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For this story, TIME reporters interviewed more than 70 home-schooling parents around the U.S. to find the new faces of the movement, including a biology professor at Spelman College; a midwife and artist in Canton, Ga.; an attorney and part-time basketball coach in Houston; an Arkansas state legislator; and Leo Damrosch, a Harvard English professor who began home schooling his sons, 10 and 13, in part because "the two writers I've studied most intensively for many years, William Blake and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, were both geniuses of astounding originality, and neither of them went to school for a single day."
Many of the home-schooling parents we met were religious, but few were home schooling only to instill values. They had come to their decision after a variety of frustrations. Among them: the Fayetteville, Ga., school with 45 kindergartners in one room; the school administrators in Wheaton, Ill., who were so confused over what to do with Sue McCallum's boy that they put him in both remedial and gifted classes; the Glendale, Calif., school where Robert Phillipps' fifth-grader Bill saw too many fistfights.
These parents got fed up in different ways, but what they have in common is a willingness to sacrifice--money, career opportunities, watching soap operas--for their children's education. Sometimes these sacrifices are small, like giving up a dining room to make a classroom. But consider the Carnells of Columbia, Md., who started home schooling Erin, 6, because a shoulder injury required occupational therapy that would have interfered with school hours. The Carnells decided to keep teaching her at home because they feel they can do a better job than local schools. To teach her math and science in the mornings, Fred, a government cartographer, works the office graveyard shift, which means he and his wife Debbie, a claims adjuster, hardly see each other. The family rarely eats dinner together, and the parents are constantly exhausted. Says Debbie: "I have my schedule down to the hour on an Excel work sheet."
Erin will doubtless benefit educationally from her parents' exertions. But imagine what American public education would look like if parents who currently home school flooded their local schools with all that mighty dedication instead. One doesn't diminish a home-schooling parent's sacrifice for his child to note that he may also be abdicating some of his responsibilities to his community. "In a home school, a parent can really insulate a child from the vibrant, pluralistic, democratic world," says Rob Reich, who teaches political science at Stanford. Susanne Allen, 35, a home-schooling mother from Atlanta, claims her children will be "better citizens" because home schooling gives them the opportunity to work together, rather than sitting at individual desks. "They learn to be caring for other people by seeing an older sibling care for them," she says. But will that make them better citizens or just better siblings?