This report is maintained by the Texas Home School Coalition (THSC) and explores helpful information about growth in homeschooling in Texas and various counties and political districts across Texas.
Data for each school year is available from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) approximately one year after the end of a given school year. Data for the 2018-2019 school year was made available in the spring of 2020 and is the most recent data available. Data for the 2019-2020 school year will be available in the spring of 2021 and data from the 2020-2021 school year will be available in the spring of 2022.
As soon as new data for each school year is available, it will be published for public viewing through this tool.
Notably, the TEA only tracks homeschool withdrawals from public school between grades 7-12. The data does not account for students who withdraw from grades 6 and below or for the large number of students who began homeschooling without first entering the Texas public school system. As a result, numbers available through this tool are helpful as a partial picture of homeschool growth in Texas but do not provide a comprehensive view of homeschool growth in Texas.
Texas law prevents the disclosure of particularly small withdrawal numbers that could be used to identify individual students. Therefore, these numbers were masked in the data provided by the TEA. Although larger withdrawal totals are raw (such as total withdrawals per year statewide or withdrawals per year from larger school districts) as reported by the TEA, smaller, masked withdrawal numbers were estimated and weighted based on known averages for particular grade levels, years, and geographic regions. Only small, masked numbers were estimated by this method and the larger totals were not affected. Statewide totals for each year and other large withdrawal numbers are reported raw from the TEA.The number of students withdrawing from public school to homeschool has averaged an annual growth rate of 6.5% between 1997-2019. The 2017-2018 school year saw a record-high number of students withdrawing to homeschool.
In the following year (2018-2019 school year), the number of students withdrawing from public charter schools declined, while the number of students withdrawing from traditional ISDs increased slightly. This resulted in a net decrease in 2018-2019 of the number of students withdrawing to homeschool compared to the high in the 2017-2018 school year.