The kids are not alright!

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.

This pace of growth across the state and the city eclipses even the current rate of charter school enrollment — since 2023, homeschooling has risen nearly 8% compared to 3.1% for charter attendance.

“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.”

And frustrated parents agreed. Many told The Post they’re opting out because they’re fed up with bloated classrooms and bad results.

“So many students are in large classes where they feel intimidated to raise their hands, and parents come to me asking, ‘Why is my smart kid so unhappy at school?’” longtime New York homeschooling advocate Laurie Block Spigel told The Post.

“Every teacher and every parent knows that no two kids are the same, yet you have 30 or 35 kids in a classroom, all at different levels. You’re failing the whole class,” said Spigel, who homeschooled her two sons in The Bronx in the ’90s — her eldest attended NYU’s prestigious film school and is now a writer and her youngest studied marine biology — and now advises numerous local parents.

“And then there’s the testing. They’ve stopped teaching whole books because you can’t test comprehension of a whole book — you can only test an excerpt. How does that build readers? They’re teaching students how to write badly and how to hate reading.”

A recent analysis conducted by the Success Academy Charter Schools network found that in 906 of NYC’s 1,500-plus public schools, fewer than half of students passed math, reading, or both, on state exams last year.

And about a third of the 906 schools have appeared on state “accountability” lists since 2012, with some having been designated as failures for decades, the analysis found.

Adrienne Jensen is another parent who — while initially balking at the idea of homeschooling — decided she didn’t want to risk her kids entering an education system she didn’t trust.

“I thought homeschooling was definitely weird and fringy,” Jensen, 45, an Upper West Side mom of four, told The Post, such as religious fundamentalists and off-the-grid preppers like those in the tradwife thriller “Yesteryear” as typical homeschoolers. “I dismissed them as weirdos.”

But then, while browsing cloth-diapering forums after having her first child, she stumbled onto a homeschooling discussion board, and discovered the families she encountered were like her.

“In the beginning, our reasons for homeschooling were mainly about rigor and being able to give our kids a quality education without having to hope that they got ‘good’ teachers [and] without strategizing to live in a ‘good’ school district,” Jensen explained.

Now, Jensen, who is homeschooling three of her four children — ages 16, 14 and 12, and homeschooled her oldest daughter, a 19-year-old sophomore at Cornell — said the biggest draws became less academic and more about time and freedom.

“I love that we spend at least half our time outside or at museums and other city institutions, really living while we learn,” the Upper West Side mom said.

“At this point, I can’t imagine making my kids spend all day, every day, inside the same four walls when there’s so much life happening out here.”

Jensen’s children have taken classes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Historical Society, gone birding in Central Park, participated in book clubs and running clubs, taken field trips across the city and even created their own homeschool newspaper.

So why are so many parents taking their children out of traditional schools — and bypassing even the academically rigorous charters that have risen to rival public education?

In a 2025 survey conducted by NYC’s Department of Education, 21% of homeschool parents said they felt their children got a more rigorous education than was possible in public schools.

Similarly, in a 2019 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics, 80.3% of homeschooling parents cited concerns about their children’s school environment, 72.6% pointed to dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools and 54.2% cited a desire to spend more time together as a family.

This number includes Vivianne Wright, 46, who is homeschooling her 9-year-old daughter, Violetta.

“Homeschooling was not our initial plan,” the Harlem-based mom told The Post, but when she realized her child was academically gifted and that her busy work schedule as an A.P. test tutor was at odds with Violetta’s school calendar, she began planning for a home education.

Today, Violetta is 9. She works through math for up to 90 minutes at a time, studies humanities through projects comparing folklore from different cultures and creates her own science tests. She also takes judo three times a week, art once a week and practices chess and piano daily.

“To me, the most important habit to nourish is curiosity,” says her mother.

Meanwhile, Astoria mom, Carolina Brinkman, 40, chose to homeschool so her children could see their father, a chef with demanding overnight hours.

“We knew traditional school hours would mean not getting time together,” she told The Post.

Brinkman has homeschooled her four children — ages 15, 14, 12 and 10 — since kindergarten.

Brinkman has also turned libraries, museums, parks, playgrounds and historical sites into lessons.

“A lot of times, you learn alongside your kid,” she said. “It’s really cool to experience that together.”

But is it in the best interest of New York children?

Some research says “actually, yes.” Studies show that homeschooled children can perform as well as or better than traditionally schooled students academically. Some research also finds positive social and developmental outcomes.

But clinical psychologist Dr. Wildaliz Caro told The Post that social development involves more than simply “providing the child with exposure to same-age peers.”

It requires regular opportunities to resolve conflicts, navigate differences, follow group expectations and build sustained, daily relationships with people outside the family.

“Parents need to think carefully about what their child might lose as well as what they might gain,” said Dr. Connie McReynolds, a licensed clinical psychologist. “Schools provide access to different teachers, specialists, group learning, activities and a wide variety of social situations.”

But according to Laurie Block Spigel, a longtime NYC homeschooling advocate, many children wither in larger group settings and get lost in a big classroom.

“If [homeschooled] kids were happy and thriving in traditional schools, they would likely stay there,” said Spigel, the founder of HomeschoolNYC, an advocacy resource hub for self-directed learning.

And homeschoolers are also held to the same standards as those schools — and a plethora of paperwork to go with them.

To switch from homework to home lessons, parents have to notify their local school district, file an Individualized Home Instruction Plan (IHIP), track attendance and submit four quarterly progress reports each year.

Kids must receive the equivalent of 180 days of instruction each school year — at least 900 hours for grades K-6 and 990 hours for grades 7-12 — covering subjects including English, math, science, social studies, health, physical education, art and music.

There’s also an annual assessment with testing requirements that vary by grade.

Parents don’t need a teaching certificate or college degree to take on the job. But they do have to make sure their home classroom meets the state’s requirements.

The one thing they don’t get in New York — unlike in some other states like Arizona — is an educational choice voucher that would funnel some federal money directly to parents, to spend on private school or fund home tutoring.

“If families had that choice, half of the state’s public schools would empty in a week,” quipped Silenas. “Unfortunately, most New York families currently have no practical way to leave the system, unless they are wealthy or super-determined parents can homeschool.”

But homeschooling moms Jensen and Wright told The Post they wouldn’t want the money.

“Money always comes with strings attached,” argued Jensen. “And with government, that means more regulation. The biggest benefit of homeschooling is the freedom.”

Wright agreed.

“One of the greatest advantages of homeschooling is the autonomy it gives families: we can decide what subjects to teach, how to teach them, and even how proficiency should be assessed. Accepting government funding would reasonably come with some level of accountability.

“The more benchmarks and requirements the government introduces, the more homeschooling begins to lose some of the independence that makes it appealing in the first place.”