Illinois homeschooling on the rise

Originally published by Axios Chicago.

National Public Radio recently reported that public school enrollment across the nation continues to decline.

Why it matters: This includes the loss of 10,000 students at Chicago Public Schools this year after losing 14,000 the previous school year.

• Researchers told NPR that some parents are delaying pre-K and kindergarten enrollment, which saw a 13% drop last year.
• But more are turning to charter schools, private schools and especially homeschooling.

Zoom in: Local homeschooling data is hard to pin down since Illinois is one of only 11 states to not require homeschooling families to register.

• But national homeschool curriculum developers Time4learning tell us they added “548 new families in the Chicago area at the beginning of the 2021-2022 school year.”
• “In the state of Illinois, Time4Learning saw 3,431 new student profiles created from August to October. For context, only 1,113 new profiles were created in 2019.”