California Homeschool Requirements: You Are Not Homeschooling, You Are Running a Private School

Search "California homeschool law" and you will find a lot of nervous forum posts and no statute, because there is no statute. California never wrote a homeschool law. What it wrote instead was a private school exemption from compulsory attendance, and for decades California families have homeschooled by operating a very small private school out of their own house. That sounds intimidating and it is genuinely not. But it explains everything that confuses people about this state: why you file an affidavit instead of a notice of intent, why nobody ever tests your child, why the paperwork asks about your faculty, and why the deadline lands in October instead of August. Here is the whole picture, taken from the text of the Education Code, the California Department of Education's own private school pages, and HSLDA's California guidance.

The short version

• Compulsory attendance runs from age 6 to age 18 under Education Code 48200, a wider range than most states.
• There are four legal routes. Three are private, one is public. Which one you pick is the only real decision on this page.
• The most common private route is filing a Private School Affidavit with the state, once a year, between October 1 and October 15.
• No standardized testing. No portfolio review. No annual report to anybody. No parent credential on the private school routes. The law asks only that instruction come from "persons capable of teaching."
• You keep an attendance register and a few other records at home. Nobody collects them.
• Filing the affidavit is not an application and it is not an approval. The state says so in writing, and that sentence matters more than it looks.

The four doors

Every California family lands in one of these. They are not equally famous, and the loudest one online is not automatically the right one for you.

Door 1: your own home based private school

You file the Private School Affidavit yourself, in your own name, for your own children, and you are the school. This is the most independent option and the most common one for families who want their curriculum choices left entirely alone. You do all your own record keeping. Nobody supervises you.

Door 2: a private school satellite program, usually called a PSP

You enroll your children in an existing private school built for homeschoolers, and the majority of the instruction still happens at your kitchen table. The PSP files the affidavit, keeps the records, and issues transcripts and eventually a diploma. Many California families choose this specifically for the high school years, because a third party transcript makes certain college applications simpler. You trade a little independence and usually a modest fee for someone else carrying the paperwork.

Door 3: a credentialed private tutor

This is the narrow one, and the only route with hard numbers attached. Under Education Code 48224, the person teaching must hold a valid California teaching credential for the grade level being taught, and instruction must run at least three hours a day, between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m., for 175 days a year. If you happen to be a credentialed teacher, this route exists for you and requires no affidavit. If you are not, it is not your door, and you can stop worrying about those hours, because they do not apply to doors 1 and 2 at all. A great deal of California homeschool anxiety about "175 days" and "three hours a day" is people reading the tutor statute and assuming it lands on them.

Door 4: a public charter independent study program

Your child enrolls in a public charter school that supports learning at home, an education specialist checks in with you on a schedule, and the charter gives your family an instructional funds allotment to spend on curriculum, classes, and materials. This is real money and a great many California families use it happily.

It also carries a condition you should hear plainly before signing anything. We come back to it below, because it is the single most consequential fact on this page for some families and completely irrelevant to others.

Step 1: the affidavit, October 1 through October 15

If you are going through door 1, this is your entire annual obligation to the state.

The Private School Affidavit is filed with the California Department of Education under Education Code 33190. The statutory window is October 1 through October 15. In practice the CDE's online filing system stays open from August 1 through June 30 specifically so that new schools and new homeschools starting mid year can file when they actually start, which is the accommodation most new families need. If you are pulling a child out of school in February, you file in February. If you are starting in the fall, you file in that October window.

The affidavit asks for the kind of information a school would have: the school's name and address, enrollment counts, a custodian of records, and the names, addresses, and educational qualifications of the faculty. For a family school, the faculty is you.

The sentence on the state's own page that settles a lot of arguments

The CDE is unusually direct about what filing does and does not mean. Their guidance states that filing the affidavit "shall not be interpreted to mean" that the State of California "has made any evaluation, recognition, approval, or endorsement" of the school, and that the department does not approve or accredit private schools. Their role with the data is to build a directory and pass information to agencies that offer programs and services.

Read that in both directions, because it cuts both ways and honest advice says so. It means nobody is going to approve or deny you, review your curriculum, or grade your teaching. It also means you cannot turn around and tell a college or an employer that the state signed off on your school, because it did not, and California put that in writing on purpose.

Step 2: the records you keep at home

Nobody collects these. Under 33190 and Education Code 48222, a private school in California is expected to maintain:

• An attendance register. The statute says attendance "shall be kept by private school authorities in a register, and the record of attendance shall indicate clearly every absence of the pupil from school for a half day or more." That is a calendar with days marked, not a research project.
• A faculty list with names, addresses, and a record of the educational qualifications of each. For most family schools that is one line about one parent.
• The courses of study offered. A list of subjects, not lesson plans.
• Immunization records for each enrolled student, on the same footing as any other California school.

