The Cato Institute wonders what all the fuss is about:
The reality, verifiable by anecdote and standardized test alike, is that in every academic area home-schooled students are far surpassing students enrolled in government schools. The most reliable data are from a 1998 study by Dr. Lawrence Rudner of the University of Maryland in which over 20,000 home-schooled students took standardized tests and completed other questionnaires. Unlike previous studies, Rudner's was conducted on a comparatively large sample and included only families who agreed to participate before knowing their children's test scores. The study concludes that "in every subject and at every grade level of the [tests], home schooled students scored significantly higher than their public and private school counterparts." Furthermore, the study shows that home-schooled children had average scores that fell between the 82nd and the 92nd percentile in reading and reached the 85th percentile in math. By the eighth grade, the average home-schooled student is performing four grade levels above the national average.
Home-schooled students are almost always self-selected (I suppose there are a few kids whose parents would rather not teach them at home, but are forced to do so), so author Isabel Lyman is, quite rightly, not arguing that homeschooling causes these academic gains.
Some interesting arguments:
Home schooling, by contrast, is based on the principles of liberty. Families enjoy the freedom to teach what they want, when they want. Parents can advocate a strict creationist view or they can offer evolution, without fear of offending anyone. Home-schooling parents don't take a dime from taxpayers and don't impose their educational methods on others; their children certainly are not gunning down other children.
The principles of liberty as applied to homeschooling extend so far as to include unschooling, in which it certainly seems possible for children to miss the lessons that come with drudgery, boring topics, and external schedules (whether you think those lessons should be missed is another issue). And while homeschooled kids might not be scoping out (in the ugliest sense) other children in large numbers, we can no longer argue that all homeschooled familes are insulated from teenage violence. As The American Spectator notes, though, dangerous homeschooled kids are very much the exception, not the rule, and the evidence is piling up that homeschooled kids, in general, are not lacking in academic or social progress when compared to their public- and private-schooled peers.
Posted by kswygert at February 13, 2006 04:15 PM