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.
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.
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?
“Well, a peach is a lot bigger than a blueberry…and it’s not the same color…and it’s got fuzzy skin…”
There are so many differences that it might not come out too clearly.
…oops.
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…
“It’s about the same size and shape, and they have very similar coloring, and the main difference is that a nectarine’s skin is smooth, while a peach’s skin is fuzzy!’
…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.
These kiwi were very sad that they weren’t included in the fruit salad.
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.
what CRHE staff do in our spare time.
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.
Strawberries can come in all kinds of shapes and sizes — just like homeschooling families!
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.
***
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.
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:
Senator Mike Folmer, Committee Chair: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/member_information/senate_bio.cfm?id=1080
Senator Andrew E. Dinniman, Committee Minority Chair: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/member_information/senate_bio.cfm?id=1049
Senator Lloyd K. Smucker: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/member_information/senate_bio.cfm?id=1185
Senator Joseph B. Scarnati III: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/member_information/senate_bio.cfm?id=283
Senator Patrick M. Browne: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/member_information/senate_bio.cfm?id=76
Senator Jake Corman: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/member_information/senate_bio.cfm?id=251
Senator Stewart J. Greenleaf: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/member_information/senate_bio.cfm?id=173
Senator Robert M. Tomlinson: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/member_information/senate_bio.cfm?id=151
Senator Daylin Leach: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/member_information/senate_bio.cfm?id=991
Senator Rob Teplitz: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/member_information/senate_bio.cfm?id=1628
Senator Anthony H. Williams: http://www.legis.state.pa.us/cfdocs/legis/home/member_information/senate_bio.cfm?id=153
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.
When my parents moved to New Jersey, they wanted the best possible education for my older brother and me, so they bought a house in a town with a strong public school system. And because they wanted the best possible education, when they made friends with other families and found out that there was a parochial school for our religion with an even better reputation than the district’s public schools, they sent my brother and me there, despite the financial hardship it put them through. And at first, my brother and I were both happy and challenged at our school.
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 multiplecases 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.
This week the Coalition for Responsible Home Education turns six months old. Our mission of raising awareness about the need for homeschooling reform and advocating for responsible home education practices has struck a chord, and we’ve received support from homeschooling parents and homeschool alumni across the country.
One of our primary features is our testimonial section, where homeschooled alumni and homeschooling parents write about their experiences and connect them to our call for reform. Over time, we have published several testimonials from homeschooled alumni who had positive experiences and who affirm our mission. You can read more about these testimonials here.
We invite all current and former homeschooling parents and homeschooled students who are supportive of CRHE’s mission and goals to contribute to our efforts by writing a testimonial grounding their support for CRHE in their experiences. Instructions for how to write and submit your own testimonial can be found here.
We are also looking for volunteers who are interested in contributing to our mission with blog posts or short research projects, or by helping us with fundraising and spreading the word. If you are interested in contributing in these or other ways, we encourage you to fill out our volunteer form.
You may also contribute to CRHE by donating to our Paypal account here. Every dime we raise will go towards our overhead and making sure we can continue advocacy for responsible homeschooling. We have filed for 501c3 nonprofit status with the IRS and hope to hear back from them in the next few months. Once we received 501c3 status, all donations made to us, past and future, will be tax-deductible.
I live in New Hampshire, where kindergarten is optional and compulsory education begins at age six. In September 2013 my son was five and would have begun half-day kindergarten at our local public school, while my daughter would not eligible for kindergarten until September 2015. After years of informal early home education for both of them, I decided to formally launch our homeschool program. I figured that if it didn’t work out, I could simply enroll my son in first grade on schedule next year, no harm no foul.
I knew which homeschooling philosophy best met my objectives. I purchased curricula for reading, grammar, math, and history. I set our school calendar and plotted out our daily schedule. I took the obligatory ‘first day of school’ picture showing both my kids standing in our playroom/schoolroom, smiling broadly and still wearing their pajamas. And then we got started.
And we hated it.
It was drudgery for both me and the kids. After the first month I decided my plan was too ambitious for a preschooler and kindergartner, so I dropped history and grammar and just focused on reading and math. But ‘doing school’ was still a miserable experience for all of us. I gave up the reading and math curricula in the middle of October and we took a week’s vacation while I researched online options.
I found an online program that included language arts, math, and science, and started the kids on it in late October. They loved it, as long as I backed off and left them alone to do their thing. I just monitored their progress online and only stepped in to bring them back to revisit activities they didn’t do very well.
My daughter completed Pre-K 1 and Pre-K 2 in just a few weeks. She began the kindergarten activities shortly before her fourth birthday. She moved on to first grade language arts four months later.
On a hunch I put my son in kindergarten math and first grade language arts from the beginning. He was doing well with it, but I soon realized he was skipping all the worksheets and skimming past the reading assignments. He was also neglecting the subjects he didn’t like. So in a fourth major shake-up of our homeschooling plan, I began assigning the kids online activities, overseeing worksheet completion, and listening to the reading assignments. School became miserable again.
