The Akron, OH Beacon Journal is skeptical about claims of homeschooling success:
...there are many among the approximately 1.1 million home-schooled children who are receiving an above-average education. However, if Americans accept the idea that home schooling is putting public schools to shame with an extraordinary crop of bright students, it's mainly because home schoolers successfully have marketed good anecdotes and bad analyses of the few national studies.
Despite [president of the Home School Legal Defense Association] Smith's assertion, there are serious critics [sic - I think they mean "criticisms"].
• Studies routinely cited as evidence that home-schooled students perform better than public school students don't prove anything because there are huge, untested segments of the home-school population that may be failing, according to many researchers.
Yes, and they may also be passing. Why assume that only the ones who agree to testing are doing well? That might be a valid assumption, but we don't know at this point.
• Representatives of the SAT and ACT college testing services said their annual reports are being misused and don't prove that home schoolers are smarter.
Really? I haven't seen this anywhere. And how could high scores for homeschooled students been interpreted any way other than evidence that those particular students did master the material? Certainly, representatives of the College Board, ETS, and ACT may say that those tests are not IQ tests, but that applies to all students. Likewise, the scores of homeschooled kids might not be generalizable to the population of homeschooling kids at large, but that doesn't mean we should conclude that untested kids are in fact doing poorly. We just don't know.
• Some state universities, Ivy League colleges and military academies said that home schoolers have been underrepresented among their incoming freshmen.
And this is a criticism of homeschooling how?
• Only a few states collect information about home schoolers. In Arkansas, where the state has aggregate standardized test scores for home schoolers, results show a downward trend for at least six years and, at best, academic mediocrity.
Fine. Solid data to suggest that in Arkansas, homeschooling students may not stand out. But if we're not going to generalize to all homeschooled students on the basis of the few who test, I see no reason to generalize to homeschooled students across the country on the basis of Arkansas.
• There is concern among school officials and some researchers that the number of home-school failures is growing at a rate and a social cost that are unknown -- and no one is paying attention.
You mean, a high social cost as compared to what is placed upon society by failing public schools? Given the relatively small numbers of homeschooled children, it's very hard to believe that they're representing all of what's wrong with kids these days. I'd have to see some seriously hard data to believe that inadequate homeschooling has anywhere near the negative impact on society as bad public schooling.
Although this introduction is not promising, the rest of the article is fairly well-informed, albeit sensationalized, with the obligatory "homeschooled-kid-shackled-to-a-bed" horror story. All the caveats included by researchers in this article are good ones, and the criticisms are exactly what I expected - the results of previous studies do not "prove" that homeschooled kids are, as a whole, better off. However, neither do they suggest, as opponents of homeschooling would have you believe, that homeschooled kids are as a whole worse off. And I certainly wouldn't conclude from what's presented here that we should all worry about those untested homeschoolers and their potential negative impact on society.
Certainly, the topic of how much oversight should be focused on homeschoolers is debatable. I also agree that homeschooling support groups may have been too effusive with their claims of success. But I also still feel, even after reading this article, that a lot of opposition to homeschooling comes from the belief that only parents who want to ignore or mistreat their kids keep them away from the public school system. Perhaps the reason homeschooling supporters get carried away with their praise of homeschooling is because they're tired of being viewed as religious freaks who want to keep their kids chained to beds all day.
Posted by kswygert at November 15, 2004 04:45 PM