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New Frontiers in Research and Practice on Homeschooling

In 2000 and 2013, The Peabody Journal of Education published issues about homeschooling, providing a platform to deliberate on what was in 2000 a burgeoning movement in the United States and has now become a population estimated by the National Center on Education Statistics (NCES) to number between 3% to 4% of the school-age population (Snyder, de Brey, & Dillow, 2018). There are also indications that home education is a growing global phenomenon. The recent Wiley Handbook of Home Education devoted an entire section to homeschooling practice worldwide (Gaither, 2017). Moreover, in the past 6 years three global conferences have been held on the subject, the most recent of which was held in Russia with over 1,000 participants. The conference included a research track yielding dozens of papers, several of which are included in this issue. Holding a conference about home education in Russia is itself an intriguing occurrence worthy of consideration in the context of geopolitical happenings. Since then, a new organization called the Global Home Education Exchange Counsel has formed (www.ghex.world) with a mission that includes supporting more and diverse research on home education. In the 2000 and 2013 issues on homeschooling in this journal, supporters and critics alike drew upon political philosophy and legal thought to make normative arguments about the legitimacy of homeschooling or to debate how homeschooling and the policy environments under which the practice was regulated and exercised could benefit or harm not only individual students but also collective aspects of civic life. Researchers reviewed the literature to evaluate claims of the efficacy of homeschooling on academic achievement, postsecondary preparation, and socialization. The issue also explored the impact of home education on the education profession and education research. Debates continue over topics such as how much state oversight over homeschooling is desired, whether homeschooled students are prepared for civic life, the extent to which homeschooling can be considered a human right, and the effects of homeschooling on academic outcomes. Discussions on these topics pervade academic papers, conferences, and the popular media. Despite the persistence of these perennial issues, much has changed. Homeschooling research and practice have evolved recently. On the practice side, the composition of the homeschooling population, the reasons for homeschooling, and the way homeschooling is carried out have become increasingly diverse. Perceptions that homeschooling, from the point of its modern rapid growth in the early 1980s through the early 2000s, is primarily practiced by white families for religious reasons continue to endure and are borne out by some data (Kunzman & Gaither, 2013). But other data collected and released in the 2016 NCES survey indicate that now the most common reason parents homeschool is because of “concern about the environment in schools,” indicating that homeschooling is chosen for a variety of other reasons (McQuiggan, Megra, & Grady, 2017). For example, homeschooling is increasingly practiced by some black communities for ethnocentric reasons (Fields-Smith & Kisura, 2013). The NCES data also show growth of homeschooling in minority communities with Hispanic homeschoolers estimated at 26% of the population and black homeschooling families at 8%. Both numbers show significant growth from previous reports (Snyder et al., 2018). Families who have children with special needs are also increasingly electing to homeschool – a trend buoyed by the passage of