A Max Exodus from a Million Young Fears: School Shootings and Homeschooling Enrollment

Abstract

School shootings are becoming an increasingly prominent issue within the American education experience, generating well-documented harms to schools, students, and communities. Prior research into parental response explores families switching to private schools or residential relocation, but homeschooling—which represents a complete exit from the institutional school network—is yet to be empirically studied. This paper fills that gap by estimating the effect of school shootings on next-year homeschooling rates, using a difference-in-differences framework and event study applied to a school district-year panel covering 29 states and Washington D.C. from 2017-18 to 2022-23 academic years. The coefficient of interest is negative, small, and statistically insignificant across all specifications, and the event study confirms the absence of a delayed response beyond the one-year window. The null result is consistent through alternative severity measures of school shootings, such as fatal shootings, number of victims killed, number of victims killed or injured, and media exposure, and also heterogeneous tests for district income, parental education, and racial composition. These findings suggest that homeschooling does not serve as a widespread behavioral response to school shootings and that reactive homeschooling does not create a detectable enrollment effect at the district level.