In an attempt to find the right balance between independence and accountability, I reinvented our homeschool plan yet again. In our fifth incarnation, eight months into our first “formal” year, I realized both my kids shut down when forced to dwell on something they’d already grasped. The worksheets, which had been intended to cement concepts through additional practice, were actually serving as a barrier to progress, so I agreed to let them skip those. The math curriculum wasn’t working for either of my kids, so I found two others that we now alternate between, and they seem to work a lot better. Both of our new math programs require a lot of one-on-one attention from me, but the kids can progress through language arts at their own pace. They know to call me over to listen when the online activity requires them to read a story, and they know I’ll help them skip through some of the more repetitive non-scored activities they find so annoying. I wasn’t impressed with the online science program, so now we do some fun science experiments every few weeks. I’ve also added handwriting and German language instruction, a monthly world geography activity, and have included more time for fun (and educational, but they don’t know that!) computer games. Audiobooks have become a staple in our car when we’re running errands or driving from one activity to another.
Less than a month before the local public school wraps up for the year, I feel like we’ve finally found our groove. Our homeschooling looks nothing like what I’d meticulously planned last September, but the kids have progressed quite a bit since the beginning of the school year and they can easily match their public school peers in academic proficiency.
For all my years of research and early experimentation, I was not prepared for the reality of a sustained academic year of homeschooling. My one saving grace was that I’d gone into this year understanding it as a trial run. That mindset gave me permission to shake things up as often as necessary until I found what worked. Now that (I think) I’ve found it, I’m willing to sign up for another year.
If what’s working now stops working later, I’ll shake things up again until we’re back to making forward progress. I’ll keep evaluating year by year, and enroll them in public or private school if homeschooling ever stops serving my children’s educational needs. Because the other big thing I learned this year is humility. It’s not about me as a teacher. With a lot of the independent work my kids are doing, I’m not teaching them a thing. But they’re still learning, and the best thing I can do is give them the resources they need and get out of their way. In other areas, the teaching style I’m most comfortable with doesn’t work for them at all, and I have to adjust what I’m doing so it benefits them. As much as I love my schedules, my calendars, and my neatly planned milestones, my kids couldn’t care less about them. If my schedule says we’re going to do math for 30 minutes but it takes one of my kids an hour and 15 minutes to grasp the concept, then I’d better be willing to throw my schedule out the window and give them the time they need, regardless of what it does to the other lessons I had planned for that day.
If you’re thinking of homeschooling, know that flexibility isn’t just a benefit—it’s a requirement. Whether you’re doing a ‘trial run’ year like I did or you’ve gone all in already, give yourself permission to make changes—both minor adjustments and major reinventions—if that’s what it takes to help your kids along. Someday your children will be adults needing to function in this world, and as a homeschooling parent it’s up to you to give them the tools and the skills they’ll need to do that effectively. By remaining flexible enough to meet their individual academic needs, you’ll also teach them important lessons in tenacity, learning from failure, and adjusting to a changing environment, not to mention showing them just how important they are to you. These skills are just as critical to a successful future as mastering the three R’s.
My homeschooling dreams share little in common with my homeschooling reality, but I can’t deny that my kids are flourishing, and that is my ultimate dream as a homeschooling parent.
There is sometimes an assumption that only homeschool alumni with negative homeschooling experiences support oversight of homeschooling. This is not the case. Many homeschool graduates with positive experiences grew up knowing homeschoolers who were limited or harmed by their homeschooling experiences while others have been saddened by stories of homeschooling gone awry and want to do what they can to improve homeschooling for present and future generations. These homeschool graduates have a vision in which homeschooling supports children’s academic, emotional, and physical wellbeing, and they draw from their own positive experiences as they argue in favor of homeschooling accountability.
Last week Alisa Harris became the latest homeschool graduate to write a testimonial for our website. Alisa praised her own positive homeschooling experience before grounding her call for homeschooling accountability in the negative experiences of others around her:
Even growing up, I knew I was one of the lucky homeschoolers. My family knew homeschooled children who worked in the family businesses instead of doing school, kids who could barely read and who had learning disabilities that their families were not equipped to even identify, let alone address. There were cases of neglect and shocking domestic violence and sexual abuse. In so many of these cases, the physical, educational, and emotional neglect was never confronted, not even by fellow homeschooling parents, the only people in a position to see it. The abuse remained hidden until it ended up on the nightly news or the wives and children fled.
Giselle Palmer, who went on to become a public school teacher, also had a positive homeschooling experience. In her testimonial, Giselle spoke of her positive experience before grounding her support for homeschooling accountability in the not-so-glowing stories of some other homeschool parents she has come in contact with and in her passion for education and supporting children’s interests:
My main reason for supporting accountability for homeschoolers is to help prevent the abuse and neglect of children. I have met children who were “homeschooled” and then entered the public schools woefully unprepared. I’ve encountered others who were habitually abused and, because they were homeschooled, no one knew or suspected what was going on in their families.
I believe that the majority of homeschooling families raise and educate their children in good faith, to the best of their abilities, and in a generally appropriate fashion. I do not believe intensive oversight of families is necessary, unless there are serious suspicions of abuse or educational neglect, demonstrated by a lack of academic progress. However, as an educator and a child advocate, I believe that all children have the right to learn and live free from fear and abuse. For these reasons, I support homeschool accountability at the state/county level.
