The homeschool movement — left, right, and otherwise
· 12 min read
The Moores and the early Christian wing
Raymond and Dorothy Moore, a Seventh-day Adventist husband-and-wife team, published Better Late Than Early in 1975, arguing on developmental and religious grounds that formal schooling before age eight or ten was harmful. The book reached evangelical audiences through James Dobson's Focus on the Family broadcasts, and the Moores became the founding figures of the Christian homeschool wing. Their pitch combined developmental science (some of it solid, some not) with religious authority claims about parental responsibility. The combination was powerful because it gave evangelical parents both a scientific-sounding case and a scriptural one. By the early 1980s, the movement had its own publishers, conferences, and curriculum companies — A Beka, Bob Jones, Sonlight — and the infrastructure to sustain growth without the public schools' approval.HSLDA and the legal fight
The Home School Legal Defense Association, founded in 1983 by Michael Farris and Michael Smith, was the legal arm of the Christian homeschool movement. It defended families against truancy prosecutions, lobbied state legislatures, and built precedent. The strategy was disciplined and effective. By 1993, homeschooling was legal in every state, with varying degrees of regulation. The HSLDA has continued operating since, often pushing positions on regulation, parental rights, and adjacent culture-war issues that not all homeschoolers share. Its dominance in the legal landscape gave the Christian wing disproportionate visibility, and outside observers in the 1990s and 2000s often described homeschooling as if it were synonymous with the HSLDA's positions, which it never quite was.The Holt wing and Growing Without Schooling
John Holt's magazine, Growing Without Schooling, founded in 1977 and published until 2001, was the central organ of the inclusive (non-religious) homeschool wing. It was small, scrappy, and ideologically distinct from the Moore-Farris infrastructure. Holt's wing did not have the demographic mass to match the Christian wing's growth, but it had disproportionate intellectual influence, partly through Holt's own books and partly through the network of writers and practitioners — Patrick Farenga, Susannah Sheffer, later Grace Llewellyn — who carried the work forward. The current secular unschooling community is a direct lineal descendant of this wing, and most of its vocabulary (deschooling, child-led, life learning) was forged in those pages.Gaither's account of the coalition
Milton Gaither's Homeschool: An American History is the standard scholarly work on the movement. His argument is that the coalition between the two wings was real but limited — they cooperated on legalization, occasionally on lobbying, and rarely on anything else. They read different books, attended different conferences, used different curricula, and held each other at arm's length even at the height of the coalition. Gaither resists the easy framing of homeschoolers as either a religious right phenomenon or a countercultural one. His evidence shows the movement was always both and increasingly neither, and that the polling on homeschool motivations has consistently shown a mix of religious, academic, safety, and child-specific reasons that does not collapse into a single ideological story.Stevens's two cultures
Mitchell Stevens's Kingdom of Children, based on fieldwork in the 1990s, mapped the two organizational cultures of homeschooling as a sociologist would map two religious sects. The inclusive wing valued child individuality, was wary of authority, used a vocabulary borrowed from progressive education, and tended to be located in college towns and on the coasts. The believer wing valued family hierarchy, was comfortable with authority, used a vocabulary borrowed from evangelical Protestantism, and was located across the country with a center of gravity in the South and Midwest. The two wings, Stevens noted, had different theories of the child, different theories of authority, and different relationships to the state, and the homeschool movement had largely managed to keep both groups inside the same legal tent without forcing them to reconcile.The Black homeschooling surge
Black homeschooling has grown faster than any other demographic segment since the early 2000s. The motivations documented in surveys and ethnographies — work by Cheryl Fields-Smith, Ama Mazama, and others — center on the documented mistreatment of Black children, especially boys, in public schools: disproportionate discipline, lower expectations, racial hostility from teachers and peers, the "school-to-prison pipeline" pattern. For these families, homeschooling is not a countercultural lifestyle or a religious commitment; it is a defensive response to a system that has demonstrably failed their children. The vocabulary is closer to civil rights than to either Holt or the HSLDA, and the curriculum often emphasizes Black history, identity, and self-determination in ways neither historical wing prioritized.Pandemic disruption
The COVID-19 school closures of 2020–2021 forced millions of families into home-based education without preparation. Most returned to schools when they reopened, but a meaningful percentage stayed. Census Bureau data showed homeschool rates roughly doubling in 2020 and remaining elevated through 2022 and 2023, with the largest absolute increases among Black, Latino, and Asian families. The new cohort, by self-report, is more diverse on every axis than the historical movement, and is less likely to identify with either of the two founding wings. The pandemic, in this sense, did not just expand homeschooling; it remade its demographic and political center.Microschools and pods as adjacent forms
