Today WORLD Magazine posted an article listing our policy recommendations alongside a response by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). The article’s author, Daniel Devine, did not offer us space to respond, so we will do so below, after a few introductory points.
WORLD Magazine has not been upfront about the fact that its editor-in-chief, Marvin Olasky, holds the Distinguished Chair of Journalism and Public Policy at Patrick Henry College. Michael Farris is both the Chancellor of Patrick Henry College and the Chairman of HSLDA. This conflict of interest on the part of WORLD Magazine is not mentioned here.
That aside, we are happy to read HSLDA’s response to our policy recommendations and hope for the chance to engage with them further on this topic. HSLDA and CRHE’s positions on homeschooling policy differ because they serve two different audiences: HSLDA’s mission is “to defend and advance the constitutional right of parents to direct the education of their children” (emphasis added), while CRHE’s goal is “advocating for homeschooled children.” In theory, though, policy recommendations should be able to benefit both homeschool parents and homeschooled children.
However, HSLDA’s response to our policy recommendations makes it clear that they are advocating for the interests of their members—homeschooling parents—at the expense of the interests of homeschooled children. We do not believe that this is a positive framing for homeschooled children, who may not have chosen homeschooling as their educational method and who may not have a voice of their own.
As we mentioned in our first statement to WORLD, we have been working with HSLDA on their child abuse pages, and we hope to find more common ground in the future. Unfortunately, we remain troubled by HSLDA’s insistence on minimizing the problem of abuse and neglect in homeschooling circles and prioritizing homeschool parents’ convenience over homeschooled children’s safety.
State notification
Coalition for Responsible Home Education: “We recommend requiring parents to provide annual notification of their intent to homeschool. This notice should include at a minimum children’s names, ages, and grade levels, as well as the names of the parents and family’s address.”
Home School Legal Defense Association: “HSLDA is pro-homeschool freedom; we believe that parents as the natural God-given teachers should be allowed to homeschool their children. Most states already require notification, but many don’t, and HSLDA advocates to keep it that way.”
Response:
We believe that homeschooling is a legitimate way to educate children, and that therefore parents—as legitimate educators—should take steps to ensure the welfare of the children they are teaching. Notifying local or state officials when a child is being homeschooled is in no way an imposition on homeschool freedom. Instead, notification provides a safeguard for homeschooled children who might otherwise fall through the cracks, as well as protecting children’s freedom to receive an education—be that through public schools, private schools, or homeschooling.
Finally, it’s worth noting that HSLDA does not merely advocate for those states that do not require notification “to keep it that way,” it has also been active in ongoing efforts to repeal notification requirements in those states that do have them. One such example is Iowa, which repealed its notification requirement last year with a bill shepherded through the legislature by HSLDA.
Parental education
CRHE: “We recommend that the parent providing primary instruction be required to have at least a high school diploma or GED.”
HSLDA: “Most parents in the United States have a high school diploma (85 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau). HSLDA has yet to see research indicating that children of homeschool parents who do not have a high school diploma or its equivalent score lower on standardized tests than children of graduates. In fact, the only research of which we are aware shows that they score similarly.”
Response:
HSLDA correctly points out that the number of parents who do not have a high school diploma or equivalent is comparatively small. NCES data shows that 11% of homeschooled children had no parents with a high school diploma or its equivalent in 2011. However, we do not believe that this segment of the homeschool population is unimportant simply because the percentage is relatively small: roughly 195,000 children are being homeschooled by parents who have less than a high school education.
In the late 1990s, HSLDA hired researcher Lawrence Rudner to conduct a massive study of homeschooled students’ academic performance. That study, the results of which were released in 1999, found that children homeschooled by parents without college degrees scored twenty percentile points lower than those homeschooled by parents with college degrees. More recently, an HSLDA-promoted study by Brian Ray published in 2010 also found that children homeschooled by parents with college degrees perform better academically than those homeschooled by parents without college degrees. In other words, we know conclusively that parental education plays a significant role in homeschooled children’s academic achievement. This holds true even among more privileged and involved homeschoolers, who composed the majority of Rudner’s and Ray’s samples.
Even outside of homeschooling circles, parental educational achievement is highly correlated with higher levels of income and standardized test scores. Dr. Janet Currie, Chair of the Economics Department at Princeton University, has written on the impact of maternal education on children’s test scores in multiple papers. In a 1995 paper on children’s cognitive achievement, she and co-author Duncan Thomas wrote, “the evidence is clear: maternal income and education do affect children’s test scores, even after controlling for [background factors].” In the homeschooling world, mothers are usually their children’s most important academic influence: it would follow that their educational success depends upon their mothers’ ability to instruct them.
But for all the demonstrated importance of parental education, WORLD magazine actually incompletely quoted our policy recommendations: we think that homeschool parents who do not yet have their GED should be allowed to homeschool—provided that they do so under the supervision of a certified teacher or other similarly qualified individual, either indefinitely or until a GED is obtained. This provision is similar to models in Ohio, Washington, and North Dakota.
Subject matter
CRHE: “We recommend requiring parents to provide instruction (or facilitate learning) in the same range of subjects (e.g. English, math, science, history, etc.) taught in public schools in the state in which they live. Parents should not be required to use the same textbooks or methods as public schools. Because homeschooling allows for positive flexibility and child-led learning, we oppose requiring students to be at grade level in each subject.”
HSLDA: “[We recommend the] same ‘range’ of subjects, yes, but not exactly what is taught in public school. HSLDA has consistently opposed the state setting what must be taught in each subject. But CRHE’s proposal is already the case is almost every state—even in states like New Jersey or Texas that don’t require notification, there’s almost always a list of subjects that must be taught, or a requirement that ‘equivalent’ instruction has to be given.”
Response:
We are pleased that HSLDA supports our recommendation that homeschool parents be required to provide instruction in the same range of subjects taught in public school, but are disappointed that HSLDA has minimized the number of states that currently do not require this. Thirteen states allow parents to homeschool without requiring them to provide instruction in any specific subject. These parents are not held to any sort of “equivalent instruction” requirements, and are not required to have their children’s academic progress assessed. In these states homeschool parents can legally neglect to educate their children in science, or math, or history, or all of these.
We believe that homeschooled children in every state should have access to a well-rounded education, and we hope HSLDA will work with us to change the law in those states with inadequate or nonexistent subject requirements.
Record-keeping
CRHE: “Parents should be required to maintain academic records for each child they homeschool. Parents should be required to submit copies of each child’s birth certificate, immunization records, and annual assessment to be kept on file by either the local school district or state department of education or, when applicable, an umbrella school.”
HSLDA: “We have always recommended to our members that they keep good academic records for their own legal protection, no matter what state they live in. We would strongly oppose requiring parents to submit sensitive information such as birth certificates and immunization records to the government.”
Response:
We believe parents should keep good academic records not merely for their own legal protection but to ensure their children’s academic success. Homeschool parents are responsible for writing their children’s high school transcripts, a task that is difficult when good records have not been kept. Furthermore, the records homeschooling parents keep are often the only evidence homeschooled children have that they have received an education.
Keeping basic academic records should not be optional for homeschool parents, as these records are not optional for their children’s success in adulthood. We would like to see these records submitted to the local school district annually and kept on file, subject to the same privacy requirements as other children’s academic records, in order to ensure that homeschool parents are keeping the required records and to ensure that homeschool graduates, including those whose parents might withhold these documents in an effort to control them, have access to them.
We recommend requiring parents to submit their children’s birth certificates to the local school district or the state department of education in order to verify the child’s age and ensure that the child has not been kidnapped or trafficked. Sadly, there are numerous cases where kidnapped or trafficked children have been homeschooled in order to keep them from detection. If homeschool parents are required to provide notice and submit the children’s birth certificates, this could be avoided. As for immunization records, we believe homeschooling parents should be held to the same vaccination requirements as all other parents, which includes submitting immunization records or exemptions.
Finally, we find it odd that HSLDA objects to requiring parents to submit their children’s birth certificate “to the government” when these documents are issued by the government.
Assessment
CRHE: “Students’ academic progress should be evaluated and reported annually. Parents should be allowed to choose between a number of different assessment mechanisms, including standardized tests and portfolio reviews. Failure to make adequate academic progress should result in intervention.”
HSLDA: “We oppose submission of annual evaluations for homeschool students, as do a majority of states in the United States. However, for states that do require assessments, we agree with CRHE that the assessments should ‘take into account the flexible and innovative nature of homeschooling,’ and we agree that parents should have a choice of options.”
Response:
At issue here is accountability. While many homeschool parents provide their children with an excellent education, others fail to provide instruction in even basic subjects. In states without an assessment requirement, there is nothing to protect these children’s interest in receiving an education. Half of all states (25) require some form of assessments for homeschooled children, but 7 of these states do not require that the assessments be submitted or have no minimum score and 11 of these states offer additional homeschool options with no assessment requirement. We believe that every homeschooled child should have access to an education, and that basic accountability is an important part of ensuring that access.
Stories from homeschool alumni testify to the importance of accountability. One homeschool graduate writes of being homeschooled in Pennsylvania, where yearly assessments kept her and her mother motivated and on track, and then moving to New Jersey, where “things fell apart” due to the lack of assessments or accountability of any sort. HSLDA may urge parents to see accountability as a violation of parents’ freedom to homeschool, but not all homeschooling parents see it that way. “Opposition to oversight and accountability within education seems foolish,” explained one such parent.
Protections for at-risk children
CRHE: “We recommend barring from homeschooling parents convicted of child abuse, sexual offenses, or other crimes that would disqualify them from employment as a school teacher. We also recommend creating a process for flagging at-risk children, such as those in families with a troubling history of child protective services involvement, for intervention or additional monitoring. Finally, we recommend that the annual assessment requirement be conducted by mandatory reporters such as certified teachers; these individuals should be trained in how to recognize signs of abuse and how to report suspicions of maltreatment.”
HSLDA: “We oppose this blanket sledgehammer approach in favor of a more individualized response. As an example, I worked with a family a few years ago where the mother had been convicted of child abuse. The juvenile court had the child attend public school for a year, then allowed the mother to begin homeschooling under court supervision for two more years. When it was obvious that the previous issues had been dealt with, the court closed the case.”
Rebuttal:
There is no way to institute an individualized response without a system in place to identify families at additional risk of abuse or neglect. HSLDA has in the past opposed efforts to create such a system by flagging families with prior child abuse convictions or investigations for additional monitoring. Indeed, HSLDA is on record above supporting the status quo in states with no notification requirements for homeschooling. If parents need not notify anyone when they begin homeschooling, how are those with prior child abuse convictions or other risk factors to be identified for extra monitoring? As we know and as HSLDA surely knows as well, homeschooled children whose parents are convicted sex offenders or child abusers, or whose families have a troubling history of social services involvement, are at higher risk of child abuse. Only two states currently offer any protections for these at-risk homeschooled children.
We have spent over a year researching and analyzing cases of abuse and neglect in homeschooling settings in an effort to identify common themes and create policies that will most effectively protect at-risk homeschooled children. In many cases, children have beenabused or neglected by parents who homeschool specifically to conceal their maltreatment. These families often begin homeschooling after an unsubstantiated child abuse investigation following a report by a teacher. In some cases these childrenhave died. Homeschooled children have also been abused by parents who were convicted sex offenders or by parents who had previously had a child removed due to abuse. Homeschooled children’s interest in a safe and non-abusive upbringing must be protected.
Public school services
CRHE: “We recommend allowing homeschooled students to enroll part time in their local public schools and to participate in extracurriculars, including sports. Public schools should have cooperative policies for awarding credit and assisting with the transition for homeschooled students who want to transfer in.”
HSLDA: “Traditionally, HSLDA has been neutral on this issue. We have members who are passionately in favor of more access and members who are completely opposed. However, if a state does allow access, we will advocate on behalf of our members if they are discriminated against.”
Response:
There is no reason why HSLDA members who oppose access to public school services should block access for homeschool students who do wish to be involved. Those not interested in public school extracurriculars need not participate. Making educational decisions for your own children is one thing, but making educational decisions for other people’s children is something HSLDA claims to oppose. We believe that homeschooled children benefit from access to public school extracurriculars and classes and see working toward public school access in every state as part of advocating on behalf of homeschooled children.
Public funding
CRHE: “Public school districts should receive funds for services provided to homeschooled students. State funding should be made available to fund oversight of homeschooling.”
HSLDA: “We would be in favor of public school districts receiving funds for services provided to homeschool students. We would be opposed to school districts getting extra funding just to further regulate homeschooling.”
