Ifza Khan’s mornings don’t start with the school bell.
Instead, the 11-year-old gets out of bed, walks downstairs and heads to her dining room table, where her mom, Arsala, leads Ifza and her two siblings in the day’s lessons. Some days they join 12 other families for a park meet-up or a field trip to a local museum. On other days, they’ll gather for in-person, à la carte lessons at different locations, which focus on everything from horseback riding to robotics engineering.
For years, the Khans have been among thousands of California families homeschooling their children. But today, they’ve got much more company. Since the year before the pandemic shut down schools, the number of California kids being homeschooled has skyrocketed by 70% — and despite a return to in-person learning, many are not going back.
“When you’re in public school, it’s almost like a death march: you’re going to go through this set of classes whether you like it or not,” said Leigh Cline of San Francisco, who shifted her daughters to homeschooling last year. “I wish I’d (begun homeschooling) earlier.”
In California, homeschooling rates peaked during the 2020-21 academic year. They have declined since then, but the rates are still much higher than anything the state had seen pre-pandemic as more families grow convinced of the merits. The Arnold family from Lafayette, for example, switched to homeschooling after discovering how much more flexibility it gave their family, both to travel and to spend more time together. The Clines decided during COVID-19 that their daughters weren’t getting the support they needed in the classroom — and that a homeschooling model might be a better fit.
The Khans made the decision in 2017, after starting Ifza in a program where kids would go to the classroom two days a week. By the time she was in second grade, they’d moved to homeschooling full time, bringing along Ifza’s now 9- and 6-year-old siblings.
“This was kind of my way of rebelling against Silicon Valley’s singular focus on strong academics, and the idea that math and science was all that mattered,” said Arsala Khan, who lives in Milpitas. “I wanted my kids to have a more organic process of learning so that they wouldn’t end up hating it.”
Homeschooling can take different forms in California, making it nearly impossible to obtain an accurate estimate of the number of children educated that way.
Parents can establish a “private school” of under six children in their own home by filing an affidavit that the state uses to identify students who are likely homeschooled. Parents can also enroll their children in a more traditional private school that offers homeschooling programs, or with an independent study program at a public school. Or, they can enroll in a home-based charter school, which gives parents around $3,000 per child, per year, for outside classes, and provides monthly meetings with an educational specialist to ensure students are staying on track.
Only the home-based private school option is uniformly tracked by the state. This year, more than 40,000 children were registered through affidavits of private schools of less than six students statewide, as compared to just over 25,400 during the 2018-19 academic year.
At the same time, schools across California have been losing students, especially since the pandemic. From the 2018-19 to 2022-23 academic years, California’s public-school enrollment declined by more than 5%, and the number of kids in traditional private schools ticked up only slightly: less than a 2% increase in the same time period.
Jamie Heston started homeschooling her kids two decades ago — and ever since she’s had a front-row seat to the way the trend has shifted. For years, the Hayward resident has coached other parents through the details, moderating a Facebook group for homeschool families, and hosting a “homeschooling 101” class for parents every few months.
Before COVID-19, Heston’s class would attract 20 to 30 parents each session. Midway through 2020, she said her numbers topped 100. Since then, attendees have eased back down — but every week, Heston said about 20 new families join the 7,300-strong Facebook group.
“Every time there’s a school shooting, we see a boost,” Heston said. “Every time there was talk of a COVID mandate, we saw a boost. But the biggest boost came from the pandemic. People got a glimpse into their child’s classrooms, and many of them didn’t like what they saw.”
That’s how it unfolded for Leigh Cline, who began homeschooling her now 15- and 13-year-old daughters last year. During the pandemic, Cline said she saw one of her daughters — who has learning difficulties — getting yelled at by her teacher.
“My daughter was acting out and needed guidance, but the school had too many kids to actually manage them all. It just wasn’t working,” Cline said.
By the end of that year, the Clines moved from Santa Monica to the Bay Area, which they’d heard was an epicenter of homeschooling resources. They now live in San Francisco, a city with easy access to a multitude of tutors and in-person classes for homeschooled kids, Cline said, along with hundreds of families creating “co-ops” to socialize their kids in parks, on field trips, or through joint lessons in public spaces.
Still, there are many other reasons families are choosing to homeschool their children. During the height of the pandemic, Alissa Arnold — a mother of a 13-year-old, 10-year-old and 7-year-old in Lafayette — said she saw how remote learning could mean a more flexible lifestyle for her family. Another driver for the switch was the social pressure embedded in the public school system. Like Khan, Arnold feels children are pushed toward academic excellence as the be all, end all, and that there’s more to learning than just exams and textbooks.
“If you look at this grand experiment of public education, the numbers are out. The anxiety, the suicide, the mental health. We’re just not getting it right,” said Arnold. “Homeschooling is an entire paradigm shift.”
Both the Khans and Arnolds are enrolled in home-based charter schools, which provide light support for families in the form of funding, check-ins with an educational specialist, and optional classes. Home-based charters are difficult to track, as they are grouped with regular public schools in state datasets. But according to a list compiled by a home-based private school, Peach Blossom, there are at least 140 of these schools across California, including about 30 in the Bay Area.
While only 23 of those Bay Area charters provided easily accessible data to the state, together, they had a student count of over 22,530 this academic year — a 14% spike since 2018-19.
Even using the most optimistic estimates, homeschooled students are still just a fraction of the state’s overall student population, which tops 6 million. Despite the small numbers, homeschooling’s continued prevalence is still an interesting pattern, said Julien Lafortune, a research fellow specializing in K-12 education at the Public Policy Institute of California.
“It’s still unclear where we’ll land in our new normal post-pandemic,” Lafortune said. “Is this the baseline (number of homeschooled students) we’ll recede to? Or will this number continue to drop, and end up back where it was pre-pandemic? That’s still to be determined.”
Homeschooling gets more complicated as children age into high school, taking classes that are beyond the abilities of many parents to guide. Cline said she finds tutors or group lessons for advanced courses she cannot teach, such as chemistry.
“We play to our strengths when we teach our kids, and we outsource our weaknesses,” she added.
Every year, Khan says she asks her children whether they still want to be homeschooled, or whether they’d like to try the public school route. But so far, the resounding answer from both children has been clear.
“Other kids are stuck in a classroom when they’re at school,” said Ifza. “Sitting for hours and hours? No way. I don’t want that.”
