An analysis of educational sector mixing among US homeschooling families from three waves of the national household education survey

Conceptual frameworks and policies about homeschooling often assume that families homeschool either all or none of their children because the decision to homeschool is based on the belief that homeschooling is the normative means to educate one’s children. Thus, the practice of sector mixing, defined as a family’s reliance on both conventional schooling and homeschooling to educate their children, is typically assumed to be rare among homeschooling households. Although there is some documentation of sector mixing, the prevalence and factors explaining the practice have seldom been examined. The authors address this gap not only by estimating the prevalence of sector mixing in a representative sample of US households but also by proposing and empirically testing a new conceptual framework that explains how household characteristics influence sector mixing. They find that half of homeschooling households practise sector mixing. Family size, parents’ employment status and motivations to homeschool explain its likelihood.