When Anna Mock started homeschooling her kids over a decade ago, she had a second grader, a kindergartener and a $200 yearly budget between the two of them. It covered math and grammar lessons and some art supplies from Walmart. Whatever else she needed, she outsourced.
They went on field trips to free museums and hikes out in central Utah to learn more about the world around them. They maxed out their library checkouts, borrowing 70 books at a time from their local branch in Spanish Fork to pore over at home. They scrimped and saved to make do with what they had. And it all worked out just fine with that shoestring budget, at least for a while.
For generations, state governments funded only public education. If a family chose to bring up their children outside of the public school system, the financial burden fell on the family, which, according to a report by the Home School Legal Defense Association, costs, on average, about $1,500 per child.
Today, though, homeschooling is experiencing a renaissance. It’s more popular, more diverse and more varied than ever. And politicians are paying attention.
A 2023 analysis by The Washington Post found that it’s the fastest-growing form of education in the country and that, in many states, the number of homeschooled students increased by more than 50 percent since 2017. In July, Congress approved the first national school voucher system.
State governments are likewise stepping in to create Education Savings Accounts and voucher programs that provide families with thousands — sometimes up to $30,000 — in taxpayer dollars to cover the costs associated with alternative schooling. These programs exist in more than a dozen states, with a cluster in the West, including Arizona, Montana, Wyoming and Utah — which launched the Utah Fits All Scholarship program less than two years ago. Though they’re not without their controversies.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed HB215 into law in January 2023, which created the Utah Fits All Scholarship, a program that offers private schooling families up to $8,000 per child and homeschooling families up to $6,000 per child for education expenses. Mock received the scholarship last year and used the money to pay for advanced English classes, prep for college admissions exams, math tutors, and fees for extracurricular activities like choir and debate — higher-end resources that her family might not have had access to otherwise. But then, in May 2024, the Utah Education Association (the state’s largest teachers’ union) filed a lawsuit against the program. The following April, a 3rd District Court judge deemed the scholarship unconstitutional for not being freely and equally available to all students, and for misusing funds designated for public education.
For generations, state governments funded only public education. That’s changing.
The state has appealed to the Utah Supreme Court, which will decide whether the law is unconstitutional, and whether it fuels options for a few at the expense of a public resource. A Deseret News/Hinckley Institute poll from May found that a majority of respondents, 62 percent, at least somewhat support the scholarship. Regardless of whether the program sticks around for good, its genesis is indicative of something far larger. In the half-century since homeschooling came into contention with public education, it has never been as mainstream or publicly funded as it is today. This is a win for advocates who see educational choice as a fundamental freedom. “When my first was born, I just kept thinking, I don’t want to send him off so that someone else can raise him,” Mock says. She’s been homeschooling her children for more than a decade now. “They’re getting a high-quality education. It’s just not regulated. And maybe that’s scary for people.”
Yet, these programs also carry consequences for the future of government oversight and what social welfare means in this moment in the nation. And, for some, how people choose to educate their children isn’t the scary part — it’s the implications of how private lifestyle choices are publicly funded and the far-flung impacts it might have on the state of American education in the generations to come.
Modern homeschooling picked up in the 1970s as a refuge for counterculture leftists who viewed public schools as too conservative. It was only about a decade later, in the 1980s, that a new movement grew, spurred by Supreme Court rulings starting in the 1960s that banned public school prayer, mandatory Bible readings and creationism lessons in schools. Evangelicals and fundamentalist Christians — who stressed a focus on families, moral education and religious values — turned to homeschooling because they felt that the growing push to make public schools secular corrupted or indoctrinated their kids. So, rather than continuing the push to transform state schools, many frustrated families pulled their kids out of them altogether.