That is the whole file. It fits in a folder. The reason to actually keep it, rather than intending to keep it, is that the one moment anyone ever asks is the moment you cannot go back and reconstruct it.

Step 3: what you teach

Education Code 48222 exempts children "being instructed in a private full-time day school by persons capable of teaching," and asks that the instruction cover the several branches of study required in the public schools and be given in the English language. In plain terms: the ordinary school subjects, taught by someone capable of teaching them.

What is not in there is worth naming. No required curriculum. No state approved book list. No minimum hours for doors 1 and 2. No scope and sequence anyone reviews. No credential requirement. "Capable of teaching" is the entire qualification standard, and California has never defined it more tightly than that.

The charter money, and the condition attached to it

This is the part of California homeschooling families most often find out about too late, and it deserves to be stated calmly and completely rather than argued about.

Door 4, the charter independent study program, comes with instructional funds. It also makes your child a public school student, and California public schools are required to be nonsectarian. Education Code 47605 requires that a charter school "shall be nonsectarian in its programs," and the California Constitution bars the teaching of sectarian or denominational doctrine in the common schools. The practical result is that charter instructional funds cannot be spent on religious curriculum, and charter oversight can decline to fund or award credit for materials with religious content.

Families have challenged this. On March 24, 2026, a divided panel of the Ninth Circuit upheld California's exclusion in Woolard v. Thurmond, holding that these parent designed independent study programs are public school programs and therefore subject to the state constitutional bar, over sharp dissents. The families have continued to press the issue.

We are not going to tell you how to feel about that. Here is the honest operational takeaway for a parent choosing a door in California:

• If your curriculum choice is secular, the charter route is real money for materials and classes, and a great many families are glad they took it.
• If you intend to teach from a faith based curriculum, the charter funds will not pay for it, and structuring around that restriction is an ongoing headache rather than a one time form.
• The private school affidavit route, doors 1 and 2, carries no such condition, because you are not spending public money. There is no funding, and there is also nobody with an opinion about your reading list.

Money with conditions and independence without funding are both legitimate choices. What is not legitimate is a family finding out about the condition in November, after they have already bought the year.

What the public schools owe your family

California's answer to this question is not one answer. It is four, because it depends on which of the four doors you walked through, and that is the part nobody explains. A family under a private school affidavit and a family in a charter independent study program are in completely different legal positions here, even though both of them say "we homeschool" at the park.

Sports, and the sentence the whole thing turns on

High school athletics in California are run by the California Interscholastic Federation, which Education Code section 33353 describes as "a voluntary organization that consists of school and school-related personnel with responsibility for administering interscholastic athletic activities in secondary schools." Its Bylaw 301 is titled Home Study, Home Schooling, and it says this:

Students who are not enrolled in programs under the jurisdiction of a member school's governing body are not eligible to participate in CIF competition. Such programs would include, but not be limited to, home schooling or home study wherein parent(s)/guardian(s)/caregiver, or other persons, are responsible for instruction and evaluation.

A sourcing note we owe you, because it is the weakest citation on this page. The CIF's own website blocks automated access, so we could not pull that bylaw from cifstate.org. The text above is taken from the 2023-24 CIF Constitution and Bylaws as published by a California public school district, Lodi Unified, and the bylaw's own approval line dates it to 2000 and 2002. Confirm the current wording with your CIF section office before you plan a season around it.

Now read what the bylaw actually keys on, because it is not the word "homeschool." It is "enrolled in programs under the jurisdiction of a member school's governing body." That phrase maps onto this guide's four doors, and it maps unevenly.

• Doors 1, 2 and 3, your own home based private school, a private school satellite program, or a credentialed private tutor, put your child outside any public school governing board's jurisdiction. On the face of Bylaw 301 that is the group it excludes.
• Door 4, a public charter independent study program, enrolls your child in a public school. Whether that particular charter is a CIF member school, and whether its independent study students may play, is a real question with a real answer, and it belongs to that charter and your CIF section rather than to us. Ask both, before you enroll, in writing.

We are not going to soften this. For most California homeschoolers the public school team is closed, and a family for whom sports are non-negotiable should factor that into the door they choose rather than discover it in ninth grade. The homeschool sports leagues that exist in California exist because of this bylaw, not in spite of it.

If you do get a decision you think is wrong, there is an appeal and it is in the same statute. Section 33353(a)(3) states the Legislature's intent that the federation "Establish a neutral final appeals body to hear complaints related to interscholastic athletic policies," and (a)(2) subjects its league, section and state meetings to the Ralph M. Brown Act, California's open meetings law. A body that has to meet in public and hear appeals is one you can actually ask.

