Taking Attendance: Estimating Homeschooling Populations in States without Official Homeschool Data – a Pilot Analysis in Missouri

By Amy Shelton, Ph.D. and Collin Hitt, Ph.D.

There are over one million school-age children in Missouri, and we estimate 61,000 (6% of all school-age children) are homeschooled. Missouri is one of 29 states that does not require homeschooling to be reported. Using methods that can be replicated elsewhere with publicly available data, we test three approaches to estimating homeschool participation: using American Community Survey (ACS) data; subtracting public and estimated private school counts from ACS school-age totals; and polling parents. We comment on the usefulness and limitations of each approach and provide a model for researchers seeking to estimate homeschooling trends in states that lack administrative data.

Key Points:

• There are more than 1 million school-age children in Missouri.

• Approximately 860,000 children are enrolled in public school.

• No state agency in Missouri collects enrollment data for private school or homeschool children, therefore the authors developed “meta-estimates” using data from six different data sets.

• According to these estimates, approximately 61,000 children in Missouri are being educated at home this year – which represents more than 6.1 percent of the state’s school-aged population. 

• The number of Missouri children homeschooling in Missouri doubled since 2019 and there is no evidence of a post-pandemic drop in homeschooling numbers. 

• For perspective, the number of homeschooled students in Missouri is equal to the number of students enrolled in both the St. Louis and Kansas City public school districts combined. 

Please Cite As: Shelton, A., & Hitt, C. (2024). Taking Attendance: Estimating Homeschooling Populations in States without Official Homeschool Data – a Pilot Analysis in Missouri. Journal of School Choice, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/15582159.2024.2422240