Number of home-schooled children in the U.S. doubles as parents recognize hopeless failure of government-run education

(BigGovernment.news) Well, this isn’t going to sit well with the big education nannies in Washington, D.C. and the teacher’s unions.

As reported by The Washington Post, recent stats indicate that the number of kids who are being schooled at home by parents has doubled since 1999:

Approximately 1.8 million U.S. children were home-schooled in 2012, more than double the number that were home-schooled in 1999, when the federal government began gathering data on national home-schooling trends, according to estimates released Tuesday. The estimated number of home-schooled children represents 3.4 percent of the U.S. student population between the ages of 5 and 17.

The increase was fastest between 1999 and 2007, then slowed between 2007 and 2012, according to the estimates from the National Center for Education Statistics.

The figures show that most home-schoolers were white and living above the poverty line in 2012. An estimated 4 in 10 home-schoolers had parents who graduated from college, while about 1 in 10 had parents whose formal education ended before they graduated from high school.

The division appears to be roughly equal among rural, suburban and urban areas, with each claiming about one-third of all home-schooled kids.

The Post tried to spin the story as a defeat for religious morality among parents, while wiffing big time on one of the major reasons why parents are teaching kids at home:

It’s particularly difficult to tell whether parents’ reasons for home-schooling have changed. In 2007, for example, 36 percent of parents said that providing “religious or moral instruction” was the most important reason for home-schooling. It was the top-ranked “most important” reason for home-schooling that year.

In 2012, that share appeared to fall: Seventeen percent named religious instruction as most important and 5 percent said moral instruction was most important. But the question was asked differently, with religious and moral instruction as two separate reasons instead of one combined reason, and so it was not immediately clear whether the numbers represented a real change in parents’ motivations.

So what is driving a record number of parents yank their kids out of government-run public schools? In short, rabid, off-the-rails liberalism.

Besides the fact that year after year, international studies find that U.S. students score poorly on math, science and reading – despite the United States spends more per student than any other developed nation – what’s really driving parents to leave the public school system are goofy, left-wing policies like “gender neutral” locker rooms and the inability to discipline rowdy students.

As to the violence, it should have been obvious something was wrong when it became necessary to begin stationing armed police officers in our public schools. But further, The New York Post reports, is the liberal idiocy underlying policies negating discipline:

Convinced traditional discipline is racist because blacks are suspended at higher rates than whites, New York City’s Department of Education has in all but the most serious and dangerous offenses replaced out-of-school suspensions with a touchy-feely alternative punishment called “restorative justice,” which isn’t really punishment at all. It’s therapy.

“Every reasonable effort must be made to correct student behavior through…restorative practices,” advises the city’s new 32-page discipline code.

Except everywhere it’s been tried, this softer approach has backfired.

Left-wing “diversity” policies, top-down federal education “standards” and the replacement of education with indoctrination are driving more American parents out of the public school system. And as long as leftist policy dominates, more will leave.

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