I would prefer a different presentation of the “percentile” chart.The gloss over the “average” statistic when comparing homeschoolers to “percentiles" of P.S. students.
Granted that there may be a shortage of data to break out the detail I’m curious about for College-degreed and non-degreed parents and other things they control for, I don’t get the impression that they are comparing homeschooling children of college-educated parents to PS-educated children of college-educated parents, for example. And that is actually what is significant to parents who of course either are or are not college educated, and know it, at the time they decide to or not to homeschool.
But I guess that’s a problem with any statistic along those lines. The people who homeschool are a self-selected group. Some tried it, and didn’t like it or found they couldn’t do it. The only true statistic would come from parents who flipped a coin to decide whether to homeschool or not. And that ain’t happening, at least not very much.
But I guess that the thing that would be most interesting would be to graph out the entire distribution for homeschooler children of college-educated parents and superimpose it on the entire distribution for PS educated children of college-educated parents. The trouble with comparing to “all” PS children is that so many of them, and even of their parents, are indifferent to education. That’s a bad comparison, since none of homeschool parents are that way.
My question is, “Does institutional schooling teach anything at all?”
Really, this is a serious question. No studies have ever been done to see where the student is learning ( home or classroom) and who is doing the teaching ( teacher, parent, or child by reading texts and doing projects in the home). Unless, this is studied it is impossible to know if the thousands spent on each children every year in government school is actually producing a functional service.
I ask this because it is my anecdotal observation that the home lives of academically successful children, whether home or institutionally schooled, are remarkable similar to that of the home I provided for my homeschoolers. Academically successful institutionalized children are doing the **same** amount of homework as my homeschoolers did all day They have parents who stated reading to them daily as infants, took frequent education field trips, had steady and predicable meal and sleep schedules, and rational disciplining.
My conclusion: The learning of academically successful institutionalized children is happening in the home and not much in the school. They are literally homeschooling after school! This is sometimes called “after schooling”.
Finally,....When parents buy a home in a so-called “good” school district they should ask, “ How many of the children are going to private tutoring and/or being “after schooled” by their parents? “ And....It is entirely possible that we spend thousands upon thousands of dollars on each children for government schooling that is possibly entirely ineffective!