When I was in my late teens, an obscure magazine named me one of “America’s Top Ten Outstanding Homeschool Students.” The article’s headline read “Homeschooling Works!” I now find that headline misleading. More accurately, it would have indicated that the way my family homeschooled worked—for me. The choice to homeschool, in itself, guarantees nothing; in some cases, it is deeply damaging. Oversight won’t fix all of those damaging cases, but it will help stop some instances of abuse and give basic structure to families who need it. Additionally, I’m optimistic that oversight could help foster a culture of accountability in some homeschooling circles and temper the culture of fear. (As my fellow legal historians like to note, law and society shape each other!) Most of all, I hope that one day all homeschooled children will receive an education like the one I had, preparing them to flourish and reach their full potential in a world they’re ready to explore.
Our CRHE board is made up of homeschool graduates with a mix of homeschooling experiences ranging from profoundly negative to profoundly positive. Board member Kathryn Brightbill, who was homeschooled in the 1980s and 1990s, bases her involvement in CRHE and her interest in advocating for homeschooled children in her own homeschooling experience. As she wrote in her testimonial:
I support oversight of home education not because I had a bad homeschooling experience, but because I had a good one. I’ve seen how wonderful homeschooling can be when it works because I’ve lived it. When I hear the stories of homeschooled students who experienced educational neglect or abuse, or the formerly homeschooled adults who are struggling to overcome the deficits in their education, it saddens me to know how much the system failed them. The educational method that gave me wings to soar is the same one that left them hobbled and struggling. It doesn’t have to be that way, it shouldn’t be that way.
This desire to help make homeschooling as positive for others as it was for them is a common thread that runs through testimonials. Another common thread involves dispelling fears about homeschooling oversight. It is not uncommon for homeschooling parents to express concern about how their homeschools would be affected by the sort of oversight recommended by CRHE. In their testimonials, however, these homeschool graduates are emphatic that basic oversight of homeschooling would not have negatively impacted their positive experiences in any way.
I was homeschooled in Indiana, a state with no oversight of homeschooling. My parents did not even have to file notice, which meant that as far as the state knew, we did not exist. All of the things my parents did—creating curriculum plans, putting together annual portfolios, having us tested—they did in an effort to homeschool us effectively and responsibly. My parents would not have found oversight of homeschooling an inconvenience or burden because they already voluntarily did everything effective homeschool oversight generally requires.
As for the regulations being discussed by the Coalition for Responsible Education and other organizations, not only are they only a minimal intrusion on the educational experience of homeschooling, they are in most cases things my family, and others, already did. Portfolio requirements? My mom always maintained a “school folder” for me and my sister consisting of a representative sampling of our academic work and our creative “non-school” activities, so that we could have a record of our achievements when we grew up. Occasional standardized testing? My parents administered the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills to us every three years, just to check on how we were doing, and of course we had to take the SAT if we wanted to attend college. Yearly meetings with mandatory reporters? That would be my regular yearly checkup at the pediatrician’s office to make sure I was in good health. These are not the sort of burdensome requirements John Holt and others feared would teach children to please authority figures rather than to learn for learning’s sake. Instead, they are common sense requirements that responsible families already follow.
Alisa Harris concluded her testimonial with a similar statement:
I am in favor of sensible homeschooling oversight that preserves all the best aspects of homeschooling—the rich, individualized, and creative education—while mitigating some of the isolation, neglect, and potential harms. Homeschooled students should be allowed to benefit from the diversity of relationships and experiences they can gain by taking a class at a public school or by participating in public school sports and extracurricular activities. We also have a responsibility to protect children who may be at risk for neglect or abuse. We need to intervene and assist if a child’s education is being neglected, and we need to ensure that parents are qualified to teach. My parents and the many other responsible homeschooling parents I knew would have easily exceeded the standards proposed by Coalition for Responsible Home Education. For less fortunate kids, these standards would have protected them and kept them from slipping through the system’s cracks.
We appreciate Alisa and others like her for supporting CRHE and sending us their testimonials. We could not discuss responsible homeschooling without the examples of positive homeschooling experiences before us. Just as negative homeschooling experiences point to what can go wrong, positive homeschooling experiences point to what can go well. Understanding what factors make homeschooling a success is key to making homeschooling the best it can be for each child.
If you would like to read more testimonials please see our testimonials page, and if you would like to submit your own testimonial please see these instructions.
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Growing up in the conservative Christian homeschooling world, I heard this quotation more times than I can count. It was always wielded against the specter of “big government,” whether that meant government intervention or government programs. Presented in contrast to the so-called “liberal” ideals of big government was the conservative ideal of checks and balances. Conservatives pointed to the U.S. Constitution as the prime manifestation of the conservative ideal. The Founding Fathers created checks and balances in power between different branches of government: the executive, the judicial, and the legislative.
It’s been years since I was a homeschool kid, reading “Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?” and absorbing political arguments from the Heritage Foundation. I don’t know today whether I’m a “conservative” or a “liberal.” The difficulty there, of course, is that it depends on how you define those words. I’m not a fan of sloppy, mismanaged government. But I’m also not a fan of scarce government. I believe in human rights for all people, and I believe government serves a vitally important role in protecting those rights.
