- Home schools are growing in popularity, often attracting students from miles away and resulting in waiting lists.
- Thirteen states have education savings account programs, and more are adding school choice options.
The dining room is a learning lab, the living room is a classroom, and the backyard is a playground. Amy’s Anthem home is also a school. High Point Academy serves 11 students ages 6-14 and features a “hands-on, project-based approach to learning that builds real-world problem-solving skills and critical thinking”.
Amy provides a safe space for the children to grow. “I treat them like my own children,” she says of her students. She utilizes local outdoor spaces and works with families to create flexible attendance plans.
Rachel’s Peoria home is also home to the Integrated Learning Academy, a private, nonprofit Christian school that serves 20 neurodiverse learners (half of whom have identified special needs), including four of her own students. Four days a week, the entire first floor is dedicated to the school. The smaller rooms (formerly bedrooms and offices) are where the occupational therapist and speech therapist work with the students.
Amy and Rachel started the home-based school in 2019 with startup Prenda, a venture-backed startup that recruits micro-school students into an online charter school. (See a podcast with Prenda founder Kelly Smith.)
Both schools now operate independently, using a variety of instructional resources to develop individualized pathways for each student. A $7,000 Arizona Empowerment Scholarship account pays most of the tuition. Overtime and special services are paid separately. Some students come from the community, but others need to travel 30 minutes away because families enjoy the program and environment. Both schools seem to offer well-structured, individualized programs. Both schools rely on word-of-mouth recommendations and both have waiting lists.
Don Soifer, CEO of the National Center for Microschools, recently led a tour of these and other ESA-funded microschools in the Phoenix area. Most are home schools, while others are located in retail and commercial spaces.
Soifer’s team connects interested families with micro-school providers including Acton Academy, KaiPod, Prenda, and Wildflower (see also Arizona State College Prep resources). They also help home school operators like Amy and Rachel with training, tools, and resources.
Expanding Options for Learning at Home
In the U.S., about 3.5 million K-12 students are homeschooled (about 6 percent of the student population). A growing number of homeschools offer a variety of arrangements for learners from multiple families.
There are approximately 3 million home schooled students in the United States. Some of them participate in cooperative structures with other homeschool families and work at least part-time in informal micro-schools, many of which are homeschools.
More than half a million students attend virtual schools (mostly charter schools, some district schools, and some private schools), and many work with other families on home and community-based sites. One State provider reported that one-third of students benefited from collaborative arrangements during the pandemic.
More than 100,000 students had their education paid for through state voucher and education savings account programs (70,000 in Arizona). Most of these students use this funding to attend private schools, and a growing number go to home schools.
In 2023, 20 states have expanded school choice. Thirteen states have education savings account programs. Five states-Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Utah, and West Virginia-follow Arizona with 100 percent of their students eligible for private schools, but Arizona remains the least restrictive state, with no requirements for requirements for accreditation, approval, licensing, or registration of private schools.
More than half of Arizona’s ESA funds are used to subsidize private school tuition for students previously enrolled in private schools. The ESA program director estimates that 40 percent of this year’s ESA students are from public schools. Most transferred to existing private schools. A few join (or participate in the formation of) home schools as described above.
In short, more and more students are learning at home – more than the 3.2 million students attending brick-and-mortar charter schools. In addition to individual families choosing to homeschool, there are a wide variety of homeschooling arrangements, ranging from informal to formal.
- Cooperative arrangements in which several homeschool families share custodial responsibilities.
- Cooperative arrangements for virtual public school families (charter and district-run); and
- Private schools (LLCs or nonprofit organizations) that charge tuition, in some cases partially or fully offset by vouchers or education savings accounts.
- All of these may be considered home-based micro-schools, but learners may be enrolled by the state as home school students, public school students, or private school students.