NOTE: to see why home schooling is better click here for a number of articles!
________________________________________________________________________
Concern over the quality of education in the public schools is a factor in the growing number of families in the United States who choose to home school their children.
________________________________________________________________________
Clearly, home schooling offers the potential for a very different educational environment for children. The question is, Is this an equitable educational experience for the children involved?
________________________________________________________________________
The number of families in the United States who choose to educate their children at home is on the rise. In the late 1970's, there were roughly 12,500 children taught at home. Today, the United States Department of Education estimates that there are half a million home schooled students - approximately one percent of the total school-age population. No one knows exactly how many home schoolers there are because reliable numbers are hard to come by. Not only do states define and track home schoolers differently, but some parents do not comply with state laws requiring them to register their home schooled children. Home school organizations estimate that there are over 1.2 million home schooled children, and the numbers are growing about twenty-five percent annually.
Home schooling is now legal in every state, but states regulate home schoolers at varying degrees. All states expect the home schooling family to file basic information with the state or local education agency. Five states require formal approval from local school boards or superintendents and only ten states require parents to have a high school diploma to teach their children at home. Twenty-nine states have standardized testing requirements.
In a 1990 survey of families who are members of the Home School Legal Defense Association based in Purcelville, Virginia, found that 68% had three or more children, and the mothers did the primary teaching 88% of the time. Additional studies show that most home schoolers come from two-parent solidly middle-class families. (Schnaiberg 25) Early grades are the most popular grade levels among home schoolers. (Clark 773) According to a study by the National Home Education Research Institute, the number of home schooled children tapers off after fifth grade. (Clark 773) Eventually one-third of home school students return to traditional schools, typically during high school. (Kennedy )
There are a variety of different "routines" in the home school. One family may start the day with prayer or a flag salute followed by a traditional scheduled curriculum. Another may throw out the schedule and opt for child-led learning, providing help as the child expresses interest in a topic. In either type of family, the children are likely to take increasing responsibility for choosing and carrying out projects as they mature.
________________________________________________________________________
The stereotype is that most families home school for religious reasons; however, religion is only one of the many reasons. Florida is a state with a large number of families who home school their children. The 1995-96 Florida Education Department survey found that 61% of parents ranked dissatisfaction with public school environment and instruction as the primary motivation for home schooling - topping religion, listed by 21%, for the second year in a row. (Hawkins 57)
Home schooling allows families to incorporate their own
religious beliefs and values into all areas of the curriculum. This is
the primary religious reason for home schooling. Other more secular reasons
include good academics, selective socialization, and safety.
Doubts About the Effectiveness of Public Education
Many parents feel that the instruction they can provide in the home is superior to the educational experience children receive in the public schools. The complaints that home schooling families have about public schools are the same concerns that public educators have. The classes are too large, and too much of the teacher's time is spent on discipline. As Jason Smith, a home-schooled student, puts it, "You don't have to put up with classmates or teachers wasting time on all the students who don't want to be [in class], so I actually get to learn more." (Natale 38)
In the public school, the class usually moves ahead whether all student have mastered skills or not; instruction meets the needs of the average student while the needs of the exceptional learner go unmet. Public schools simply do not have the flexibility and options that home schools have. Because home schools involve only a small number of people, they are more able to achieve their goals than large, crowded educational institutions.