Response:
We are pleased that HSLDA is in favor of public school districts receiving funds for services provided to homeschooled students, a system which expands homeschooled students’ options and is already in place in states like Idaho and New Mexico. However, we are concerned about their unwillingness to fund oversight of homeschooling. One of HSLDA’s regular criticisms of school districts providing oversight for homeschooling has been that districts do not have the resources to effectively monitor homeschooling families. It is inconsistent to oppose adequately funding school districts and then turn around and oppose oversight on the basis of inadequate funding.
Conclusion
Most of HSLDA’s rejections of our proposed recommendations seem to be based on the principle of maintaining the status quo. The insistence on this principle belies the fact that HSLDA has been working to roll back homeschool oversight for decades now, and it obscures the reality that HSLDA has created that status quo—they are the ones who prevented oversight provisions from being enacted in those states that do not have them. Further, HSLDA is actively lobbying for less oversight in states that already have it, such as in Pennsylvania, and describing mere calls for research on the efficacy of current laws, such as HJ-92 in Virginia, as a “faith-based attack”.
In both this and last week’s WORLD magazine article on this topic, HSLDA has pushed back against calls for oversight by arguing that the majority of homeschoolers are fine under the current laws. This may be true for many homeschoolers, but it is not true for all homeschoolers. We are contacted regularly about abusive or neglectful homeschooling situations and are in contact with large numbers of homeschool alumni who grew up in bad homeschooling environments. There are homeschooled children today, as we write and as you read, who are being denied access to an education, or abused without access to mandatory reporters. These children need protections. We find it very strange indeed that a resolutely Christian organization like HSLDA is spending so much time caring for its current flock and so little time considering the stray lamb.
Last Updated: 20 October, 2023 by CRHE
How My Parents’ Homeschooling Methods Empowered Me to Follow My Dreams
I recently strolled down homeschool memory lane, googling the titles of fondly-remembered novels, asking my mom for an inventory of her closet stuffed with educational board games, recalling how one co-op teacher tied calculus to cryptography. My amble through the past reminded me that successfully homeschooling children — as my mom did with my sister and me — takes work, skill, creativity, and drive. But it also reminded me of the myriad resources that can facilitate the sort of responsible homeschooling I experienced — and the importance of sharing those methods, mindsets, and materials with current or prospective homeschooling parents, as I hope to do here.
Before describing how my family homeschooled, I want to note that even successful homeschooling looks different for different families. Indeed, one advantage of homeschooling is the ability to tailor education to kids’ individual needs, personalities, interests, and learning styles. This post should not be seen as prescriptive or limiting, though I do hope it will furnish ideas and motivation.
I should also provide my “homeschooling worked for me” bona fides, along with a caveat. After being homeschooled K-12, I attended and thrived at Princeton, graduating from there with highest honors. I am now a Ph.D. candidate in the humanities. However, I hope readers will not interpret what follows as “how to homeschool your child for the Ivy League” or “how to homeschool your child for a career in academia.” There’s no way to ensure selective college admissions or pre-ordain a child’s career path, and more importantly, I don’t think “homeschooling for the Ivy League” is a healthy ethos. I believe that homeschooling responsibly entails pursuing academic excellence, encouraging kids to dream big, and supporting those dreams — and where that leads will be different for every child.
So how did we homeschool? My mom describes us as “unschooler wannabes” prior to high school. (More on high school in a bit.) We were “looking to be as flexible and freedom-loving as we could be without sacrificing the basics,” she told me. “In fact, ‘cover the basics, pursue their passions’ came to be the operative phrase.” Since we mostly followed a traditional academic year schedule, she used our summer vacation to comb through catalogs — Timberdoodle was a favorite — and research next year’s materials. Mom always tried to place large orders by July 4, which gave her time to make changes if something disappointed her or her kids once it arrived. When considering new options for the upcoming year, she gravitated toward books and curricula that sounded “playful” rather than dry and boring.
All this ordering and experimenting was expensive, but not prohibitively so: our yearly homeschool budget was around $1,500 during the 1990s, not counting the (significant) opportunity cost of my mom giving up her previous career as a film animator.
As part of our daily routine, my mom, sister, and I kicked the morning off with a game — usually involving math, wordplay, or critical thinking. Favorite start-the-day games included Quiddler, Set, Yahtzee, Bethump’d with Words, Upwords, Oh Scrud!, Connections, Triology, Fictionary (no materials required other than a dictionary), educational games from Aristoplay, and educational versions of the game Concentration adapted to our unit study of the moment – e.g., matching presidents and first ladies if we were doing a unit on presidents.
Following our game, we usually had a math period that involved both independent textbook work and puzzles or word problems that we did together. Go-to resources for math included Family Math, Miquon, 30 Wild and Wonderful Math Stories, and word problems drawn from books we were reading or whatever unit study we were doing (more on units in a moment). Beginning around middle school, we also used Saxon for cover-the-basics, which worked well for me personally, though it was less successful for other homeschoolers I knew.
After math came language arts, which also involved both independent work and activities we did together. Much of my language arts education happened as I developed passions for reading and writing on my own — voraciously gobbling novels, scribbling stories, and writing a history column for a local newsletter. (We owned mountains of books, often purchased used at library sales or garage sales, and spent ample time at the library.) But we also followed curricula for writing and grammar. Favorite resources included the Wordsmith series, Learning Language Arts through Literature, and the Editor in Chief series. My mom says she gleaned additional ideas and activities from Any Child Can Write, Books Children Love, and If You’re Trying to Teach Kids How To Write…. One of my favorite writing exercises, though I am not sure where we got the idea, was the “wild write.”
After language arts, we shifted our focus entirely to whatever unit study we were currently doing. (Though my mom did not share Valerie Bendt’s main reason for homeschooling, she says she got the idea and some of the structure for unit studies from her.) Unit studies meant immersing ourselves for approximately six weeks in a topic that my sister or I chose: checking out stacks of library books on that subject, play-acting or building or experimenting, exploring relevant museums and cultural centers, sampling new cuisine where appropriate. Subjects we chose at various stages of homeschooling included baby animals, aviation, the French Revolution (including a memorable role-played Marie Antoinette trial), the Russian Revolution (I was obsessed with the Romanovs), and dinosaurs.
For our final unit of the year, my sister and I always wrote, illustrated, and bound our own books — mine tended to be historical fiction and mysteries — with my mom using Bendt’s Creating Books with Children as a guide. Writing and crafting these books every year remains one of my favorite childhood memories, and I still enjoy pulling the final products off the shelf and rereading them when I visit my parents.
We studied other subjects on certain days of the week rather than every day; these electives included French, Latin, and logic. My mom had studied French and Latin in high school and college, which made things much easier, though we were also able to learn some Spanish from another homeschool mom who was a native speaker. For French, we used Learnables and read French novels once we were able to do so, including translations of books like Harry Potter. Favorite logic books included The First Honest Book about Lies and books from the Critical Thinking Company. I do not recommend the dry and error-riddled Latin curriculum we used (by the Logos School), but I did enjoy this supplementary Latin book.
A quick note on differentiation: though my two-years-younger sister and I did most of the hands-on, interactive activities — games, brainteasers, creative writing exercises — together with our mom, our use of more traditional curricula like Saxon and Wordsmith for the basics of the three Rs allowed us to use different books and therefore be on different levels in these areas, reflecting both our age gap and our varying learning paces. Our approach to foreign languages, logic, and unit studies lent itself to learning together, which we usually did, but we sometimes differentiated in these areas too — e.g., I remember researching quasars at length during an astronomy unit, while my sister did a shorter project about Pluto.
Outside-the-home extracurricular activities were also part of our weekly schedule; these included piano and figure skating lessons, drama classes, choir, summer programs in creative writing, and play groups when we were younger. By high school, I was also doing a lot of self-directed experiential learning, such as giving tours of our state Capitol building to local school groups, interviewing veterans for an oral history project, and serving as a page in our state legislature. Finding these activities was not difficult but took initiative — sometimes simply calling an office or group and asking if there was a role for an interested teenage volunteer.
High school also differed from K-8 in terms of my class schedule. To her great credit, my mom wanted to ensure that we would be able attend quality colleges if we chose that path, so we planned grades 9-12 according to college admissions offices’ expectations for a rigorous high school program. (For instance, based on what seems to be the “rigorous” standard, we added a separate year of geometry, which meant abandoning Saxon for a year and using Harold Jacobs geometry.) We continued some of the same traditions that defined K-8, such as starting the morning off with a game, but otherwise my schedule would shift from day to day depending on my outside-the-home activities and the work I needed to complete for my external classes.
Indeed, external classes dominated my high school academic education. I took correspondence courses in essay-writing through Johns Hopkins CTY, calculus with a local homeschool co-op teacher (who used Saxon as a textbook but added his own creative cryptographic flair), French with the local Alliance Française, chemistry correspondence courses through UNL, and several online AP classes from Pennsylvania Homeschoolers. I highly recommend that last item in particular; in addition to preparing me very well for the AP exams, the PA Homeschoolers classes featured delightfully offbeat learning exercises — we became burger tycoons in AP Economics, for example — and vibrant online discussions, allowing me to connect (albeit virtually) with academically-focused homeschoolers from around the world.
All of this pre-planning streamlined the process of applying to college as a homeschooler, which my mom had rightly recognized would be a major undertaking. As she put it, “Suddenly I was the principal, guidance counselor, and sometimes the teacher.” To ensure that I had solid applications, we used Loretta Heuer’s excellent Homeschoolers Guide to Portfolios and Transcripts as a primary resource, supplemented with Cafi Cohen’s And What About College?. Though not specifically for homeschoolers, we also used Michele Hernández’s A is for Admission in order glean guidelines on essay-writing, activity lists, and competitive admissions. In addition to providing all the standard components of a college application that a high school would normally provide (transcript, guidance counselor’s letter, test scores), my mom wrote a “homeschool profile” explaining how and why we homeschooled. I also included a portfolio of some of my creative writing.
Though my external classes provided grades and letters of recommendation from non-parental teachers — crucial for homeschool college applications — I also needed more outside verification, so I took several SAT IIs and AP tests at a local public high school, in addition to the more widely-taken PSAT and SAT I. To prepare for these tests, I used free guides and practice tests from the College Board, as well as guidebooks from the Princeton Review and Kaplan. I also enjoyed a quirky SAT prep book called Up Your Score.
My homeschool experience was not perfect. Despite some of the fun science units we did in the early years (Bernoulli’s Principle with paper airplanes!), I missed out on the full-scale lab experience in high school, and I ended up with an unscientific biology textbook due to recommendations from some other local homeschoolers. I also wish I had experienced more unstructured peer socialization during my teen years. But as I learn more about the range of homeschool and public/private school experiences, I am more convinced than ever that I was incredibly lucky to receive the K-12 education that I did.
During our recent “interview,” I asked my mom about her mindset and attitude during our homeschool years. She mentioned that it took confidence and enthusiasm, words that stand out as I reflect on what went right. My mom was not arrogant — she acknowledged her limitations and sought help where she needed it — but she felt comfortable cobbling together curricula and methods based on what her kids needed, and on what suited her own personal teaching style. She also read widely within homeschool “theory” — everything from John Holt to the Colfaxes to Susan Wise Bauer — but, precisely because of this eclecticism, avoided dogmatically following any one figure or philosophy. She had her own vision, informed by her kids’ vision.
Homeschooling is not for everyone, but it worked well for us. My family’s way of homeschooling is not for everyone, but I hope this description of what we did sheds some light on what homeschooling responsibly can look like. The effects, after all, are long-lasting: I can still kick butt in a game of SET or Bethump’d With Words — and when you have lots of free time, ask me about the Romanovs.
Last Updated: 23 March, 2021 by Rachel Coleman
The Homeschool Math Gap: The Data
The question of how homeschooled students fare academically has been raised countless times over the past three-and-a-half decades. Numerous volunteer-based studies have compared homeschooled students’ percentile scores on standardized tests with the national average and other studies have approached the issue from other angles, but few researchers have asked a different question: Does homeschool performance vary from discipline to discipline? Do homeschooled students tend to score better in some academic subjects than others?
In 2013, researchers Robert Kunzman and Milton Gaither reviewed the extant research on homeschooling and found evidence of a “math gap.”
