How many homeschooling families are there?
Estimates of homeschooling children vary. Patricia Lines, a federal Department of Education official, in a working paper for the U.S. Department of Education, “Homeschoolers: Estimating Numbers and Growth” concluded that “around 700,000 to 750,000” children were homeschooled in the 1995-96 school year. Another study done by the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) concluded that there were 1.23 million homeschooled children in the United States in the fall of 1996, with an estimated error of measurement of ten percent. Whatever the exact figures, all studies conclude that homeschooling has had a sustained growth rate of 15 to 20% for the last three decades.