Declining test scores in public schools are a concern for parents. Parents are troubled by what they see and hear, and worry that the schools have low academic standards. As Rachelle Collins, home schooling parents, states, "I don't want [my children] congratulated at school simply for reading at grade level." (Schnaiberg 28) Parents can set higher standards for their children at home and are able to provide more individualized instruction. Parents are able to take into account personality differences, differences in learning style, and learning through life experiences. Interdisciplinary units are much easier to design and implement in the home school than in the traditional setting. Separating disciplines (a block for mathematics, a block for literature, a block for science, a block for history, etc.) provides a very fragmented education. According to Larry Kaseman, director of the Wisconsin Parents Association, "The main attraction of home schooling is that it is a more normal process for learning from the real world from people who care deeply about you." (Clark 773) Home schools are free to focus on what is best for the individual learner and take into account stages, not ages. Also, tutorial instruction at home can be more efficient; students can make more progress in less time since the teacher does not have to try to instruct student of varying ability levels at the same pace. According to David Wagner of the Family Research Council, "You can get done in two hours what public schools take six to accomplish." (Clark 771)
Tabitha Abbott, college student who was home-schooled,
sums up her experiences as follows: "[Home schooling] gave me the
personal attention and chance to move at my own pace that are not easy
to get in public schools. I was never pushed faster or slower than I wanted,
and I felt that what I learned was important to the instructor. I was given
strong self-esteem and never made to feel dumb." (Clark 771)
Academic Performance of Home Schoolers
Does home schooling help children academically? Numerous
studies have been conducted, indicating that home schooled students are
frequently top achievers, scoring higher than the national average on standardized
achievement tests. In 1990, the National Home Education Research Institute
conducted a study of over 2150 home schooling families. The study found
that the average scores of the home school students were at or above the
80th percentile in all categories. The home schoolers' national percentile
mean was 84 for reading, 80 for language, 81 for math, 84 for science,
and 83 for social studies. (Klicka 10) Another study conducted in 1994
by the same institute found in an analysis that 16,000 home schoolers ranked
in the 77th percentile of Iowa Tests of Basic Skills basic battery scores,
the most frequently administered standardized test. (Klicka 10) (An excellent
source of information on other studies is Christopher Klicka's book The
Right to Home School: A Guide to the Law on Parents' Rights in Education.)
Many parents who choose to home school their children do so for religious reasons. They are unhappy with what they consider "unhealthy" and anti-religious values being taught in the schools. (Clark 782) Religion is a major part of American culture, but some parents think public schools fail to take religion seriously. Fear of church and state laws keep them from even mentioning the influence of religion in American life. Instead of working side-by-side with the religious establishment, the educational establishment has attempted to strangle religion's influence. (Jeub 52 ) Instead of recognizing religion as part of our culture, many have fought hard in the courts to make religion illegal in the classroom.
Parents who home school their children are free to incorporate their own religious beliefs and values into all areas of the curriculum. These parents feel that it is very important that their children have the same values and faith. Says Stephen Holtrop, home schooling parent, "Our values...are important to us, and we wish to maximize the chances of our children embracing those values." (Holtrop 75)
Dr. Rousas Rushdoony writes, "To review briefly the
powers which Scripture gives to the family...the first is the control of
children. The control of children is the control of the future. This power
belongs neither to church nor state, nor to the school, but to the family...Education,
a basic power, is given by God to the family as its power and responsibility."
(Blumenfeld 764)
Many critics of home schooling say that home schooled students miss out on the social aspects of school and may lack proper socialization skills. However, in speaking about socialization, parents and educators often neglect to differentiate the kind of socialization they prefer. Not all socialization is good for a child. Parents often feel that the socialization children experience in schools is not necessarily healthy; it may be competitive, intimidating, and even violent. "I do not think gang membership is proper social development," says Donna Nichols-White, home schooling parent. (Gibbs 62) Some social activity and negative peer pressure can lead to experiences with drugs, alcohol, tobacco, premarital sex, guns, and violence. Parents who choose to home school their children are trying to avoid this "negative peer pressure."
This is not to say that home schooled students lack socialization skills. In most areas, whenever there is more than a handful of home schoolers, they get together and organize home school networks and support groups.
A 1988 study by Seattle University researcher Linda Montgomery found that home schoolers were just as involved as conventional students in music and dance lessons, scouting and 4-H clubs, and were even more likely to have jobs such as delivering papers, mowing lawns, or baby-sitting. (Clark 777) Also in 1988, the Washington Home School Research Project found that more than half of the home schooled students surveyed spent 20-30 hours a month in community or volunteer activities. (Clark 777)
Many home school proponents point to the proliferation of book clubs, Little League teams, and joint field trip that have been organized by home schooling support groups. Also many are heavily involved with church activities and organizations. Children engaged in home schooling may spend less time with their peer group and more time with people of different ages. "They're being prepared to function in interpersonal relationships in an adult world. Public schools only prepare you to deal with a peer group," says home schooling mother Sharon Williams. (Kennedy 51)
Limited testing of a self-selected group of home schooled children shows that they are above average in their social and psychological development. (Lines 66) Home schoolers have high levels of sharing, networking, collaboration, and cooperative learning.
