The purpose of any educational institution is, primarily, to produce young adults with marketable skills. There's a lot to that, and it can be a complicated task in our complicated modern world. The question is this: What's the best way to make sure that primary purpose is served?
In New York City, the answer parents are increasingly coming up with is the same: Homeschooling.
The number of New York parents choosing to homeschool has exploded by more than 200% over the past 15 years — the highest rate of growth in all school sectors — as the nation’s biggest public school system struggles with an illiteracy and innumeracy crisis.
According to the most recent 2025-2026 figures analyzed by The Post, New York state now has a whopping 53,905 children being homeschooled — a figure that has more than tripled since 2009-10.
In New York City, those figures are also rising — with more than 14,000 children being homeschooled at last count.
That's a small amount of the school-aged kids in the Big Apple, but the trend is what's telling here. Parents in New York, the state and city both, are looking at their kids' schools and saying, "nope."
Here's why:
“For the past few decades, New York’s schools have been in a death spiral of worsening performance and exploding costs,” Zilvinas Silenas, president of the Empire Center for Public Policy think tank, told The Post.
“New York’s taxpayers spend $37,000 — the most in the world to educate one kid — yet we lose in reading and mathematics to Mississippi, the poorest state.
“It might not be that all parents that homeschool think homeschooling is the best thing in the world. It could also be that anything – even homeschooling – is better than New York’s government system.”
Here's the problem: New York's taxpayers are still on the hook for that $37,000 a year, per child, whether they have kids in the public school system or not. This would seem to indicate an even greater level of discontent than indicated just by the number of people homeschooling; it's not just the effort, it's that they are still being forced to pony up for failing schools. That's what needs to change.
Not so very long ago, schools were pretty much exclusively a local affair, at the city or county level. My mother, who grew up on a small Iowa farm in the Depression, used to describe how their schoolteacher - there was just one - was interviewed by, and hired and housed by, the county. That was where Mom and her peers went to school, grades 1-8, in a one-room schoolhouse with one teacher. Now, that won't work in a place like New York, but what that city is doing now clearly doesn't work, either.
The answer for New York parents, and for parents and students everywhere, is this: Make the money follow the student. It would be preferable to decouple education from government altogether, but that's probably not happening; so the best and first move must be to put in place some manner of voucher system for education. If parents choose to send their kids to a private school, then that $37,000 a year should go to the private school. If parents choose to homeschool, they get a tax credit, at the very least.
What's happening now, in our major cities and elsewhere, is educational malpractice. These institutions are failing to do the one thing that they are supposed to do above all else: Produce young adults with marketable skills. That's why New York parents are bailing on the schools at an increasing pace. And decoupling the funding monopoly of public schools is how we fix it.
Editor's Note: President Trump is fighting to ensure America's kids get the education they deserve.
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