What I do know is that I am mystified by the anarchy (and consequent parental dictatorship) that reigns supreme among most homeschooling communities—whether those communities are conservative or liberal, Christian or non-Christian. In fact, while many homeschooling communities are sharply in disagreement over issues like religion and educational method, most of them appear unified in a stance against any and every government oversight of homeschooling. The atheist unschooler will stand side by side with the right-wing Christian in lobbying against protections for homeschooled children. Pluralistic homeschool organizations will join HSLDA even against minimal research of homeschooling methods, as VA Homeschoolers did when they lobbied arm-in-arm with HSLDA against Virginia’s HJ 92.
This mystifies me. For one thing, liberal homeschoolers contradict liberal principles with this sentiment. Liberal principles would say children—with their marginalized position and limited rights—need people to advocate for them. Their rights ought to be protected, and the liberal position is that government should be a tool in securing those rights.
But honestly, conservative homeschoolers contradict conservative principles with this sentiment, too. I know this because I was once a conservative Christian homeschool kid myself. I was raised a good conservative, which directly primed me for supporting homeschool oversight.
Conservatives believe in checks and balances. They believe that power should never be focused entirely within one group: whether that group is the executive branch of government or the legislative or judicial branch. Consistency with this conservative ideal would dictate that power over a child’s education should never be focused entirely within one group, whether that group is the federal government, the local school board, or a child’s parents.
The “parental rights” agenda popular among conservative homeschoolers attempts to give parents absolute power over their children. But this very idea is a betrayal of the conservative ideal, which would demand that neither parents nor the government should have absolute power. After all, absolute power corrupts absolutely. A common sense attitude toward government oversight of homeschooling would provide useful checks and balances between a parent’s right to educational choice, a child’s right to a quality education, and the government’s duty to both sets of rights.
Advocacy for homeschool oversight shouldn’t be a radical position. This should be the common sense position for both liberals and conservatives. Unfortunately, the homeschooling world has stubbornly staked out the actually radical position so consistently that they—not us advocates of responsible homeschooling—have moved the Overton Window to the point that basic checks and balances are “tyranny.”
But remember: tyranny begins in the absence of checks and balances. It begins when power is invested absolutely and with no responsibility. That includes parental power. I therefore challenge conservative homeschoolers to rethink their opposition to basic oversight, because that opposition isn’t as conservative as they think.
While some homeschooled students receive transcripts or diplomas through accredited correspondence programs or satellite schools, homeschool diplomas and transcripts are typically family-generated. In other words, homeschool diplomas and transcripts are similar to diplomas and transcripts from unaccredited private schools, except that they are composed by the student’s family.
How does the fact that the homeschool diploma and transcript are family-generated affect the admissions process? How do admissions officials evaluate these documents? As part of his 2003 dissertation, “The Selection Process and Performance of Former-Homeschooled Students at Pennsylvania’s Four-Year Colleges and Universities,” Joseph Richard Barno sought to answer these questions by sending surveys to admissions officers at all 109 four-year colleges and universities in Pennsylvania. Ultimately, he collected responses from 72 schools.
One of Barno’s major findings was that the homeschooled students he surveyed felt they were treated fairly by admissions officials. Another finding was that admissions officials used different criteria to evaluate each group of students.
In the case of traditional students, admissions officials relied heavily on diplomas and transcripts, with 75% relying ‘mostly’ on diplomas and 95% relying ‘mostly’ on transcripts when evaluating traditional students’ eligibility for admission. By contrast, only 25% of officials relied ‘mostly’ on diplomas and 50% relied ‘mostly’ on transcripts when evaluating homeschoolers’ eligibility.
Note that admissions officials gave diplomas and transcripts generated by correspondence programs or satellite schools more weight than those generated by a student’s family, though still less weight than those issued by a public school. This indicates that the reduced weight placed on homeschool transcripts is a result not of discrimination but rather a result of the family-generated nature of these documents.
While transcripts and diplomas carry the most weight for traditionally schooled students, for homeschooled students other admissions criteria are more important to the admissions process. As Barno reported:
Admissions personnel rated high school transcript as the most important criterion for traditionally-schooled students, but not for former home-schooled students, while virtually all other criteria, including SAT score, ACT score, personal interview, letters of recommendation, extracurricular activities, portfolio and statement of intent were more important for former home-schooled applicants than for those traditionally schooled.
In his survey, Barno asked the admissions officials to do the following:
Please indicate with a check mark the degree to which each of the following is important in the acceptance of former home schoolers to your institution.
The result was the following chart.
Note that, while almost one-third of admissions officials relied ‘mostly’ on the quality of homeschoolers’ portfolios when determining admissions eligibility, only 10% of officials did so when evaluating traditionally schooled students. A similar pattern is found in other admissions criteria such as the SAT score, personal interview, letters of recommendation, essays, extracurriculars, and statement of intent—admissions officers relied more heavily upon these criteria to determine homeschoolers’ eligibility than to determine that of traditionally schooled students.