Frost and Morris (1988) found in a study of 74 Illinois homeschoolers that, controlling for family background variables, homeschoolers scored above average in all subjects but math. Wartes, similarly, found that homeschoolers in Washington state scored well above average in reading and vocabulary but slightly below average in math computation (Ray & Wartes, 1991). The HSLDA-sponsored studies also found that homeschoolers do comparatively less well in math than in language-based subjects (Ray, 1997a; Rudner, 1999). Likewise Belfield (2005), in a well-designed study that controlled for family background variables, found that homeschooled seniors taking the SAT scored slightly better than predicted on the SAT verbal and slightly worse on the SAT math. A similar study of ACT mathematics scores likewise found a slight mathematical disadvantage for homeschoolers (Quaqish, 2007). Given this persistent corroboration across two decades we might conclude, tentatively, that there may be at least a modest homeschooling effect on academic achievement—namely that it tends to improve students’ verbal and weaken their math capacities.
The existence of a homeschool math gap is not surprising. It is easier for the average parent to teach children to read and let them loose on the library than it is for them to teach a sequential and increasingly challenging math curriculum. Few parents are qualified to teach higher-level math, and tutors or community college classes can be expensive. In many cases, homeschooled teens are expected to teach themselves algebra or calculus out of a textbook without the aid of any kind of teacher or adult help—something most children likely cannot do successfully.
Indeed, researchers Richard Medlin and Robin Blackmer found in a study conducted in 2000 that:
Homeschooled children were more intrinsically motivated in reading and less intrinsically motivated in math than children attending a conventional school using grades to evaluate students’ performance.
In other words, Medlin and Blackmer found that the homeschooled children they surveyed had less intrinsic motivation to learn math than other children. This is likely related to the relative difficulty homeschool parents have teaching math as compared to other subjects.
Testing data from Arkansas and Alaska, the only states to collect and release homeschool testing data, and studies of homeschool graduates enrolled in various colleges provide further verification of the homeschool math gap. In this article, we will survey the Arkansas and Alaska data, look briefly at the SAT and ACT, and then turn to how this math gap affects homeschool alumni’s college attendance and choice of major.
Arkansas, Alaska, and the Math Gap
All homeschooled students in Arkansas are tested annually, and the scores are released to the public in annual reports. In addition to providing the average homeschool scores by grade, these annual reports break down the scores by subject and compare homeschool scores to public school scores. The chart below includes homeschool percentile scores in reading and in math, listed by grade for the years 1997 to 2004. The reading scores are in blue and the math scores are in red.
We find that homeschooled students regularly score ten or more percentile points better in reading than in math. This is an especially interesting finding when we consider that Arkansas public schooled students tend to score better in math than in reading (you can see this by reading the public school comparisons made in the state’s annual homeschool reports).
Alaska is another state with publicly available data. The majority of Alaska’s homeschooled students are enrolled in the state’s popular correspondence programs, which offer money for educational expenses and allow parents to homeschool just as they normally would, requiring only quarterly progress reports and annual testing. Each correspondence school releases its data to the public. In the chart below, the correspondence schools’ scores are averaged and compared to the public school average.
As the graph above shows, 6% more of the homeschooled students in Alaska’s correspondence programs are proficient in reading than their public school counterparts, but 6% fewer of the homeschoolers are proficient in math. This gap persists for every demographic.
We know that homeschooled students have a harder time with math than with reading, but how do their scores compare to public school students? Are homeschoolers scoring around the same as their public school peers in math and higher in reading? Or, are they scoring lower in math and about the same or above in reading? Do we have data to address this question?
How homeschooled students’ scores compare to their public school peers is a question in demand of more research. Homeschooled students participating in studies conducted by homeschool advocacy groups, such as Rudner (1999) and Ray (2010), have tended to score thirty or forty percentage points above average, but these studies use volunteer samples and do not correct for background samples and are thus not generalizable. Further, this research has been increasingly called into question in light of new findings by other researchers. In a study published in 2011, Sandra Martin-Chang, Odette N. Gould, and Reanne E. Meuse compared a volunteer sample of 37 homeschooled children to 37 demographically matched traditionally schooled children and found that homeschooled students in structured learning environments scored slightly higher on standardized tests, those in less structured learning environments scored slightly lower. That same year, the Cardus Education Survey, which used a random sample and corrected for background factors, found that its homeschooled respondents were behind other students academically. Finally, in early 2014 a study conducted by Sharon Green-Hennessy found that homeschoolers were two or three times more likely to report being behind grade level than their traditionally schooled peers.
But how do homeschooled students’ scores compare in math and reading specifically? Does the Alaska and Arkansas data touch on this question? In Arkansas, preliminary data suggests that homeschooled students’ scores are roughly equivalent to public schoolers’ scores in math and higher in reading. However, this data is not corrected for background factors. In Alaska, preliminary data suggests that homeschooled students scores are lower than public schooled students’ scores in math and higher in reading. However, when we correct for background factors we find that some demographics’ reading scores are also below those of their public school peers. While more research needs to be done to make a determination, this data seems to suggest that homeschooled students score worse in math than their traditionally schooled peers.
But when we talk about the homeschool math gap, for the purpose of this post, we are not interested in how homeschooled students’ math scores compare to those of public school students. We are primarily interested in how homeschooled students’ math scores compare to their own reading scores—or, namely, that there is a gap between the two.
The SAT/ACT and the Math Gap
Homeschool advocates frequently point out that homeschoolers have higher SAT and ACT scores than other students in both the verbal and math sections. These claims ignore background factors—and also the oddly low numbers of homeschoolers taking the SAT and ACT. They also miss the discrepancy between verbal and math. You can see this illustrated below:
In other words, homeschooled students’ SAT scores suggest a higher discrepancy between verbal and math ability than is seen among students who attend public or private schools. In fact, while homeschooled SAT-takers’ scores are higher on the verbal section than the math section, the opposite is true for public school students.
What happens to homeschooled SAT-takers’ scores when we correct for background factors—things like parental education, gender, ethnicity, and county-level poverty rate, etc.? Belfield analyzed the 2001 SAT data by dividing students based on educational method and factoring in background factors. He used these factors to predict how students in each demographic, with their background factors, should score on each section. He found that while homeschooled students scored better than predicted on the verbal section, they actually scored slightly worse than predicted on the math section.
The predicted math score is higher for homeschooled students than for public schooled students because homeschool SAT-takers have background factors that typically correlate with higher SAT scores. In other words, homeschool SAT-takers’ parents were more highly educated than public school SAT-takers’ parents, so we would expect homeschoolers’ math scores to be higher than public schoolers’ math scores (based not on educational method but simply on parental education). While homeschool SAT-takers only slightly underscored their predicted math score, that they underscored it at all suggests that homeschooling does not enhance homeschool SAT-takers’ math ability.
All this said, comparatively few homeschoolers take the SAT or ACT. While 2% of all students were homeschooled in 2001, only 0.5% of students who took the SAT were homeschooled. The same is true of the ACT. In 2011, when 3.4% of all students were homeschooled, only 0.8% of those taking the ACT were homeschooled. This is relevant to the homeschool math gap in several ways.
Because taking the SAT or ACT is voluntary for homeschooled students, those homeschooled students who do take these exams are likely to be those most prepared—those who are college-bound. The same is less true for public school students, because some states and some school districts require students to take the SAT or ACT, either as another assessment or to encourage college attendance. This difference may serve to elevate homeschooled students’ scores relative to public school students.
The number of students taking the SAT or ACT can also inform us about homeschooled students’ college attendance—something that can’t help but be affected by their math ability. The College Board maintains its own school code for homeschooled students, as does the ACT. A few states allow students to be homeschooled through enrollment in private “umbrella schools,” but while some of these schools may have their own SAT and ACT codes others simply have students use the existing homeschool code. By looking at the number of students using the homeschool code when taking the SAT and ACT, then, we gain a rough idea of how many homeschooled students take these college entrance exams—and thus how many homeschooled students are college-bound.
If we assume that no homeschooled student takes the SAT or ACT more than once and that no homeschooled students take both tests, we find that at most 20% of homeschooled students take one of these exams. If some of these students take one of these exams twice, or take both of them, that percentage goes down. Nationally, 40% of high school graduates enroll in four-year colleges (another 20% enroll in two-year colleges). Virtually all four-year colleges require SAT or ACT scores. The rate at which homeschooled students take the SAT and ACT suggests that homeschooled students are underrepresented at four-year colleges. It is likely that, for at least some students, a deficiency in mathematics plays a role in the decision not to attend college.
Major Choice and the Math Gap
Studies conducted to date have tended to find that homeschool alumni have higher college GPAs than other students. This is likely at least in part a result of homeschooled students’ lower college attendance rates—the ones who do attend college are likely the most prepared, the best of the best. However, most of studies of homeschool alumni’s college performance fail break down students’ GPAs by subject area or to report on students’ choices of major. Only two studies, conducted at Austin College in Texas and Grove City College in Pennsylvania, have touched on these subjects. These studies offer an opportunity to examine possible long-term effects of the homeschool math gap.
Austin College is a four-year liberal arts college in Texas with a larger-than-average homeschool population (5% of incoming freshmen were homeschooled in 2008). In 2010, the school’s Institutional Research department carried out a study of homeschool graduates attending the school. The study found that homeschool graduates took fewer total math and science courses (0.8 and 1.9) than their traditionally schooled counterparts (1.9 and 3.2), and that while they achieved a slightly higher average GPA overall they had lower GPAs in math and science courses (2.58 and 2.62) than their conventionally schooled peers (2.72 and 2.65).
Unfortunately, while the Austin College study does state the majors chosen by homeschool alumni attending Austin College (45.7% majored in social sciences, 43.5% in humanities, 7.6% in sciences, and 3.3% in interdisciplinary studies), it does not offer a similar breakdown for traditionally schooled students. However, the fact that homeschool graduates at Austin College took fewer math and science courses than traditionally schooled students clearly indicates that they were less likely to major in these fields than were other students.
To our knowledge, only one study of homeschool alumni at a college or university has ever looked specifically at homeschool alumni’s choice of college major in comparison with the major choices of other students. This study was conducted at Grove City College, a four-year Christian college in Pennsylvania. The study, which found that homeschool students were much less likely to major in math and science than other students, was published in Sociological Viewpoints in 2010.
The Grove City College study found that homeschool graduates majored in the natural sciences (7.7%) and math/engineering (5.1%) at far lower rates than either public school graduates (17.8% and 15.6%) or private school graduates (17.0% and 14.3%).
There is little extant research on homeschooled students’ college major choice beyond what we can glean from these two studies. This is unfortunate, because each study looks only at one college and it is therefore possible that they are outliers and that homeschoolers at other colleges make different major choices. A recent informal study of young adults who were “unschooled,” a form of homeschooling that focuses on experiential learning in place of formal textbooks and curricula, found that an especially large portion of the participants went into the creative arts.The question of homeschool alumni’s major and career choice demands further research.
Further research on students’ GPAs by subject area is also needed. Do homeschool graduates who attend college have lower GPAs in math and science than in other subjects, or is the difference found in the Austin College study simply a result of major choice? A study of York Technical College, a community college in South Carolina, found that homeschoolers had a slightly higher math GPA than other students. However, in the qualitative component of the York Technical College study, homeschooled students verbally reported feeling unprepared for college math courses. It may be that homeschooled students can perform as well as other students in college math and science courses (perhaps because their prior math deficit was related to access rather than ability), but that a limited math education prior to high school graduation influences their career interests and thus their choice of college major.
Conclusion
There is a preponderance of evidence pointing to a homeschool math gap. There is also preliminary data pointing to some of the ways this math gap may affect homeschooled students as they graduate and begin their adult lives. In an era when STEM fields have taken on increasing importance, the homeschool math gap should be taken seriously by both homeschool parents and policymakers.
It should be noted that individual homeschooled students may excel at math. The existence of a math gap does not mean every homeschooled student has deficiencies in math. What it means is that homeschooled students on average have substantial lower math scores as compared to reading scores, a discrepancy that may follow many out of childhood into their adult lives.
Last Updated: 25 April, 2022 by CRHE
Why Homeschooling Needs Oversight: Responding to HSLDA and WORLD
Today WORLD Magazine posted an article listing our policy recommendations alongside a response by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA). The article’s author, Daniel Devine, did not offer us space to respond, so we will do so below, after a few introductory points.
WORLD Magazine has not been upfront about the fact that its editor-in-chief, Marvin Olasky, holds the Distinguished Chair of Journalism and Public Policy at Patrick Henry College. Michael Farris is both the Chancellor of Patrick Henry College and the Chairman of HSLDA. This conflict of interest on the part of WORLD Magazine is not mentioned here.
That aside, we are happy to read HSLDA’s response to our policy recommendations and hope for the chance to engage with them further on this topic. HSLDA and CRHE’s positions on homeschooling policy differ because they serve two different audiences: HSLDA’s mission is “to defend and advance the constitutional right of parents to direct the education of their children” (emphasis added), while CRHE’s goal is “advocating for homeschooled children.” In theory, though, policy recommendations should be able to benefit both homeschool parents and homeschooled children.
