids are getting educated.”

Besides, the radical conservative changes to public education are pushing out
more than avowed liberals. Many of the new home-schoolers interviewed for this
article identify as Christian and politically moderate, and they see
home-schooling as a way to opt out of the endless culture wars. “I don’t want to
be around two sides yelling at each other,” Jessica says. She started
home-schooling her kindergarten-age daughter last year because of the “Don’t Say
Gay” bill, the escalation in book bans and the changing educational standards in
Florida. “If I don’t have to do that, why would I?”



Ashley grew up in a fundamentalist Christian community in central Florida in the
1990s. She was mostly home-schooled, as were all of the friends she saw at her
youth group and the thrice-weekly church services they attended. Her parents,
who grew up during integration in Florida, chose home-schooling because they
didn’t want her and her brother to be “indoctrinated” in school; growing up,
everyone she knew was Christian and White.

After one year at a Pentecostal college, Ashley transferred to a public state
university in Florida against her parents’ wishes. For the first time, she took
classes in anthropology, read books by queer authors and made friends of
different ethnicities. “My whole worldview shifted,” she says. “I had to unlearn
things I had heard my parents say about how the world worked.” After her first
year, seeking to avoid returning home, she went to Vietnam to teach English; to
her surprise, she loved it. She went on to get a master’s degree in education
and teach English at public high schools across the country.

Expand

Home-schooling materials in a Florida home.Photographer: Michael Adno for
Bloomberg Businessweek

So when Ashley’s family moved from Washington state to Florida in January 2023,
it was obvious that the children—one in tenth grade and twins in sixth
grade—would continue going to public school. But over time, as she and her
husband asked what they were learning, they grew concerned that the kids were
receiving information that seemed biased and incorrect. One evening, the twins
told Ashley about Manifest Destiny and westward expansion: Native Americans had
felt crowded, so they decided to move where they could enjoy more land. “I kept
saying, ‘Are you sure that’s what the teacher said?’” Ashley recalls. “Finally,
I looked back at the slides from their class, and it said that the Indians moved
West for more opportunities. The Trail of Tears was completely not there.”

That’s when she and her husband started talking seriously about home-schooling.
At first she was hesitant. “Because of how religious my experience being
home-schooled was, that’s all I thought it could be,” she says. But at the
conclusion of the kids’ first semester—which included a traumatic lockdown at
their middle school, an exercise that neither parents nor teachers knew was a
drill—she decided to give it a try. This fall, Ashley found herself in a
position she never thought she’d be in again: part of a home-schooling family in
small-town Florida.

For the twins’ at-home seventh grade classroom, Ashley uses her own curricula
for English and social studies, and curricula she bought online for science and
math. A morning might consist of a logic puzzle, then a History Channel
documentary about the 1770 Boston massacre, followed by a discussion about how
there can be multiple historical perspectives and, before breaking for lunch, a
personal finance lesson. Ashley’s older son, who’s in 11th grade, takes some
classes online through the Florida Virtual School, and she teaches him some
English and history. Her husband helps with math lessons and teaches their kids
cooking, including a recent unit on how to chop vegetables.



The first few months have gone well, though Ashley is still conflicted about
choosing to home-school given her upbringing. The movement might be broadening,
but she still sees uncomfortable parallels between herself and her parents, who
chose home-schooling to keep her away from education that wasn’t religious and
people who weren’t White. “They home-schooled me out of a place of fear,” she
says. “I hate that I’m also home-schooling from a place of fear, in a completely
different way.”

New home-schooling families say that losing their school communities is one of
the biggest drawbacks of their choice. They can mitigate this downside by
finding other forms of in-person instruction, but only so much. Twice a week,
Ashley drives her twins 45 minutes to the one co-op she’s found of families
doing secular home-schooling together, so they can do science experiments and
work on art projects alongside other students. The lease for their house is up
in January, and she and her husband are considering moving so they can be closer
to the secular home-schooling group. “We make the drive because it’s valuable,
but there’s nobody where I can walk down to their house and trust that their
house is safe and they’re not saying crazy stuff,” Ashley says.

