Dec 22, 2021 - News

Illinois homeschooling on the rise

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."

More Chicago stories