When teacher and author John Holt invented the term "unschooling" in 1977, he may not have realized his catchphrase would someday represent a groundswell movement roughly two million strong. Though an atheist, Holt, the founding publisher of Growing Without Schooling magazine, became a pioneer in a market that today is most often linked with the conservative, Christian segment of the population. But even that designation is slowly blurring as more and more non-religious folk join the ranks of home-schoolers.
"We're talking about a $1-billion market," said Pat Marcum, director of Appalachian's home-school division. The Johnson City, Tenn.-based wholesaler, which caters primarily to evangelical Christians, launched its Home School Headquarters division in January 1999 after identifying this quiet—but very large—market.
Marcum comes up with that figure through an industry standard of $540 per student per year spent on home-schooling products. Others, such as Pat Farenga, publisher of Growing Without Schooling and cataloguer for John Holt's Bookstore in Cambridge, Mass., posits the more conservative figure of $800 million. But that's only because no one knows for sure just how many home-school students are out there. Estimates range from 1.3 million to 2 million students, and the numbers are climbing every year.
According to the National Home Education Research Institute (based on a study by Lawrence Rudner of the University of Maryland), the median income for home-school families ($52,000) is higher than that of all families with children ($36,000). One-fourth of home-school students are enrolled one grade or more above their age-level peers, and home-schoolers consistently out-perform public- and private-school students on tests. Perhaps the best news—at least for trade publishers curious about this developing market—is that the number of home-school students is growing at a rate of 7%—15% a year.
The Columbine Connection
While the home-school market has grown steadily from its mom-and-pop roots in the early 1980s, sources who spoke with PW all identified one event as a catalyst for the movement's recent explosive growth: the Columbine High School shootings of 1999. "Columbine had a serious impact on parents all over the country, and many of the home-school associations had to put on extra staff just to handle the phone calls," Marcum said of the more than 10,000 home-school support groups nationwide.
"After Columbine, our phones began to ring off the hook," said Wayne Doyle, operations manager and book buyer at Radiant Book & Music Center in Springfield, Mo., a store known for its well-stocked home-school section. "People are either afraid or just disgruntled with the public school system in general."
Indeed, those two issues—school violence and a growing dissatisfaction with public education—have helped this former cottage industry break through the walls of its "cottage." Today the home-schooling category includes 10,000—15,000 products, Marcum said. After a strenuous whittling process, Appalachian debuted its home-school division with 450 products but now carries more than 2,000, representing about 100 publishers. During that first year (1999) the wholesaler signed up 65 stores for its home-school program, which required participating stores to invest in all 450 products. Now the roster numbers 178 bookstores, mostly in the evangelical market. Stores that sign on the dotted line with Appalachian receive marketing help, a catalogue and promotional materials such as bag stuffers, posters and resource materials to help home-schoolers gets started. "It's worked quite well," Marcum said. "The stores experience big sales in the summer, which is the peak buying time for home-schoolers."
Though low-profile, the industry is networked by more than 500 conventions—including 75 state conventions, attracting between 3,000 and 9,000 attendees. A handful of magazines, Homeschooling Today, Teaching Home, Practical Homeschooling, Growing Without Schooling and Home Education, have a combined distribution of more than 350,000 every month. And the home-school network is abuzz with newsletters and a lively grapevine—both electronic and verbal—that proves the power of word-of-mouth marketing.
Getting Acquainted
Until recent years, when distributors like Appalachian and Ingram began stocking home-school product, consumers bought it in one of two ways: through home-school conventions or catalogues. But securing a distributor is only half the battle for publishers who want a leg up on this burgeoning market. "I have publishers call me all the time, saying they have this fantastic product that home-schoolers will love," Marcum said. "I basically tell them: if you have a product you think will fit in the home-school market, I'm not the place to start."
To many publishers' dismay, the home-school market has to be courted—wooed and won in a manner unlike the marketing tactics used for nailing traditional niche markets. "To properly reach the home-school market, publishers need to establish themselves and their product with the consumer as feasible, workable and acceptable," said Marcum. "Publishers don't establish themselves with distributors."
Instead, he recommends they begin promoting their product in home-school magazines, send sales reps to the major home-school fairs and ship product samples to cataloguers. Since the home-school market is still largely Christian—Marcum estimates 80% falls in that category—products that hope to hit both sides of the secular-Christian spectrum should be void of humanistic philosophy and topics like evolution. Not surprisingly, home-schoolers put a premium on historical accuracy and family-centered values. Political correctness, he notes, is a death-sentence for products targeting the Christian segment.