However, HSLDA’s response to our policy recommendations makes it clear that they are advocating for the interests of their members—homeschooling parents—at the expense of the interests of homeschooled children. We do not believe that this is a positive framing for homeschooled children, who may not have chosen homeschooling as their educational method and who may not have a voice of their own.
As we mentioned in our first statement to WORLD, we have been working with HSLDA on their child abuse pages, and we hope to find more common ground in the future. Unfortunately, we remain troubled by HSLDA’s insistence on minimizing the problem of abuse and neglect in homeschooling circles and prioritizing homeschool parents’ convenience over homeschooled children’s safety.
State notification
Coalition for Responsible Home Education: “We recommend requiring parents to provide annual notification of their intent to homeschool. This notice should include at a minimum children’s names, ages, and grade levels, as well as the names of the parents and family’s address.”
Home School Legal Defense Association: “HSLDA is pro-homeschool freedom; we believe that parents as the natural God-given teachers should be allowed to homeschool their children. Most states already require notification, but many don’t, and HSLDA advocates to keep it that way.”
Response:
We believe that homeschooling is a legitimate way to educate children, and that therefore parents—as legitimate educators—should take steps to ensure the welfare of the children they are teaching. Notifying local or state officials when a child is being homeschooled is in no way an imposition on homeschool freedom. Instead, notification provides a safeguard for homeschooled children who might otherwise fall through the cracks, as well as protecting children’s freedom to receive an education—be that through public schools, private schools, or homeschooling.
Finally, it’s worth noting that HSLDA does not merely advocate for those states that do not require notification “to keep it that way,” it has also been active in ongoing efforts to repeal notification requirements in those states that do have them. One such example is Iowa, which repealed its notification requirement last year with a bill shepherded through the legislature by HSLDA.
Parental education
CRHE: “We recommend that the parent providing primary instruction be required to have at least a high school diploma or GED.”
HSLDA: “Most parents in the United States have a high school diploma (85 percent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau). HSLDA has yet to see research indicating that children of homeschool parents who do not have a high school diploma or its equivalent score lower on standardized tests than children of graduates. In fact, the only research of which we are aware shows that they score similarly.”
Response:
HSLDA correctly points out that the number of parents who do not have a high school diploma or equivalent is comparatively small. NCES data shows that 11% of homeschooled children had no parents with a high school diploma or its equivalent in 2011. However, we do not believe that this segment of the homeschool population is unimportant simply because the percentage is relatively small: roughly 195,000 children are being homeschooled by parents who have less than a high school education.
In the late 1990s, HSLDA hired researcher Lawrence Rudner to conduct a massive study of homeschooled students’ academic performance. That study, the results of which were released in 1999, found that children homeschooled by parents without college degrees scored twenty percentile points lower than those homeschooled by parents with college degrees. More recently, an HSLDA-promoted study by Brian Ray published in 2010 also found that children homeschooled by parents with college degrees perform better academically than those homeschooled by parents without college degrees. In other words, we know conclusively that parental education plays a significant role in homeschooled children’s academic achievement. This holds true even among more privileged and involved homeschoolers, who composed the majority of Rudner’s and Ray’s samples.
Even outside of homeschooling circles, parental educational achievement is highly correlated with higher levels of income and standardized test scores. Dr. Janet Currie, Chair of the Economics Department at Princeton University, has written on the impact of maternal education on children’s test scores in multiple papers. In a 1995 paper on children’s cognitive achievement, she and co-author Duncan Thomas wrote, “the evidence is clear: maternal income and education do affect children’s test scores, even after controlling for [background factors].” In the homeschooling world, mothers are usually their children’s most important academic influence: it would follow that their educational success depends upon their mothers’ ability to instruct them.
But for all the demonstrated importance of parental education, WORLD magazine actually incompletely quoted our policy recommendations: we think that homeschool parents who do not yet have their GED should be allowed to homeschool—provided that they do so under the supervision of a certified teacher or other similarly qualified individual, either indefinitely or until a GED is obtained. This provision is similar to models in Ohio, Washington, and North Dakota.
Subject matter
CRHE: “We recommend requiring parents to provide instruction (or facilitate learning) in the same range of subjects (e.g. English, math, science, history, etc.) taught in public schools in the state in which they live. Parents should not be required to use the same textbooks or methods as public schools. Because homeschooling allows for positive flexibility and child-led learning, we oppose requiring students to be at grade level in each subject.”
HSLDA: “[We recommend the] same ‘range’ of subjects, yes, but not exactly what is taught in public school. HSLDA has consistently opposed the state setting what must be taught in each subject. But CRHE’s proposal is already the case is almost every state—even in states like New Jersey or Texas that don’t require notification, there’s almost always a list of subjects that must be taught, or a requirement that ‘equivalent’ instruction has to be given.”
Response:
We are pleased that HSLDA supports our recommendation that homeschool parents be required to provide instruction in the same range of subjects taught in public school, but are disappointed that HSLDA has minimized the number of states that currently do not require this. Thirteen states allow parents to homeschool without requiring them to provide instruction in any specific subject. These parents are not held to any sort of “equivalent instruction” requirements, and are not required to have their children’s academic progress assessed. In these states homeschool parents can legally neglect to educate their children in science, or math, or history, or all of these.
We believe that homeschooled children in every state should have access to a well-rounded education, and we hope HSLDA will work with us to change the law in those states with inadequate or nonexistent subject requirements.
Record-keeping
CRHE: “Parents should be required to maintain academic records for each child they homeschool. Parents should be required to submit copies of each child’s birth certificate, immunization records, and annual assessment to be kept on file by either the local school district or state department of education or, when applicable, an umbrella school.”
HSLDA: “We have always recommended to our members that they keep good academic records for their own legal protection, no matter what state they live in. We would strongly oppose requiring parents to submit sensitive information such as birth certificates and immunization records to the government.”
Response:
We believe parents should keep good academic records not merely for their own legal protection but to ensure their children’s academic success. Homeschool parents are responsible for writing their children’s high school transcripts, a task that is difficult when good records have not been kept. Furthermore, the records homeschooling parents keep are often the only evidence homeschooled children have that they have received an education.
Keeping basic academic records should not be optional for homeschool parents, as these records are not optional for their children’s success in adulthood. We would like to see these records submitted to the local school district annually and kept on file, subject to the same privacy requirements as other children’s academic records, in order to ensure that homeschool parents are keeping the required records and to ensure that homeschool graduates, including those whose parents might withhold these documents in an effort to control them, have access to them.
We recommend requiring parents to submit their children’s birth certificates to the local school district or the state department of education in order to verify the child’s age and ensure that the child has not been kidnapped or trafficked. Sadly, there are numerous cases where kidnapped or trafficked children have been homeschooled in order to keep them from detection. If homeschool parents are required to provide notice and submit the children’s birth certificates, this could be avoided. As for immunization records, we believe homeschooling parents should be held to the same vaccination requirements as all other parents, which includes submitting immunization records or exemptions.
Finally, we find it odd that HSLDA objects to requiring parents to submit their children’s birth certificate “to the government” when these documents are issued by the government.
Assessment
CRHE: “Students’ academic progress should be evaluated and reported annually. Parents should be allowed to choose between a number of different assessment mechanisms, including standardized tests and portfolio reviews. Failure to make adequate academic progress should result in intervention.”
HSLDA: “We oppose submission of annual evaluations for homeschool students, as do a majority of states in the United States. However, for states that do require assessments, we agree with CRHE that the assessments should ‘take into account the flexible and innovative nature of homeschooling,’ and we agree that parents should have a choice of options.”
Response:
At issue here is accountability. While many homeschool parents provide their children with an excellent education, others fail to provide instruction in even basic subjects. In states without an assessment requirement, there is nothing to protect these children’s interest in receiving an education. Half of all states (25) require some form of assessments for homeschooled children, but 7 of these states do not require that the assessments be submitted or have no minimum score and 11 of these states offer additional homeschool options with no assessment requirement. We believe that every homeschooled child should have access to an education, and that basic accountability is an important part of ensuring that access.
Stories from homeschool alumni testify to the importance of accountability. One homeschool graduate writes of being homeschooled in Pennsylvania, where yearly assessments kept her and her mother motivated and on track, and then moving to New Jersey, where “things fell apart” due to the lack of assessments or accountability of any sort. HSLDA may urge parents to see accountability as a violation of parents’ freedom to homeschool, but not all homeschooling parents see it that way. “Opposition to oversight and accountability within education seems foolish,” explained one such parent.
Protections for at-risk children
CRHE: “We recommend barring from homeschooling parents convicted of child abuse, sexual offenses, or other crimes that would disqualify them from employment as a school teacher. We also recommend creating a process for flagging at-risk children, such as those in families with a troubling history of child protective services involvement, for intervention or additional monitoring. Finally, we recommend that the annual assessment requirement be conducted by mandatory reporters such as certified teachers; these individuals should be trained in how to recognize signs of abuse and how to report suspicions of maltreatment.”
HSLDA: “We oppose this blanket sledgehammer approach in favor of a more individualized response. As an example, I worked with a family a few years ago where the mother had been convicted of child abuse. The juvenile court had the child attend public school for a year, then allowed the mother to begin homeschooling under court supervision for two more years. When it was obvious that the previous issues had been dealt with, the court closed the case.”
Rebuttal:
There is no way to institute an individualized response without a system in place to identify families at additional risk of abuse or neglect. HSLDA has in the past opposed efforts to create such a system by flagging families with prior child abuse convictions or investigations for additional monitoring. Indeed, HSLDA is on record above supporting the status quo in states with no notification requirements for homeschooling. If parents need not notify anyone when they begin homeschooling, how are those with prior child abuse convictions or other risk factors to be identified for extra monitoring? As we know and as HSLDA surely knows as well, homeschooled children whose parents are convicted sex offenders or child abusers, or whose families have a troubling history of social services involvement, are at higher risk of child abuse. Only two states currently offer any protections for these at-risk homeschooled children.
We have spent over a year researching and analyzing cases of abuse and neglect in homeschooling settings in an effort to identify common themes and create policies that will most effectively protect at-risk homeschooled children. In many cases, children have beenabused or neglected by parents who homeschool specifically to conceal their maltreatment. These families often begin homeschooling after an unsubstantiated child abuse investigation following a report by a teacher. In some cases these childrenhave died. Homeschooled children have also been abused by parents who were convicted sex offenders or by parents who had previously had a child removed due to abuse. Homeschooled children’s interest in a safe and non-abusive upbringing must be protected.
Public school services
CRHE: “We recommend allowing homeschooled students to enroll part time in their local public schools and to participate in extracurriculars, including sports. Public schools should have cooperative policies for awarding credit and assisting with the transition for homeschooled students who want to transfer in.”
HSLDA: “Traditionally, HSLDA has been neutral on this issue. We have members who are passionately in favor of more access and members who are completely opposed. However, if a state does allow access, we will advocate on behalf of our members if they are discriminated against.”
Response:
There is no reason why HSLDA members who oppose access to public school services should block access for homeschool students who do wish to be involved. Those not interested in public school extracurriculars need not participate. Making educational decisions for your own children is one thing, but making educational decisions for other people’s children is something HSLDA claims to oppose. We believe that homeschooled children benefit from access to public school extracurriculars and classes and see working toward public school access in every state as part of advocating on behalf of homeschooled children.
Public funding
CRHE: “Public school districts should receive funds for services provided to homeschooled students. State funding should be made available to fund oversight of homeschooling.”
HSLDA: “We would be in favor of public school districts receiving funds for services provided to homeschool students. We would be opposed to school districts getting extra funding just to further regulate homeschooling.”
Response:
We are pleased that HSLDA is in favor of public school districts receiving funds for services provided to homeschooled students, a system which expands homeschooled students’ options and is already in place in states like Idaho and New Mexico. However, we are concerned about their unwillingness to fund oversight of homeschooling. One of HSLDA’s regular criticisms of school districts providing oversight for homeschooling has been that districts do not have the resources to effectively monitor homeschooling families. It is inconsistent to oppose adequately funding school districts and then turn around and oppose oversight on the basis of inadequate funding.
Conclusion
Most of HSLDA’s rejections of our proposed recommendations seem to be based on the principle of maintaining the status quo. The insistence on this principle belies the fact that HSLDA has been working to roll back homeschool oversight for decades now, and it obscures the reality that HSLDA has created that status quo—they are the ones who prevented oversight provisions from being enacted in those states that do not have them. Further, HSLDA is actively lobbying for less oversight in states that already have it, such as in Pennsylvania, and describing mere calls for research on the efficacy of current laws, such as HJ-92 in Virginia, as a “faith-based attack”.
