However, Tate Reeves said he expects to redraw state’s four congressional districts before the 2027 elections

On Wednesday morning, Mississippi’s governor, Tate Reeves, said that he is canceling a special legislative session that was scheduled to redraw the state’s supreme court districts next week. However, Reeves, a Republican, noted that he does expect the state to redraw its four congressional districts at some point in the near future.

Reeves, in an appearance on SuperTalk radio, a conservative talk radio network, also said that it would be difficult for the state to redraw the congressional districts in the Republicans favor in time for the upcoming midterm elections, slated for November. Doing so might also hurt Republicans in congressional races.

When schools abruptly closed their doors at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, millions of students unexpectedly started learning at home, with or without the help of Zoom lessons.

Many observers – and perhaps some parents – assumed these kids would return to in-person classrooms once the COVID-19 risk decreased. But homeschooling numbers indicate that many families chose to keep their kids home after the pandemic.

Today, more than 6% of school-age children – or 3.4 million students – are learning at home.

This is higher than before the COVID-19 online learning period. In March 2020, 5.4% of school-age children in the U.S. were homeschooled.

Growth in homeschooling has been gradual.

About 3.4% of K-12 students in the U.S. were homeschooled during the 2022-23 academic year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.

More than one-third of the 30 states plus Washington, D.C., that report homeschooling trends hit record enrollment as of November 2025. The growth is particularly strong in Midwestern and Southeastern states.

Homeschooling has a long history in the U.S. and is legal in all 50 states. States have varying requirements for homeschooling families, from close state regulation to none at all.

Contrary to what many people thought, the pandemic alone didn’t drive this increase. It gave families who were already inclined toward homeschooling a low-risk opportunity to try it.

Families who found benefits from homeschooling continued to teach their children at home. In essence, the forced opportunity to help their kids learn at home during the pandemic let the families experience the benefits of the experience without the permanent risk.

A jumping-off point

We are researchers at Mississippi State University who study why parents want to homeschool. As part of our forthcoming research, we conducted a survey in 2024 with 201 homeschooling parents, primarily those who live in Southern states and were part of national homeschooling networks and educational organizations.

The parents we surveyed were divided into two groups: parents who began homeschooling before the pandemic and those who started homeschooling during the pandemic. While this is a self-selected sample and not nationally representative, it allowed us to look at the differences between people who began homeschooling before and during the pandemic.

The findings tell a very different story than some narratives suggest.

Rather than saying COVID-19 prompted them to begin homeschooling, many parents said that they found during the pandemic there were certain homeschooling benefits. This encouraged them to keep their kids learning at home after schools reopened.

For example, 43% percent of the parents we surveyed said there were more benefits to homeschooling than public schooling – such as flexible work arrangements and more family time.

One parent, a former teacher, said her kids thrived during the initial months at home and that she felt equipped to continue. Another parent called homeschooling a gift that let their family slow down and be present for one another and their community. A third parent realized her children didn’t need eight hours in a classroom to get a quality education.

In other words, parents we surveyed said that homeschooling during the pandemic was an unplanned trial to homeschool. Those who said they perceived positive benefits continued to homeschool.

Similar motivations, different journeys

Researchers often refer to push or pull factors to describe how families make homeschooling decisions. Push factors explain why families leave public education for homeschooling. These include a lack of safety or bad experiences at school, or a school that cannot meet a child’s particular needs.

Pull factors are the reasons why families are drawn to homeschooling for its own sake. They include flexibility with school hours, a closer relationship with family and a customized, educational environment.

In our study, parents who were homeschooling before the pandemic began and those who began homeschooling during the pandemic had similar motivations to homeschool.

COVID-19 health concerns were largely dismissed by both groups. More than 60% of the parents from both groups indicated they did not believe that COVID-19-related health issues, such as masking requirements and vaccination mandates, affected their choice to homeschool or continue homeschooling.

Time matters more than money

Our survey results demonstrated that there was a stronger relationship between flexibility in work schedule and motivation to homeschool than there was with family income and motivation to homeschool. In other words, families who had flexibility in their schedule to find the time to teach their own were especially likely to homeschool.

For example, self-employed and stay-at-home parents were more likely to continue homeschooling their kids than those working full time. Specifically, parents who worked outside the home less than 10 hours per week were far more likely than parents who work full time to want to homeschool because of their child’s specific needs.

These findings challenge the idea that homeschooling is primarily a path for wealthy families. In this sample, the families who homeschooled weren’t necessarily the ones with the highest incomes. They were the ones whose work lives gave them the time.

Why policy keeps missing the mark

To be clear, there are many reasons families homeschool, but our research indicates that the families in our study made a thoughtful and informed decision to homeschool.

If school districts are relying upon children returning to enroll in public schools when they were previously homeschooled, they may be misjudging the situation. It seems that some families intend to continue homeschooling for the long term. Our research indicates that the pandemic did not necessarily produce a surge in interest in homeschooling, as much as it revealed an existing level of demand – in some cases.

Understanding the reasons behind these demands could provide legislators and educators with a greater opportunity to develop regulations and practices that are consistent with how families are making educational choices.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

It may sound hard to believe, but the almost trillion-dollar U.S. military is struggling to fight cheap drones in its war with Iran.

Iran has built a simple drone, the Shahed, with a motorcycle-type engine, loaded it with explosives and successfully targeted its neighbors’ cities and power plants.

Iran has also hit U.S. military bases with these drones, including an early April 2026 attack on the U.S. Victory Base Complex in Baghdad.