Behavioral psychologist Urie Brofenbrenner concluded that
"meaningful human contact" is best accomplished in environments
where few people are around. (Jeub 51) In a 1986 study based on the widely
used Piers-Harris Children's Self-Concept Scale, John Wesley Taylor found
that, on average, home school students ranked in the 91st percentile. (Clark
778; Jeub 51)
A common complaint about public schools is that instruction meets the needs of the average student while the needs of the exceptional learner go unmet. Parents of special needs students want to give their children an opportunity to learn at their own level without being labeled or embarrassed by comparisons to other students their age. Home school families are free to focus on stages, not ages.
Home schooling can give gifted students additional time to explore their academic interests and talents. In many schools, tight budgets have resulted in elimination of gifted programs, and when they do survive they after often branded as elitist. Lorraine Hoyt, parent of gifted children whom she home schools, says her children would have been lonelier at school - surrounded by others they were supposed to feel connected to but didn't - than they are at home. Rather than send them someplace where they would risk feeling ashamed of the gifts they possess, she decided to help them build the self-confidence they will need to fend for themselves in the real world. (Schnaiberg 31)
Also in the category of exceptional learners are those with learning disabilities. Parents who work with these students know more about the children's limitations, and these students need not suffer the embarrassment and frustration of comparisons to other students in the class. They can work at their own pace and not be made to feel dumb as a result.
Families with children who suffer from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder often find satisfaction in home schooling. It is difficult to meet the needs of these students in a typical classroom, but at home parents can plan shorter instructional periods to match shorter attention spans. The students can learn without the constant reminders to sit still or pay attention. (Dahm 70)
Other home school advocates are skeptical of teacher-bestowed
labels, such as "learning disabled" and "gifted and talented."
Oregon home schooling activist Grace Llewelyn recalled the girl whose parents
had once been denied permission to home school her because the public schools
had identified her as learning disabled. Her parents fought and won permission
to proceed. Three years later, after she took the state's mandatory assessment
test, the girl was told she could not be home schooled anymore because
she was gifted and would not get the special attention she needed at home.
(Clark 773)
Many home schoolers also express the complaint that public schools gear children to the needs of business at the expense of fostering individuality. Schools are chastised for putting too much emphasis on consumerism, conformity, excessive devotion to one's job, numerical performance measures, and social-class distinctions.
Home schooling families often cite the historical nature of their educational system. Home schooling was the norm before the advent of American public schools in the mid-nineteenth century and the enactment of compulsory schooling laws in all states by 1918. These families consider public schools an unnatural setting for the education of youth.
Some home schooling families consider themselves unschoolers. Distinct from other home schoolers, unschoolers generally believe children learn best when left on their own. They think the best learning occurs when children want or need to learn something, not when they are forced. Learning is not a product of teaching. (Schnaiberg 26)
________________________________________________________________________
ARGUMENTS AGAINST HOME SCHOOLING
Home schooling is not popular with many educators who worry that the average parent is not knowledgeable enough in all areas to teach at home. There is legitimate concern over the requirements - or rather, lack of them - for parents who home school their children. Home schooling is now legal in all fifty states, but there are very different regulations set up by each state. The vast majority (40) do not require parents to have any specific qualifications for teaching. While 29 states require students to have regular evaluations or take standardized tests, many parents are not required to turn over the results of these evaluations to anyone. Some states do set cutoff scores that home schoolers have to meet. But even in those states, if the student fails to make the established score, the parents generally have a year or so to improve. In the eyes of many teachers and administrators, the apparent lack of quality control makes home schooling a dangerously deregulated enterprise. (Schnaiberg 25) Both the National Association of Elementary School Principals and the National Education Association have recently adopted resolutions critical of home schooling.