In both this and last week’s WORLD magazine article on this topic, HSLDA has pushed back against calls for oversight by arguing that the majority of homeschoolers are fine under the current laws. This may be true for many homeschoolers, but it is not true for all homeschoolers. We are contacted regularly about abusive or neglectful homeschooling situations and are in contact with large numbers of homeschool alumni who grew up in bad homeschooling environments. There are homeschooled children today, as we write and as you read, who are being denied access to an education, or abused without access to mandatory reporters. These children need protections. We find it very strange indeed that a resolutely Christian organization like HSLDA is spending so much time caring for its current flock and so little time considering the stray lamb.
Last Updated: 25 April, 2022 by CRHE
CRHE to World Magazine: Don’t Downplay Abuse and Neglect
Today WORLD Magazine—an evangelical Christian news magazine established in 1986—published an article titled “Homeschool debate: How to keep a few bad apples from spoiling the bushel,” written by Daniel Devine. CRHE corresponded extensively with Devine prior to this article’s publication as he conducted multiple interviews with CRHE co-founder Heather Doney and other members of CRHE.
We are grateful to Devine for bringing attention to the problem of child abuse in homeschooling families, and for the time he took to interview Doney and speak with executive director Rachel Coleman and HARO executive director (and CRHE board member) Ryan Stollar. However, we are disappointed by what seems to be biased and irresponsible reporting by Devine or by his editors at WORLD. The failure to fact-check the statistics quoted and cited in the article, the implicit endorsement of community self-policing, and the use of decontextualized quotes from the websites of CRHE and HARO result in an article presenting only one side of the story and communicating, intentionally or not, a lack of respect for the experiences of abuse survivors among the homeschooling alumni community.
Abuse and the Homeschooling Community
The WORLD Magazine article downplays child abuse and neglect in homeschooling communities in several ways. Devine cites data from published studies purporting to show that the national rates of child abuse are between 4% and 7%, arguing that, by contrast, “only 1.2 percent of Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) members called for help in dealing with child protective services investigations” in 2004. However, these numbers do not actually tell us anything about the rate of child abuse and neglect in homeschooling families, and what few statistics we do have suggest that abuse and neglect are not less common in homeschooling families. Devine admits that the figure he cited “isn’t scientific,” but he nonetheless draws conclusions from it. There are several problems with this.
There is good reason to believe that abuse and neglect in homeschooling families is severely under-reported. Homeschooled children are not seen regularly by mandatory reporters in the way children who attend public school are, which alone would decrease abuse and neglect reports. Further, HSLDA excludes from membership families with prior contact with social services, automatically eliminating those families most at risk for abuse or neglect from its statistics. In addition, the rhetoric of many homeschool organizations, including HSLDA, is anti-social services, which discourages homeschool parents from reporting concerns about other families in their homeschool communities. HSLDA’s own pages on child abuse continue to discourage members from reporting suspected abuse and neglect and run contrary to best practices. Too often, abuse in the homeschooling community only comes to the public’s attention when a homeschooled child dies.
Homeschooling’s Invisible Children (HIC), a CRHE-affiliated site, exists to document these deaths, along with other abuses that occur in homeschooling communities. HIC, which Devine mentions in passing but does not expand on, has assembled a database of hundreds of criminal cases of neglect and abuse, including 92 cases of homeschooled children who have died from abuse and neglect from 2000 to the present. This number is comparable to the number of children who die of abuse and neglect in the general population, when taking the children’s ages and the number of students being homeschooled into account—and the HIC database is still very incomplete, drawing only on publicly available news articles and court cases. Our findings suggest that death from child abuse and neglect is at least as common among homeschooling families as in the general population, and is very likely more common.
Of course, not all abuse is captured by the high fatality rate. Physical, verbal, emotional, and sexual abuse are all major issues in homeschooling communities. We know that HSLDA’s staff is aware of these problems, as they have been consulting with us at CRHE for months on ways to improve their child abuse resource pages. For HSLDA staffers to dismiss abusive or neglectful homeschooling families as “fake homeschoolers” is extraordinarily callous—and it is also false. Abusive and neglectful homeschooling parents tend to follow their states’ woefully inadequate homeschooling laws and are often involved in their local homeschooling communities. They are not “fake,” they are very real.
Finally, we are disappointed that Devine chose to quote homeschooling leaders with vested interests in HSLDA without providing the perspective of social workers, employees of the educational system, or experts on child abuse such as Boz Tchividjian of GRACE. These individuals could have provided a more balanced view of the often closed and insular world of Christian homeschooling, allowing the article to escape its ‘he-said-she-said’ narrative.
Educational Neglect in Homeschooling Families
Devine cites Dr. Brian Ray of the National Home Education Research Institute as claiming that most studies “show the average homeschooler scoring in the 65th to 80th percentile on standardized tests.” Devine uses Ray’s statement to argue that educational neglect is not a problem in homeschooling circles. But this explanation fails on several levels.
Devine neglects to mention that most of the studies Ray cites were conducted by Ray himself. Ray has consistently demonstrated a lack of understanding of statistical survey methods—his samples are drawn from the most successful and activist homeschooling families and he makes no effort to correct for background factors. In other words, these studies do not include those homeschooled families who are most at-risk of educational neglect, meaning that they cannot be used to speak to the prevalence of educational neglect in homeschooling circles. The results of one of the few studies not conducted by Ray were published in 1999 by Lawrence Rudner. “This study does not demonstrate that home schooling is superior to public or private schools,” Rudner wrote. “It does not indicate that children will perform better academically if they are homeschooled.” CRHE provides more detailed critiques of Ray’s research studies on our Research Analysis page.
Our own original research on non-biased samples from Alaska and Arkansas suggests that there is very little difference between the average academic performance of homeschoolers and that of traditionally-educated students. Further, a growing body of evidence suggests that homeschoolers tend to underperform other students in math. Data from Alaska suggests that homeschooled students are 6 percentage points less likely to be proficient or above in math, a discrepancy that increases when looking at female students alone, and there is some data to suggest that homeschool graduates may be underrepresented in college attendance. Further research needs to be conducted, but no extant research suggests that homeschooled children perform better than their traditionally-schooled peers or that educational neglect is not a problem in homeschooling circles.
It’s important to remember that the problem is not so much “the average student” as it is those children who fall through the cracks. While many homeschooled children do quite well, those raised in neglectful families lack the resources provided to other neglected children who are educated in schools. Many states have no protections for homeschooled children whose parents fail to provide them with the educational resources necessary to learn, which means that children in families that badly need accountability may not only perform poorly but in fact fail catastrophically. Further, the process for reporting a homeschooling family for suspected educational neglect is often complicated and lacks transparency, suggesting that educational neglect in homeschooling communities is severely underreported. We at CRHE are contacted regularly by concerned aunts, uncles, and grandparents of children who are being educationally neglected under the guise of “homeschooling”—including families that are represented by HSLDA.
Problems with Self-Policing
Devine also spoke affirmatively of self-policing within homeschooling communities. While we are absolutely in favor of self-policing, we become concerned any time self-policing replaces outside accountability and genuine legal protections. Not every homeschooling family is involved in a homeschooling community, and many homeschooling communities have a culture that works against effective self-policing. Most homeschooling families are inclined to ignore warning signs based on the idea that parents know what’s best for their children and the perception that homeschooling families are immune from abuse, or even simply at less risk. This is a major problem.
Devine wrote about ICHE’s efforts at self-policing in homeschooling communities in Idaho, but those very efforts suggest that self-policing is an inadequate response to this problem. Under an agreement with the Idaho Coalition of Home Educators (ICHE), the Idaho Department of Health & Welfare forwarded reports of educational neglect in homeschool settings to ICHE, which then investigated the complaint. Yet Devine reports that ICHE found every single one of the 15 tips they received between 2000 and 2004 to be unsubstantiated, and writes that the system was discontinued in 2006 due to lack of reports. We would like to know what criteria ICHE used to determine the legitimacy of the reports, given homeschooling organizations’ general pattern of downplaying educational neglect. Our own conversations with officials in Idaho, as in other states, suggest that state officials are often at a loss to address educational neglect in homeschooling settings—their hands are tied by lax homeschooling laws and by the lack of clear reporting systems.
As Devine notes, in 2008 ICHE helped the Department of Health & Welfare draft guidelines for social services workers to use when dealing with homeschooling families. Those guidelines contain a section titled “Additional Perspectives from Home Educators” that correctly informs social services workers of the flexibility and innovation practiced by many homeschooling’ families. Though the guidelines repeatedly mention what is not a sign of educational neglect, they neglect to identify what is a sign of educational neglect. Our own guidelines provide such a list, but we have yet to find a single homeschooling organization that advises social services organizations or concerned relatives on how to recognize educational neglect in homeschooling settings rather than simply how not to recognize it.
Further, Devine’s article fails to mention the problems that did occur in Idaho’s homeschooling families during these years. In 2005, police following up on a report found Thomas and Jessica Halbesleben’s seven children alone in an unsanitary home, several suffering from medical neglect. The children, who ranged in age from 1 to 13, had experienced years of physical, psychological, and sexual abuse. Halbesleben claimed to be homeschooling, but the children were ignorant of basic math and spelling. The court found that Jessica Halbesleben had removed her children from school to prevent teachers from reporting the abuse that was occurring in the home, and that the extra time at home had exacerbated the sexual abuse, including incest between the siblings. The Halbeslebens were convicted of several counts of felony injury to a child. Thomas Halbesleben had previously been convicted of felony child endangerment in 1998, but Idaho law does not prevent convicted child abusers from homeschooling. And this is not the only case we have collected of abuse and neglect in an Idaho homeschooling family during these years.
Though we encourage homeschooling communities to create official abuse prevention policies and to educate their members on non-corporal discipline, these methods are no substitute for reporting suspected child abuse and neglect to social services—only the government has the legal authority to take judicial action to protect children. As we see in this very article, communities have an incentive to dismiss the systemic issues as merely some “bad apples.” Homeschooled children—all of them—deserve better than that.
CRHE’s Position and Moving Forward
Given all of the aforementioned problems, it seems almost trivial to complain about specific mischaracterizations of CRHE. However, WORLD did discuss our policy recommendations inaccurately: we advocate flexible yearly assessments, which may include standardized testing but could also include portfolio assessments and a variety of other methods, some of which are already being used in many states. We are not calling for the strict regimen of testing implied in the article. We also believe that parents who do not have a GED or a high school diploma should be able to homeschool—as long as they are under the supervision of a certified teacher or other similarly qualified individual. While we understand that some nuance must necessarily be lost to the space constraints of print journalism, we do not believe these constraints necessitate the misrepresentation of our positions.
We are glad that WORLD magazine is broaching the subject of abuse in the homeschooling community, but are disappointed with their treatment of CRHE and HARO in this article. We hope that further articles on homeschooling alumni’s outreach will be handled with more attention to the experiences of the homeschooled alumni and less space for the talking points of the homeschooling leadership.
To end on a positive note, we are very excited about HARO’s survey on Christian homeschooling, which has received over 2100 responses as of noon on Aug. 22. It is our hope that these survey results will give us more insight into homeschool graduates’ experiences. We believe that gaining an accurate view of what homeschooling really looks like involves talking to homeschooled students and alumni, not simply the homeschooling leaders. After all, none of the homeschool leaders cited in WORLD were homeschooled students themselves.
The CRHE Board
Kathryn Brightbill
Rachel Coleman
Kierstyn King
Ryan Stollar
Last Updated: 20 October, 2023 by CRHE
How My Parents’ Homeschooling Choices Gave Me An Excellent Education
Here are some facts about me that I don’t often share: in middle school, I was a finalist in the National Spelling Bee and competed in the State Geography Bee. In high school, I won piano competitions, placed third in a national consumer education contest, took classes at the local university and community college, and achieved a near-perfect score on the SAT. After being waitlisted at Stanford, I graduated with honors from a selective public liberal arts college on the East Coast, and have since earned a Ph.D. in U.S. History. Oh, and one final fact: my parents homeschooled me K-12.