The drones cost between US$20,000 and $50,000 to build. In response, the U.S. military sometimes fires missiles worth more than $1 million to shoot one down.

As a former U.S. Air Force officer and now national security scholar, I believe that math is a problem: The U.S. military for now has a $1 million answer to a $20,000 question. This math tells you almost everything you need to know about one of America’s biggest national security headaches.

And the frustrating part is that the U.S. military watched this happen in Ukraine for years. It knew the threat was coming.

The weapon that changed modern war

The Shahed isn’t impressive because it’s high-tech. It’s impressive because it isn’t.

Inspection of captured Shahed drones has found that many of their parts are made by ordinary commercial companies. That includes processors from a U.S. manufacturer, fuel pumps from a U.K. company and converters from China.

These military components aren’t hard to get. You could find similar parts in factories or farm machinery. That’s exactly what makes the Shahed so tough to deal with.

Russia, which also produces the drone, tolerates losing more than 75% of its Shahed stock because even at those loss rates, it’s winning the math battle against Ukraine. Russia or Iran don’t need every drone to hit its target. They just need to keep sending waves of them until their opponent runs out of expensive missiles to shoot back.

Ukraine, which had no choice but to learn fast, eventually figured out a better answer. Ukraine developed cheap interceptor drones that could slam into Shahed drones before they reached their targets. Each interceptor costs about $1,000 to $2,000, and Ukrainian manufacturers are producing thousands of them per month. That’s better math: a $2,000 interceptor against a $20,000 attacker.

Ukraine’s battlefield experience, as a result, has become one of the most valuable resources in the world, with American and allied forces asking Ukrainian drone experts to share their knowledge.

Why can’t the U.S. churn out a solution of its own? Because the U.S. military doesn’t have a technology problem but a bureaucracy problem.

The Pentagon’s three-legged slowdown

The U.S. Department of Defense typically can’t just buy things. It follows a long, complicated process that can take a decade or more to go from “we need something” to “here it is.” That process runs through three separate bureaucratic systems, each of which can cause years of delay.

First, someone must write a formal document, known as a requirement, that explains exactly what they need and why. A military service, such as the Air Force, for example, drafts up a requirement and routes it through an internal service review within only their branch.

Until recently, this service-vetted requirement went through a Pentagon review process, the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System, where all joint services took a look. This process, which the Department of Defense ended in 2025, required approval from military officials.

Even though the joint requirements process was ended, implementation of a new system is far from complete, and the existing culture potentially remains. Under the old requirements process, it took over 800 days to get a requirement approved.

Second, any new program then needs money. This is handled through the planning, programming, budgeting and execution process, a budget cycle designed in 1961. Getting a new program into the budget typically takes more than two years after the requirement is approved, because the military must submit its budget request years in advance. By then, the threat has potentially already moved on.

Third, once a requirement is approved and money allocated, the program then must be developed and built. The average major defense acquisition program now takes almost 12 years from program start just to deliver an initial capability to troops in the field, according to a 2025 Government Accountability Office report.

Add it up and you get a system where the military sees a threat, begs for a solution, argues for money and waits a decade.

Why the system is built this way

The Shahed drone exposed a gap that defense experts have been warning about for years: The U.S. military is very good at building the most advanced, most expensive weapons in the world, but it struggles to build cheap, simple things fast. That is the opposite of what this new kind of warfare demands.

It would be easy, but inaccurate, to blame the military for the decade-long contract process. The real answer is more complicated.

The Pentagon’s lengthy process was designed by the Department of Defense and Congress for a reason. Policymakers created the current system during the Cold War to combat excessive and redundant spending by the separate service branches. The system is built with checkpoints, reviews and approvals to make sure taxpayer money isn’t wasted.

Legacy military contractors also benefit from this dysfunctional process and resist change. They have the capital and know-how to wait out the predictable and stable existing contracts, while vying for new ones. These military contractors rarely need to worry about upstart contractors because they know small companies cannot survive waiting for a decade to secure funding for their prototypes.

The problem is that those rules were built for a world where the biggest threat was another superpower’s expensive jets and missiles. It wasn’t built to fight a flying bomb made from tractor parts. This type of threat requires fast innovation from lean companies, the exact companies that struggle in the current budget process.

What’s changing

There are signs of movement. In August 2025, the Pentagon killed its old requirements process entirely and replaced it with a faster, more flexible system.

However, killing the requirements process dealt with only one leg of the three-legged monster. The 1960s-era budget process that determines how money flows remains largely intact.

The most important reforms still need Congress to act, and Congress moves slowly, too. Congress has launched studies into reforming this system numerous times, with the answers being too politically difficult to implement.

Officials are expanding the use of flexible contracting tools, such as Other Transaction Authority, that let the military skip some traditional rules to get anti-drone technology faster. Yet these flexible contracting tools still represent a small slice of the Defense budget, and their effectiveness is unclear.

Ultimately, instead of using flexible contracting tools to quickly buy new prototypes, the bureaucratically easier solution could be to buy more of the expensive, already approved missiles.

This quick fix would reload the military’s stock of interceptors with existing weapons systems, which is the source of the bad math. The math would get worse and at the same time the operational imperative to find cheaper and better solutions might disappear.

So, as the Shahed keeps flying, the most powerful military in the world is still figuring out the paperwork and looking to other countries for help.

Aaron Brynildson served in the U.S. Air Force from 2016-2025.