Why American parents are abandoning public schools

BRENTWOOD, California – Every morning, seven-year-old Scarlett Laughlin finishes her formal schooling in under an hour at the kitchen table. She then heads to a nearby farm to learn how to raise goats and grow vegetables. By afternoon, she is at the park with friends.

Scarlett is one of a growing number of Americans whose parents are pulling them out of public schools. Frustrated by rigid curricula, bullying and social pressures, as well as political fights over what children are taught, families like hers are choosing homeschooling.

“It’s a movement,” said Mrs Erin Laughlin, Scarlett’s mother. “Homeschooling parents realise how much better their children are doing without the pressure of public school.”

Like the Laughlins, some parents pull their kids out of school to gain greater control over what their children are learning in the classroom. Others want more flexibility to accommodate students with special needs. But the picture is the same nationwide: A public education system once seen as the backbone of American democracy is under strain.

Public school enrolment has plunged by more than a million students in just four years, the steepest decline in decades. Government projections show a 7.6 per cent fall by 2031, which would strip nearly four million children, and the taxpayer funding they bring in, from the system.

A system in decline

What started as a temporary decline in enrolment during the Covid-19 pandemic, when schools across the country shuttered, has lingered.

Between 2019 and 2023, 41 US states reported drops in student enrolment. By raw numbers, California was hit hardest, shedding 325,000 pupils, or about 5 per cent of its total. Once considered engines of economic growth, urban school districts have seen average enrolment losses of 4 per cent. 

Falling birth rates and the exodus of families from expensive cities help explain the drop. Stanford University’s Professor Thomas Dee, who studies public school enrolment, estimates that half of the decline in public school enrolment is due to demographic shifts.

Experts warn that the decline may compound existing frustrations with the public school system, and could signal a lasting shift in America’s education landscape.

Empty desks mean less state funding, creating a downward spiral of cuts and closures. Meanwhile, teachers are leaving faster than schools can replace them. More than 70 per cent of public schools reported having difficulty filling one or more vacant teaching positions in the last academic year.

Maths, science and special education are the hardest jobs to fill. Districts often fall back on substitutes or underqualified hires, leaving students short-changed.

The effects are immediate: bigger class sizes, fewer advanced courses, and exhausted teachers trying to do more with less. All this further erodes parents’ confidence in the system, reinforcing the cycle of decline.

In Palo Alto, California, cyber-security expert Katrina O’Neil withdrew her neurodivergent son, who shone in some subjects but struggled in others, after he grew anxious and disruptive in public school. “His gifts weren’t appreciated. Only his deficits were paid attention to,” she said.

Freed from the classroom, he flourished. After a year of self-directed study, he was auditing astronomy lectures at the University of California, Berkeley, at just nine years old. Today, he is thriving, having pieced together his own education: a mix of community college courses and outdoor schooling that focuses on survival skills and time in nature.

“Homeschooling gave him back a love of learning and self-confidence,” Ms O’Neil said. “Public schools teach the same material in the same way to kids with completely different needs. Homeschooling lets us adapt constantly.”

But while stories like hers fuel the homeschooling movement, critics warn that its lack of oversight carries risks at scale.

“There is zero accountability in terms of attendance, testing, curriculum and ideology. We don’t know what is happening in the home,” said Dr Dennis Willingham, who oversees public schools in Walker County, Alabama.

Few studies have explored homeschooling’s impact on job prospects, and existing ones often have partisan bias or small samples. But a 2021 Harvard analysis of survey data from more than 12,000 children found that homeschooled students were 23 per cent less likely to attend college than their public school peers, possibly due to lower academic achievement, less interest in higher education, or admissions biases.

Rules on homeschooling vary widely across the country. In 11 states, including Alaska, Texas and Michigan, it is virtually unregulated.

Parents can start homeschooling without notifying the state in any way, and are not required to report attendance, conduct testing or submit schoolwork.

Advocates say this flexibility empowers families to tailor a curriculum to their children’s individual needs. Detractors worry it leaves children invisible to the authorities, with no guarantee they are learning at all.

The enrolment crisis is also playing out along sharp political divides. Republicans have championed “school choice” policies that allow parents to divert taxpayer funds to private or homeschooling. Supporters argue the policies empower families. Critics counter that they drain already-strapped public schools of money, accelerating their decline.

US President Donald Trump was elected in part on a pledge to slash federal education spending by 15 per cent and

gut the Department of Education

, arguing that states should take full control of education. 

While federal money makes up only about 8 per cent of overall US school budgets, it is disproportionately directed towards poor and rural districts like Walker County, many of them in Republican states. These states will struggle most to replace any funding that is cut.

To keep families engaged, the district now offers dual enrolment in trade schools and colleges, free school lunches, and free supplies so children “don’t need to bring a pencil or paper, just show up”, said Dr Willingham, the superintendent in Walker County.

But he fears looming federal funding cuts. Federal money pays for part-time art teachers, travel costs that let robotics teams compete nationally, and stipends for veteran teachers to mentor new ones.

“Please don’t take away our federal funding,” he pleaded during a recent visit to Capitol Hill. “We can’t function without it.”

Homeschooling advocates, however, reject the notion that they should sacrifice their children’s education while they wait for the public school system to reform.

“Are we here to ensure children get the best education possible, or to prop up an education model that has already shown it isn’t fully successful?” asked Mr Kevin Boden, director of the Home School Legal Defence Association.

“I’m an American. I love the market,” he said. “If public schools were more competitive, parents would probably choose them.”

America’s slipping grades on the global stage

The decline in public school enrolment could have consequences beyond the classroom. The US is already slipping in global rankings. In the latest assessment by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development of 15-year-olds, the US placed near the bottom of developed countries in maths, ranking 26th out of 37, while

Singapore claimed the top spot

.

Recent assessments by the Department of Education show that more than 30 per cent of US students finishing high school lack basic reading skills, the lowest level in more than three decades. Maths results are similarly grim: Nearly 40 per cent of 12th graders tested below basic proficiency.

The erosion of America’s public schools presents not just an academic problem, but also a civic one. Supporters of the public school system say it serves as a common ground where children of different races, religions and socioeconomic backgrounds learn side by side, forging a shared identity in a diverse nation.

“Better education not only implies higher levels of employment and higher earnings, it also stimulates innovation, improves health outcomes and improves civic engagement,” said Stanford’s Prof Dee.

“Especially in an increasingly dynamic and globalised kind of economic climate, having a robust system of schooling is vitally important and can be rightfully characterised as a national priority.”

Research underscores that schools are more than places of academic instruction – they are engines of social cohesion. 

This concern is not new. For decades, critics and scholars have argued that public schools are central to sustaining democracy.

Social critic Neil Postman put it bluntly in his 1996 book The End Of Education: “Public education does not serve a public. It creates a public. And in creating the right kind of public, the schools contribute towards strengthening the spiritual basis of the American creed.”

But as families pull away – whether towards private schools, homeschooling or fragmented alternatives – that unifying experience is weakening. Researchers warn that the loss of this shared institution could exacerbate inequality, limit social mobility and further polarise a society already divided by politics and economics.

“One of the great things about the United States is that schools belong to the local community,” said Ms Kristine A. Gilmore, head of leadership and learning at the School Superintendents Association. “School districts can be the common thread that pulls communities together.”

For families like the Laughlins, though, the decision is more personal than political. Scarlett and her younger brother Mickey’s mornings of maths and afternoons of homesteading feel healthier than the grind her older siblings endured in public school.

“They’re not worried about brands or bullying. They’re just happy,” Mrs Erin Laughlin said. “That’s worth everything.”