None of this makes me a poster child for home education – far from it; academics aren’t the only part of a child’s upbringing, after all. But though I tend to keep many of these achievements quiet – several of them I haven’t mentioned publicly in years until this article – I’d be hard-pressed to deny that my background represents a record of achievement. My own drive and interest in academic excellence are partially responsible for my success, as is my family’s middle-class socioeconomic status and high level of education – they had three masters’ degrees between them before they began homeschooling me. Yet in my experience, none of these things was the deciding factor that made me a homeschooling academic success story. Instead, my mother and father made a series of choices that determined how well our home school would function. These choices are available to every homeschooling parent, no matter their circumstances or educational background. I’ve listed them below.
1. Extending the Definition of Education Beyond the Classroom
My parents viewed virtually every experience as a potential educational opportunity. A museum visit, a book of historical fiction, a conversation with my father about aerodynamics, an impromptu physics experiment involving raisins in a glass of soda – all were as much a part of my education as were workbooks and textbooks. Don’t get me wrong – I had hours of “traditional,” sit-down instruction every day, to ensure I learned the basics and to prepare me for college. Nevertheless, my parents worked hard at finding educational value in even the most mundane or purely entertaining activities. They’d encourage me to perform literary analysis on a movie in order to better understand its meaning, or to explain the physics principles demonstrated by a fort I was building. There was no such thing as being “in class” or “out of class” in our family; our classroom was everywhere, and everything was part of my education. This facet of my parents’ teaching style made my whole life rich with educational content and taught me how to analyze ordinary occurrences for their deeper meaning, a key skill in higher-level humanities work.
2. Drawing Connections Between Activities
In addition to turning non-academic activities into learning experiences, my parents created informal educational “units,” without really saying they were doing so, to connect different types of learning with one another. A conversation with an astronomer at a science festival might lead to a visit to an observatory, a night-sky observation through my dad’s telescopes, a book on astronomy, and finally an episode of NOVA about astrophysics. My mom programmed our nightly movie-watching to correspond with things I had recently learned; she also planned outside activities such as museum trips to match things we were reading or learning at home. This ability to integrate outside learning content into a cohesive educational agenda helped me learn deeply in individual subjects, contributed to a multifaceted learning experience, and taught me to see connections between events and activities – another key humanities skill.
3) Creating Innovative Learning Opportunities
One of the great benefits of homeschooling is the ability to integrate innovative teaching techniques into the learning process. Unlike many of my friends growing up, my family didn’t use a formal curriculum; instead, my mom created one by picking up educational materials at homeschool conventions, educational supply stores, and libraries. (Today, she would have used the internet to achieve much the same goal.) Sometimes this meant I had a dated, substandard text instead of an up-to-date book, but usually it meant she had picked the best parts of the various curricula and combined them into a learning system all her own. Picking and choosing in this way also enabled her to tailor my curriculum to my strengths and weaknesses, rather than pursuing a “one-size-fits-all” approach.
In addition to the materials my mom purchased, many of the most rewarding educational activities we did were ideas she either made up or gathered from reading homeschooling magazines or alternative education books. She created a “Math Olympics” where we competed in a variety of math-based activities (I chose half of them) to learn math and win prizes; we followed that up with a more extensive “Social Studies Olympics” the following year. She put the names of historical figures in an envelope and had us pull a name at random and write a poem about that figure; when the envelope was empty, we created a book of our poems. We then did the same thing with creative non-fiction topics and finally with fiction, though we ran out of time to finish the last group before I graduated.
The key here is that my parents were not satisfied with simply purchasing educational materials and administering them to me. Instead, they worked hard to craft an individualized educational experience for me, inserting themselves into the teaching and learning process. It was that dedication to innovation, as much as any specific activities or materials, that enriched my education.
4) Following My Interests and Encouraging My Love of Learning
While much of my education was directed by my parents, they never failed to support my interests when I became excited by a subject or wanted to expand on something we were learning. When I became fascinated by clouds in elementary school, my parents took me to the library and helped me pick out a series of books which resulted in my learning about weather patterns and memorizing the names of the different cloud types. In sixth grade, they supported me as I kept working for weeks on what was supposed to be a five-page report on Ancient Rome that eventually topped thirty-five handwritten pages. The next year, after I read a fiction book set in Denmark, they encouraged me as I wrote a 20+ page report on that country entirely on my own initiative. This support for self-initiated learning waned somewhat as I reached my high school years – there just wasn’t enough time to both prepare me for college and follow up on my learning interests. Nevertheless, by encouraging self-directed learning, my parents helped me take ownership of my education and taught me that learning is something you can do for yourself, as well as for others – an idea that sustained me through college and graduate school.
5) Not Limiting My Potential
My parents did a good job of not telling me when something I wanted to do was really hard. When I wanted to win the state spelling bee, my mom didn’t tell me it was an extremely difficult thing to do, that I’d have to be a better speller than tens of thousands of kids who were studying too. Instead, we just started memorizing words. Because I didn’t know it was hard, I wasn’t intimidated by the work and was able to reach my goal. Similarly, when I unwittingly chose a difficult Bach prelude and fugue to play for my college piano auditions, neither my piano teacher nor my mother (a former piano teacher herself) bothered to tell me how hard it was. It was only after one of my auditions that the piano professor mentioned it was the hardest piece in the set! Had I known how difficult the piece was, I never would have attempted it, but because I simply worked to achieve my potential without knowing how I compared with others, I wasn’t afraid to accomplish big tasks.
6) Keeping Good Records
As soon as my mom decided to begin homeschooling me, she began keeping records of my academic work. What she called my “school folder” eventually came to encompass three full-size file boxes that contained everything from worksheets to reports to drawings to lecture and concert programs. Anything I had created, and anything that provided evidence for the activities I had done, was included. At the end of each year, my mom wrote a summary of what I’d accomplished during that year and included it in my file. Later, when it came time to create a high school transcript for me, she had only to go back through my school folder to remember everything I’d done. After I graduated from homeschool high school, my mother gave me the entire contents of the school folder – a physical record of my education for me to keep, and an invaluable collection of evidence that proved I had accomplished things as a homeschooler. Incidentally, we lived in states (California and Arizona) that didn’t require any sort of educational standards for homeschoolers, but had the state required an annual portfolio check, it would have been no problem – my mom was already keeping those records for my benefit.
7) Knowing When To Bring In Outside Help
Between the two of them, my parents were pretty well-versed in the major school subjects – my father, an engineer and psychotherapist, was trained in the sciences, while my mother, a writer and teacher, was trained in the humanities. Nevertheless, they took every opportunity to supplement my homeschooling with outside instruction, particularly when I reached the limits of their expertise. As a young child, I spent many happy hours at the local children’s library, attending storytimes and talking with friendly librarians. At the age of nine, I participated in a program called Science-By-Mail which provided me with a scientist pen-pal to oversee a series of educational units in science; I continued to correspond with this scientist until well into my college years. I also participated in a community swim team and had a private piano teacher.
My parents also realized they couldn’t provide me with an at-home experience truly equivalent to a lab science course, and sought to rectify this gap. As soon as the local community college let me begin taking classes there, I signed up to take lab courses in biology, chemistry, and physics. Later, I took additional courses at the local university.
By recognizing that they couldn’t do everything themselves, that I needed access to other teachers and educational professionals, my parents expanded the range of perspectives I was exposed to and ensured that I received a well-rounded education.
8) Preparing Me for College
College isn’t for everyone, but it clearly was for me and was something I wanted to do. Accordingly, my parents worked throughout my high school years to prepare me for college admissions. My mom drafted a high school transcript, creating credits roughly equivalent to the learning I was accomplishing, and then worked methodically to fill the gaps required for college admission; we remedied educational deficiencies through in-home learning when we could, and through college classes when we couldn’t. To prepare me for more selective colleges, my parents had me do a variety of volunteer activities (they look great on a college application!), prepped me for the SATs, made sure I took SAT II subject tests, scheduled and accompanied me on college visits, and even put me in touch with a professional college admissions counselor. Since as a homeschooler I didn’t have grades, it was especially important that my parents did all they could to make sure I’d have a chance at getting to a really good school.
* * * * *
Though I’ve divided my educational experience into helpful bullet points, taken together they paint a fairly comprehensive picture of why my education was successful. I had an excellent homeschool education because my parents invested their time, energy, and effort into creating one – and because they applied creative, innovative, and responsible solutions to the problems inherent in any educational process. They made sure I learned the basics, met critical benchmarks, prepared well for college, and documented my progress – but they did so while fostering creativity and love of learning. Creating a successful home education doesn’t require specialized training, but it does require a lot of hard work and a commitment to making good choices about your child’s future. I’m grateful to my parents for their involvement and for their good judgment, which helped make my homeschooling experience an academic success.
Last Updated: 23 March, 2021 by Rachel Coleman
Kentucky to Consider Sports Access Bill
In Kentucky, homeschools are legally considered private schools. Local school districts may allow private school students (including homeschooled students) to enroll part-time or to participate in extracurricular activities, including athletics. However, the Kentucky High School Athletic Association (KHSAA) requires student athletes to be “full time” students at the school they represent, and prohibits them from being enrolled in any other school, such as a private school (which includes homeschools). This means that while school districts technically could allow homeschooled students to participate in high school athletics, those students would not be allowed to play in any official matches. This effectively bars homeschooled students from participation in athletics at any public high school.
Homeschooled children in some states have had access to public school athletics since the 1970s, and recent legislative trends reveal a continued expansion of this access to other states. Arkansas, Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee each removed barriers to homeschooled students’s sports access in 2013, as did Alaska and South Carolina the year before. Currently, homeschooled students are prohibited from having access to public school athletics in 21 remaining states. In each of those states, the situation is the same as Kentucky’s: the state’s high school athletic association requires student athletes to be enrolled full-time in the school for which they play.
There is a chance that this may finally change for Kentucky. Last week Representative Stan Lee of Lexington, Kentucky, pre-filed a homeschool sports bill for the state’s 2015 legislative session. This bill would allow private school students (including homeschooled students) to participate in extracurricular activities, including athletics, in their local public school districts. While the text of this bill has yet to be released, it is likely similar to HB 179, a 2009 bill that failed to pass.
The KHSAA has responded negatively to the proposed bill. Their objections are typical: funding, the limited number of slots available, academic eligibility, and the potential for cheating. Some of their concerns may be related to the text of the specific bill, which may change during the committee process. Homeschooled students already have access to public school athletics in dozens of states, and those states have found ways of handling these oft-repeated objections. In these states, state law allows the school district to set its own standards for homeschooled students’ academic eligibility; prohibits public school students who withdraw to be homeschooled after landing on academic probation from participating in public school athletics for a certain period of time; and requires homeschool parents to pay their children’s fees and/or provides schools with additional state funding for homeschool participation. The 2009 bill that failed to pass left room for all of these things.
VAHomeschoolers, located in Virginia, offers some of the most comprehensive information on homeschooled students’ sports access, most geared specifically towards the hoped-for passage of a Virginia sports access law. But in 2012, the organization conducted a survey of state athletic associations in states that allow homeschoolers to have access to public school sports, providing an interesting overview of how homeschool sports access works out in practice across the country. The respondents reported that the number of homeschooled students participating in public school athletics was small, suggesting that concerns about homeschooled students taking large numbers of coveted spots are overblown. Further, while the respondents did catalog some local resistance to homeschoolers’ sports access, they had no major concerns with the policy overall, felt that the policy had been implemented successfully, and expressed no desire for overturning it. It seems that once sports access is in place, state athletic associations tend not to find it the problem they originally thought it.
We at CRHE support policies that make public school resources available to homeschooled students, including part-time enrollment, athletics participation, special needs services, and other extracurriculars. We support such policies because they expand the opportunities available to homeschooled students, not just athletically or academically but also socially. Further, we believe that a positive and cooperative relationship between public schools and homeschool families is in the best interests of everyone involved.
We believe that homeschool—public school cooperation and resource-sharing improves the lives of homeschooled students without taking from the public school students around them. In many communities, homeschooled students have few options for athletic competition, especially during the high school years. We don’t think homeschooled students should have to choose between their preferred educational option on the one hand and athletic competition on the other. We see no reason not to open public school activities, including classes, athletics, and other extracurriculars, to homeschooled students.
We welcome this development and wish the bill success in the upcoming 2015 session.
Last Updated: 23 March, 2021 by Chelsea McCracken
Correcting the Record: A Look at Rudner 1999
This post summarizes our research review, which provides a critical analysis of Rudner (1999). Click HERE to read a more in-depth version of the arguments presented.
In 1998, Michael Farris, the president of HSLDA, hired education researcher Lawrence M. Rudner to carry out a study on homeschoolers’ academic achievement. The results of this study were distributed in Home Schooling Works!, a 1999 summary of Rudner’s findings which is presented on HSLDA’s website. This summary, whose authors are unknown, misrepresents Rudner’s work in an attempt to further HSLDA’s agenda. Rudner’s actual paper, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Education PolicyAnalysis Archives in 1999, is linked to by HSLDA and is available here.
