Reply to Why do uneducated people homeschool?

Forum Index » Homeschooling

Reply to "Why do uneducated people homeschool? "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]"Let me start by quoting from the International Center for Home Education Research (ICHER), a nonpartisan group of scholars who share a common interest in studying homeschooling.

How does U.S. homeschoolers’ academic performance compare with other students?

Evidence regarding this question has been fraught with controversy because most of the studies that have received widest attention have been interpreted to say something they do not and cannot. We simply can’t draw any conclusions about the academic performance of the “average homeschooler,” because none of the studies so often cited employ random samples representing the full range of homeschoolers.

For example, two large U.S. studies (Rudner, 1999; Ray, 2009) are frequently cited as definitive evidence that homeschoolers academically outperform public and private school students. But in both cases, the homeschool participants were volunteers responding to an invitation by the nation’s most prominent advocacy organization to contribute test scores (on tests usually administered by parents in the child’s own home). The demographics of these samples were far whiter, more religious, more married, better educated, and wealthier than national averages. And yet these test score results were compared to average public school scores that included children from all income levels and family backgrounds. Not surprisingly, wealthy homeschoolers from stable two-parent families who take tests administered by their parents in the comfort of their own homes outscore the average public school child by large margins.

The simple fact is that no studies of academic achievement exist that draw from a representative, nationwide sample of homeschoolers and control for background variables like socio-economic or marital status. It is thus impossible to say whether or not homeschooling as such has any impact on the sort of academic achievement measured by standardized tests.

Read these three paragraphs carefully and reread them if you need to. They’re very concise and to the point and also very important. And before anyone starts suggesting that ICHER is biased against homeschooling, allow me to point out that one of the ICHER’s two founders (Milton Gaither) is himself a homeschool father.

The basic gist of the above paragraphs is that studies of homeschoolers’ academic performance have two problems: First, they are voluntary (and usually recruited by HSLDA, explicitly touting them as opportunities to showcase homeschoolers’ academic success), meaning they do not employ random samples and therefore are not representative. Second, homeschool advocates compare the results of these studies to the public school average without correcting for things like race, income, and family background, which means that the statistics as reported and commonly touted don’t actually say anything other than that students from white, two-parent, middle class families do better academically than the average student, which shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone."[/quote]

You know your “source” is a joke, right? Just checking, because it doesn’t seem like you do.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics