There is not doubt that every single child would benefit from more individual attention, but I am sure that you are aware of the concept of norming. For the most part home school children (according to your statistic) are performing at above average levels.
Well what is going to happen to that number when you add more and more of the population to it. Initially it will stay at or near that 86% but gradually over time it will move closer to the 50% of the rest of the population. It may never reach 50% but I can bet that it will be a lot closer to 50% than to 86%.
As far as looking at research when I have asked a certain person on this thread for on-line links I have been directed to only homeschool links. While I am not saying they are wrong I would rather see an unbiased view from a group like Rand or Heritage foundation. So if you have an unbiased link let me see it.
I understand your point, but it's irrelevant, and also not quite meaningful.
Certainly, if everyone were homeschooled, the median score would be the 50th percentile. That's a tautology.
But it's irrelevant. On average, homeschoolers do way, way better than public-schooled kids. Even as homeschoolers have gone from a tiny part of the school-aged population to roughly around 4% or so of that population, the differences have held up.
As for research, most homeschool research is conducted by folks interested in homeschooling. Most other folks don't seem very interested. However, there is research out there done by non-homeschooling-related organizations, and this research is in line with the research from homeschool=related organizations. The problem is that because non-homeschooling-related organizations don't frequently do this sort of research, the studies can be considered stale, and thus open to the criticism that they're no longer particularly relevant.
I imagine part of the problem is political correctness: the education establishment, which is officially hostile to homeschooling (but backs an absolute license to abortion on demand, go figure), is unlikely to look kindly at those who try to live within it going around and proving that public school teachers are not possessed of some highly-specialized knowledge of how to educate children.
Another problem that feeds the first is that it's easy, really easy to find large masses of public school children. And not so tough to find private school children. But it's a lot of work to find homeschoolers. We don't all congregate in big brick or cinderblock buildings by the hundreds, or even the thousands. We're usually at... HOME. Or at the park. Or the zoo. Or the aquarium. Or the museum. Or at co-op. With literally dozens of kids in a single place!
It's just a lot more work. And if your work is going to draw scorn from the educational establishment, why work so damned hard to do it? Why would a researcher make his life harder than it has to be?
In the meanwhile, I haven't seen any studies that seem to suggest the contrary, that public schooling is superior to homeschooling.
In fact, I find many folks who criticize the methodology of studies that find in favor of homeschooling (”too Christian,” “too white,” “not representative sample”), but no studies that find to the contrary. LOL. As for complaints about demographics, the larger studies report results for sub-populations. The same study that cites an overall 86th percentile shows a 77th percentile for black children, compared with a national average of something like the 28th percentile. Ouch. Too Christian?? LOL!! That's sort of a telling criticism as it seems to cede the field to Christians as being innately academically-superior. Let me tell all those [predominantly-non-Christian] Tiger Moms, Asian Dads, and Indian parents.
Another criticism is that “these studies aren't scientific experiments.” LOL!! Of course not. It's very, very hard to do actual experiments regarding educational outcomes in large populations. One wouldn't expect a scientific experiment in this sort of study.
And of course, if we're discussing these pieces of research in a scholarly environment, we should then provide the standard caveats like, “correlation isn't causation,” "we have to look for biases in the sample," etc.
That's fine.
But for all those problems, still, the studies come up overwhelmingly in favor of homeschooling. And there's not really any counter-evidence going in the other direction.
So, to homeschooling critics and those who dispute the general superiority of homeschooling, put up or shut up.
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