Editor’s Note: Although Minding the Campus focuses primarily on higher education, developments in K–12 education inevitably shape the students who arrive on college campuses. We’re therefore happy to feature Rachelle Peterson‘s review of Skipping School, which explores how homeschooling has evolved from a fringe movement into a more widely accepted educational option in American life. As homeschooling continues to grow, its effect on the preparation of future college students is a subject worth following. Indeed, we’ve already tracked some K–12 developments, including Claire Harrington’s reporting on how expanding educational choice could create a pipeline of students better prepared for higher education. You can also explore our other—albeit limited—K–12 coverage here, as well as our book reviews here.

In summer 2020, a few months into the COVID-19 school shutdowns, as many as 2.5 million children found themselves newly homeschooled. About 5.5 percent of families had previously homeschooled, but as 41 states required their schools to close, that number doubled to 11 percent.

Most had endured “Zoom School.” Some parents noticed for the first time what their kids were learning—or not learning. Many, also trying to work from home, found themselves monitoring computer classes and reteaching what couldn’t be communicated by camera. Carrying the burdens of homeschooling with none of the flexibility, why not give real homeschooling a try?

Homeschooling dipped a bit from 2021 to 2023 as COVID-19 restrictions eased and some families returned their children to classrooms. But many continued homeschooling. In 2024, the number of homeschooling families stood around 6.5 percent—a sizeable number that places a once-fringe movement squarely in the realm of “normal” (157).

How did this happen, and is homeschooling here to stay? In Skipping School: A History of American Homeschooling and How It Went Mainstream (Eerdmans, June 2026), Dixie Dillon Lane traces the American homeschooling movement from its origins in the 1950s to its national breakout in 2020 and into the present.

Skipping School is a refreshing, helpful review of what homeschooling is and how it has operated over time. Where media outlets often treat homeschooling with contempt—see the infamous 2023 Washington Post series “Home-School Nation”—or as mysterious, strange, and weird, Lane gives a clear-eyed, even-handed look at homeschooling’s actual track record—pros and cons—and the incredibly diverse ways that families implement it.

Histories of a Diverse Homeschool Movement

Lane, a professional historian and a homeschooling mother herself, weaves together statistics, legal analysis, and a mix of memoir and oral history as she tells her own story and that of dozens of homeschooling families from the early pioneers up to the present.

She notes that there is no single definitive history of homeschooling, but a collection of histories, plural. As a second-generation homeschooler who spent almost a decade in the realm of education policy, that approach struck me as correct. There are as many forms of homeschooling as there are families who practice it.

Homeschooling is an inherently diverse movement, ranging from unschooling to classical education, from online charter schools to in-person tutorials with a parent. Lane’s interviewees range from white Catholics to black Baptists to non-religious hippies, who chose to homeschool because of religious convictions, academic focus, concern about bullies or other safety issues, special needs, and far more reasons.

So what unifies homeschooling, then? Lane traces one primary theme: Homeschoolers believe that parents, not credentialed experts, know what’s best for their kids. That belief drove early pioneers to reject public schools at the risk of facing truant officers and court dates. It motivated mid-1990s homeschoolers like my parents to band with other families to build an interconnected homeschool movement. It animates my husband and me to homeschool our own children, and of course it was this belief in parental authority on full display during COVID-19, when parents withdrew their children en masse. In prioritizing parents over experts, homeschooling embodies a deeply rooted American belief in individualism and localism.

Parental Control in Education

Homeschooling has gone through a few phases, from intentionally countercultural to now occupying mainstream—though still minority—status. It was once illegal—as it remains in many European nations. But now, with 18 states allowing at least some, if not all, homeschoolers to use government funds through ESAs, homeschooling has gained some measure of government sponsorship.

Homeschoolers themselves see various epochs in their histories, and Lane builds a framework of three major periods of homeschool history. In each, though, the common theme is a trust in parents to make the best decisions for their children, requiring a flexibility and focus that public schools did not permit.

The 1950s and ‘60s were an age of consolidation and rule by experts—and the rebellion provoked by such top-down controls. In the wake of the Cold War, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act of 1958, giving the federal government new controls over what had been a more locally governed school system. Then came the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965.

From the early 1950s, American families began to opt out in an anti-institutional, countercultural move. Homeschoolers faced real risks. Truant officers showed up at doorsteps, parents were hauled into court, neighbors turned each other in. Homeschooling was either illegal or treated with extreme skepticism; in California, the site of Lane’s case studies throughout the book, it was permitted only if the parent held a teaching degree or contracted with a private school to serve as an umbrella organization.

By the 1990s, homeschooling was generally legal—thanks in large part to the Home School Legal Defense Association—well-established, and better connected. Conservative Christians like James Dobson had promoted homeschooling among the religious right, but despite the media’s continued perception that homeschooling was an insular, secretive affair, homeschooling became far more public. Families finally felt free to meet in public, visit libraries and museums during the school day, establish co-ops and homeschooling academies, and even send their kids back to public schools, at least for sports and music.

But starting around 2010 and continuing to the present, homeschooling truly entered the mainstream, Lane argues. Homeschooling became even more diverse religiously, economically, and racially. As one of Lane’s interviewees said, “the more people get to know us, they realize we’re just normal people doing it” (128). Museums and zoos began offering special homeschool days. As best I can remember, this was the era of another triumph I had long awaited: the Microsoft Office spell checker stopped putting a red squiggly line under the word “homeschool.”

This era also marked the rise of second-generation homeschoolers like myself. I’ve been struck by the growing respect for homeschooling among ordinary people. Where Lane cites early homeschoolers afraid to visit the library during the day lest truant officers pick up their children, I had the opposite experience recently. I took my own children to the grocery store late one morning after a science co-op, and the cashier gushed, “Oh, you must homeschool! It’s such a great thing to do.” Mainstream, indeed.

The Future of Homeschooling

Will homeschooling continue to grow? The future of homeschooling depends on its conditions, Lane says: Homeschooling will grow “as long as homeschooling itself remains a practice within which parents can retain significant authority” (162, italics in the original).

Lane doesn’t propose exactly how or how not governments should regulate homeschooling, but she does put the lessons of history plainly. Homeschooling has flourished because of the flexibility and freedom it has enjoyed—a freedom that permits parents to shape their children’s educations. Should that cease to be the case, homeschooling will suffer.

But Skipping School closes on a note of optimism. Homeschooling is “a resilient and adaptable part of the American educational mainstream,” and it’s here to stay.