The tone of the article is slightly suspicious.

A bunch of so-called "experts" are looking at an upswing in homeschooling numbers, and are getting suspicious. I won't argue that it ought to take more than the school's word to define kids withdrawn from said school as being homeschooled, but I don't think it ought to take more than a signed and notarized statement from the parents.

I think the tone of the article is slightly suspicious. It may just be my own biases, but the negative way the article discusses homeschooling, and the positive references to the strict regulations some states have put onto homeschoolers (i.e., parents being forced to register what curriculum they use for each homeschooled child) makes me suspicious of the whole article.

I doubt that homeschooling has had as much of an upswing as the article says (most parents are too busy working two to three jobs trying to keep up with the Joneses, or are too lazy to do what's best for their kids), and admit fully that they probably have a point. However, I do know that homeschooling has become far more popular, mostly because of how absolutely awful public schools have become, both academically and administratively. I would believe a 10% or even a 15% uptick in homeschooling elementary and middle school age kids. I am, however, with the authors of the aricle in doubting a full 24% upswing, especially when you consider that there are a lot of high schoolers figured in, and "More than 22,620 Texas secondary students who stopped showing up for class in 2008 were excluded from the state's dropout statistics because administrators said they were being home-schooled."