Instead, Ashley has found some community online, largely through a Facebook
group for an organization called Secular Eclectic Academic Homeschoolers, or
SEA. Founded in 2014 by Blair Lee, an educator who was home-schooling her son in
California, SEA has become a resource for families who want to give their kids a
nonreligious, academic education at home. “SEA formed in response to the two
largest groups of home-schooling, which were religious or unschooling,” Lee
says. “When you start to segment yourself out from what’s already a small
population, it can be very hard to find community, and that’s what I needed.”
Other parents gravitated to SEA, and especially to the Facebook group. As the
pandemic dawned in January 2020, it had 41,976 members, who posted asking for
creative-writing curriculum suggestions or recommendations for how to teach
multiplication.

In the following months, with school closures cresting, thousands of people
started joining every day, says Kat Hutcheson, a second-generation home-schooler
who manages the group. Some people were looking for guidance on how to start;
others were parents seeking advice on temporarily managing kids attending
virtual classes. Once in-person instruction resumed, many people left the SEA
Facebook group, but the growth continued overall. On average, 300 to 350 people
join the group each week, Hutcheson says. As of late October, it had 91,238
members.

Expand

A home-schooling mom and her child work through their curriculum.Photographer:
Michael Adno for Bloomberg Businessweek

The latest newcomers have tended to cite conservative laws in their requests to
join, Hutcheson says. When a bill restricting gender-affirming care passes or a
state legislator proposes arming teachers at public schools, she often sees more
people wanting in. She remembers big spikes in March 2022, after the “Don’t Say
Gay” bill passed in Florida, and in August 2023, when members of the Texas State
Board of Education sought to include the positive effects of fossil fuels in
eighth-grade science textbooks. Hutcheson estimates that she adds 100 people a
week, including some whose kids are not yet school-age, who explicitly describe
conservative policies and school shootings as their rationale. “We’re seeing
such huge growth, not only in people who currently have school-age kids, but in
people who are fed up with the politicization of the school system to the point
where they won’t even consider enrolling their children in public school,” she
says.

The home-schooling classroom is led predominantly by moms, regardless of
ideological beliefs. The recent Washington Post poll found that 79% of
home-schooled children were being taught by their mother (40% were being also or
solely taught by their father), consistent with past trends among conservative
home-schoolers. In October 2023, 87% of the SEA Facebook group identified as
female. Petty, the Torchlight founder, and Parrinello-Cason, the Dayla Learning
founder, both fit the description. Neither of them set out to become education
entrepreneurs; they taught their own children first. Yet while the boom in
home-schooling has fueled some businesses, it also exacts an economic toll.



When schools closed during the pandemic, mothers, in particular, often became de
facto home teaching aides. Combined with the job losses taking place in retail,
restaurants and hospitality—all arenas where women are traditionally
overrepresented—this led to the “pink-collar recession.” Three years later,
women have largely reentered the workforce, but the hit to working mothers
remains. “The pandemic and associated disruptions to the labor market in the US
may wipe out decades of progress in the labor force,” says Yue Qian, a
sociologist who studies gender, work and family at the University of British
Columbia.

This experience presents differently depending on a mother’s education level, as
it did during the pandemic: Mothers without a college degree lost their jobs in
disproportionate numbers, and their labor market participation rates are still
recovering. Mothers with a college degree were more often able to adjust to
remote work, but they still took on more child-care duties than working fathers,
which led to a greater loss of workplace productivity among mothers. Now women
with a higher education are contending with the highest motherhood wage gap in
the 21st century, according to research Qian co-authored.

An increasing wage gap is a self-perpetuating cycle of devaluing mothers in the
workforce. When a family decides that one parent needs to step back to take care
of kids, it usually makes more sense economically for the mom to do it; this
contributes to workplace stereotypes that penalize working mothers and reward
working fathers. It also strengthens cultural assumptions that a mother’s
primary job is child-rearing and that her career should recede to account for
her family’s needs. “When the state fails to provide a social safety net, it’s
often women who absorb this work,” says Jill Yavorsky, a sociologist at the
University of North Carolina at Charlotte who co-led the motherhood wage gap
study with Qian and Rebecca Glauber, head of the graduate sociology program at
the University of New Hampshire. That’s how it’s playing out for many new
home-schoolers: When restrictive conservative policies take students from
liberal families out of the classroom and into home-schooling, they also
typically take their mothers (back) out of the paid workforce.

