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Last week, the U.S. Treasury Department released proposed rules for the first national school scholarship program. Federal regulators made clear that those dollars could cover homeschooling costs in some states, tutoring and special education therapies. 

The announcement comes as millions of families across the country have navigated the highs and lows of back-to-school season, including mine. Except my daughter did so without packing backpacks or catching a yellow bus at the end of our driveway. 

Instead, she sat down at our kitchen table, as she has for almost a decade now, for the start of another year of homeschooling. My daughter and her older sister learned at home for very different reasons. One daughter homeschools because of a learning disability, and the other homeschooled her way to balance thirty hours a week of ballet training.

As Washington rolls out the rules for this new program, the loudest picture of homeschool families is still a caricature. This summer, a podcast clip went viral for painting these families as a homogeneous group with one, narrow ideology 鈥� very religious, very skeptical of government, essentially, “MAGA on steroids.鈥� 

It鈥檚 a convenient trope. But it also doesn’t resemble the family sitting at my table or many of the families I advise who are trying to find the best education experience for their kids. 

And, the research also tells a much different story for what has become one of the fastest-growing educational options. children, or roughly 6% of all K-12 students in the U.S., were homeschooled in the 2024-25 academic year 鈥� nearly twice as many as before the pandemic. 

As enrollment expands, so too does the ideological, racial and geographic of the families choosing to homeschool. A big part of the narrative that鈥檚 also being overlooked is that many of these families still tap into certain aspects of public and private schooling as their child鈥檚 needs change. As Angela Watson, director of the Johns Hopkins Homeschool Research Lab, it, 鈥渢he line between 鈥榟omeschoolers鈥� and everyone else is blurrier than the discourse suggests.鈥�

The families opting in today don’t look like those who opted in 20 years ago, and it’s time for politics to catch up with that reality.

My politics don鈥檛 align with the common stereotype. I believe public education is essential to a thriving democracy. I grew up a public school student, and loved my experience so much that my teachers attended my wedding years later. My mother was a public school teacher for 36 years and taught special education. My family isn鈥檛 running from institutions, rather we are choosing a different tool for a specific job. 

Like many mothers with multiple children, I saw how unique each of my children were and came to realize that they may all need different things from school. My own homeschooling journey was prompted initially when one of my daughters was being bullied on the bus. We took her out the next year, not expecting this would be a decision we made for all of our daughters. 

Then, her sister was diagnosed with sensory and motor delays as a toddler, obsessive compulsive disorder at age 8 and autism at 10. She spent the earliest years of her education journey qualifying for evaluations but not services, because she tested too well in some areas to “count” as needing help. When we finally did enroll her in special education, our school fought us over things as small as a seating accommodation, a point of tension that defined an entire school year and set my daughter’s mental health careening. 

Homeschooling gave us the flexibility to get her real support on her actual timeline, instead of forcing her progress into a district’s calendar. 

My oldest daughter spent two years living away from home at a pre-professional ballet school, training and performing at a level no traditional school day could accommodate. When an injury unexpectedly changed that path, homeschooling gave her the flexibility to adapt without having to fit her life back into a traditional school schedule. It gave each of my daughters the flexibility to learn in a way that fit their lives.

This is the diversity that our politics keeps missing. Lawmakers debating regulation of homeschooling 鈥� or shaping the next generation of education savings accounts 鈥� are too often legislating against a caricature of who’s opting out of traditional schooling instead of designing policy for the actual range of families making that choice and for the diverse range of reasons they’re making it.

The new federal scholarship program offers a good example. Under Treasury鈥檚 proposed rules, whether homeschool families can use scholarships for eligible education expenses may depend on how their state defines a 鈥渟chool.鈥� In states that recognize homeschools as schools, families like mine could have access to those resources. In others, they may not 鈥� even though the reasons that families homeschool, and the educational needs they are trying to meet, may be exactly the same. Some states have yet to opt into the federal scholarship program at all. 

Most homeschooling families I know aren鈥檛 making a statement about the government or even public education. They鈥檙e making a decision about a particular child, at a particular moment. For one family, that may mean navigating a special education plan. 

The rules that the Treasury Department proposed last week will be fought over by people who already know what they think of families like mine. As federal officials and states work through how this new program applies to homeschool families, I hope they look past the stereotype, in either direction, and at the children.

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