Missouri Homeschool Rates in 2024: First-of-its-kind research from the PRiME Center finds more than 61,000 students in Missouri are homeschooled
Report: 1 in 16 Missouri students are homeschooled, signaling a “massive shift” in the state’s educational landscape
First-of-its-kind research by the PRiME Center at Saint Louis University finds that more than 61,000 students in Missouri are educated at home, roughly equal to the public-school enrollments of the state’s two largest public school districts combined
St. Louis, MO – At least 1 in 16 school-aged children in Missouri are educated at home instead of at brick-and-mortar public and private schools. This is the key finding of a new report by the Policy Research in Missouri Education (PRiME) Center at Saint Louis University.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many families turned to homeschooling for the first time. Now, a new study from the PRiME Center puts a number to the population of students in Missouri who are homeschooled post-pandemic. Researchers at the PRiME Center estimate that at least 61,000 students in Missouri are homeschooled. This figure represents more than 6 percent of all school-aged children across the state.
“This information points to a massive shift in the educational landscape in Missouri,” said Collin Hitt, executive director of the PRiME Center and co-author of the study. “It was widely believed that parents who turned to homeschooling during the COVID-19 pandemic would send their children back to brick-and-mortar schools after the pandemic ended, but the data paints a dramatically different picture. Homeschooling is surging in popularity in Missouri, and we see no signs of it slowing down.”
According to the study:
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.
“This research tells an important story about the way the pandemic changed parents’ attitudes toward education,” Hitt said. “Homeschooling has always been around. But the data tells us that in the post-pandemic world, homeschooling has become far more common in Missouri. There’s no evidence of a return to past trends. One out of every 16 students in the state is homeschooling right now, perhaps more. It is crucial for policymakers to know these numbers.”
The study offers the most rigorous analysis to date of the homeschool population in Missouri following the COVID-19 pandemic. As in many other states, Missouri state government does not tabulate the number of homeschoolers or require homeschooling families to alert the government or their local school district.
To put a number to the size of the homeschooling population in the state, researchers at the PRiME Center utilized multiple statewide and national datasets to assess where the state’s more than 1 million school-aged children are educated. The methods developed by PRiME researchers can be used in other states.
The PRiME Center study will be published in a special November edition of the Journal of School Choice. The study’s findings also will be presented at the fall meeting of Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management.
