Minnesota, the state of the United States in which I attended public school while growing up, and the state of my domicile, is the first state for which I obtained official figures on the number of homeschoolers. Minnesota's homeschooling statute requires notice of intent to homeschool filed with local school districts, which in turn pass on their counts of homeschooled children to the state. The official figures from the Minnesota Department of Education (which in some years was called the Department of Children, Families, and Learning) for earlier years were reported in the April 26, 1996 Star Tribune: Newspaper of the Twin Cities on page B10. I later obtained from the department figures for the most recent two years, including in the total number of homeschoolers a small number of homeschoolers reported as not in compliance with one aspect or another of Minnesota's homeschooling law (a figure school districts are required to gather by statute). I do not know whether figures for earlier years include that (small) category of homeschoolers not in compliance. My own family appeared nowhere in Minnesota's official figures before my December 1998 move to Taiwan, as my oldest child was then still below Minnesota's compulsory instruction age.
Homeschooling Growth in Minnesota
School Year
Official # H's'ed Children
Increase
1987-1988
2,322
N/A
1988-1989
2,900
25%
1989-1990
3,538
22%
1990-1991
4,418
25%
1991-1992
5,086
15%
1992-1993
6,149
20%
1993-1994
7,671
25%
1994-1995
9,135
19%
1995-1996
10,519
15%
1996-1997
12,168
16%
1997-1998
13,081
08%
1998-1999
13,459
03%
Minnesota now has more than 1 percent of its schoolchildren in homeschooling. There are homeschoolers in every county in Minnesota. These official figures suggest the annual growth in homeschooling in Minnesota is 19 percent, with a slower growth rate in recent years.
MACHE is Minnesota's oldest statewide homeschooling organization.
The organization holds an annual conference that is Minnesota's largest gathering of homeschoolers, in recent years attracting more than 3,000 attendees to the St. Paul Civic Center (which is now called RiverCenter).
MACHE publishes a newsletter, the Paper Mache.
MHA is a newer, inclusive homeschooling organization of which I was once president. MHA holds public information meetings about homeschooling and publishes a newsletter, the Grapevine.
Other Pages of This FAQ
Feel free to browse the other pages of the Homeschooling Is Growing Worldwide FAQ, besides this Homeschooling in Minnesota page, for more detailed information. The overall structure of the FAQ is like the outline below:
Basic information and links about homeschooling in Canada, a country with thousands of homeschoolers.
This Homeschooling in Minnesota page can also be considered a subpage of the Learn in Freedom! Internet Resources Hot-List (links) page on this site. More specific pages for states of the United States and for countries around the world will be added as my schedule permits. Please send me any information you have about the number of homeschoolers in any place you know about.
A general State education is a mere contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another: and as the mould in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by a natural tendency to one over the body.
John Stuart Mill On Liberty (1859)
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