Shawna Wingert’s older child was struggling. The third grader excelled academically; they’d been reading since the age of 2 and a half. But school was overwhelming — the noise, the smells, the social interactions.
Anna North is a senior correspondent for Vox, where she covers American family life, work, and education. Previously, she was an editor and writer at the New York Times. She is also the author of four novels, including the forthcoming Bog Queen, which you can preorder here.
The fear and anxiety got so bad that they “would panic every morning at the idea of going to school, panic about getting shoes on, panic about getting socks on, panic about leaving the car to go into the classroom,” Wingert said. “It was such a difficult environment for them.”
Wingert’s child would eventually be diagnosed with autism, but their Southern California school was “rigid” when it came to providing accommodations, Wingert said. Even requests that seemed simple, like asking for more advanced reading material, were difficult to fulfill. Ultimately, she made the difficult decision to put her career on hold and homeschool both her kids.
Frustrated with public schools, families of students with disabilities and learning differences, like Wingert’s, are increasingly turning to homeschooling — and newer “microschools,” very small learning environments that straddle the line between homeschooling and traditional school — in an effort to meet their children’s needs. Those needs can include everything from a distraction-free learning environment to individualized reading instruction to lessons that play to kids strengths, not just their challenges.
These families are changing the face of education in America, diversifying the homeschooling landscape while creating what is essentially a parallel school system, one that can be especially attractive to other parents whose kids had a bad experience in traditional schools.
School closures in 2020 forced most American families to supervise children’s education from home, and many chose to keep doing so after school buildings reopened, sometimes because months of at-home instruction during lockdown made them more comfortable with the idea.
According to a Washington Post estimate, between 1.9 million and 2.7 million children are currently homeschooled, up from 1.5 million in 2019. While homeschooling was once primarily a Christian phenomenon, today just 34 percent of families who homeschool do so for religious reasons, according to a Washington Post-Schar School survey, down from nearly two-thirds in 2012.
Meanwhile, 32 percent of homeschooling families say they made that choice because their child has special needs that public schools can’t or won’t meet, and 28 percent say they homeschool because of a child’s psychological or behavioral issues (respondents were allowed to choose multiple options).
Many parents say their kids thrive on the one-on-one attention homeschooling can provide. For Wingert’s younger child, who has dyslexia, it sometimes meant “we’re going to practice sight words today, but we’re going to do it outside with your dog,” Wingert said.
Some experts, however, are concerned that a lack of oversight in homeschool and microschool settings could leave students vulnerable not just to substandard education but even to injury or abuse because these settings are not subject to the same legal safeguards as traditional schools.
Homeschool laws vary by state, with some setting forth detailed requirements for subjects and assessments, and others imposing few or no restrictions. Within their state’s guidelines, families can typically choose how to structure their children’s days by following an existing curriculum or creating their own.
Critics point out that transforming one’s home into a school requires an investment of time, money, and space that many families can’t afford. On a broader level, some fear what happens to all students if America begins to give up on its public schools.
“There’s a community-building aspect to a school,” said Lauren Morando Rhim, executive director of the Center for Learner Equity, a nonprofit that advocates for students with disabilities. It can be a place “where everyone comes together to learn a common understanding of our history” — a common understanding that could be lost if everyone homeschooled their kids.
For some, the rise of homeschooling is a call to action for public schools to do better by students with disabilities so they and their families don’t feel forced to go it alone.
Why some families choose homeschooling
Children with disabilities are legally entitled to a fair and equitable education in public schools. Those schools can be required to provide occupational therapy, speech therapy, and other services for students with disabilities, as well as working with families to develop individualized education plans.
Some families, however, say that public schools have left their kids feeling marginalized — or worse. “The system can be very large and rigid,” Rhim said. Families sometimes feel they’re getting a one-size-fits-all approach: “‘Your child has this disability, and this is what we do for children who have that disability,’ versus saying, ‘What does your child need?’”
This rigidity can be especially problematic when it comes to discipline. When a child with a disability behaves “in a way that is different than the way the school wants them to behave,” they’re often punished or pulled out of class, Rhim said.
In some cases, children with disabilities aren’t allowed to be in school at all, even though they’re legally guaranteed a spot there. Lisa Manwell, a Michigan mom, told the Hechinger Report that she was repeatedly called to pick up her son John from his middle school because of behaviors related to his ADHD, or because he had been bullied by other students and did not want to return to class. “He was withdrawing. He started talking about hurting himself,” she said.
Because the calls weren’t recorded as formal suspensions, she said she had little legal recourse. Ultimately, Manwell chose to homeschool her son.
Some parents say homeschooling “was less stressful than trying to get the services they thought their child needed from the school,” said Kathy Kuhl, a homeschooling coach who taught her own child at home.
For kids with disabilities and learning differences in particular, the smaller setting can allow parents (or whoever’s doing the teaching) to focus not just on areas where students struggle, but also on nurturing their particular talents and interests, Kuhl said. Her own son, who has ADHD, was excited to start homeschooling because he could finally play with his Legos at recess, she told me.