It is true that parents may hire tutors for areas they are not especially skilled in, but this does not always happen, and students may not receive proper education in these areas. For instance, one home school student says she has little interest in algebra, and the parents are not requiring her to learn it. Thus home schoolers may lack some essential skills. (Schnaiberg 25)
A frequently asked question about home schooling is, "Does
home schooling help children academically?" There is considerable
disagreement on this question. While states that require testing have a
multitude of data showing that the tested home schooled children are above
average, this information may not be wholly accurate. The information from
these sources may reflect only a select group of home schoolers, as not
all families cooperate with state testing requirements, and private efforts
rely on voluntary information. No one has undertaken research involving
controls that indicate whether the same children would do better, worse,
or the same in a public school classroom. (Lines 65)
Among public educators, the absence of social interaction is a major objection to home schooling. A home schooled child, it is felt, is not exposed to the diversity of beliefs and backgrounds that a child would encounter in the public schools and is deprived of an opportunity for socialization. John Dewey himself wrote that, "The teacher is engaged not simply in the training of individuals but in the formation of the proper social life." (Clark 780)
In a survey of 115 educators, more than 80% believed home schoolers were at a disadvantage in the social development of the child, and 59% believed that a disadvantage of home schools was the lack of competition in the child's academic and social world. (Clark 775)
Janet Bass, a spokeswoman for the American Federation of Teachers, asks, "What about socialization? Kids do learn from other kids, especially since teachers nowadays are moving away from chalk and talk drills and moving to more cooperative class discussions." (Clark 773)
William Martin, director of communications for the National Education Association, says children get a lot in a class setting that they cannot get at home, such as help from other children, help from teachers trained in dealing with different learning styles, and a chance to mix with kids of diverse backgrounds. (Clark 773)
While many parents opt to home school because they want to avoid negative socialization, there are those families who choose to home school because they prefer to avoid diversity, "David Koresh-types," as one state official calls them, who keep their children home because they don't want them to mix with children of other races or faiths. (Schnaiberg 25)
Joe Nathan, director of the Center for School Change at the University of Minnesota, says he has met many people for whom "home schooling has been wonderful. But I've also talked to far-right ideologues in Idaho who want it to promote worldviews that are essentially Nazi. I've talked to home schoolers in Minnesota who are racist, anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish, as well as members of a far-left lesbian commune near Grand Falls, Oregon, who want their own schools" to promote anti-male views. (Clark 772)
Says Gary Marx, senior associate executive director at the American Association of School Administrators, "Much of the motivation of home schooling is to escape the diversity of society. While the parents may seem to be saving their children from confronting diversity in thinking, race, economic status and social skills, in the long run these young people will still have to go into the world. And these kids later will feel deprived." (Clark 775)
Home school parents counter that their children are involved
in other activities. In response to this, Thomas Shannon, executive director
of the National School Boards Association, the after-school activities
do not make up the difference. "When you send them out to soccer and
scouting, you're usually sending them out to a very select group of people
who share, to a considerable extent, your own values. That's a controlled
group. The problem is, when they finally do get to working they won't be
in that controlled group." (Gibbs 64)
According to the Montana School Boards Association, "We see a lot of the kids returning to public schools at the junior high and high school level whom I suspect are not satisfied. They want to be with other kids, and they're a discipline problem because they're not as easy to control. We also have the problem of where to place these kids because they have not transcripts or assessments. One parent wanted his kid to return as a freshman, but we knew he should be a sophomore because he was bored to tears. In another case, the parents wanted the kid to be a sophomore, but he was working only at the eighth-grade level. Parents don't have a fix on how their kids compare with other students." (Clark 779)
________________________________________________________________________
COOPERATION BETWEEN HOME SCHOOLS AND PUBLIC SCHOOLS
In school districts across the country, a growing number of home schoolers would like to participate in at least some activities at traditional schools. Some want scholastic benefits; others want extracurricular benefits for social reasons. Some parents feel that because they pay taxes, their children should have access to public school band, athletics, and classes. (Kennedy 53) Some communities are open to those kinds of arrangements, but many have resisted. Says one opponent of home schoolers gaining access to public school benefits, "It's not fair for them to want the best of what the public school has to offer without paying the dues." (Hawkins 57) The sports issue gets the most attention, because this is one area of activity that families cannot easily duplicate as their children reach high school age.
