Home: Where the school is

Apparently, staying at home not only helps you get over an illness, it can also help students recover from public schools. “Home schoolers scored 34-39 percentile points higher than the norm on standardized achievement tests,” the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) claims. “The home school national average ranged from the 84th percentile for Language, Math and Social Studies to the 89th percentile for Reading.”

“The study also found that whether or not parents were teacher-certified had no impact on these scores.” Thus do home schoolers need to tread carefully: When you are living proof that a government program doesn’t work, proponents of said public work may put you on the Endangered Species List (ESL).

The Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) reauthorization could give the U. S. Congress the chance to do just that. “As Congress prepares to reauthorize ESEA, we respectfully urge Congress to retain Section 9506 in ESEA to protect home schools and nonrecipient religious and private schools from any regulation by the federal government,” the HSLDA asked in a letter to lawmakers on May 25, 2010. “Section 9506 was inserted into the No Child Left Behind Act in 2001.”...

I have been homeschooling for 10 years, and I just wanted to say welcome to homeschooling! I hope you find it as rewarding as we have all these years. Also, I wanted to share my favorite resource with you, which I believe would be a help to you in navigating new waters. Its a magazine called Old Schoolhouse magazine, and it comes out quarterly. It is such a rich source of information that I rarely throw out a copy, as I go back to them again and again. You can purchase a copy at Barnes and Noble, or on their website. (Just google Old Schoolhouse magazine, you’ll find it.) If you become a “fan” of theirs on facebook, they run frequent sales where a subscription costs less than $10, which is a bargain, given that the usual price is, I believe, about $5 per copy. Good luck on your new adventure!

My guess is that public school students who have parents that are very involved in their education would yield educational results that are similar to homeschooled students.

of course this will be true for some... there are overachieving public school students and underachieving homeschoolers... i have yet to find a public or private school in my area that offers as rigorous an academic program as we do...

I am consistently amazed at the utter gullibility of Freepers in regards to statistics/research/claims about homeschooling. I searched the HSLDA site for the white paper on the study used to generate these stats, and found they came from NHERI. NHERI is the National Home Education Research Institute.

So I went there to find the white paper. The most recent study had this in the abstract The purpose of this study is to understand academic and social attitudes among undergraduates who have been home educated as primary or secondary students and to learn from their transition to university. A comparative study of 215 undergraduates was conducted in 2005, via questionnaires, to determine if academic and social differences exist between university students who have been previously home educated versus their conventionally schooled peers who attended public or private school. This report concentrates on a subsample of 28 undergraduates who were home educated for at least seven years.

So the study size was 215, with specific emphasis on 28 students. That's it? Really? To find out the actual criteria one must purchase a subscription, or the article, but the abstract should contain significantly more information about the methods use, reliability, validity, standard deviation, etc.

Now, someone may jump on her and with an accusing all caps about how much I hate homeschooling. Nope, not at all. Should I be unfortunate to live in DC, I'd homeschool my child even if I did a worse job that the DC teachers because I wouldn't want my kids in that school system.

We Freepers pride ourselves on demanding facts, proof, stats, etc and never want to blindly follow another. So this type of gullibility is really sad.

Geez people - ask questions before you start spouting stats - KNOW what you are saying before you say it. Just because it's written on the internet doesn't make it true!

You are assuming, by virtue of being educated with a degree from a Tier One Research school, that this would be the case wherein it could be an article that desires to hear its own echo.

As you posted else-thread, this organization is in the business of making a profit, not necessarily to have real research.

I hope your summer is well!

Is UVA a tier one school?

And my summer hasn’t started yet, although the students seem to think it has. If I live to be 100 I will never understand why teachers at the end of the year think it’s fine for kids to just ‘relax.’ Uhm,,, no. Put 30 ‘relaxing’ kids in a room with no discipline and you will have 30 kids swinging from the lights.

Nope, we work up until the last day of class in here. Then I start my summer school. Getting a second endorsement

As far as this research goes, I’m not asking for much - just stats on reliability, validity, standard deviations, and maybe a more representative sample size.

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