Posted on 07/03/2021 3:18:17 PM PDT by DoodleBob
Home schooling grew by record numbers in North Carolina last school year and enrollment in private schools rose by the largest number in 24 years during the coronavirus pandemic.
New state figures released Thursday show North Carolina’s estimated home-school population grew by more than 30,000 children during the 2020-21 school year — a 20.6% increase from the prior year. At the same time, the state’s private schools added 3,282 children for a 3.3% increase.
The growth in homeschooling, private schools and charter schools during the COVID-19 pandemic came as the state’s traditional public schools saw a 5% drop in enrollment, falling by 70,000 students.
North Carolina’s drop mirrors a nationwide decline in public school enrollment during the pandemic, according to the Associated Press. The question facing school and political leaders is how many of those children will return to traditional public schools.
“The pandemic has opened the eyes of a lot of families who were reluctant to attend a home or private school but who in the end found it was the best option for their families,” Terry Stoops, director of the John Locke Foundation’s Center For Effective Education, said in an interview.
“There may be some families that migrate back to traditional public schools. But I think we’ll see growth in the home and private-school sectors for the foreseeable future.”
The initial closure of all the state’s K-12 public schools in March 2020 forced students to switch to an all-virtual educational environment. It helped shape the decisions that families made last school year and potentially for the future.
After a frustrating two months of virtual schooling, Tina Sherman of Apex pulled her twin boys out of middle school to home-school them for sixth grade. But she left her other two children in the Wake County school system.
“It was really hard to have a full time job and home-school two kids,” Sherman said in an interview Thursday. “But I don’t regret it. We absolutely made the right decision for our boys.”
Sherman was among a record 19,294 new home schools that opened in the 2020-21 school year — a 103% increase over the prior year. The state website to register for home-schooling was down for nearly a week last July due to a tremendous surge of parental interest, The News & Observer previously reported.
According to state figures, there were 112,614 home schools registered last school year. The 179,900 students in home schools is more than the Wake County school system, which is the largest district in North Carolina.
The state’s home-school population had been rising steadily since before the pandemic, but it jumped by a record 30,727 children last school year. The number of students has more than doubled since the 2012-13 school year.
Nationwide, a U.S Census Bureau report found that home schooling had doubled between the start of the pandemic and last fall, according to the AP.
“Given the challenges of this past year-and-a-half, we anticipated seeing a shift in what the educational landscape would look like, and at the top of that list was the real likelihood that home-school enrollment would go up, which is what we’re seeing now,” Brian Jodice, executive vice president of Parents For Educational Freedom in North Carolina, said in a statement.
The majority of the state’s public schools opened last school year offering only remote learning. Schools then transitioned to offering a mix of both in-person and online classes, with most districts eventually switching to full-time, daily in-person instruction by the end of the school year.
But many of the state’s private schools opened last school year, promoting how they were offering in-person classes while still following COVID-19 safety precautions.
The state’s private schools would go on to see their largest single-year increase in enrollment since 1997. There are now 107,341 students attending North Carolina private schools.
“I think families made school choice decisions this last year for different reasons, including the uncertainty around the virus as well as the uncertainty around when schools would return in-person,” Jodice said. “With private schools offering in-person learning with much more availability across our state, it should come as no surprise that there was an uptick in private school enrollment.”
Stoops of the Locke Foundation said another thing to consider is that there are now a record 783 private schools open in the state, an increase of 32 schools over the prior year.
“There was a recognition among individuals and organizations of an increased demand for private school seats, and there were those that did as much as they could to accommodate that demand,” Stoops said.
The vast majority of North Carolina’s children still attend traditional public schools. But that number has been declining, dropping by 100,000 students since 2014. Charter schools, which are taxpayer funded schools, grew by nearly 9,000 students last school year.
The percentage of students attending North Carolina’s traditional public schools fell to 76.4% last school year. In Wake County, it fell to 75.8% of students attending the district schools.