Barno’s findings indicate that, because homeschool diplomas and transcripts tend to be family-generated, admissions officials place increased weight on external and corroborating measures of achievement such as SAT scores or extracurriculars.This suggests that homeschooled students and their parents should take extra care in preparing letters of recommendation, essays, and other application materials, as admissions officials will be looking to these documents to confirm the quality of their homeschool education.
In this month of graduations, we at CRHE wish every graduating homeschool senior all the best. We support parents’ and students’ efforts to draw up transcripts and diplomas and collect corroborating information and documentation to make their college applications well-rounded and successful. Congratulations to the 2014 graduates!
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.
***
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 Ryan Stollar
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.
Last Updated: 20 October, 2023 by CRHE
A Call for CRHE Volunteers
This week the Coalition for Responsible Home Education turns six months old. Our mission of raising awareness about the need for homeschooling reform and advocating for responsible home education practices has struck a chord, and we’ve received support from homeschooling parents and homeschool alumni across the country.
One of our primary features is our testimonial section, where homeschooled alumni and homeschooling parents write about their experiences and connect them to our call for reform. Over time, we have published several testimonials from homeschooled alumni who had positive experiences and who affirm our mission. You can read more about these testimonials here.
We invite all current and former homeschooling parents and homeschooled students who are supportive of CRHE’s mission and goals to contribute to our efforts by writing a testimonial grounding their support for CRHE in their experiences. Instructions for how to write and submit your own testimonial can be found here.
We are also looking for volunteers who are interested in contributing to our mission with blog posts or short research projects, or by helping us with fundraising and spreading the word. If you are interested in contributing in these or other ways, we encourage you to fill out our volunteer form.
You may also contribute to CRHE by donating to our Paypal account here. Every dime we raise will go towards our overhead and making sure we can continue advocacy for responsible homeschooling. We have filed for 501c3 nonprofit status with the IRS and hope to hear back from them in the next few months. Once we received 501c3 status, all donations made to us, past and future, will be tax-deductible.
Here’s to many more anniversaries to come!
Last Updated: 20 October, 2023 by Karen Goltz
When Homeschool Dreams Meet Reality
I live in New Hampshire, where kindergarten is optional and compulsory education begins at age six. In September 2013 my son was five and would have begun half-day kindergarten at our local public school, while my daughter would not eligible for kindergarten until September 2015. After years of informal early home education for both of them, I decided to formally launch our homeschool program. I figured that if it didn’t work out, I could simply enroll my son in first grade on schedule next year, no harm no foul.
I knew which homeschooling philosophy best met my objectives. I purchased curricula for reading, grammar, math, and history. I set our school calendar and plotted out our daily schedule. I took the obligatory ‘first day of school’ picture showing both my kids standing in our playroom/schoolroom, smiling broadly and still wearing their pajamas. And then we got started.
And we hated it.
It was drudgery for both me and the kids. After the first month I decided my plan was too ambitious for a preschooler and kindergartner, so I dropped history and grammar and just focused on reading and math. But ‘doing school’ was still a miserable experience for all of us. I gave up the reading and math curricula in the middle of October and we took a week’s vacation while I researched online options.
I found an online program that included language arts, math, and science, and started the kids on it in late October. They loved it, as long as I backed off and left them alone to do their thing. I just monitored their progress online and only stepped in to bring them back to revisit activities they didn’t do very well.
My daughter completed Pre-K 1 and Pre-K 2 in just a few weeks. She began the kindergarten activities shortly before her fourth birthday. She moved on to first grade language arts four months later.
On a hunch I put my son in kindergarten math and first grade language arts from the beginning. He was doing well with it, but I soon realized he was skipping all the worksheets and skimming past the reading assignments. He was also neglecting the subjects he didn’t like. So in a fourth major shake-up of our homeschooling plan, I began assigning the kids online activities, overseeing worksheet completion, and listening to the reading assignments. School became miserable again.
In an attempt to find the right balance between independence and accountability, I reinvented our homeschool plan yet again. In our fifth incarnation, eight months into our first “formal” year, I realized both my kids shut down when forced to dwell on something they’d already grasped. The worksheets, which had been intended to cement concepts through additional practice, were actually serving as a barrier to progress, so I agreed to let them skip those. The math curriculum wasn’t working for either of my kids, so I found two others that we now alternate between, and they seem to work a lot better. Both of our new math programs require a lot of one-on-one attention from me, but the kids can progress through language arts at their own pace. They know to call me over to listen when the online activity requires them to read a story, and they know I’ll help them skip through some of the more repetitive non-scored activities they find so annoying. I wasn’t impressed with the online science program, so now we do some fun science experiments every few weeks. I’ve also added handwriting and German language instruction, a monthly world geography activity, and have included more time for fun (and educational, but they don’t know that!) computer games. Audiobooks have become a staple in our car when we’re running errands or driving from one activity to another.
Less than a month before the local public school wraps up for the year, I feel like we’ve finally found our groove. Our homeschooling looks nothing like what I’d meticulously planned last September, but the kids have progressed quite a bit since the beginning of the school year and they can easily match their public school peers in academic proficiency.