. Alaska, California, Idaho, and Iowa are among the states allowing access to classrooms. Colorado, Illinois, Oregon, and Washington grant access to after school activities. Driver education classes are particularly popular among home schoolers in Iowa. Massachusetts recently agreed to a one-year trial period where local school boards decide whether home schoolers can compete in interscholastic sports. Most states resist the idea of home schoolers taking courses or participating in extracurricular activities. In Pennsylvania a federal court ruled that the constitutional rights of students who were not allowed to play sports were not violated because the district could not verify their grades and attendance. In Florida, the issue of home schoolers playing on public school athletic teams is still being debated. The Florida High School Athletic Activities Association banned nonstudents on the theory that "a student cannot represent what he does not attend." (Hawkins 58) However, many parents say their children are interested in playing sports in college and, "In the field of college ball, college scouts come to look at the kids in high school, so [my son] has to play there also." (Hawkins 57)
In several communities, public funds support special centers for home schoolers. In Washington state, for example, the Home-Link Technology Center provides computer instruction to 300 home schoolers and their parents. The center also offers field trips, sponsors a student chess team, and counsels high school age students on meeting graduation requirements. The center is financed through state education dollars, staffed by school district teachers, and overseen by a parents' board. (Hawkins 58)
________________________________________________________________________
Among the strengths and advantages of home schooling are the following: A child can learn at his own pace, when he is ready, using the learning styles and approaches that work for him. Without the limitations of a conventional classroom, he can pursue special interests in depth, think creatively, and make the most of his strengths, abilities, and talents. Within the security of his own home and family, he can work one-on-one with a parent who cares deeply about him and gives him strong support. He does not have to contend with either the competition and peer pressure of a classroom or the stress of trying to learn something before he is ready. He has the opportunity to learn from direct experience with the real world, to interact with a wide range of people of different ages, to be of service to others, to participate in real activities that make sense and to discover how to learn in his own way.
Some concerns over home schooling are that it may: deprive the child of important social experiences; isolate students from others social/racial/ethnic groups; deny students the full range of curriculum experiences and materials; be provided by non-certified and unqualified persons, not permit effective assessment of academic standards of quality; not provide the accurate diagnosis of and planning for meeting the needs of children with special talents, learning difficulties and other conditions requiring atypical educational programs.
According to Leslie Dahm, who works with the Home Instruction Program in Iowa, "We do not recommend that parents home school as a way to solve problems. For the majority of families, in fact, home schooling is not a workable situation. It requires major lifestyle changes that many families are not able or willing to make." (Dahm 70)
Says Michael A. Resnick, senior associate executive director of the National School Boards Association, "Home schooling can benefit a small percentage of a nation of 45 million students. But most parents are not educationally able to provide a curriculum and don't have the instructional capability. Those who are doing it seem to be doing well, but there's no way of comparing it with how those kids would have done in public schools." (Clark 773)
________________________________________________________________________
When I began this research, I had some strong feelings
against home schooling. As I found out more about it, though, my opinion
changed some. There are many reasons parents choose to home school their
children, reasons that, as a future educator, I can appreciate. Individualized
instruction is the goal of all educators. Everyone wants students to have
instruction that is best suited for them and, when properly administered,
home schooling can be a wonderful benefit for the students that are receiving
this type of instruction. I do not believe that avoiding negative socialization
is a bad thing, but when families choose to home school their children
in order to avoid diversity, this is not an appropriate reason to home
school. Thus, my conclusion is this: When undertaken for appropriate reasons,
and when administered by a qualified instructor, home schooling does not
hinder the academic or social progress of students.