Now in eighth grade, her daughter attends a microschool twice a week. The part-time option is something that many small alternative schools offer for families who don’t want a five-day commitment.

“It never worked for us to isolate ourselves and be just the two of us at home,” Feinberg said. “We’re not that kind of homeschool family.”

Her choices are more common than she thinks. Combining homeschooling with something else — whether that’s a microschool, an online class or a co-op has become the norm —according to released Wednesday from Johns Hopkins University and the Rand Corp. 

In Rand’s of parents, 88% of those who currently homeschool their children use some additional type of support. Over 40% said they use online resources, which could range from a YouTube video to an online curriculum. Nearly a quarter enroll their child in an online school, and 10% use a tutor. As public schools increasingly compete for students, many, especially in Florida, also offer a la carte classes to homeschoolers.

Replacing federal data

To some traditional homeschoolers, those who enroll their children in virtual programs aren’t truly homeschooling, especially if it’s a public online school, because parents are less involved in directing the learning. But Angela Watson, researcher at Johns Hopkins University and director of the Homeschool Research Lab, chose not to define homeschooling on the survey.

“It’s getting so tricky,” she said. Some parents who attend a microschool “identify as being homeschoolers either for policy reasons or because they feel like they are homeschooling.”

The lines between homeschool and other models have been blurry for years, said John Watson, founder of the Community Advancing Digital Learning, a network of online providers. (He is not related to Angela Watson.)

He recently heard about some relatives who said they were homeschooling, but “upon digging deeper, I found they are attending an online charter school,” he said. The rise of education savings accounts, allowing parents to enroll their children in virtual programs using public funds, has further contributed to the “intersection of homeschooling and online schools or courses.”

Johns Hopkins University commissioned Rand to insert homeschooling questions into its survey to learn more about a population growing in both size and diversity. 

“The hope is to better understand current homeschool trends and more about who is doing it,” Angela Watson said. 

Of the 2,427 parents surveyed, about 10% say they homeschool their children. That’s nearly double the 5.2% last when the National Center for Education Statistics released a “first look” at new data.

A fuller report, from the National Household Education Survey, was expected in January 2025. But that after Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency wiped out the Institute for Education Sciences. It’s unclear whether efforts to include restarting that project. 

“I thought, ‘Let’s just make some lemonade out of these lemons,’ ” Watson said, explaining why she turned to Rand.

‘Run the gamut’

Some of the providers who market to homeschool families met last week near Atlanta for the fifth annual National Hybrid Schools Conference, a gathering of those serving students who split their time between different educational settings. 

Exhibitors included twin brothers Matthew and Jared Young, who founded Read Write Create, which offers creative writing classes and materials like journals and colored pencils. 

The homeschoolers who participate in their program “run the gamut,” said Matthew Young. Some do it for religious reasons, while others weren’t happy with the traditional public system. What they have in common, he added, is that they “like the freedom of being able to use whatever they want.” 

In one session, the marketing team from Kaipod, a network of microschools, coached school founders on how to use websites and social media to attract parents looking for something different.

“Enrollment of a child in school is a major decision especially if they’re walking away from a more familiar model,” said Christine Carlson, Kaipod’s head of content marketing.

Sometimes homeschooling is what’s most familiar, but parents want their child to have more socialization, said Candice Hilton, founder of Hilton Horizons Academy, a Kaipod program in Tennessee offering two-, three- or five-day schedules. 

“They may just want to have community. When you homeschool, sometimes you feel a little bit isolated,” she told ĂŰĚŇÓ°ĘÓ. Other parents, she said, want an educator’s assurance that their child is on track. “It’s like ‘I feel like we’re doing really awesome, but I want to confirm.’ ”

Three survey samples

How homeschoolers’ complement their kids’ education with other programs is just a small slice of what Watson’s team will be able to learn from the parent survey. They also asked parents what grades their children are in, if homeschooling was their first choice or a last resort, what their political and religious views are, and whether their child has disabilities. 

In Austin, Feinberg’s daughter has learning difficulties, but also needs the part-time arrangement because of a chronic illness. 

“We’re super happy there,” Feinberg said. She originally enrolled her daughter for four days a week, but “she doesn’t have the stamina yet.”

Watson, at Johns Hopkins, also wants to learn directly from homeschooled students. Rand just completed a survey of students, with results out later this spring. The data will provide more information on how kids move in and out of different educational settings.

“Nobody really thought to ask ‘Were you only homeschooled for two years?’ “ Watson said. “That seems different than being homeschooled for 12 years.”

Finally, Rand will soon conduct a broader survey of adults, asking if they were ever homeschooled and for how long. Results from the three samples, Watson said, will provide “more confidence that these survey findings are accurate and reflect what is actually happening in the nation.” 

Students learning remotely missed the most days of school this year, according to from Connecticut. And students who were chronically absent in the fall were far more likely to keep missing school during the winter months.