For all my years of research and early experimentation, I was not prepared for the reality of a sustained academic year of homeschooling. My one saving grace was that I’d gone into this year understanding it as a trial run. That mindset gave me permission to shake things up as often as necessary until I found what worked. Now that (I think) I’ve found it, I’m willing to sign up for another year.
If what’s working now stops working later, I’ll shake things up again until we’re back to making forward progress. I’ll keep evaluating year by year, and enroll them in public or private school if homeschooling ever stops serving my children’s educational needs. Because the other big thing I learned this year is humility. It’s not about me as a teacher. With a lot of the independent work my kids are doing, I’m not teaching them a thing. But they’re still learning, and the best thing I can do is give them the resources they need and get out of their way. In other areas, the teaching style I’m most comfortable with doesn’t work for them at all, and I have to adjust what I’m doing so it benefits them. As much as I love my schedules, my calendars, and my neatly planned milestones, my kids couldn’t care less about them. If my schedule says we’re going to do math for 30 minutes but it takes one of my kids an hour and 15 minutes to grasp the concept, then I’d better be willing to throw my schedule out the window and give them the time they need, regardless of what it does to the other lessons I had planned for that day.
If you’re thinking of homeschooling, know that flexibility isn’t just a benefit—it’s a requirement. Whether you’re doing a ‘trial run’ year like I did or you’ve gone all in already, give yourself permission to make changes—both minor adjustments and major reinventions—if that’s what it takes to help your kids along. Someday your children will be adults needing to function in this world, and as a homeschooling parent it’s up to you to give them the tools and the skills they’ll need to do that effectively. By remaining flexible enough to meet their individual academic needs, you’ll also teach them important lessons in tenacity, learning from failure, and adjusting to a changing environment, not to mention showing them just how important they are to you. These skills are just as critical to a successful future as mastering the three R’s.
My homeschooling dreams share little in common with my homeschooling reality, but I can’t deny that my kids are flourishing, and that is my ultimate dream as a homeschooling parent.
Last Updated: 20 October, 2023 by Rachel Coleman
Homeschool Alumni with Positive Experiences Call for Oversight
There is sometimes an assumption that only homeschool alumni with negative homeschooling experiences support oversight of homeschooling. This is not the case. Many homeschool graduates with positive experiences grew up knowing homeschoolers who were limited or harmed by their homeschooling experiences while others have been saddened by stories of homeschooling gone awry and want to do what they can to improve homeschooling for present and future generations. These homeschool graduates have a vision in which homeschooling supports children’s academic, emotional, and physical wellbeing, and they draw from their own positive experiences as they argue in favor of homeschooling accountability.
Last week Alisa Harris became the latest homeschool graduate to write a testimonial for our website. Alisa praised her own positive homeschooling experience before grounding her call for homeschooling accountability in the negative experiences of others around her:
Even growing up, I knew I was one of the lucky homeschoolers. My family knew homeschooled children who worked in the family businesses instead of doing school, kids who could barely read and who had learning disabilities that their families were not equipped to even identify, let alone address. There were cases of neglect and shocking domestic violence and sexual abuse. In so many of these cases, the physical, educational, and emotional neglect was never confronted, not even by fellow homeschooling parents, the only people in a position to see it. The abuse remained hidden until it ended up on the nightly news or the wives and children fled.
Giselle Palmer, who went on to become a public school teacher, also had a positive homeschooling experience. In her testimonial, Giselle spoke of her positive experience before grounding her support for homeschooling accountability in the not-so-glowing stories of some other homeschool parents she has come in contact with and in her passion for education and supporting children’s interests:
My main reason for supporting accountability for homeschoolers is to help prevent the abuse and neglect of children. I have met children who were “homeschooled” and then entered the public schools woefully unprepared. I’ve encountered others who were habitually abused and, because they were homeschooled, no one knew or suspected what was going on in their families.
I believe that the majority of homeschooling families raise and educate their children in good faith, to the best of their abilities, and in a generally appropriate fashion. I do not believe intensive oversight of families is necessary, unless there are serious suspicions of abuse or educational neglect, demonstrated by a lack of academic progress. However, as an educator and a child advocate, I believe that all children have the right to learn and live free from fear and abuse. For these reasons, I support homeschool accountability at the state/county level.
Homeschool graduate Arielle G. made similar statements in the testimonial she wrote for CRHE earlier this year, describing herself as a “homeschool poster child.”
When I was in my late teens, an obscure magazine named me one of “America’s Top Ten Outstanding Homeschool Students.” The article’s headline read “Homeschooling Works!” I now find that headline misleading. More accurately, it would have indicated that the way my family homeschooled worked—for me. The choice to homeschool, in itself, guarantees nothing; in some cases, it is deeply damaging. Oversight won’t fix all of those damaging cases, but it will help stop some instances of abuse and give basic structure to families who need it. Additionally, I’m optimistic that oversight could help foster a culture of accountability in some homeschooling circles and temper the culture of fear. (As my fellow legal historians like to note, law and society shape each other!) Most of all, I hope that one day all homeschooled children will receive an education like the one I had, preparing them to flourish and reach their full potential in a world they’re ready to explore.