"A product doesn't have to be Christian, as long as it is not inconsistent with Christian ideology," said Jane Williams, president and founder of Bluestocking Press in Placerville, Calif., which publishes a home-school catalogue and annual report called The Home School Market Guide. "An example is Christmas. Home-schoolers are going to want a religious story as opposed to Santa Claus. And if you're doing a book of word problems, don't include a story about kids going out on Halloween dressed as witches and goblins." Bluestocking Press, which carries products on economics, history and law, appeals to "all the markets," Williams said, because it follows this rule of thumb.
One of Bluestocking Press's most successful lines is the Uncle Eric series by financial expert Richard Maybury. In the books, a fictitious character named Uncle Eric writes letters to a niece or nephew, putting the complex topics of history, economics and law into a readable format. Now up to nine books, the series includes titles such as Whatever Happened to Penny Candy? (economics), Whatever Happened to Justice? (law) and its most recent, The Thousand-Year War in the Mideast: How It Affects You Today. Although the series is targeted to 12- to 14-year-olds, Williams said she's had businessmen buy case lots of Penny Candy and distribute it to their employees. She recommends that trade publishers who want to get into catalogues start their mining in the fall so reviewers can have a chance to look at the material before the catalogue publishing deadline.
A Bookseller's Boon
Making a name for yourself as a home-school resource center can pay high dividends for booksellers. That's what Doyle at Radiant Book & Music discovered when he took the plunge in May 1999. The store is the retail arm of Gospel Publishing House, a division of the Assemblies of God denomination, headquartered in Springfield, Mo.
"Customers began to come in and ask for home-school products, and after a while I told my boss, 'We need to do some research here because we're getting a lot of questions about home-school,'" Doyle said. At first daunted by the size of the market—and the sheer volume of publishers he would have to order from—Doyle hesitated until he learned about Appalachian's Home School Headquarters. "Our store is now set up with electronic ordering with Appalachian, which is wonderful for me because I only have to go to one source."
Prior to designating floor space to this untried market, Doyle contacted local home-school leaders, held focus groups, and discovered their needs and wants. "Before we tied up a lot of inventory dollars, we wanted to make sure there was a market here," he said. Now Radiant serves about 1,200 home-school families, with a good mix of both Christian and non-religious home-schoolers, "but we don't ask them if they go to church," Doyle quipped. The store sells to both markets.
Radiant's home-school section started on a back wall. By the second week, Doyle was forced to move it into a separate room to accommodate foot traffic. One year after its inception, the home-school section became a major department on the floor. "In the first five months of year two, sales tripled," he said. "This year, they've gone through the roof." The store set up a VIC (very important customer) club for home-school customers with a punch card that pays a $25 gift certificate when customers spend $250. Doyle places the used-up punch cards in a monthly drawing good for another $25 gift certificate. Customers' addresses are listed on the back of the punch cards, and Radiant built its home-school mailing list (both e-mail and snail mail) from that information. It also advertises on a local Christian radio station and in the local newspaper.
Radiant decided to absorb shipping charges to keep customers from ordering direct from cataloguers, and it also stocks actual products on its shelves—not just the catalogues. According to Doyle, one home-school mother came in and said, "Radiant has changed the way we buy product. It used to be we'd get together in the spring and go through catalogues. Now, if I'm not going to teach it till December, I don't buy it till December. You took the guesswork out for us."
Powell's Books in Portland, Ore., set up a home-school section in its main store several years ago and reports brisk sales. Richard Corbett, a book buyer in the children's department, said the section is very popular. "We get a lot of requests for it," he noted.
Cracking the Trends
Like any movement, home-schooling today is not what it was 10 years ago—or even just five. According to sources PW talked to, the most prevalent trends in the market are surges in "alternate learning" and home-schooling cooperatives, and the growing number of home-schooled teens. Many leaders also note a move away from full-line curriculum to more independent study. "From 1995 to now, there's been an explosion in the number of books and materials for teenage home-schoolers," John Holt's Farenga said. "Historically, home-schooling occurred most prolifically in k—6, and after that it dropped off dramatically."