A big part of the drop in traditional public school enrollment was in kindergarten, where some families may have opted to wait a year before enrolling their children. A bill stalled in the General Assembly would allow school districts to delay planned kindergarten class-size reductions this fall if they see a spike in their enrollment.
Families of older students may also be returning to traditional public schools.
Sherman, the home-school parent, said she’s already re-enrolled her twins in the Wake County school system. She said the combination of COVID-19 vaccine availability for her older children and the desire to have them have more social interaction with other kids helped make the decision for her.
“This for me, and many of the families I know, homeschooling was out of necessity and out of necessity for the challenges my children were facing,” Sherman said.
The state Department of Public Instruction is projecting that school districts will recover most of the students they lost during the pandemic.
The budget approved by the state Senate would prevent DPI from taking state funding away from districts whose enrollment this fall comes under projections. The budget also includes a bigger than normal reserve to give to districts whose enrollment is above projections.
Some state lawmakers aren’t as sure that many of the students will return to traditional public schools though.
“We’ve got a lot of students that have moved out for various reasons related to COVID and other things,” state Rep. David Willis, a Union County Republican, said during a legislative committee meeting. “But we’ve also got students who are moving out of the public instruction arena and moving into home school and private schools and I think some of that trend is not going to revert.”
Good start.
The time has come for separation of school and state.
Homeschooling increase across America as the Hate Amerika crud continue to ruin public schools across America.
Famous Investor (Netscape Co-Founder): The Homeschooling Boom Is Just Beginning
Famous Investor (Netscape Co-Founder): The Homeschooling Boom Is Just Beginning
Foundation for Economic Education ^ | June 30, 2021 | Kerry McDonald
Posted on 7/2/2021, 8:03:28 PM by DoodleBob
Speculation abounds over whether or not the pandemic-induced growth in homeschooling is temporary. While there are several signs indicating that parents won’t be sending their children back to public schools this fall, and homeschooling continues to be a popular choice, the question remains: for how long and to what extent?
According to remarks by one prominent investor, this is just the beginning of a widespread shift away from conventional schooling models toward disruptive innovation in education–with homeschooling leading the way. “It certainly feels like we’re on the front end of a pretty dramatic homeschooling boom,” said Marc Andreessen, co-creator of the original Mosaic web browser, co-founder of Netscape, and co-founder and general partner of the leading venture capital firm, Andreessen Horowitz.
Speaking on the “Invest Like the Best” podcast this week, Andreessen said the pandemic has been a catalyst for parent-driven, technology-enabled educational change that will have a large and lasting impact on the education sector. For one thing, the pandemic gave parents a close-up opportunity to view what was happening in their children’s classrooms.
Black homeschoolers led the surge, with a five-fold increase in homeschooling rates from the spring of 2020.
“I think it’s the first time parents saw what their kids are getting in the classroom at the K through 12 level, in many, many years,” said Andreessen. “Most parents, if you’re in your thirties or forties and your kids are in sixth grade or eighth grade, you were taught in the classroom 30 years ago, it turns out some things have changed. So the current curricula is quite a bit different at a lot of schools. I know a lot of parents were just shocked, absolutely shocked at the stuff that was coming across.” He added that “some set of parents are like, I’m not sending my kids back to that.”
Andreessen explained that his investment firm is eagerly backing online learning startups that can accelerate disruption in the slow-to-change, regulatory-laden education space. An article on the firm’s website provides more details on the forward-looking changes they expect to see in education technology startups as a result of COVID-19’s impact, as well as their investment strategy. In particular, the firm expects to move away from investing in founders who are focused on selling products and services directly to schools in favor of those founders who are selling directly to parents. “Many parents are taking an increasingly pronounced role in the academic experience, and we’ve seen the emergence of new platforms for supplemental education and homeschooling,” the article states.
