Home schoolers are quick to point out that their own surveys show their kids are outperforming those in public schools. They cite statistics that home schooled kids read better in comparable grades, score better on ACT and SAT tests, and have a higher GPA average in college.REICH:
The worry I have about those claims is that it's based on research that has been done almost exclusively by home school advocacy organizations, and so it's not an accident that very little of the research on home schooling has not appeared in peer-reviewed academic scholarly journals.The worry I have about this claim is that very little research on homeschooling has appeared in peer-reviewd academic scholarly journals. This suggests that those journals will not publish anyone who is interested in the subject.
In the absence of such publication, the assumption has to be that the obvious advantages of tutoring over classroom education do produce the results claimed by the parental tutoring ("home school") advocates.
Yet when we make roughly this same point about "global warming", we are called neanderthals who are against "sound science".
You bet. Reich is an idiot if he doesn't know the politics of publicaton these days.(Well, he's an idiot anyway, plus he's too short.) There is no more integrity in the academic publishing game than there is in the do-it-yourself curriculum favored by greedy administrators and lazy "professors."
The "peers" are the leftists in the ed schools. Moreover, the ed schools are notorious for being havens for the intellectually challenged whose "research" is not taken seriously outside of the inbred corridors of the education establishment. Tom Sowell mentions in one of his books that in Morningside heights (Columbia Universtiy) the jibe is that the widest street in the world is the street that separates Columbia Teachers College from the rest of the university.
Reich is also being dishonest. Much of the data comes form states where homeschoolers are tested by the state. In the cases in which homeschooling organizations (his "advocacy groups") have produced research it has often been by contracting it out to well known and respected researchers such are Dr. Lawrence Rudman. While in every social science study there are various methodological issues, the striking thing about the homeschool research is that no study has ever shown that the children don't do better than the average child in public school. This even holds true for minorities, single parent, poor, and uneducated families.
The point here is not that the homeschoolers are perfect or inherently better. Rather, the point is that the public schools have become so corrupt that they now take perfectly capable children and turn them into dullards.
Note, too that Reich's comments on academics was not the ground he wanted to stand on - he knows that pushing th eissue becomes very embarrassing for his ed school friends. Instead, his main argument is the homeschool families must be regulated in a way that public school content is puumped into the heads of homeschool children. When he talks of "ethical servility" what he is really saying is that homeschooling allows parents to pass on their values rather than those of the public school establishment.