Education Briefs
A recent Fox News online post explains the why of the homeschooling surge and suggests that parents are likely to continue the trend in 2025. Fox summarized an article by Home Addict in the format of a slide deck, which points out that homeschooling is an educational choice that “has moved from fringe to mainstream,” with 3.7 million homeschooled children currently representing “6.73% of all K-12 students.” Texas and 
Georgia lead the pack in homeschooling numbers, with 8.1% and 7.9% of all students homeschooled respectively in those states. Despite their leadership, Fox reports that Florida, Tennessee, and Indiana now “top the list of states seeing an influx of education-focused families,” having eliminated cumbersome reporting requirements and expanding tax benefits for homeschoolers. Real estate professionals in these states are experiencing increased requests for homes as forward-thinking parents seek homeschool-friendly places to live. Despite the stereotype of socially handicapped homeschooled kids, Home Addict contends that their social skills actually improve, citing National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) studies showing that “87% of research indicates homeschooled children have better social skills than peers.” This is because 90% of homeschoolers participate in weekly sports, volunteering, homeschool co-ops, or other community activities, which provide beneficial interaction with both adults and peers. Home Addict contends that the motivations prompting parents to homeschool in lieu of public education include divisive sex and other “woke” curricula, safety concerns in an increasingly violent school environment, and general frustrations with public-school systems, all of which are likely to continue at least temporarily in 2025.
The 71,000-student Fresno, California Unified School District (FUSD) stands accused of “hiding” academic support programs from white students. A WorldNetDaily article explained that the FUSD, the third largest school district in the state, instituted an “Office of African American Academic Acceleration” in 2017, which focuses exclusively “on mentoring African American middle and high school students.” The office
currently “runs 13 various programs with a $12 million [taxpayer] budget” that, while not specifying a racial requirement, exclude other students by marketing exclusively to African Americans. These programs have caught the attention of the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), which has mounted a challenge to the FUSD on behalf of the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation (CFER) for “unlawfully gating access to the student help programs.” PLF lawyer Wilson Freeman called the exclusion “unfair and unconstitutional,” whether it is “explicit or implicit.” Freeman explained that “taxpayer-funded academic support programs should be available to all students based on need, not race. FUSD’s practices violate multiple legal protections, including the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, the Civil Rights Act, and California’s Proposition 209.” The legal action charges that FUSD administrators instruct teachers to inform “only African American parents and students about these opportunities, leaving other students unaware.” The PLF points out that “academic need doesn’t discriminate,” but can affect students of any race who may need extra help “to reach their full potential. This includes children whose parents belong to CFER, a non-profit group that fights for equal treatment under the law.”
Amid the most recent dismal NAEP results, a shining star emerged. Students in the state of Mississippi were the only ones to achieve impressive gains in reading. From the poorest state in the union, which ranks the fourth-lowest in per-pupil education spending, comes the news that fourth-grade reading scores were the highest in the country. The 74 summarized these gains in an article titled There Really Was a ‘Mississippi Miracle’ in Reading. States Should Learn from It. 
Given that the overall NAEP scores were so low, it may be tempting to question the importance of these results, but Mississippi “raised the bar and the floor” at the same time, as both the highest and the lowest student reading scores rose. The 74 reported that “Mississippi is also the only state to see gains across all performance levels over the last decade ... Its black students rank third nationally, and its low-income kids outperform those in every other state.” What is the basis of Mississippi students’ success? The answer may be gleaned from the Mississippi Department of Education’s Leading in Literacy overview. The stated core beliefs include: “All students deserve access to evidence-based literacy instruction using standards-aligned, high-quality instructional materials (HQIM) grounded in the Science of Reading,” a.k.a. phonics-based instruction. The overview also states: “All students deserve explicit, systematic literacy instruction that spans birth to grade 12 and must occur across the curriculum for students to experience success in achieving literacy proficiency needed for college and workforce success.” (Emphasis added.] Enough said.
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