Abetted by school closures and related pandemic policies, the education sector is ripe for “creative destruction,” the term used by economist Joseph Schumpeter in his 1942 book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, to describe the dynamic process of new business models and enterprises replacing legacy organizations and industries. He explained that capitalism is “the perennial gale of creative destruction,” fueled by entrepreneurship and innovation. Schumpeter writes: “The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrated the same process of industrial mutation—if I may use that biological term—that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.”
Parents want more choices and entrepreneurs will provide them.
As parents demand more education options beyond an assigned district school, the opportunity for creative destruction grows. New federal data reveal that overall K-12 public school enrollment fell three percent during the 2020/2021 academic year, while preschool and kindergarten enrollment dropped by an astonishing 13 percent. Many parents opted out of district schooling for homeschooling, which tripled from pre-pandemic rates to over 11 percent of the US K-12 school-age population. Black homeschoolers led the surge, with a five-fold increase in homeschooling rates from the spring of 2020. Moreover, voter support for school choice policies that allow education funding to follow students instead of school systems has just reached an all-time high this month.
Parents want more choices and entrepreneurs will provide them. Legacy schooling models are on borrowed time, as new educational prototypes gain popularity and support. But Marc Andreessen warns that the process of disrupting the educational status quo won’t be easy.
He explains that “new education startups should be ready to come under just withering assault from Washington or from Sacramento because all of the teacher unions, and all of the universities, and all of the people who are basically wired into those systems are going to just try to kill it.”
With the enthusiasm of millions of parents and learners, and the support of prominent investors, there’s never been a better time for entrepreneurs to battle the entrenched education bureaucracy–and win.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3973003/posts
The “pandemic” shouldn’t have a damn thing to do with it. The schools are nothing but democRAT indoctrination centers.
I don’t even have kids and I can see the problems.
Why would that be? Because the teachers were not free to teach their crap to the kids because the parents were watching. And, they did not like it.
How can you teach perverse sex ed in front of parents? Answer is ya can't.
Not in SC but the wife of a friend of mine had a 3 hour conversation with my wife this morning.
We home educated four kids all the way.
The counsel from my wife solidified their decision to homeschool
Take your children out of the left-wing indoctrination centers (formerly called schools).
My extended family has many home schools and every one has done well. Every child has been accepted into good universities, some graduated and have good employment, a couple in six figures at an early age.. However home schooling is not for every family.
1. Some families need to have working parents and there is not sufficient time to do a decent job teaching the children.
2. and there are some families you don’t want their parents teaching the children no matter how good the self-teaching material is. These are parents who have been poorly educated, and just can’t do the job.
If most parents ever attended a large state or regional home school curriculum fair and saw how many resources are available to them to educate their children, homeschooling would grow even faster. The ones I attended over the years got larger and were better attended every year. I was always amazed at how many homeschooling families would be in attendance. And each year more support groups would have booths.
By the way, I never shot an Indian nor have I ever owned a slave and I refuse to feel guilty about what my ancestors did.
The News and Observer is neither news nor observant.
This is a result of activism in the state curriculum that is being forced onto conservative counties. Parents are now seeing there kids have no shot at becoming useful if they continue with public schooling.
HB 324 is now in the senate and would kill CRT that is currently infesting state curriculum.
It would be more if FREEPERS weren’t demanding government indoctrination centers be opened. I was floored by the insistence that schools be open. What a complete disregard of everything they say they believe.
Homeschool is the best education now. You will know what is being taught.
Even before the pandemic, Wake County had more children in homeschools than in private schools.
We are one of them for our 15-year-old starting this fall. She wasn’t doing well at her charter school for various reasons and Kung Pao Flu just finished it off. So we will get her through her last three years at home where we have more control over what she’s learning and can adapt the learning to how her brain works
}:-)4
We homeschooled and it was the best decision we ever made. Our schedule was our own and we could choose curriculum to our standards. We were able to travel and could adjust our schoolwork accordingly.
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