(The Center Square) – Homeschooling is on the rise in Missouri.
At least one in 16 school-aged children in the state are homeschooled rather than attending brick-and-mortar schools, according to a new report from the Policy Research in Missouri Education (PRiME) Center at Saint Louis University.
Homeschooling rose in popularity amid the coronavirus pandemic. However, those gains remain permanent, the report said. At least 61,000 Missouri students are homeschooled, more than 6% of the state’s school-aged child population. That is about the same number of students enrolled in the St. Louis and Kansas City public school districts combined, the release said.
“This information points to a massive shift in the educational landscape in Missouri,” Collin Hitt, executive director of the PRiME Center and co-author of the study, said in a press release from PRiME. “It was widely believed that parents who turned to homeschooling during the COVID-19 pandemic would send their children back to brick-and-mortar schools after the pandemic ended, but the data paints a dramatically different picture. Homeschooling is surging in popularity in Missouri, and we see no signs of it slowing down.”
The study found that while Missouri has over one million school-age children, about 860,000 are public school students. Missouri lacks a mechanism to collect enrollment data for private schools or homeschooling, so the study authors used “meta-estimates,” which included six different data sets, the release said.
Notably, the study found that the number of homeschooled children in Missouri had doubled from 2019 to 2024 without much of a drop-off following the coronavirus pandemic.
“This research tells an important story about the way the pandemic changed parents’ attitudes toward education,” Hitt said in the release. “Homeschooling has always been around. But the data tells us that in the post-pandemic world, homeschooling has become far more common in Missouri. There’s no evidence of a return to past trends. One out of every 16 students in the state is homeschooling right now, perhaps more. It is crucial for policymakers to know these numbers.”
Missouri is one of many states that does not require families homeschooling their children to alert the government or their local school district, the release said.
PRiME Center said that its methodology could be used in other states to break down where children receive their education.
The PRiME Center study will appear in a November edition of the Journal of School Choice; the findings will be presented at the fall meeting of the Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management.