Part-time classes at the public school

Here we can only tell you what we could and could not verify, which is better than a confident guess. The California Department of Education's own homeschooling page does not address part-time enrollment in a public school at all, and we found no provision of the Education Code creating a right to it for a private school student. That is not the same as a prohibition. It means the answer is a local one, so ask your district directly, ask whether your child would be classified as enrolled or as a visitor, and get it in writing. The community college answer below is far better sourced, and for a high schooler it is usually the better door anyway.

Dual credit, and the petition almost nobody knows exists

This is the part of the section that is genuinely good news, and it hinges on a single subsection.

Every article about California dual enrollment describes Education Code 48800, under which "The governing board of a school district may determine which pupils would benefit from advanced scholastic or vocational work" and may authorize them to attend a community college, on the recommendation of the principal of the pupil's school of attendance. Reading that, a homeschooling parent reasonably concludes they need a school district's permission, and many give up there.

They do not. Education Code 48800.5 has a subsection written for exactly your situation:

(c) A parent or guardian of a pupil who is not enrolled in a public school may directly petition the president of any community college to authorize the attendance of the pupil at the community college as a special part-time or full-time student on the ground that the pupil would benefit from advanced scholastic or vocational work that would thereby be available.

Directly petition the president of any community college. No school district, no principal's recommendation, no gatekeeper between your family and the college. If your child is not enrolled in a public school, and under doors 1 through 3 they are not, this is your route and it is written into the code.

The practical terms, all from the statutes rather than from a college's website:

• Up to 11 units a semester. Education Code 76001(d): "a special part-time student may enroll in up to, and including, 11 units per semester, or the equivalent thereof." That is most of a full load.
• A denial has to come with reasons, in writing, on a clock. Under 76001(b), if the governing board denies the request it "shall record its findings and the reasons for denial of the request in writing within 60 days," at a board meeting at least 30 days out. A no that has to be written down and explained is a different kind of no than a shrug at a counter.
• You register last, and that is the real constraint. 76001(e)(1) requires the board to "assign a low enrollment priority to special part-time or full-time students" so they do not displace regularly admitted students. Popular courses fill before your registration window opens. Plan for the second choice and the second term.
• The fee is a maybe, not a no. The statutory enrollment fee is "forty-six dollars ($46) per unit per semester" under Education Code 76300(b)(1), and subsection (f) says the district "may exempt special part-time students admitted pursuant to Section 76001 from the fee requirement." May, not shall. Many districts do exempt them and it is worth hundreds of dollars a semester, so ask before you assume either way. Books are yours regardless.

One thing to keep in your own records while you do this: the college will want some evidence that your student is prepared for the course. You are the school that says so. A transcript, a course list, and a record of what your child has actually completed is the difference between a petition that reads as serious and one that reads as hopeful.

The honest part about a state this hands off

California asks less of a homeschooling family than its reputation suggests. One form, in a two week window, and no one ever checks your work.

The trade is the same one every lightly regulated state makes, and this site says it about Texas and Ohio too. When no one tests your child and no one reviews a portfolio, nothing outside your own house will ever tell you where your child actually stands. Not in third grade, not in seventh, not until something forces the question. Plenty of California families handle that fine. But the parent lying awake wondering "is she behind, and would I even know" is asking a completely fair question, and California's answer is silence by design.

That is not an argument for more regulation. It is an argument that the checking became your job, and it is worth doing on purpose instead of by accident.

How an AI teacher fits into a state like this one

Start with what we are not. Kitchen Table School is not a registered or accredited school in California or any other state. We do not file your affidavit, we are not your PSP, we are not a charter, and we do not administer any assessment on the state's behalf. You are the private school on the paperwork, exactly as the Education Code intends.

What we do is the part California stopped doing. Before anything else, the teacher sits down with your child for a free placement conversation that feels like a friendly chat rather than a test, and tells you where they actually are in each subject, not where the grade label says they should be. From there your child gets a patient teacher working one on one at their real level, kindergarten through twelfth grade, on the curriculum you choose. California families take the upload your own curriculum path: you pick the materials, the teacher reads them and teaches from their actual pages, paced across your school year.

And every session writes itself down. The date, the subject, the book and unit, how long it ran, what your child worked on. California only asks you for an attendance register, and the records our teacher keeps go well past that: attendance you can print, per skill evidence receipts, and a portfolio you could hand to a PSP, a charter, a college, or a district office if you ever transfer back. You will probably never be asked for it. You will be very glad it exists the one time you are.

One note specific to this state, said plainly because our own position is public. Kitchen Table School is openly Christian, in the simple sense that Josh built it as a Christian and the site says so rather than hiding it. Every child gets identical warmth and identical academic standards regardless of what their family believes, and families of every background are welcome here. We raise it on this page only because California is the one state where that fact brushes up against a funding decision you might be making this month.

Curious how this works day to day once the affidavit is filed? Here's the honest guide to teaching your own curriculum with us, written for every out-of-state family, California included. Or see the requirements for every other state.