Is Homeschooling Holding Down the Labor Supply? NewsWire

NewsWire: 10/25/21

• Since the pandemic began, homeschooling has surged across America. Initially sparked by parental fears and the closing of classrooms, some parents are opting to continue homeschooling their children even as schools resume in-person classes. (Associated Press)
• NH: We've written several pieces about why LFP is failing to rebound as expected. A few of the reasons we have discussed: Long Covid, early Boomer retirements, changing attitudes towards work, and the rise of extended family households. (See "The Long Shadow of Long Covid," "Why Wealthy Nations Can’t Find Workers," and "Are Mothers Leaving the Workforce?") 
• Another suggested driver of low LFP is the recent rise in homeschooling. Some researchers claim that homeschooling rates have exploded since the pandemic began. And this could mean parents are leaving the workforce to teach their children. Let's take a look at the data.
• According to a regular Census survey, reported homeschooling has indeed experienced a dramatic rise since the pandemic began. From 2012 to 2019, per the Census, the national homeschooling rate stayed flat at 3.3%. By the spring of 2020, the rate increased to 5.4%. And by the fall of 2020, it jumped further to 11.1%.
• The magnitude of the increase differed by race and ethnicity. Blacks saw the largest jump from 3.3% in the spring to 16.1% in the fall. That’s a whopping rise of +12.8 percentage points. The rates for Hispanics, whites, and Asians all rose between 4 and 6 percentage points.

• We know that moms typically bear the brunt of teaching homeschooled children. And this could explain why the September labor force participation rate for women is still down -3.3% from January 2020, while it's only down -2.3% for men.

• Perhaps. But IMO we need to be cautious.
• The biggest weakness of the homeschooling argument is the weakness of the data backing it up. Quite simply, we possess no reliable or comprehensive data on the number of homeschooled children in America. We do have such data for public and private schooling. They are published by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). But homeschooling? Not much, really, other than memberships in various homeschooling organizations. States all vary in how they define "homeschooling," and eleven states don't report any numbers at all.
• To be sure, the U.S. Census does conduct an annual survey of households. But this is basically little more than a yes-or-no questionnaire. The survey gives us no understanding of what the parents mean when they say they are "homeschooling." They could mean they have dedicated themselves to a long-term regimen of home study for their kids (including whatever periodic achievement testing that is required by the state). Or they could mean simply that they have yanked their children out of school for a month or a semester or a year.
• So it's hard to say exactly what has been going on during the pandemic. Homeschooling advocates like the Home School Legal Defense Association are reporting that the rate of homeschooling has indeed jumped and is still climbing. They claim that 19% of students were homeschooled in spring 2021. But researchers who track national public school data are coming to a very different conclusion. The analysts at the Education Data Initiative (EDI) conclude, based on the latest NCES data, that the homeschooling rate, after climbing during the fall of 2020 and spring of 2021, has now dropped again all the way back to 4% in the fall of 2021.
• In support of the narrative that the "rise of homeschooling" has been a transitory phenomenon, we can point to the final NCES numbers for the 2020-21 school year, released in June. They show that YoY K-12 enrollment (public and private), after staying pretty flat in recent years, was down only 3%. Moreover, most of the declines were in districts that had been shut down for long periods. This is what we might expect if parents were keeping their kids home temporarily due to the pandemic. Also, kindergarten enrollment was down the most, followed by grades 1-8. This too reflects worried parents who might more readily "redshirt" their toddler or third-grader than an adolescent already in middle school.
• Although a good survey could clarify parental motivations over the past year, none seems to be available. Clearly, K-12 schools were gripped in chaos last fall and winter. Unvaccinated teachers were afraid to come into classrooms. Parents were fearful on behalf of their own children. And the widespread confusion over how to conduct or grade remote learning pushed many frustrated parents, who may themselves have been at home (either working remotely or receiving benefits), to keep their kids out of school.
• According to earlier surveys conducted over the last twenty years, one of the top parental motivations for homeschooling has always been safety. Safety clearly was at work during the 2020-21 school year. But whether safety continues to be a motivator post-pandemic remains to be seen.
• Close behind safety, in these surveys, are principled objections to the curriculum being taught. This too seems to have been a driver over the past year. We have also seen news stories about black parents reporting a greater anxiety about K-12 public schools due to racial unrest after the George Floyd protests. And this fall, some suburban whites are mobilizing in the 2021 off-year elections against "critical race theory." 
• So where does that leave us? Clearly, a lot more parents kept their kids home from school during the pandemic. Some of these parents--who didn't homeschool their kids before are doing so now. And it's very probable, in turn, that some of these parents, typically moms, used to work and are not working now. What we don't know is how large this number is. Or how rapidly the number is now declining.