The post-2020 expansion has been accompanied by the rise of microschools, learning pods, and hybrid private schools that meet two to three days a week. Some of these are legally homeschools; some are licensed private schools. The distinction matters for regulation but matters less for the lived experience of the families using them. The microschool wave, treated more fully in the next article, has produced a continuum between full homeschooling and full traditional schooling that did not exist a decade ago, and the regulatory categories are struggling to catch up.The regulation question
States regulate homeschooling on a spectrum from heavy (New York, Pennsylvania — required portfolios, testing, sometimes home visits) to almost none (Texas, Idaho, Illinois). The HSLDA has historically opposed regulation; some inclusive-wing groups have supported moderate oversight, particularly around abuse cases involving homeschooled children. The Coalition for Responsible Home Education, founded in 2013 by adult survivors of abusive homeschool households, has documented cases in which the legal invisibility of homeschoolers allowed abuse to continue unnoticed. The debate over how much oversight to allow is one of the few issues that splits the movement internally, with no clean ideological alignment.What the data actually shows
Outcomes data on homeschoolers is uneven. Standardized test data, when available, generally shows homeschoolers performing above public school averages, but the sample is self-selected (parents who report data are not random). College attendance and completion rates are comparable to or slightly higher than the surrounding population. Studies of adult outcomes — work by Brian Ray and others — should be read with awareness of the studies' funding sources and selection effects. The defensible summary is that homeschooling does not, on average, harm academic outcomes and may modestly help them, with high variance depending on the specific household. The variance is the story. A great homeschool is much better than a great public school. A bad homeschool is much worse than a bad public school. The floor and the ceiling are both wider.The socialization question, mostly settled
The single most common outside objection to homeschooling — that homeschooled children are socially stunted — has been studied repeatedly since the 1980s and has not held up. Homeschooled children, on average, score normally or slightly better on measures of social skill, civic engagement, and adult life satisfaction. The intuition that they must be isolated comes from imagining a child alone in a house all day, which is not what most homeschooling actually looks like. The typical homeschooled child spends more hours per week with mixed-age peers, adults, and the surrounding community than the typical public school child, who is in age-segregated rooms for most of the day. The intuition is wrong because the picture in most people's heads is wrong.The internal critiques
The movement is now mature enough to have substantial internal critique. Adult survivors of fundamentalist homeschool households have written memoirs and exposés — Tara Westover's Educated is the most famous, though Westover's case was extreme — that document the ways homeschool can shield abuse, religious extremism, and educational neglect. The CRHE has pushed for limited reforms. Some inclusive-wing homeschoolers have publicly distanced themselves from HSLDA positions. These critiques are uncomfortable but healthy. A movement that cannot name its own failure modes cannot improve them, and the current generation of homeschool advocates is more honest about the failure modes than the founding generation was.What the practice has become
The homeschool of 2026 is not the homeschool of 1986. It is more diverse, more connected, more hybrid, more secular, and less ideologically coherent. The infrastructure is thicker, the legal questions mostly settled, the curricular options nearly infinite. The remaining hard problems are the same hard problems all education faces — what to teach, how to assess, how to support the families who lack resources, how to protect children whose parents harm them. Homeschooling does not solve these problems; it relocates them to the household, where they become more visible to the parent and less visible to the state. Whether this is good or bad depends on the household. For Law 2 thinking, the takeaway is that educational choice is not a single policy but a set of practical and ethical trade-offs that each family negotiates against its own particular conditions. The collective story is that more families are now in a position to make that negotiation than at any previous point, and the institutions around them are still adjusting.Citations
1. Gaither, Milton. Homeschool: An American History. 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 2. Stevens, Mitchell L. Kingdom of Children: Culture and Controversy in the Homeschooling Movement. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. 3. Holt, John, and Patrick Farenga. Teach Your Own: The John Holt Book of Homeschooling. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2003. 4. Moore, Raymond S., and Dorothy N. Moore. Better Late Than Early: A New Approach to Your Child's Education. New York: Reader's Digest Press, 1975. 5. Fields-Smith, Cheryl. Exploring Single Black Mothers' Resistance Through Homeschooling. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. 6. Mazama, Ama, and Garvey Lundy. "African American Homeschooling and the Quest for a Quality Education." Education and Urban Society 47, no. 2 (2015): 160–81. 7. Gray, Peter. Free to Learn: Why Unleashing the Instinct to Play Will Make Our Children Happier, More Self-Reliant, and Better Students for Life. New York: Basic Books, 2013. 8. Taylor, Astra. "Unschooling." n+1 no. 13 (Winter 2012). 9. Coalition for Responsible Home Education. Homeschooling's Invisible Children (online report series). Canton, MA: CRHE, 2014–present. 10. Westover, Tara. Educated: A Memoir. New York: Random House, 2018. 11. Llewellyn, Grace. The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education. Eugene, OR: Lowry House, 1991. 12. Bello, Akil. "Why More Black Families Are Homeschooling." Forbes, August 22, 2020.
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