Oh, I suspect that if you looked at homeschoolers in total in Massachusetts, they would still be more conservative than the state overall - there was definitely some sample bias in the people we were around.
We went to a homeschool curriculum event once at the arena in Worcester, where all the publishers brought their material, and I felt surrounded by women in skirts and covered heads. Most of the curricula also tend to be fundie, and there were also some side lectures, including one on the Constitution that was nuts.
I’ll tell you one funny thing, though – my wife had sent me off to look at physics textbooks, which I had at least a nominal grasp of since that was my undergraduate degree. The textbooks were uniformly awful, except one… Bob Jones University, one of the most fundamental schools in the country, had created a textbook where the main text was actually very good, but each chapter was followed by a long rambling bit tying the chapter into godly thinking. We didn’t end up getting it, but I told my wife if she just razor-bladed the end of every chapter, it was perfectly serviceable. All the other textbooks? Mostly God, not so much physics.
My stepmom, who is from LA, homeschooled her two kids when they lived in rural Tennessee, in the Bible belt.
She’s not particularly political, if I had to guess I’d call her fairly moderate. So I think she and my dad just couldn’t stand the kind of education they were getting at the local public school, so they pulled out. (A lot of religious stuff was being pushed as fact, etc.)
Some of those sound like the A-Beka curriculum, which is published by Pensacola Christian College in Florida. We sometimes get those donated at the library.
I wandered over to the Abeka site to see what it was about. Surprisingly while it talked about learning “from a Biblical perspective” and “If God calls you to homeschool your children, following His plan for your family is priceless,” they offer no samples of what the lessons say.
If I were a parent of faith, homeschooling my children to keep them from being indoctrinated with secular values, I’d want to make darn sure what values they were presenting.
I found out today that a FBF and her husband have been HSing their own son, apparently because the local school system can’t seem to handle his learning disability. They are about as secular and liberal as they come, and her husband has been doing 99% of it because he works evenings and is at home during the day.
They also do it through the local public school, and he has no shortage of playmates in their neighborhood.
My BIL homeschooled his two boys. He’s as crazy religious fundie (Christian) as they get. He didn’t want any of that “liberal godless indoctrination” for his kids.
Interestingly, he homeschooled his two boys, but his daughter refused to cooperate, as for some reason the religious fundie didn’t take with her. So she was such a “problem” they ended up putting her in the public school.
Some Ohio Republican legislators, meanwhile, are pushing for weakened regulations on home schools.
One of the factors driving homeschooling is parental desire to keep their kids from being vaccinated. That isn’t necessarily tied to being “progressive”, but it should be noted that allegedly progressive Waldorf schools encourage antivaccination beliefs and practice.
Even if you think your kids benefit from homeschooling for one reason or another, it’s arguable that society as a whole doesn’t.
I know one family who decided to homeschool their children (all three of whom ended up attending the university where I teach) specifically because their mother didn’t want them exposed to religious fundamentalism. She was also agoraphobic, so this may have been partly an excuse; but it is true that here in Mississippi it is very hard to avoid religious indoctrination even in public schools, and pretty much impossible if your local public school is not a good option for your kids for one reason or another.
My area has lots and lots of homeschooling. Most of the parents I know are liberal or very liberal. There are undoubtedly many conservatives as well, but I don’t know if the kids of those I know are homeschooled.
Between 2019 and 2020, the number of students registering for home schooling in Oregon shot up about 71%, from just over 18,000 to more than 31,000.
It was part of a nationwide trend. Between the spring of 2019 and the fall of 2020, the number of students registered for home schooling across the country doubled, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Among Black and African American students, the number taught at home quintupled.
Data from 18 states analyzed recently by The Associated Press shows a slight decline in home-schooled numbers since the pandemic, about 17%, but not a return to pre-pandemic levels.
^There’s a nice graph in the article that I can’t copy over easily.