The Problem with Counting People
Statistics shape policy, but they often miss people. A few years ago, demographers discovered that the world’s population had been systematically miscounted. Rural families in Africa and South Asia weren’t being properly recorded; fertility rates and household sizes were underestimated. The result: global population was millions higher than official tallies suggested.
Closer to home, in the U.S., the 2025–26 school year opened with a shock. Superintendents across dozens of states reported that classrooms were emptier than their projections. Budgets based on expected headcounts suddenly had holes. The missing students hadn’t vanished; they had shifted — into homeschooling, microschools, church umbrella schools, or simply off the official books.
The state doesn’t see what it doesn’t count. And what it doesn’t count, it can’t understand.
Virginia as a Case Study
Virginia reports about 60,000 homeschoolers each year under its Notice of Intent (NOI) law. But that number hides thousands more excused under a unique provision: religious exemption from compulsory attendance (Va. Code §22.1-254(B)(1)).
Unlike NOI, which resets annually, religious exemptions are cumulative and permanent. A child granted an exemption at age 6 in 2019 remains exempt at 16 in 2029. Axios reported that between 2019 and 2024, around 30,000 such exemptions were granted. Add that to NOI, and Virginia may actually have 90,000–100,000 students outside the state’s system today — not 60,000.
This is a hidden population. Invisible in reports. Forgotten in policy.
The National Picture
Virginia is not alone. Across the U.S.:
Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina → thousands of families homeschool through church umbrella schools. Official homeschool counts exclude them.
Ohio → families register as “non-chartered religious schools.” The state lists the schools, but doesn’t count the students.
Texas, Idaho, New Jersey, Oklahoma → no reporting required. Hundreds of thousands of homeschoolers never appear in state statistics.
Amish communities in PA, WI, SD → teens leave school after 8th grade under Wisconsin v. Yoder. They’re not in homeschool counts, not in private school counts — simply absent from state ledgers.
If 10–15% of homeschoolers nationwide are uncounted, a conservative estimate, that means hundreds of thousands of children are being educated outside the official system.
Why This Matters
Numbers drive funding, regulation, and perception. When officials say “there are 60,000 homeschoolers in Virginia,” they understate reality by tens of thousands. When national surveys report 3.7 million, the truth may be closer to > 4 million.
This isn’t just a bookkeeping error. It changes how lawmakers think about parents. If they believe homeschooling is marginal, they regulate it as a curiosity. If they grasp that > 6% of all students are outside the system, and growing, they must treat families as central actors in education’s future.
Families Own the Responsibility — and the Records
Here’s the paradox: the students the state doesn’t count are still learning, still growing, still applying to colleges, apprenticeships, and jobs. Their transcripts, diplomas, and portfolios matter even more, precisely because the state won’t vouch for them.
That’s why parent-owned records are decisive. Families can timestamp a transcript, hash a diploma, and verify learning without surrendering ownership. This is the core idea behind our project, ScholarBitBook:
Parents add courses, grades, and hours over years.
Each update creates a new transcript root, timestamped on-chain.
Exports produce PDFs with QR codes linking to verifiable stubs.
Strict privacy: no student PII (personally identifiable information) on-chain — only hashes + timestamps.
Compliance is not protection. Parents are. Records are the bridge between private authority and public trust.
A Broader Lesson
From rural villages miscounted in global censuses, to shrinking enrollments in U.S. districts, to Virginia’s hidden exemptions, the lesson is the same: statistics miss people, but families do not.
We are in an age when AI can verify truth in seconds, but policy still clings to paper forms. The real question is whether we trust parents to be the first institution, the true record-keepers of their children’s education.
If the state won’t count your child, you must.