It’s back-to-school season! But, because my family homeschools year-round, our routine for core academics will change little. My 11-year-old technically is entering sixth grade, but we’re already halfway through the challenging Dimensions Math sixth-grade program, which means my son is factoring algebraic expressions.
This Summer, my son also read the “Hunger Games” trilogy; the “Isle of the Dark” series by Rina Brown (a local author); the “Sound of Nothing” series by Nicole Aisling (also local); the Magnus Chase series by Rick Riordan; “Project Hail Mary,” “The Martian,” and “Artemis” by Andy Weir; “Middle School” by James Patterson; and other books.
Together as a family we also read the outstanding “Calliope Callisto Clark and the Search for Wisdom” by Boulder author (and former philosophy professor) Claudia Mills. I love that book!
We also read four books together from the Elizabeth School District list of suppressed books. We especially enjoyed “You Should See Me in a Crown” by Leah Johnson and “Redwood and Ponytail” by K. A. Holt.
We’re now also reading “The Secret Lives of Dinosaurs” by paleontologist Dean Lomax, who is visiting Denver next month. Did you know that some animals can both lay eggs and give live births?
The point is, my son, who has never in his life attended regular school, is well ahead of most of his public-school peers academically.
Yes, our schedule will change somewhat for the Fall. Our district-authorized one-day-a-week “enrichment” program is starting back up, so that approaches “real school.” We’re joining three new homeschool co-ops, one nature-based, the other two for science projects and the like. So it does feel like a change of seasons for us, even though our core academic program looks largely the same.
Answering smears against homeschoolers
Given what we’re doing academically, it is not much of a surprise that our son scores in the top one percent on the California Achievement Test. It saddens me that so many public-school children learn well below their potential.
What do surprise me are the bigoted smears that homeschooling families such as mine continue to endure.
After podcaster Jennifer Welch said, “I think homeschooling is weird,” a caller said, “What I have absolutely f***ing had it with is watching some of the stupidest people I went to school with decide that they’re qualified to homeschool their children.”
Cohost Angie Sullivan replied, “I just think homeschooling is a bad idea, from soup to nuts. I don’t care if you’re a nuclear physicist. I think it’s just f***ing weird as f*** that you want your kids around you all day, every day, and all night. And just the socialization. For me personally, it was that I would have gotten up on my hands and knees and strapped them to my back and crawled to get them to school every day just to get them where I wasn’t. So, I don’t trust somebody that wants to be with their kids 24/7. I think a lot of dumb people do it because it’s just easier and that’s a concern. . . . It’s like two or three hours a day at the computer and then the kids are going just off to the races. So, I just can’t think of very many good things about homeschooling.”
As tempted as I am just to dismiss such overt bigotry out of hand, I will answer the objections directly.
In responding to the podcast episode, Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) writes, “A new systematic review of only peer-reviewed, representative-sample studies . . . [reports] sixty-two percent of those studies find homeschooled students significantly outperforming others academically. Sixty-four percent find better social-emotional outcomes, such as lower depression, higher social competencies. Fifty-four percent find stronger adult outcomes—greater political tolerance, higher conscientiousness and agreeableness, lower neuroticism and divorce rates. In the large majority of the remaining studies the homeschooled perform at parity, not worse.”
True, these studies are working with limited data, but the results hardly count against homeschooling.
The claim that homeschooling is easier for parents is laughable. Still, it is just a myth that homeschooled children spend every moment with their parents. In addition to our enrichment program, our son spends an afternoon every week with his grandparents and plays with his friends for hours on end at meet-ups. My son gets much more, and much higher-quality, “socialization” time with his friends than do many public-school kids.
True, homeschooling parents generally do spend more time with their children. Why is that weird? As one of my homeschool friends answers such concerns, “I happen to like my kids.” Humans have been around for hundreds of thousands of years, and the norm for almost all of that time has been for children to learn with their parents. What’s weird is the modern practice of dumping your kids off in a bureaucratized, regimented school.
The grain of truth to Sullivan’s remarks is that homeschooled kids often can efficiently fit their core academics into a shorter time. This is not surprising, given that most public school students waste most of their time in school. Even in the best classes, teachers must slow down the material and bore the more-advanced students so that others don’t fall behind. Even then some fraction of students fails to grasp the material.
Public schools falling short
If the public schools were performing well that would be one thing. But critics of homeschooling often try to generalize from the worse stories of homeschooling while treating public schools as idealized utopias.
The point bears repeating: In not a single grade, in not a single subject, do a majority of Colorado students perform at grade level, according to the Colorado Measures of Academic Success.
For some public-school students, “socialization” means being terrorized on a daily basis. Earlier this year, Erica Breunlin described the experiences from a decade ago of one Colorado public-school student: She was publicly called a “nobody,” and “kids…threw gum at her, picked apart what she wore, iced her out during lunch and started false rumors that she had cancer, or that she was pregnant. The torrent of hateful comments stopped only with her death by suicide.”
Here is a report from June 16: “ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) has filed a federal civil rights complaint with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, alleging a Jewish student was subjected to persistent, escalating and severe antisemitic harassment and assault while enrolled in the Boulder Valley School District.”
High school survey data from 2015 through 2023 indicate that over ten percent of Colorado students reported being “bullied on school property during the past 12 months.” True, in 2025 93% of youth said they felt safe at school, but that implies that 7% did not feel safe.
News reports about alleged abuses by adults in public schools also appear with alarming frequency. Here is one recent report from 9News: “A former paraprofessional at a Jefferson County elementary school is charged with felony assault related to an incident involving a developmentally disabled student in April of this year.”
I’m not saying that such bullying and abuse is widespread in public schools. Nor am I saying that homeschooled kids never are abused or bullied. What I am saying is that homeschooled kids on the whole get plenty of quality social time, and homeschooling families often are able to avoid problems of abuse and bullying that are too common in public schools.
I’m also not saying that my family’s homeschool experiences are universal. I agree with Welch and Sullivan that some people homeschool for bad reasons. Some homeschooled children, like most of their public-school peers, are not doing well academically. That is hardly a reason to paint all homeschoolers with a broad brush and make us out to be stupid and demented.
Homeschooling in Colorado news
Homeschooling continues to pop up in the news occasionally. A recent CBS story begins, “A new law governing homeschool enrichment programs in Colorado is leaving some families and teachers in limbo.” (I’ve discussed details in previous columns.)
A recent KRDO article finds that “the number of students reported as homeschooled full-time increased by 541 students, from 9,826 in fall 2024 to 10,367 in fall 2025,” with most of the increase coming in “six southern Colorado school districts.”
There are two problems with this. First, as the article notes, homeschoolers can file a notice of intent in any district. Second, most people who “homeschool” technically are enrolled in private “umbrella” schools, which do not report their attendance totals, so nobody really knows how many homeschoolers there are. NHERI suggests the actual number is several times the official count.
Homeschooling works great for some
I do not want to suggest here that homeschooling always and everywhere is some sort of blissful paradise, nor that it is the right choice for every family. All of us have our struggles. And a small fraction of cases are genuinely concerning.
But it simply will not do to presume the worst about homeschoolers while treating the public-schools as trouble-free paradises. The typical homeschool experience is great. I routinely ask my child if he’d rather attend regular school. He consistently tells me he’d rather homeschool, and my family has been able to make that work. For us, it’s a great lifestyle and a great academic adventure.
Ari Armstrong writes regularly for Complete Colorado and is the author of books about Ayn Rand, Harry Potter, and classical liberalism. He can be reached at ari at ariarmstrong dot com.
