Homeschooling in the United States

Homeschooling is a social movement that has served as a container for multiple, competing ideological perspectives and has grown in both popularity and diversity in the last decade. Chapter 1 reviews the history and present state of homeschooling in the United States in order to contextualize the narratives of the parents featured in the remainder of the book. The author first provides a brief history of the modern homeschooling movement, highlighting the ways in which both conservative and progressive education critiques have driven the movement. She then discusses the current state of homeschooling, including the legal status and regulation of homeschooling, the spectrum of homeschooling instruction approaches, and what research shows about the outcomes of homeschooling, and about demographic trends in who homeschools.