Our CRHE board is made up of homeschool graduates with a mix of homeschooling experiences ranging from profoundly negative to profoundly positive. Board member Kathryn Brightbill, who was homeschooled in the 1980s and 1990s, bases her involvement in CRHE and her interest in advocating for homeschooled children in her own homeschooling experience. As she wrote in her testimonial:
I support oversight of home education not because I had a bad homeschooling experience, but because I had a good one. I’ve seen how wonderful homeschooling can be when it works because I’ve lived it. When I hear the stories of homeschooled students who experienced educational neglect or abuse, or the formerly homeschooled adults who are struggling to overcome the deficits in their education, it saddens me to know how much the system failed them. The educational method that gave me wings to soar is the same one that left them hobbled and struggling. It doesn’t have to be that way, it shouldn’t be that way.
This desire to help make homeschooling as positive for others as it was for them is a common thread that runs through testimonials. Another common thread involves dispelling fears about homeschooling oversight. It is not uncommon for homeschooling parents to express concern about how their homeschools would be affected by the sort of oversight recommended by CRHE. In their testimonials, however, these homeschool graduates are emphatic that basic oversight of homeschooling would not have negatively impacted their positive experiences in any way.
I made this point in my own testimonial:
I was homeschooled in Indiana, a state with no oversight of homeschooling. My parents did not even have to file notice, which meant that as far as the state knew, we did not exist. All of the things my parents did—creating curriculum plans, putting together annual portfolios, having us tested—they did in an effort to homeschool us effectively and responsibly. My parents would not have found oversight of homeschooling an inconvenience or burden because they already voluntarily did everything effective homeschool oversight generally requires.
Another homeschool alumnus, Jeremy, made the same point in his testimonial:
As for the regulations being discussed by the Coalition for Responsible Education and other organizations, not only are they only a minimal intrusion on the educational experience of homeschooling, they are in most cases things my family, and others, already did. Portfolio requirements? My mom always maintained a “school folder” for me and my sister consisting of a representative sampling of our academic work and our creative “non-school” activities, so that we could have a record of our achievements when we grew up. Occasional standardized testing? My parents administered the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills to us every three years, just to check on how we were doing, and of course we had to take the SAT if we wanted to attend college. Yearly meetings with mandatory reporters? That would be my regular yearly checkup at the pediatrician’s office to make sure I was in good health. These are not the sort of burdensome requirements John Holt and others feared would teach children to please authority figures rather than to learn for learning’s sake. Instead, they are common sense requirements that responsible families already follow.
Alisa Harris concluded her testimonial with a similar statement:
I am in favor of sensible homeschooling oversight that preserves all the best aspects of homeschooling—the rich, individualized, and creative education—while mitigating some of the isolation, neglect, and potential harms. Homeschooled students should be allowed to benefit from the diversity of relationships and experiences they can gain by taking a class at a public school or by participating in public school sports and extracurricular activities. We also have a responsibility to protect children who may be at risk for neglect or abuse. We need to intervene and assist if a child’s education is being neglected, and we need to ensure that parents are qualified to teach. My parents and the many other responsible homeschooling parents I knew would have easily exceeded the standards proposed by Coalition for Responsible Home Education. For less fortunate kids, these standards would have protected them and kept them from slipping through the system’s cracks.
We appreciate Alisa and others like her for supporting CRHE and sending us their testimonials. We could not discuss responsible homeschooling without the examples of positive homeschooling experiences before us. Just as negative homeschooling experiences point to what can go wrong, positive homeschooling experiences point to what can go well. Understanding what factors make homeschooling a success is key to making homeschooling the best it can be for each child.
If you would like to read more testimonials please see our testimonials page, and if you would like to submit your own testimonial please see these instructions.
Last Updated: 20 October, 2023 by Ryan Stollar
Checks and Balances: The Conservative Case for Homeschool Oversight
“Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Growing up in the conservative Christian homeschooling world, I heard this quotation more times than I can count. It was always wielded against the specter of “big government,” whether that meant government intervention or government programs. Presented in contrast to the so-called “liberal” ideals of big government was the conservative ideal of checks and balances. Conservatives pointed to the U.S. Constitution as the prime manifestation of the conservative ideal. The Founding Fathers created checks and balances in power between different branches of government: the executive, the judicial, and the legislative.
It’s been years since I was a homeschool kid, reading “Whatever Happened to Penny Candy?” and absorbing political arguments from the Heritage Foundation. I don’t know today whether I’m a “conservative” or a “liberal.” The difficulty there, of course, is that it depends on how you define those words. I’m not a fan of sloppy, mismanaged government. But I’m also not a fan of scarce government. I believe in human rights for all people, and I believe government serves a vitally important role in protecting those rights.
What I do know is that I am mystified by the anarchy (and consequent parental dictatorship) that reigns supreme among most homeschooling communities—whether those communities are conservative or liberal, Christian or non-Christian. In fact, while many homeschooling communities are sharply in disagreement over issues like religion and educational method, most of them appear unified in a stance against any and every government oversight of homeschooling. The atheist unschooler will stand side by side with the right-wing Christian in lobbying against protections for homeschooled children. Pluralistic homeschool organizations will join HSLDA even against minimal research of homeschooling methods, as VA Homeschoolers did when they lobbied arm-in-arm with HSLDA against Virginia’s HJ 92.