These two publications are widely cited to support the claim that homeschoolers have higher levels of academic achievement than other children: Rudner reports that, for every subject and at every grade level, his participants’ average score was between 60% and 90%. The participants’ best subject was reading (where they scored 85.7% on average) and their worst subject was math (where they scored 75.1% on average). Around one-quarter of Rudner’s participants were ahead of their public schooled peers by at least one grade level, and they outpaced public schoolers as they advanced through the grade levels. Several demographic factors were found to have a significant positive effect on the participants’ scores, including family income, expenditure per child, and parents’ education level.
However, the design of the study severely limits our ability to draw conclusions from it. As Rudner himself says, “This study does not demonstrate that home schooling is superior to public or private schools…It does not indicate that children will perform better academically if they are home schooled.” The major impediments to drawing such a conclusion are:
1) Selection bias
Rudner’s sample of homeschoolers was not random. All of Rudner’s approximately 20,000 participants were recruited when they contracted with the evangelical Bob Jones University Press Testing and Evaluation Service, one of four major testing services for homeschoolers in 1998. However, only an estimated 16% of homeschoolers nationwide used such a testing service that year. It is likely that these homeschoolers were high achievers and had parents who were invested in their educations and expected them to do well on standardized tests. Unsurprisingly, Rudner’s participants scored around the 80th percentile—just as we would expect from a study designed only to test high achievers.
2) Non-representative sample
Rudner’s participants are not comparable to the population of school-age children in the United States, nor are they representative of all homeschoolers. Rudner’s sample of homeschoolers was disproportionately white (94%), Christian (94%), and young (only 11% of participants were in high school). They were also unequally distributed by state of residence. Most participants had married parents (97%) and large families (62% had families with three or more children), and their parents were highly educated (66% of their fathers and 57% of their mothers had at least a Bachelor’s degree) and had high incomes (only 8% of Rudner’s sample fell into the lowest income bracket, while 33% of homeschoolers fall into this category).
Rudner’s study tells us essentially nothing about homeschooled high schoolers, children of color, poor children, unschoolers, children with poorly educated parents, children being raised by single parents or by parents who both work, abused or educationally neglected children, or disabled or special needs children. The higher-than-average standardized test scores earned by Rudner’s highly privileged group of homeschoolers are only what we would expect from a study where nearly all disadvantaged children are excluded.
Rudner states very clearly in his introduction that “this study is not a comparison of home schools with public or private schools” [emphasis added], since homeschoolers are not representative of the general US population. This means that Rudner’s study does not show that homeschoolers score better than public schoolers. It merely assembles the scores of a particularly privileged group of homeschoolers and shows that they are capable of achieving high scores on standardized tests.
Unfortunately, this study’s findings have been continually misrepresented by HSLDA. Their online summary, entitled Home Schooling Works!, omits discussion of the study’s methodology and replaces Rudner’s conclusions with an op-ed by Michael Farris. In this piece, Farris claims that “It is clear that the average home school child performs significantly higher than the average public school child”—a finding which Rudner’s study explicitly does not show.
Farris further claims that “it would be contrary to the evidence to suggest that public school regulatory measures are justifiably imposed on home schoolers” because “it is only safe and fair to conclude that home education works well for those who are choosing this form of education.” But Farris has no evidence for this claim.
In the end, it doesn’t matter if Farris is deliberately deceiving the homeschooling parents who trust him for political gain, or if he is merely ignorant of what Rudner is actually saying. Either way, Farris is harming the cause of homeschooling by promoting it as a miracle cure for all families. Homeschooling alone does not produce better outcomes for children: supportive, involved families with high levels of resources produce better outcomes, no matter how their children are educated. Rudner’s evidence supports this hypothesis.
Last Updated: 16 October, 2014 by Rachel Lazerus
Fruit Salad Fallacies: Explaining “Control Groups”, “Random Sampling”, and “External Validity”
Research on homeschooling often uses very precise statistical concepts whose meanings aren’t always clear to all non-statistician readers. Today, we’re going to take some time and define some of these basic concepts. To keep you interested, we’re going to apply them using something completely different: fruit salad!
Fruit Salad Fallacies: Explaining “Control Groups”, “Random Sampling”, and “External Validity”
written by Rachel Lazerus
illustrated by Kierstyn King
1) Control Groups
Here is a peach.
And here are some blueberries.
There are a lot of things that both peaches and blueberries have in common. They’re both fruit, they’re both sweet, and they’re both delicious.
But could you describe a peach to a stranger, using only a blueberry as a reference point?
There are so many differences that it might not come out too clearly.
Trying to describe a peach using only a blueberry as a reference point might result in a very hairy pumpkin instead.
But, if I ask you to describe me a peach in terms of a nectarine…
…then you can describe, pretty accurately, what a peach looks like.
This is why control groups are so important in studies. When we have a control group, we have a group that looks very much like the experimental or treatment group that we want to study, but differs in just one area: the area we want to study. A nectarine and a peach are very similar—they just have one major difference. A blueberry and a peach are very different—different sizes, shapes, tastes, etc. For all that blueberries and peaches have in common, they’re not good comparisons for each other. For statistical studies to make sense, you want to make sure your groups are very similar to each other. This way, you won’t get confused by other factors.
Ideally, when we’re doing statistical studies that involve control groups, we would have two groups that are exactly the same except for one variable, so that we can measure exactly what the impact of this one variable is. Without the use of a control group, we can’t be sure that we’re actually studying the impact of that one variable.
If we’re studying the difference in test scores between homeschoolers and public school students, there are a lot of differences. Homeschoolers are more likely to be white than the average public school student. They’re more likely to be in two-parent families. They’re more likely to live in rural areas. So if we want to compare homeschoolers to public school students, instead of comparing the homeschoolers to the national average, we need to compare homeschoolers to public schoolers who share these same characteristics and can act as a control group—students who are white, in two-parent families, who live in rural areas. Comparing to the national average without using any control group is like trying to describe a peach only using a blueberry as a reference. You end up with a hairy pumpkin of statistical nonsense.
2. Random sampling
Suppose I have gone to the grocery store to get some fruit for a fruit salad. You look at my purchases and see that I bought peaches, bananas, strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries. And maybe your interest stops there, because you’re thinking about the delicious fruit salad I’m going to make now. But maybe you’re wondering why I bought these specific types of fruit, out of all of the fruits available in the store, and what (if anything) this says about my grocery store’s selection.
You could tell lots of stories about how I picked the fruit I bought. Maybe I only picked the cheapest fruits, or maybe I picked the ones closest to the front of the store. Maybe I picked my favorite fruits; maybe I picked your favorites. Maybe I deliberately selected the fruits for my salad such that there would be no green fruits.
But in all of these stories, there’s an element of choice. I selected the fruit that would go into our fruit salad. I didn’t tell you why I did it: all you know is that there must be some sort of decision-making process that went into picking the fruits at my grocery store.
Knowing this, what can you say about the fruit that are available at my local grocery store? Not much, besides the fact that these five types of fruit were there and present. Thus, the fruit that I bought from my grocery store is a non-random sample of the fruit available there.
If I were to take fruits at a completely random basis, then every single fruit in the store would have an equally likely chance of being purchased. This means I could have ended up with a fruit salad that you find disgusting—or that I find disgusting. By being selective about my fruit, I end up with what I think is a more delicious salad—but you also have much less information about what was available at the store than you would if the fruit were a random sample. And since I’m non-randomly picking only the fruits that I like, this means that my preferences are being expressed—and yours aren’t.
Now when we’re talking about fruit, you probably already have a good idea of what’s available at a grocery store. But what if we’re talking about a population where the true parameters are more unknown, like the homeschooling community in the U.S.? If I select a sample based on only the people I already know or like, or find it easy to contact, I will not be able to use my sample to say much at all about the homeschooling community as a hole.
This is the problem with many homeschooling research studies: they use non-random samples, which means that they don’t reflect the whole of the many different facets and communities that homeschool. For a random sample to be truly random, every person in the study must have had an equal chance of being selected. When a researcher finds participants off of an organization’s email list, or by word of mouth, or through a blog, this is not the case—some individuals have a very high likelihood of being selected while others have absolutely no likelihood of being selected. When this happens, it’s called selection bias.
True randomness is hard to achieve in research studies. Getting a truly random sample takes a lot of time and effort. But without a randomly-selected sample, we don’t know what the population really looks like—we only know what the groups we’re already familiar with look like.
3. External validity.
My non-random fruit salad has now been made. Now it’s Kiery’s turn to make a fruit salad. Kiery is my friend and coworker: we are both short and are both fans of science-fiction and fantasy, so we are very much alike.
Knowing what you do about me and my fruit salad, what can you say about Kiery’s fruit salad?
NOTHING!
Knowing what I like to put in fruit salad tells you nothing about what Kiery likes to put in fruit salad. This is because fruit salad has low external validity—you can’t generalize from one person’s preferences to another’s.
Having external validity means that the results can be generalized from one member of a group to all members of a group. There are some traits that do have external validity and can be generalized—knowing that Kiery and I have similar tastes in fantasy means that if one of us likes a movie, the other probably will too. Therefore, our taste in fantasy movies has external validity. But even though Kiery and I are similar in our heights and our workplace and our love of fantasy, none of that has anything to do with our preferences about fruit salad!
A major problem with a lot of studies about homeschooling is that they overstate their external validity: they think that the results have implications for people who weren’t part of the study. If a study has low external validity, it can’t be generalized: your study can only tell us about the people in your study, nothing more.
External validity is especially important when studying homeschoolers, whose individualism is well-known: each homeschooler has a story of why they’re being homeschooled, what works for them and what doesn’t, and so on. These stories can vary wildly even within a single homeschooling family. Because of this variety, it is important not to assume that what is true for one group of homeschoolers is true for another, or for all homeschoolers in general. But many studies of homeschooling outcomes which lack external validity claim to do exactly that—applying findings about, for example, an evangelical Arizona co-op or an association of hippie Vermont unschoolers to the entire homeschooling population. (At the same time, studies that do have external validity can capture really important aspects of the homeschooling community at large.) By looking at different kinds of homeschooling communities, not just self-selected homeschoolers, we can be sure that the homeschooling experience we’re describing is representing all homeschoolers, not just the groups that volunteered to be examples.
Two ways that people increase external validity in their studies are through using both random samples and control groups. This makes it more likely that the findings in the study represent the true population, and not just the sample. And to get that external validity for studies on the homeschooling population at large, it’s going to take time, energy, and access to a wide variety of homeschooling communities—even ones we’re not personally part of.
Now, just to be clear, even a study with great external validity isn’t going to say very much about the specific lived experience of your own homeschooled family. Instead, a study with external validity would tell us about the average homeschooled family. Science and statistics can only describe human behavior in probabilities, not predict it. It’s like how most of the strawberries you get at the supermarket will be average-sized, but there might be one or two really big ones or super-tiny ones in the carton you get.
Once we have studies about homeschoolers with external validity, we still won’t be able to predict exactly how any one homeschooling family does, but we’ll know a lot more about what the average homeschooling family is like.
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Research is important, and can tell us so much about the world around us. But when people use shortcuts in their research—when they don’t consider the important effects of control groups, random sampling, and external validity—the research they produce is inherently unreliable. Using a shortcut like this is like using rotten fruit in your fruit salad.
Major statistical fallacies can be found everywhere you look: in blog posts, politicans’ speeches, and even research. When put into terms of fruit salad, they seem obvious, right? But when they’re telling you information you’re already primed to believe, then they can even be seductive: you don’t want to examine that good-looking fruit too closely, in case it’s rotten inside.
When CRHE researches topics, we want you to be able to trust that we’re only using good fruit that we have carefully inspected. We know we’re doing research on topics that are very important to homeschooling parents and homeschooled students alike. We also care a lot about these topics, and we want to do them justice. When we research homeschooling studies, we take care to check the methodology of our sources and to think through the implications of their research. When we criticize a study done by someone else, even a very respected name in the field, we want you to understand what our problems are and why we’re doing this.
Last Updated: 5 October, 2023 by CRHE
Pennsylvania’s HB 1013 is Bad for Homeschooling
Eleven states include a portfolio option in their homeschool law. Under this option, homeschool parents put together a portfolio of each student’s work which is then reviewed and evaluated by a qualified individual. CRHE supports such evaluations because we believe accountability is healthy and good for homeschooling families and communities. Portfolio evaluations add not only accountability for homeschool parents, but also encourage parents to receive input and advice about their children’s education. These two actions help to promote the quality of homeschooled students’ education.
