Homeschooling enters The Bob Zadek Show as one item in a list of alternatives to government-run schooling, not as a subject the program examines on its own. In the excerpts, it is named as a destination for families leaving public schools and as a category of enrollment data, and it is folded into the broader school-choice argument that runs across the episodes.
School choice and the voucher frame
In the 2014 discussion of school vouchers, Bob Zadek places homeschooling inside a policy lineage he attributes to Milton Friedman. Zadek describes Friedman as a strong advocate of breaking the public school monopoly and of exposing public school education to private choice, so that parents can pick the vendor providing education to their children. Zadek says that this approach is meant to encourage charter schools, private schools, and homeschooling, along with other alternatives, so that parents can choose how to educate their children Aren’t Men Entitled to Due Process on Campus? (2014).
The voucher mechanism Zadek describes would route tax dollars to parents rather than directly to public schools. He attributes to Lamar Alexander the formulation that the government would pin $2,000 onto the clothing of the student, who would then spend the voucher either in a public school or a private school. Zadek characterizes the effect as taking funding away from public schools and giving it to private schools, parochial schools, or whatever. Homeschooling is not separately analyzed in this segment; it appears only as one of the alternatives the choice framework is intended to encourage.
John Rothmann, Zadek’s guest, opposes the voucher program and argues that it is destructive to public education. He calls public education the backbone of American democracy and says that gutting it would put the country in deep trouble. Rothmann describes Lamar Alexander’s bill as taking $24 billion, or about 41% of current federal spending on elementary and secondary public schools, and allowing states rather than individuals to decide how that money would be spent. He says that for each eligible child, based on family income, an average of about $2,100 of federal money would be allocated, and he argues that no school, parochial or private, can provide an education for that amount, noting that most private schools in San Francisco have tuitions running from $15,000 to $30,000 Aren’t Men Entitled to Due Process on Campus? (2014). Rothmann’s objections are directed at vouchers and at the effect on public schooling; homeschooling does not figure in his remarks.
Enrollment flight and the pandemic
The 2021 episode with Matt Welch treats homeschooling as a measurable consequence of the pandemic. Welch, describing himself as a parent of two children in the K-12 system, says that in the prior year about 3 to 3.5% of students left the government-run K-12 system, and that many went into homeschooling, private schools flattened a little bit down, charter schools went up, but homeschooling was actually the biggest thing Parents Voting With Their Kids’ Feet (2021).
Welch’s article, which Zadek asks him to explain, is built on preliminary fall enrollment numbers. He cites a school 10 to 15 minutes from where he lives in Park Slope, Brooklyn, whose principal sent an email saying the school had lost one-third of its enrollment; an elementary school lost 120 students, going from 345 two years earlier to 225. He adds that the public elementary school his youngest child was pulled out of sent an email saying its enrollment had gone from 948 two years earlier to less than 800. These figures are offered as early indications of what the fall enrollment picture would look like after the pandemic year.
Welch also reports that homeschooling doubled in the country and that the biggest growth element of homeschooling is Black families. He frames this as part of a change in how people view education, saying that many people experienced at least some remote learning and thereby became face-to-face with the curriculum and with the decision-making process.
Funding, competition and structural difference
Zadek’s questioning in the 2021 episode presses on the structural difference between public schools and their alternatives. He asks what enables private schools to cater to their customers better than public schools, and he asks Welch to explain why losing enrollment matters to public schools. Welch answers that in most jurisdictions, though not all, a big chunk of school budgeting is based on per-student funding, so a school going from 948 students to roughly 770 stands to lose a big chunk of funding. He notes that the federal government has sent close to $200 billion to K-12 for emergency coronavirus-related purposes over two years, against a normal annual federal contribution of $40 billion, and that in practice the money is almost all personnel Parents Voting With Their Kids’ Feet (2021).
Welch describes charter schools as public schools funded by government money but not run by governments, generally not unionized, and much more nimble. He says that in New York City they educate 10% of the K-12 student population, and that an artificial cap the state puts on the number of physical charter schools has not prevented growth. He contrasts private schools with public schools on the question of reopening, saying that in New York private schools were open the entire year right across the street from a public school that was maybe open twice a week and subject to hair-trigger closures, and that California had the least open schools in the country.
On the policy side, Welch says that 25 or 30 states, something like half the country, introduced during the pandemic some form of legislation providing that state education spending should follow students rather than school buildings. He notes that state education spending is one out of every five dollars in most states, 20% of the tax money they spend in total budget. He calls these backpack funding bills a huge shift that would institutionalize the charter school system on a national level, and he says the money goes in the backpack of the student wherever the student goes, and that could be homeschooling too, which again has grown faster than any other category in the last 18 months.
Zadek’s framing of the competitive dynamic is that charter schools operating in the same customer base as government-run schools improve the quality of the government-run school, because it must for the first time structurally deal with competition and its customers have an alternative rather than being a captive customer base. Welch responds that positive reforms are more likely to come from without than from within, that some nimble response to competition is possible from good mayors and school district chiefs, but that the change will come from outside under pressure, including from taxpayers asking why their property taxes are so high when nobody even wants the free school they are paying for.
Across episodes
The two episodes treat homeschooling differently in scope but not in kind. In 2014 it is one entry in Zadek’s list of alternatives that a voucher or choice regime would encourage, with no enrollment data attached; in 2021 Welch supplies figures — the 3 to 3.5% of students leaving government-run K-12, homeschooling doubling, Black families as the largest growth element, and backpack funding bills that could direct money to homeschooling. The excerpts show no argument advanced against homeschooling in either episode, and no dedicated treatment of it as a practice.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe how homeschooling is regulated, what curricula homeschooled students follow, or what legal framework governs it in any jurisdiction. They do not name any homeschool advocacy organization, any court decision, or any statute bearing on homeschooling. They do not state whether Zadek or either guest has personal experience with homeschooling, and they do not present a guest whose subject was homeschooling itself.