But the approach also comes with challenges. Helping students with disabilities learn effectively can require specific expertise, something parents and others without formal teacher training may not have, said Robert Kunzman, an education professor at Indiana University Bloomington who studies the practice. Moreover, in some states, homeschooled students are not eligible for publicly funded services, like occupational therapy, that are provided at schools, meaning families have to pay for those services on their own (or go without).
Families in some areas can use publicly funded education savings accounts to pay homeschool expenses, which can range from $50 a year for a basic curriculum to hundreds of dollars a week for specialized lessons or learning pods outside the home. Some worry that these accounts siphon off money that would otherwise go to public schools, many of which are facing budget crises as pandemic-era aid dries up.
Homeschooling can be beneficial for individual families, said Russell Skiba, a professor emeritus of counseling and educational psychology at Indiana University Bloomington who studies school discipline and students with disabilities. But “especially if it takes money away from those students who may not be able to afford that private schooling or homeschooling option, I think it’s really unjust.”
Newer microschools are changing the landscape
Homeschooling can put a significant financial strain on families, especially if one adult has to drop out of the workforce to teach kids. “We were not able to save effectively,” said Wingert, the California mom. “We never bought a house. We lived a very different life than our counterparts who had kids in school and had dual incomes.”
Still, families with incomes under $100,000 are more likely to homeschool than wealthier households. And the homeschooling population has only become more diverse since the pandemic began — while about three quarters of homeschooling families were white as of 2019, the Post’s 2023 survey put that share at just under half.
Some families balance work and homeschooling by looking to options that let their kids spend at least part of the week learning outside the home, the Post reported. Homeschooling families have long formed cooperatives in which parents share teaching duties and kids get to socialize, Kuhl said. But recent years have seen a growth in more formal arrangements like microschools. Sometimes operating out of houses of worship or other nontraditional spaces, these schools may offer part-time instruction to students who are otherwise homeschooled. Others enroll students full-time, but with class sizes that supporters say are more conducive to individualized learning. With a median size of 16 students in an entire school, microschools now enroll about 2 percent of students nationwide, according to the National Microschooling Center.
The schools have also drawn interest from families of kids with special needs, some of whom aren’t able to make a switch to full-time homeschooling. According to the National Microschooling Center, 63 percent of microschools report serving neurodiverse students (those with diagnoses like ADHD or autism), and 53 percent report serving students with other special needs. “You can truly build microschools around the specific needs of the individual learners that you’re serving” in a way “that just doesn’t happen in large traditional schools,” said Don Soifer, the center’s CEO.
In some cases, students with disabilities can get public funding to attend microschools. Georgia’s Special Needs Scholarship, for example, provides an average of about $6,600 per year for students with disabilities to use on tuition at private institutions, including microschools, according to the education news organization The 74. Indiana has a similar program. As of 2024, about one third of microschools accept public funding for tuition, up from 18 percent in 2023, according to the National Microschooling Center.
The increase in such schools receiving public dollars has some education advocates concerned. Microschools are not held to the same legal standards as public schools when it comes to providing an equitable education to students with disabilities. In some states, they don’t even have the same legal oversight as private schools, and are established as more informal “learning centers.”
“Eventually, something horrific is going to happen in one of these situations,” Jen Garrison Stuber, advocacy chair of the Washington Homeschool Organization, told the Washington Post. “A kid’s going to get killed, a kid’s going to get seriously injured or molested, because the safeguards that you have at a private school aren’t happening.”
Microschooling advocates say that regulations and accountability metrics will evolve in time. “Microschooling is very much in the early adoption phase right now,” Soifer said. Meanwhile, the methods used to measure the success of public schools, like standardized tests, aren’t necessarily especially effective, he argued.
But some experts caution that families shouldn’t have to upend their lives — or leave the public school system — in order to give their kids the education they’re entitled to under the law. “There shouldn’t be any reason for a kid with disabilities to be pushed out of school,” Skiba said.
Instead, some say students with disabilities leaving public schools should be a wake-up call for those schools to do better. Schools need to treat parents as real partners in their children’s education, and be flexible when it comes to accommodations like a different seat in the classroom or extra time on tests, Rhim said.
Teacher training programs also need to do a better job of integrating general and special education skills, she said. Too often, general education teachers are trained to “teach the mythical ‘average child.’” Instead, sending the message that “all kids are on a continuum” might help teachers create classrooms that are “more prepared to adapt to how kids learn,” Rhim said.
Wingert’s kids are older now: Her older child has graduated from college and wants to use their interest in history in a career in museums. Her younger child just completed high school at home, and is taking the year to work at a rock-climbing gym he loves.
Wingert knows not everyone can homeschool their kids, but she’d like to see public schools incorporate some of the individualized approach and outside-the-box thinking she was able to employ as a teacher in her own home. That includes giving classroom teachers more freedom, she said: “It’s frustrating to me that teachers, year after year, are in a position where they have less and less autonomy in terms of making the right decisions for their kids.”
And, she said, it includes a willingness to shake things up when the old ways aren’t working. She hopes public schools start to reach the point she ultimately reached in her own home: “Let’s just figure out what works instead of being so constrained by the way we’re supposed to do it.”
