Think you’re not smart enough to home school?

A a report on home schooling released today by The Fraser Institute should make you more confident in your ability to educate your children, even if you don’t have a university degree.

Home Schooling: From the Extreme to the Mainstream (2nd edition) by Patrick Basham, John Merrifield, and Claudia R. Hepburn is a current survey of many peer-reviewed homeschooling studies that have been published recently. While true statistics are impossible to come by, a survey of all the existing data can be helpful to come to some general conclusions about the value and efficacy of home schooling.

The report covers the history and regulation of homeschooling, the growth of the movement, the socio-economic characteristics of homeschooling, academic successes, and socialization concerns related to homeschooling.

Some interesting stats in the report:

• Home schooling parents have above-average levels of education. 75% of homeschooling parents have studied beyond high school vs 56% nationwide
• 81% of homeschoolers are two-parent households vs 66% of American families with children
• Having at least one parent who is a certified teacher appears to have no significant effect on the achievement levels of home schooled students.
• Homeschooled children of university graduates perform significantly better than do children whose parents do not have a degree, BUT the educational achievement of the homeschooling parent has LESS impact than the educational achievement of the parents of public schooled kids.
  “…regardless of whether their mothers held a degree or did not complete high school, the [home schooled] children’s scores stayed between the 80th and 90th percentile. By contrast, in 8th grade math, public school students whose parents are college graduates score at the 63rd percentile, whereas students whose parents have less than a high school diploma score at the 28th percentile. Students taught at home by mothers who never finished high school scored a full 55 percentile points higher than public school students from families with comparable education levels.”
  
• Home schooled kids watch less television than their public school peers
• Home schooled students enjoy a life satisfaction score considerably above the score of their public school peers

Overall, nothing but good news. Home schoolers already know they’re making the right decision, but it doesn’t hurt to have a little encouragement from researchers now and then.

Tags: homeschool, research, homeschooling

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 4th, 2007 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Homeschooling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.