One book that helped set the home-school teen trend is The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education by Grace Llewellyn (Lowry House, 1996). "It caused quite a stir when it came out," Farenga said. "The basic message of the book is, 'How do I go out and grab life?' and it uses real examples, not theory." Other titles popular with home-schooled teens are And What About College? How Homeschooling Can Lead to Admissions to the Best Colleges & Universities by Cafi Cohen (Holt Associates, 2000) and The Unschooling Handbook: How to Use the Whole World as Your Child's Classroom by Mary Griffith (Prima, 1998).
As home-schooling grows more popular—and students get more comfortable with learning sans school—a corresponding number of creative approaches to education are springing up. One such trend is what Farenga calls "cooperatives," in which several home-school parents and students organize informal learning get-togethers. For example, Farenga's wife, a home-schooling parent, runs a group called "History on Film" out of their home. "About 14 kids come over and watch films like Spartacus and other historical movies," Farenga said. "Now they're all going to see Pearl Harbor. My kids also participate in a group literature class, and they've done Dante's Inferno—it's not dumbed down."
Noting the trend, some groups have taken an entrepreneurial approach to cooperatives, such as the Path Finder Learning Center in Amherst, Mass. "They're charging people money to facilitate these cooperatives," Farenga said. At least two small publishers have picked up on the trend, releasing titles such as Creating a Cooperative Learning Center by Katherine Houk (Longview Publishing, 1999) and Creating Learning Communities (Center for Educational Renewal, 2000), for which Farenga contributed a chapter.
Lydia Gamble, who heads the children's department at Stow-Munroe Falls Public Library in Stow, Ohio, told PW she has also observed a higher incidence of alternative learning among home-schoolers. And she's in a good position to comment: the library has maintained a vibrant relationship with home-schoolers for more than two decades. "We have 149 home-school families in Stow, and we decided to make that one of our priorities," Gamble said. "We created a parent/ teacher section, and several home-school groups meet here. We're seeing [interest in] a lot of inspirational series—anything VeggieTales I can't keep in the building—and more alternative schooling, home-schooling that is linked to public schools but gives students greater autonomy."
These "halfway houses," as Home Education publisher Mark Hegener calls them, represent the best of both worlds for parents who are disgruntled with public schools but want to keep ties with organized education. "It's an incredibly attractive option," Hegener said. "This new hybrid, with school products delivered into the home, makes everybody happy."
But perhaps happiest of all are those students who can pick and choose their own course study, using the texts that appeal most to them. "When home-schooling first began, most people bought into packaged curriculum," Bluestocking Press's Williams said. "Now they tend to go out and freelance it from the beginning, custom designing their curriculum immediately. There's a lot more to choose from and a lot of support out there these days."
That's good news for trade publishers, who may have backlist titles that already would make a nice fit for home-schoolers. In fact, said Williams, sometimes the older, the better. "Series like Childhood of Famous Americans [Aladdin] and Adventures in Colonial America [Troll Association] have had a resurgence because of the home-school market, because they're looking for things traditional." Both series began publishing in the early '80s.
No Religion, Thank You
One unmistakable trend in the home-school market is the growth of its secular side. And for those like Farenga, whose catalogue and magazine cater to nonsectarian readers, it's about time. "A lot of people are saying, 'I want to home-school, but I can't get into this or that group because I won't sign their statement of faith,'" Farenga said. "We've represented the secular end of the market from the beginning. [John Holt] was there before the Christian side of the market."
Farenga recalls an event that marked this shift in focus for him personally. Four years ago, he was invited to speak to the Florida Parent Educators Association (FPEA), a large home-schooling convention that draws about 13,000 attendees. At the convention, a survey disseminated by the Florida State Department of Education asked why people chose to home-school. The number-one reason had always been religion, but in 1991 it shifted to "better education," he said. Though predominantly a conservative group, the FPEA "realized the need for a larger market, so we've been invited," he added.
Just that one home-school convention is growing at about 40% per year, Farenga noted. "When you go to the floor, there are about 75 or 80 vendors. A lot of the materials are focused on the Christian market, but there's a lot of traditional school stuff, too."
Christian or not, home-schooling is one market that's not going away anytime soon. And by all accounts, it's finally come of age. "The fact that Publishers Weekly comes back and revisits this issue every few years says something," Bluestocking's Williams said. "Ten years ago, everybody scoffed at it."
