Parents of the Pandemic - The Education Lockdown and its Impact on Homeschooling in America

America has been at crossroads before - and in the spring of 2020, the country faced another defining moment: millions of U.S. schoolchildren were sent home from school amid a threatening outbreak of the coronavirus, COVID-19. The scourge, eventually classified as a pandemic by the World Health Organization, kept children home in every state in the nation, even in the few states which did not call for sheltering in place.

55 Million Children Out of School

In this 123-page report, through scores of graphs, a dozen tables, and thousands of personal comments to help illustrate the findings, the analyst relates how these parents of the pandemic have coped with the demands of educating at home.

Millions of Parents Schooling Kids at Home for the First Time

Their experiences provide a revealing look into American parenting in the early 21st Century and parents’ surprising willingness to consider new models of at-home learning.

The Parents of the Pandemic poll were conducted on May 16-27, 2020 among 631 online respondents who were double opt-in members of a panel run by Dynata.

The 631 respondents to the study deliver a margin of error of ±3.9% at the 95% confidence level; results would be within this margin for 19 in 20 studies conducted in a similar way.

This study was fielded while the country emerged from shelter-in-place orders instituted by the governors of most US states, amid a worldwide pandemic due to the COVID-19 virus.  Virtually every school in the country was closed, even in states where no lockdown was instituted.

To participate, parents of school-age children (who comprise 27 percent of the US population), were recruited and asked to affirm they had children at home and out of school due to the pandemic lockdowns. They answered dozens of questions about their lockdown lifestyle, how they managed to survive the disruption, and answered a half-dozen open-ended questions about their experience. These verbatim responses offer a personal glimpse into the sentiment of American parents about the immediate state of US Education.