When It Comes To Choosing Schools, Families Are Mixing It Up

A New Study On Sector Mixing And Homeschooling

When we think about how parents choose schools for their children, most of us think of it as a single choice. Parents exit the traditional public school system. They choose charter schools, private schools, or homeschooling. They are forever a private-school, charter school, or homeschool parent. The end. But that narrative oversimplifies what is actually happening. Many families make dynamic choices about how to educate their kids. They do that at varying rates and for varying reasons.

My new study, co-authored with Kennesaw State University’s Matthew Lee and The Ohio State University’s Albert Cheng, shows that families are mixing things up when it comes to educating their families. They choose a type of school for one child while choosing a different type of school for another child, at the same time, in the same household. We call this phenomenon sector mixing, and it is more common than people think, especially among homeschooling families.

Analyzing nationally representative data of U.S. households in 2012, 2016, and 2019, we find that 2.5% of all U.S. households with more than one school-aged child mix sectors. However, among households that homeschool at least one child, 53% send another child to a conventional school at the same time. There are about 3 million homeschooled students in the US, and that number continues to grow while enrollment in other sectors declines. If just over half of them are in a mixing household and assuming most of them have at least one sibling, that is almost 1.5 million homeschooling families who mix.

Documenting this mixing is important, but so is understanding why families make these complicated choices. Several family and student factors predict mixing. For example, larger families are more likely to mix sectors, likely because children within the same household may have different educational needs. With more children, there are more opportunities for mixing. Homeschooling households where both parents work are also more likely to mix—it’s just a bit more challenging for parents to homeschool all their children when both have job commitments. On the other hand, families motivated by educational convictions that apply to all children in the household—such as providing moral or religious instruction according to a specific tradition or a desire to practice unschooling—are less likely to mix sectors. In contrast, families who homeschool because of a child-specific need—such as a disability or temporary illness—are more likely to mix. They homeschool the child with that need; they enroll the child without that need in a conventional school. Makes sense.

But 2019 was a long time ago. A lot has happened since then that could change things; a pandemic disrupted education around the globe, the expansion of public funding for school choice opened doors to families who were shut out, technological advances made it easier to work and learn from home, and AI is just getting started on changing how we do just about everything. Those changes should further enable sector mixing today, right? In another study that uses more recent 2024 data to examine sector mixing, Matthew Lee and I found that it’s still happening. That study additionally shows that families who choose charter schools also mix at high rates, meaning that mixing isn’t isolated to homeschooling families. Mixing is still happening and has been for a while. In fact, studies dating back 20 to 30 years also documented mixing among homeschooling families.

So, what does this mean for the broader education landscape? Look a little closer, and you will see how, going forward, a clear picture of mixing should inform education policy and practice and why ignoring it is a mistake. Homeschooling families have always known about the possibility of mixing. But policymakers and academics—and we include ourselves in the latter group—have not. Yet these same decision-makers often propose ideas about homeschooling policy without clear knowledge of how homeschooling is actually practiced. That realization should change how we think about supporting families and what the state demands of homeschooling families.

This is an opportunity for all types of schools to better serve the needs of families who want to mix it up. Public schools with declining enrollment have an opportunity to welcome millions of homeschooling families and strengthen their school communities, whether by offering participation in extracurricular activities or a la carte courses. This opportunity to reach an untapped pool of potential students is available to private schools, too. But policies in some states prohibit homeschooling families from accessing the educational opportunities offered by public and private schools.

Families are changing how they consume education. It used to be very difficult for families to access different educational options. No longer. Families can make the best choice on a child-by-child and grade-by-grade basis, often from the convenience of their own home. Gone are the days (if they ever existed) when most kids were educated in one sector for their entire education, and that trend is likely to expand as more people have more access to more choices than ever before. The time for schools, other educational providers, and policymakers to find ways to support families engaging in sector mixing is overdue.