Unfortunately, only 1 of those 11 states — Pennsylvania — ensures accountability for the individuals who evaluate homeschooled students’ annual portfolios. PA is the only state that actually requires the supervisor of the home education program (the parent) to provide the superintendent of the local school with both a portfolio of the student’s work and a written evaluation of the student’s educational progress composed by a teacher or other professional.
Even more unfortunately, a bill that just passed the PA House of Representatives — HB 1013 — would eliminate this requirement. On July 1, HB 1013 cleared the House and has now been referred to the Senate Education Committee. HSLDA, the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, has thrown their support behind HB 1013, specifically stating that it would “Eliminate the public school superintendent’s review of portfolios” and urging their members to “Contact members of the House Education Committee and urge them to vote for HB 1013!”
The Christian Homeschool Association of Pennsylvania (CHAP) has also rallied behind HB 1013’s irresponsible advocacy of accountability removal. CHAP created a Change.org petition in support of the bill, falsely stating in the petition that “studies also indicate that homeschoolers in low-regulation, mid-regulation, and high-regulation states (such as Pennsylvania and New York) all perform approximately equally in standardized testing, and in every case outperform public school testing results.” Accurate reviews of what those studies actually say can be viewed here.
CRHE profoundly disagrees with HSLDA, CHAP, and advocates of HB 1013. We believe that eliminating PA’s requirement of portfolio review would be irresponsible and would take away an important tool that can protect homeschooled students and encourage those students’ teachers to ensure a quality education. We hope that all states will adopt a portfolio review requirement because we believe that checks and balances between state, government, and child are both common sense and integral to children’s best interests. Testimonies by homeschool alumni give voice to what happens when such checks and balances are neglected. Kieryn and Teresa’s testimonials, in particular, reveal how badly things can go when there is no accountability included in a state’s portfolio requirement.
CRHE applauds Pennsylvania’s current homeschool statute as the only homeschool statute in the country that provides accountability for portfolio evaluators. We urge the PA Senate Education Committee to reject HB 1013 to ensure this fact does not change — for the sake of both homeschooled children and homeschooling parents.
HB 1013 is sponsored by Representative Mark M. Gillen, who can be reached at his home office at (610) 775-5130 or at his capitol office at (717) 787-8550.
TAKE ACTION AGAINST HB 1013
Please take a stand for PA’s homeschooled children and against HB 1013 by emailing or calling the following 11 members of the Senate Education Committee. Their contact information is provided in the links below. There is also a sample email template to help you craft your own message to each senator based on your personal homeschool experience.
Also, please spread the word on social media that HB 1013 is bad for homeschooled children! If you’re using Facebook or Twitter, use the hashtag #HB1013.
Contact Information for PA Senate Education Committee Members:
Sample Email to Send Each Senator:
Dear Senator ______,
My name is ________. I am a former homeschool student and graduate. I was homeschooled for ____ years. I am writing to you today in opposition to HB 1013 — the “Homeschool Portfolio Evaluations” bill sponsored by Representative Gillen and currently referred before the Senate Education Committee on which you serve.
It might seem strange to you that I, as a homeschool student and graduate, would oppose this bill when you have likely heard so much support for it from HSLDA, CHAP, and other homeschool organizations as of late. So let me explain: All those “homeschool” lobbyists are lobbying for the voices of parents and extremists, not actual homeschool kids or alumni — like me — who have first hand experience of what it is like to be homeschooled without a good system of checks and balances to ensure a kid receives a good education. As someone who has that first-hand experience actually being homeschooled, let me assure you that PA’s law – that requires portfolio review and quality assurance — is one of a kind. Literally: no other state has such a good law. And HB 1013 would eliminate this unique and positive aspect of PA’s homeschool oversight.
I could tell you stories of real homeschool students and alumni from other states who suffered because those states did NOT have a law like PA’s. So for the sake of homeschooled children and graduates everywhere, I urge you to not put your own state’s homeschool kids at risk. Please vote to protect us homeschoolers by voting against HB 1013.
Respectfully,
Last Updated: 20 October, 2023 by Rachel Lazerus
Why My Parents Refused to Homeschool Me and Why That Was the Right Choice—For Them
But by seventh grade, it wasn’t working for me anymore. I was bored in all of my classes and bullied by my classmates. My parents were concerned about me: I was concerned about me. And so I came up with the perfect solution: I should be homeschooled.
My parents disagreed, and took that option entirely off the table.
After several months of arguing with the parochial school’s administration and trying to find a solution, meeting with teachers and administrators at the local public school, and a week’s trial at the public school, my parents and I agreed to enroll me in the public middle school and then high school. I excelled there, eventually taking 10 AP classes (and 11 AP tests) and winning a merit scholarship to the University of Chicago, where I graduated with honors.
Today, I look back at my educational history, and I admit that my parents were completely, absolutely, 100% right not to homeschool me.
Before I go into the reasons for why my parents were right and I was wrong (something I wouldn’t have ever admitted for any reason when I was twelve), I don’t want this essay to be seen as prescriptive: each family has its own story about why homeschooling is or is not right for them and their children. This is only my family’s story. Maybe you’ll recognize yourselves in it: maybe you won’t.
I wanted to be homeschooled for the wrong reasons. I got the idea to be homeschooled from my friend Peter, who was homeschooled via a virtual curriculum where he had to be online for several hours a day to complete his work. For twelve-year-old me, being on the computer all day sounded like a dream come true. My parents feared that if given free rein, I would spend all day chatting with friends or working on my website. That was indeed my plan, and they thwarted it.
I was afraid of public school. I had been having such a terrible experience with my peers at my parochial school that I was deeply afraid of other kids my own age. I wanted to avoid public school, or contact with anyone new. I pushed for homeschooling because it was a way to avoid my biggest fears. Had I been homeschooled as I’d hoped, I could have completely escaped having to interact with people my own age. As it turned out, on my very first day of public school, I met someone who has become a life-long best friend and even had a role in my wedding. This is clearly a best-case scenario—but if I’d been homeschooled, I would have never faced these fears, and I would have had fewer opportunities to make friends.
Some of my fears about public school were internal, and some of them had been planted in me. The parochial school I had attended informed all of its students—and all of its students’ parents—that going to public school would result in your child smoking, drinking, and having sex by the age of 16. I was a good kid, and I was petrified of any of those kinds of shenanigans. In reality, I was never offered so much as a puff on a cigarette at my public school. My parents now also regret that they trusted the parochial school’s line that they were the most academically rigorous school around, as we later found out that the public high school offered a much better academic experience.
My parents didn’t have support. No one in my parents’ circle of friends homeschooled—why would they, with such great local schools? My parents would have had to start completely from scratch. Perhaps if they had planned to be homeschooling parents, they would have been able to find a community or support. But as it was, with me mid-school-year, they prioritized my need for stability over their learning curve.
My parents understood their limitations. My parents are brilliant, hard-working people—my father is a computer engineer, my mother is a registered nurse—and I love them deeply. But they are not temperamentally suited toward teaching, especially not at the middle or high school level, and they understood this. By age twelve, I was also developing a strong preference for reading and writing over anything science or math-related, and they were not confident in their ability to engage my passions or teach me subjects I didn’t want to learn. They knew it would be best for me to be in a school where I would be required to take classes in math and science — and indeed, I ended up getting a statistics-heavy Masters degree, something I would have never done if not for a particularly influential high school class.
Back then, I didn’t really understand their reluctance to homeschool. But recently, prompted by my work for CRHE, I asked my parents again why they didn’t homeschool me.
My dad replied, “I don’t think we could have homeschooled you. Yes, I could teach you math through calculus, but that would be about it. Yes, I made fun of some of the silly phrases your bio teacher taught you, but you learned a lot more biology in that class than Mom and I could teach you. Also we had no way to give you bio, chem, and physics labs. Social studies: you were lucky to have such a great teacher there; we could never have come close to what he taught you. One further thing: your having to write compositions for a variety of teachers was training in writing and thinking that we could not have given you.”
My mom chimed in, “I was scared about homeschooling you. I did not think that I had the knowledge to teach you, and you would be done with whatever projects I could have given you, and then you would be on the computer talking to your friends all day.”
Even without being homeschooling parents, my parents were able to educate me in a variety of different ways. I gained a love of reading and writing and history from my father, who also typed up my very first short stories when I was four. My mother grounded me in religious texts and thought and gave me a strong sense of civics, social justice, and how they combine. They took the whole family to museums regularly, bought educational computer games, and always let me get as many books as I could carry from the library or bookstores. Parents teach their children lessons in many ways, even when the relationship isn’t formalized as teacher and student.
And the most important lesson they taught me?
Each child is different. Throughout all of the turmoil over whether or not I would transfer to public school, my brother was a tenth grader at the same parochial school. Other parents in their situation might have insisted that he change schools when I did to make life easier for them—not only would our schedules have been far more coordinated, it would have meant that our parents could stop running into the same administration they’d been battling for the last six months. Instead, he stayed there for his junior and senior years, where he was valedictorian, a starting athlete, and editor of the school paper. It was the right school for him, just as public school was the right school for me.
I can’t tell you what would have happened to me if I had been homeschooled as I’d wanted, or if I’d stayed in parochial school through twelfth grade as my parents had initially hoped. And I don’t think there’s a single right way or path that a parent can choose that results in 100% good things. But ten years after I graduated from public high school, I am very happy with the place I’m in, and the success that I have had—and so much of it depends on my parents’ involvement in my education.
There was a period of time where I thought homeschooling could save me from everything that might possibly hurt me. Now that I’m older, I realize that this was a dream. Homeschooling is a tool used to educate, not a savior in and of itself. Homeschooling can be a wonderful experience for many children when parents are responsible and responsive to their children’s needs—but when parents aren’t involved, are negligent, or outright abusive, then homeschooling can be a nightmare.
Less than a year after I enrolled in public school, New Jersey changed its homeschooling law after being heavily lobbied by a coalition of (mostly religious) homeschooling groups. Under current state guidelines, homeschooling parents don’t have to inform anyone when they withdraw their children from schools. Local school boards are not allowed to examine homeschool curricula and determine educational equivalence with local districts. Most damning, homeschooled children are not required to receive regular medical check-ups—even though there have been multiple cases of homeschooled children being abused, starved, and even found dead.
Inevitably, the defenders of the status quo will say that these deaths have nothing to do with homeschooling: they’re just bad apples and not true homeschoolers. It’s true that the majority of homeschoolers would never think of abusing their children, and that many are very involved with their children’s educational process. But when mainstream homeschooling groups have repeatedly lobbied against even the most basic forms of oversight that could catch abusive parents, homeschooling parents are enabling the abusers already existing within their midst.
But it’s not just the outright abuse that has consequences on homeschooled children. The homeschooling laws in each state have effects on how parents act. In a laissez-faire system like New Jersey, parents face no legal consequences when they do not educate their children. Failing your children only results in, well, failing your children.
I’ve seen the impact of parents’ apathy and refusal to educate in my own life. Two of my friends from my public middle school were “homeschooled” during high school. One friend, “Janet”, asked to be homeschooled. Her parents let her choose her own curriculum and were not involved in her education. The other friend, “Sadie”, was pulled out of school by her mother and was not educated for a period of several months before eventually moving out of state. To the best of my knowledge neither Janet nor Sadie completed high school, and both have had difficulties personally and professionally. Meanwhile, my homeschooled friend Peter who lived in a different state, where his parents were required to report standardized test scores, is about to graduate from a top-tier law school.
Now obviously I don’t believe that homeschooling alone is to blame for Janet and Sadie’s struggles, nor do I think that homeschooling alone is to be credited with Peter’s successes. But I do think Peter had a boost from his parents’ legally-mandated high level of involvement and I think that Janet and Sadie were hurt by their parents’ legally-allowed zero involvement.
When parents aren’t involved in their children’s education, children’s outcomes are inevitably worse. When homeschooling parents are legally let off the hook by a coalition of lobbying interests, that’s a perversion of the intent of the homeschooling law as it stands. I’m sure that these lax laws make it easier and more convenient for homeschoolers to do as they wish. But what my parents taught me, through their words and deeds, is never to do something because it’s easy, but only to do something because it’s right.
Homeschooling shouldn’t be done out of ease or convenience. It should be done because it is in the children’s best interests. And if I homeschool my future children, I won’t be homeschooling because it’s what’s easiest for me, or because it works best with my beliefs — I’ll be doing it because it’s what’s right for my children’s education.