This mystifies me. For one thing, liberal homeschoolers contradict liberal principles with this sentiment. Liberal principles would say children—with their marginalized position and limited rights—need people to advocate for them. Their rights ought to be protected, and the liberal position is that government should be a tool in securing those rights.
But honestly, conservative homeschoolers contradict conservative principles with this sentiment, too. I know this because I was once a conservative Christian homeschool kid myself. I was raised a good conservative, which directly primed me for supporting homeschool oversight.
Conservatives believe in checks and balances. They believe that power should never be focused entirely within one group: whether that group is the executive branch of government or the legislative or judicial branch. Consistency with this conservative ideal would dictate that power over a child’s education should never be focused entirely within one group, whether that group is the federal government, the local school board, or a child’s parents.
The “parental rights” agenda popular among conservative homeschoolers attempts to give parents absolute power over their children. But this very idea is a betrayal of the conservative ideal, which would demand that neither parents nor the government should have absolute power. After all, absolute power corrupts absolutely. A common sense attitude toward government oversight of homeschooling would provide useful checks and balances between a parent’s right to educational choice, a child’s right to a quality education, and the government’s duty to both sets of rights.
Advocacy for homeschool oversight shouldn’t be a radical position. This should be the common sense position for both liberals and conservatives. Unfortunately, the homeschooling world has stubbornly staked out the actually radical position so consistently that they—not us advocates of responsible homeschooling—have moved the Overton Window to the point that basic checks and balances are “tyranny.”
But remember: tyranny begins in the absence of checks and balances. It begins when power is invested absolutely and with no responsibility. That includes parental power. I therefore challenge conservative homeschoolers to rethink their opposition to basic oversight, because that opposition isn’t as conservative as they think.
Last Updated: 16 October, 2014 by Rachel Coleman
Homeschool Transcripts and Diplomas in the Admissions Process
While some homeschooled students receive transcripts or diplomas through accredited correspondence programs or satellite schools, homeschool diplomas and transcripts are typically family-generated. In other words, homeschool diplomas and transcripts are similar to diplomas and transcripts from unaccredited private schools, except that they are composed by the student’s family.
How does the fact that the homeschool diploma and transcript are family-generated affect the admissions process? How do admissions officials evaluate these documents? As part of his 2003 dissertation, “The Selection Process and Performance of Former-Homeschooled Students at Pennsylvania’s Four-Year Colleges and Universities,” Joseph Richard Barno sought to answer these questions by sending surveys to admissions officers at all 109 four-year colleges and universities in Pennsylvania. Ultimately, he collected responses from 72 schools.
One of Barno’s major findings was that the homeschooled students he surveyed felt they were treated fairly by admissions officials. Another finding was that admissions officials used different criteria to evaluate each group of students.
In the case of traditional students, admissions officials relied heavily on diplomas and transcripts, with 75% relying ‘mostly’ on diplomas and 95% relying ‘mostly’ on transcripts when evaluating traditional students’ eligibility for admission. By contrast, only 25% of officials relied ‘mostly’ on diplomas and 50% relied ‘mostly’ on transcripts when evaluating homeschoolers’ eligibility.
Note that admissions officials gave diplomas and transcripts generated by correspondence programs or satellite schools more weight than those generated by a student’s family, though still less weight than those issued by a public school. This indicates that the reduced weight placed on homeschool transcripts is a result not of discrimination but rather a result of the family-generated nature of these documents.
While transcripts and diplomas carry the most weight for traditionally schooled students, for homeschooled students other admissions criteria are more important to the admissions process. As Barno reported:
Admissions personnel rated high school transcript as the most important criterion for traditionally-schooled students, but not for former home-schooled students, while virtually all other criteria, including SAT score, ACT score, personal interview, letters of recommendation, extracurricular activities, portfolio and statement of intent were more important for former home-schooled applicants than for those traditionally schooled.
In his survey, Barno asked the admissions officials to do the following:
Please indicate with a check mark the degree to which each of the following is important in the acceptance of former home schoolers to your institution.
The result was the following chart.
Note that, while almost one-third of admissions officials relied ‘mostly’ on the quality of homeschoolers’ portfolios when determining admissions eligibility, only 10% of officials did so when evaluating traditionally schooled students. A similar pattern is found in other admissions criteria such as the SAT score, personal interview, letters of recommendation, essays, extracurriculars, and statement of intent—admissions officers relied more heavily upon these criteria to determine homeschoolers’ eligibility than to determine that of traditionally schooled students.
Barno’s findings indicate that, because homeschool diplomas and transcripts tend to be family-generated, admissions officials place increased weight on external and corroborating measures of achievement such as SAT scores or extracurriculars.This suggests that homeschooled students and their parents should take extra care in preparing letters of recommendation, essays, and other application materials, as admissions officials will be looking to these documents to confirm the quality of their homeschool education.
In this month of graduations, we at CRHE wish every graduating homeschool senior all the best. We support parents’ and students’ efforts to draw up transcripts and diplomas and collect corroborating information and documentation to make their college applications well-rounded and successful. Congratulations to the 2014 graduates!