The analysis, from the Connecticut Department of Education and advocacy group Attendance Works, shows that rates of chronic absence — defined as missing at least 10 percent of the school year — were highest among students in low-income communities, English learners and students with disabilities. And the rates of poor attendance among Black and Hispanic students were two to three times higher than those of their white peers.

“It’s very likely that the trends they are seeing are similar in other states,” said Hedy Chang, the director of Attendance Works. Whether other states see those trends in their data, however, depends on how they decided to count attendance for students learning at home.

Connecticut, which implemented a new process for tracking absenteeism across in-person, hybrid and remote settings, required students to attend school for at least half a day to be marked present. If they were at home, they were responsible for participating in at least half of the virtual class time and the other offline work scheduled for that day. New Jersey adopted the same definition, but many states left the decision up to local districts or allowed a mix of criteria, sometimes nothing more than daily check-in call or a simple log-into a remote class. As of January, 19 states weren’t even requiring districts to take attendance, according to the report.

As officials debate whether they’ll allow some remote learning this fall, the Connecticut data shows chronic absenteeism among remote learners was at its worst in kindergarten and ninth grade — key transition points when in-person learning for students might be especially critical. The findings, Chang said, point to the need for leaders to track daily attendance, set consistent definitions for when a student is counted absent and build stronger connections with families so educators can intervene if a student misses too many days of school. With leaders beginning to craft plans for using federal relief funds, the report also highlights the ways Connecticut is spending last year’s federal money to target districts serving high-need students.

The state was among the first to ensure all students had devices and an , when U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona was still commissioner. But stories of families’ remote school experiences have shown that digital access doesn’t always translate into real learning.

“You’re at home. You have three kids all online and there’s one room,” Chang said. “That’s not a solution.”

‘Re-establishing relationships’

The Connecticut report adds to the findings of of attendance trends from FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University. Summarizing data from five unnamed districts serving roughly 450,000 students, the report concluded that severe absenteeism has worsened during the pandemic. In one district, 7 percent of students missed as much as half of the school year, compared to none who were absent that often before school closures.

The report draws on data from , a company that works with districts to improve attendance. The company noticed an increase in perfect attendance rates across the five districts, which points to the lower bar that some states and districts set for students.

Phyllis Jordan, editorial director at FutureEd and author of the report, said it’s clear that students missing half the school year need a lot of support. But if a student who just logs in briefly is counted present, that “makes it hard to figure out who’s in trouble,” she said.

To improve attendance among those most at risk of disconnecting from school, Connecticut spent almost $11 million from last year’s relief packages to create the — or LEAP — which includes home visits, summer learning programs, housing assistance and mental health support in 15 districts. State leaders also meet weekly with district representatives to discuss attendance issues among homeless students, English learners and other groups of students with higher than average absenteeism.

“We know the reasons for chronic absence are as many as there are kids,” said John Frassinelli, director of the department’s division of school health, nutrition, family services and adult education. “It’s really about establishing and re-establishing relationships with families.”

The East Haven Public Schools, south of Hartford, isn’t part of LEAP, but educators still routinely tracked attendance data to identify which students needed additional support. And when the district held standardized testing, Chris Brown, principal of Tuttle School, invited remote students to sit at desks outside the building to take the assessment. The practice spread to other schools.

“It was how we could draw parents in and get them on campus just to talk to them a little bit,” said Superintendent Erica Forti.

In a FutureEd webinar Tuesday, Charlene Russell-Tucker, Connecticut’s acting education commissioner , discussed the importance of working with health, child welfare and other state agencies when addressing attendance challenges.

“We all have responsibility for the same group of children, so why not collaborate and share resources?” she asked, adding that this approach has been especially helpful when families are hard to reach. “Somebody knows where they are, so it’s really important for us to connect.”

‘All over the map’

Connecticut began capturing attendance for students learning in-person, in a hybrid model and fully remote and then reported it monthly — instead of at the end of the school year, which is more common. The change allowed district officials to respond more quickly when they saw patterns of poor attendance or participation in remote learning.

Chang added that if states or districts have outdated software programs that don’t allow them to track and report attendance for both in-person and remote students, they should consider using relief funds for an upgrade.

Connecticut’s process allowed educators to notice which students struggled the most with attendance and identify trends they might not have seen otherwise.

While districts nationally saw sharp declines in kindergarten enrollment, for example, the Connecticut data shows that those who did enroll still missed a lot of school. The data suggests “kids are going to be all over the map of where they are with learning” this fall, Chang said.

In ninth grade, there was a spike in chronic absence rates to almost 30 percent for students learning remotely, which Chang said likely points to the challenges students faced starting high school without in-person interaction with teachers and peers.

“All the things we typically would have done to ensure a smooth transition to high school did not happen for these kids,” Chang said. “If you start missing a lot of ninth grade and getting D’s and F’s, you are not on track for graduation.”

Another trend at the high school level was more positive. In both fall and winter, there was little difference in chronic absence rates for students learning in person and in hybrid models.

To Chang, that suggests the flexibility of a hybrid schedule could benefit older students, especially those who need to work. “There are some things that we were forced to do by COVID that we might not want to give up,” she said.