Both movements involved people — whether liberal or conservative, urban or rural — who sought their own solutions to what they viewed as systematic shortcomings. It’s a familiar rallying cry for autonomy that exists in today’s school choice and parental rights in education movements. But it was niche for its time. The federal government didn’t legalize homeschooling nationwide until 1993. The National Center for Education Statistics began tracking the number of homeschooled children in 1999, when only 1.7 percent of students fell into the category. That number doubled to 3.4 percent in 2012, then leveled off until the Covid-19 pandemic forced schooling to move inside the home.
The United States Census estimates 5.4 percent of families homeschooled in the spring of 2020, which increased to 11.1 percent by the fall. Utah saw the same rate of increase, reaching 5.7 percent in the spring and 11.2 percent in the fall. As the virus spread, so did a general distrust in government and public institutions. Americans fought against school closures, as well as masking policies and vaccine mandates when schools opened back up. That dovetailed with the banning of more books than at any other time in our country’s history, and laws being passed to limit discussions of racism and sexism in classrooms. The distrust that formed during these moments still lingers. There are still more students homeschooling today than in pre-pandemic years.
When the Utah Fits All Scholarship launched, it offered up to 5,000 families a lump sum of $8,000 to go toward private school or homeschooling expenses for the school year. The state Legislature appropriated $42 million in taxpayer funds in order to make that possible, and determined appropriate expenses by preapproving a list of categories. These categories were broad: educational supplies, exam fees, tutoring services, electronics, physical education, extracurriculars. The state constitution says that “a student’s parent is the primary person responsible for the education of the student, and the state is in a secondary and supportive role to the parent,” so it was determined that parents should be permitted to use the money at their own discretion, so long as their needs fit under those loose categories.
Every year since its introduction, the Utah Fits All program has increased the total appropriated funds for homeschooling and private schooling vouchers, from some $40 million to more than $120 million.
That first year, about 80 percent of voucher recipients were homeschoolers. Because there are as many ways to homeschool a child as there are children, the exact breakdown of how families used the scholarship varied wildly, but enough used it for seemingly frivolous activities to incite controversy. A Deseret News/Hinckley Institute of Politics poll found a majority of respondents, 63 percent, agree that field trips are an appropriate use of the scholarship fund. But what’s a field trip? About 60 percent found it inappropriate to use the money to buy passes to ski resorts, which some families did. Lawmakers allocated another $40 million in taxpayer dollars for the total program budget in early 2024, granting up to 10,000 students a scholarship. But the amounts and conditions changed to $4,000 a year for homeschooled students ages 5 to 11, and $6,000 for those 12 to 18 years old.
Such is the central challenge in operating a program like Utah Fits All in the first place. In a state so insistent on prioritizing the rights parents have to their children’s education, how is it possible for the state to determine which extracurriculars are valid while not requiring any reporting or oversight of any other aspect of the child’s education? Does cashing thousands in taxpayer dollars made possible by a government program really count as limiting government involvement? The stakes are growing higher, too. Every year since its introduction, the Legislature has increased the total appropriated funds for the program, from some $40 million to more than $120 million for the 2026–27 school year.
Meanwhile, Utah ranks second to last in the nation for the amount spent per public school student, a sorry title that’s gone to either Utah or Idaho for the last three years.
“I can’t even imagine how much better our public schools would be funded with $122 million that should be going to those schools to start with. And when you look at the situation that we’re in with the funding issues from the Department of Education at the federal level, I think it’s probable that Utah is going to be losing a lot of funding,” says Renée Pinkney, president of the Utah Education Association, the largest teacher’s union in the state, which represents more than 18,000 educators and acted as a plaintiff in the lawsuit against Utah Fits All. “We very well could be in a crisis.”
Pinkney points to the role public schools play in communities that use school buildings as polling places, food pantries for low-income students and families, community hubs with free entertainment or adult English classes. “It is the foundation of our democracy,” she says, to use taxpayer money to benefit more people across all income levels and demographics.
In 2017, Utah stopped officially tracking the number of homeschoolers when a change in legislation allowed parents to submit a single written notice that they’d be homeschooling their children, rather than one notice every school year. Earlier this year, HB209 removed the requirement for any notice whatsoever.
