[Polybius]

Please explain your enlightened theory on why religious home schooled kids usually rank high above the avg than most kids in publik school?

Probably because the public school standardized test score averages are dragged down by abysmal inner city schools and immigrant students whose primary language is not English, whereas home-schooled children are almost entirely from an unrepresentative population of comparatively wealthy and established homes.

Well, actually, we live in a lily white county without any inner city population and the public schools education here still lags woefully behind the education that our co-op home-schooled kids are getting.

No matter what religious or secular or socioeconomic or family background kids comes from, they will, on the average, do worse in today's public school system that they would in private school or in homeschool or even in the public schools of the 1950's and 1960's era.

[AntiGuv]

I have no doubt that home schooling is inherently superior to the public school system, but the question I was answering is why home school students score high above the public school average. Home schooled students average in the 77 percentile of public school students, and that's a major divide that involves much more than just the superior learning environment.

[DennisR]

Amen to that. My two daughters went to private, Christian school and/or were homeschooled the first eight or nine years of their schooling. Public the last four of five. Not even close. They were bored. I never, ever should have listened to them when they wanted to go to public school so badly. But I did, much to my chagrin.