The State With the Biggest Interest in Homeschooling

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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The State With the Biggest Interest in Homeschooling

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According to the National Home Education Research Institute, 3.7 million K-to-12 age children were homeschooled in 2020/2021. This is 6% to 7% of the children in those grades nationwide.

One reason for homeschooling is financial:

Taxpayers spend an average of $15,240 per pupil annually in public schools, plus capital expenditures (National Education Association, 2021). Today’s roughly 4.5 million homeschool students represent a savings of over $68 billion for taxpayers. This is $68 billion that American taxpayers do not have to spend.”

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Other reasons include a belief that home education is better than the education children would receive in public schools, avoidance of violence in some public schools, the opportunity to determine the curriculum and the ability to pass on individual family values to children.

According to the recently released “Which States Are Seeing the Biggest Interest in Homeschooling Amongst Parents?” study from My eLearning World, a primary reason for the homeschool movement was safety from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although children who contract the virus often do not get as sick as adults, they may spread the disease to parents and grandparents.
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Another finding from the study was that 72.2% of people who began to homeschool their children because of the pandemic will not put these children back into public schools later.

Mindnet Analytics helped conduct the research. Google Trends was used to gauge interest by state. The results were based on search terms related to homeschooling. Additional data was provided on political leaning, income and other demographic information. States were rated on an index that ran from 100 to zero.

The state with the largest interest in homeschooling was Alaska with a score of 100. Idaho was a close second. Here are the 20 states with the most interest in homeschooling:

  • Alaska (100)
  • Idaho (95)
  • Vermont (92)
  • South Dakota (91)
  • Arkansas (88)
  • Delaware (87)
  • Kansas (87)
  • Montana (87)
  • New Mexico (87)
  • West Virginia (87)
  • Hawaii (86)
  • Missouri (86)
  • South Carolina (86)
  • Tennessee (86)
  • Maryland (85)
  • Oregon (85)
  • Virginia (85)
  • Iowa (84)
  • Kentucky (84)
  • Mississippi

Click here to see the 22 best school districts in America.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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