“The way our state is set up, parents have a lot more autonomy to decide what they feel is best for their children,” says Ryan Bartlett, director of communications for the Utah State Board of Education. “Utah has always been pretty open to letting parents have the first and largest say in how their children are educated.”
As a result, superintendents at public schools across Utah surveyed by Deseret Magazine report that many parents “don’t bother filing the homeschool affidavit with the school district,” which leaves an unknown number of kids unaccounted for.
This kind of opaqueness around enrollment with the state government is common for homeschoolers in the West. States like Idaho and Wyoming similarly don’t require parents to notify the state that they’ll be homeschooling their kids. Most other Western states besides Washington and Oregon require or enforce little else from parents besides a notification. In Utah, parents are also free from any rules regarding teacher qualifications, curriculum, or instruction time. Though several studies have found that homeschooled students perform on par or even better than their institutionally schooled counterparts — in K-12 and in college — this still leaves no way to ensure that the world’s future voters, parents, politicians and professionals are receiving an education in line with national standards, especially if they are receiving taxpayer-funded state benefits.
“We have an essentially unregulated regime in the area of homeschooling,” Elizabeth Bartholet, a Harvard law professor emeritus and nationally recognized expert on child welfare, told Harvard Magazine. “That means, effectively, that people can homeschool who’ve never gone to school themselves, who don’t read or write themselves.”
Homeschooling and public education are no longer mutually exclusive. The funding public schools receive hinges on enrollment. So, the more students who drop out to be homeschooled, the less money goes toward keeping the lights on and fulfilling the needs of public school students. That correlation is not lost on lobbyists like Allison Sorensen, a principal supporter of the Utah Fits All voucher program, who made headlines in 2023 for voicing in a leaked audio recording that she hoped to destroy public education.
“Let’s actually take the money out of the public school system,” she said in the recording. “We’ll change the way we fund the program so that it literally is pulling that money straight from the school.”
Sorensen has since apologized, and other program supporters have denounced the comments. Yet the cashflow remains unchanged, and the program continues to pose a central irony: If it exists to promote freedom of choice and independence, should taxpayers be obligated to pay for a pathway to education they might not use, agree with or benefit from?
“I can’t even imagine how much better our public schools would be funded with $122 million that should be going to those schools to start with.”
Not to say that homeschoolers don’t need financial support. If homeschooling means spending an average of $1,500 per child and Utah has the largest household size in the country, then costs add up quickly for parents like Mock, who have six or more children. “I didn’t start homeschooling because I thought I’d get all this money, because there was no money,” she says. “I homeschooled because I love being with my children, they loved being home, and it just felt like the right thing to do for our family.”
Some families may have no choice but to homeschool, or have to make accommodations for children with health or cognitive complications.
“I have a couple of kids with learning disabilities,” says Rhonda Hair, a parent of eight in Tooele who homeschools. Her daughter with high-functioning autism needed homeschooling in order to learn comfortably. “She was developing some pretty severe anxiety. Every morning, when I was trying to get her to go to school, she would cry and refuse to get in the vehicle.”
In the Utah court ruling that deemed Utah Fits All unconstitutional, 3rd District Judge Laura Scott wrote in her decision that “the Program is a legislatively created, publicly funded education program aimed at elementary and secondary education, it must satisfy the constitutional requirements applicable to the ‘public education system’ set forth in the Utah Constitution,” yet it’s “not ‘open to all children of the state.’” Utah’s Supreme Court will decide for sure whether that stands in the months to come.
Whatever that final decision looks like, the generational push and pull between public and homeschooling will continue. And parents like Mock will still find themselves on one end of that rope.
“I think everybody needs to find what works for them and where they’re comfortable and what meets all their needs. But this has met all of my needs. I really can’t think of a better life,” she says. “If it all went away, I would still homeschool my kids.”
This story appears in the October 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.