“A lot of families in the secular home-schooling community have very educated
mothers who’ve left very good careers in order to home-school their own
children,” says Parrinello-Cason, who has a Ph.D. in English with a focus on
rhetoric and composition. After she was laid off from her job as an English
professor, she decided not to accept another position so she could focus on
home-schooling her daughter. She often talks to female friends who also left
careers to home-school about how they’ve redirected their professional energy
for an audience of one, turning to Facebook groups such as SEA as a kind of
shared resource through their new jobs as K-12 educators. “Home-schooling might
individually be a happy choice,” Parrinello-Cason says. “But what does it mean
collectively if we’re saying that [pushing mothers out of the workforce] is how
we handle the crisis?”

Expand

Parrinello-Cason prepping an online curriculum in her home office.Photographer:
Photograph by Jess T Dugan for Bloomberg Businessweek

It hasn’t gone unnoticed by the new cohort of home-schooling parents that they
might be weakening the public school system. Kate’s family of six moved from
Pennsylvania to Florida for her husband’s work in April 2019, and they
prioritized high-quality public education above all else. “St. Johns County was
labeled as the best school district in the state, so we chose to move here,”
Kate says. She speaks proudly of being a product of the public education system.
Her older kids loved public school in Pennsylvania, and if they move away from
Florida, she’ll probably try sending them to public school again. If they stay
in Florida, she and her husband tentatively plan to send them to public high
school, but she has doubts, especially because the state ended AP psychology and
African American studies this year. Her children are mixed-race (Kate is White;
her husband is Black), and she also worries about how new state standards gloss
over, for instance, the horrors of slavery. “They use parental rights as their
argument for why these subjects can’t be allowed in the classroom,” she says.
“But what about the parental rights of the rest of us?”

Since 2020, according to the Stanford study, 1.2 million K-12 students have left
public education in the US, and that decrease in enrollment will mean a decrease
in funding for schools. “The enduring exodus of students is putting school
districts in a financially precarious state,” especially as federal pandemic
relief funding expires in 2024, says Thomas Dee, who worked on the Stanford
study of students leaving public schools. “There’s concern that schools that
lost enrollment have been propping up budgets with federal support, and we’re
seeing accelerated discussions around closing under-enrolled schools.”

When under-enrollment forces a district to close schools, that affects the
families who have no option beyond public school. “We’ve seen before that when
districts had to undertake school closures, it’s often the most economically
vulnerable kids who seem to suffer,” Dee says. Shutting down a public school has
significant repercussions beyond educational access, too, as lower-income
families often rely on trusted educators for support, whether for student meals
or navigating a health-care system in an unfamiliar language. “Closing a school
in a community really rends the fabric of a community in painful ways and
creates risks for students,” Dee says.

There are enduring long-term effects to individual divestment from public
schools, too. When parents who can afford to leave a district take their kids
out, they stop showing up in the less tangible ways that make a school a
community resource: joining the PTA, volunteering as a field trip chaperone,
donating classroom supplies. When their family isn’t personally invested, voters
tend to support public schools less, as well. “School districts are funded in
part by communities deciding to tax property wealth, and as they leave, they’re
less willing to be taxed for schools that their kids aren’t using,” Dee says.
“That leads to a decline in political support for funding of public schools over
time.”



In March, DeSantis signed into law an additional win for defenders of parental
rights: the Personalized Education Program, or PEP, which offers education
savings accounts for home-schooled students in the state. Parents can use the
funds to pay for materials and for extracurricular instruction such as music or
language lessons. For Kate, the policy directly benefits her family using funds
that could have supported public schools. “I wrestle with the ethics of it all,”
she says. “I can give my kids more resources, but I don’t want the public
schools to be dismantled.” When does the personal outweigh the political? Is
there a place for liberal and centrist parents in increasingly conservative
school environments?

Parents are muddling through these questions across the country, looking for the
right answers for their kids as legislation continues to change. In July 2023,
Emily, the mom whose son is trans, moved with her family from northern Virginia
to the suburbs of Memphis. Laws in both Virginia and Tennessee restrict the
rights of transgender students, but in Virginia, Emily’s son was supported at
school. They’d chosen their suburb outside Memphis because of its excellent
public schools, but when Emily emailed with the elementary school principal, she
was told that students were required to use the bathroom for their birth gender,
which would have been traumatic for her son. She stopped working to home-school
her two children. “I’m happy to do what’s best for my kids,” she says. “But I
see that they miss being around kids their age in school.” What goes unsaid is
that by the time this home-schooling cohort’s kids are ready to have children of
their own, that generation might not have a viable public school system to
either embrace or abandon.

Read next: The Business of Children’s Books in This New Era of Book Banning

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