This stat means nothing.
what you need is to take random sample of 100 kids and home school them, like it or not and compare to a random sample of 100 kids who are in public schools, like it or not.
All this stat means is that home schooled kids likely have involved, intelligent parents who are likely wealthier and smarter than the average parents.
Also, the public school scores are dragged down by the scores of blacks and hispanics. I suspect that the home schooled are largely white.
True enough, the difference is likely less stark (but I would expect, still noticeable) if we look at similar “socioeconomic” situations across the homeschool and public school models. Still it’s a good illustration of “train up a child in the way he should go” however that is achieved, and yes parental guidance is sacrificed in the public school model. Children have to have a reason why to study, and if those nurturing them care more, they generally perceive a better reason. Which is about as non rocket science as one can get, but it also tells us how to produce better rocket scientists. Just care about them more when they are growing up.
Your ignorance of homeschoolers and homeschooling is staggering.
I have yet to meet ANY homeschoolers who are wealthier than average. And I have not found homeschoolers to be any more or less intelligent than public/private school parents.
Homeschoolers are just your average, run of the mill people who want better for their kids than the public indoctrination system pumps out.
Your problem, as with all who dismiss the standardized test results, is that you are using it for the wrong purpose. You are using it as a measure of the intelligence of the child, as opposed to a measure of the success of the schooling method.
Homeschooling works for a lot more reasons than simply inherent intelligence.
You can try to dismiss and excuse away the results of the standardized tests, but they are what they are and show that homeschooling works.
yes but the point is that homeschooling produces better results because the teachers there give a crap and they make sure the kid understands.
there have been cases where a few people were lazy and weren’t doing proper schooling but they were soon found out.
Exactly my argument. I'm not against home schooling, but the vast majority of parents are quite unqualified to teach. Maybe 20-30% of parents could do a decent job teaching their kids. My own parents would have been totally inadequate. At any rate, my Dad worked and my mother didn't have time with sometimes four or five squalling brats running around the house.
These “involved” parents are **AFTERSCHOOLING***!!!! If you disagree with me then post the studies that will prove me wrong. You can't because NO ONE knows if government schooling even does the job is says it does.
If “involved” parents is the key then maybe, just maybe, taxpayers are WASTING up to $30,000/kid/year by supporting institutional government owned and run indoctrination centers ( oops! “schools”). Maybe these mulit-multi-mulit-million prison-like “schools” are essentially doing NOTHING at all except chewing up lots of tax dollars.
Let's do the study that should have been done **150** YEARS ago!!! We should see exactly where children are learning ( school or home) and who is doing the teaching ( parent, child by doing homework, or tutors).
These studies will never be done because it would put lots of very minimally educated, and talented white collar Democrats out of work, and free millions of kids from the Marxist Borg mind control machine.
By the way,...yeah...I shouting, jumping up and down, and having a fit.
We spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars a year on a government “school” BORG MACHINE and no one, absolutely NO ONE, knows if it even works.
What a mouthful of assumptions.
My family home schools, and I'd say we're pretty typical for that demographic. We have a (very) small business, which allows my wife to stay home with the kids and educate them. Even in the best of times, I don't think we've ever made more than $60K a year, so we're not wealthy by any stretch of the imagination.
As far as being smarter than other parents, my wife went to public schools in her youth, and got a rotten education. That didn't stop her from rolling up her sleeves and improving her own education while bringing our kids up through the grades. She's done a remarkable job for someone who can't even spell the word, 'potato'.
Throughout the years we've encountered countless instances where our kids showed a markedly higher level of academic knowledge and skill than their public school counterparts. We don't even question it anymore, we've seen it so often.
Although your points are all well founded, I think there is little doubt that homeschooling accelerates learning.
Because my wife and I work full time, we have sent our children to private Catholic shool. They’ve done quite well. But when I help them with their homework, I am left with a solid feeling that I could teach them the same material in <50% of the time.
It is hard to beat learning at your best pace and having a personal tutor.
I don't know what research would show today, but when my wife and I began homeschooling in about 2000, the research showed that the median family income of homeschoolers was lower than the population as a whole, primarily because homeschooling families seldom have a second wage earner in the household.
Other than that, the “criticisms” you list are valid. Sort of. Except that they're irrelevant.
The reason why folks do this kind of research is because critics have often said that homeschoolers just can't be providing a quality education for their children.
How can folks who are not professional teachers, they say, not rigorously trained in the pedagogical sciences, do a better job of teaching than professional teachers, who spend grueling years learning and honing their craft (ROFLMAO)?
This research answers the question: Yes, we DO manage to overcome all our handicaps and lacunae in the pedagogical sciences to produce superior educational results.
One of the other accusations against homeschoolers is that we're all just trying to skirt the truancy laws, that we're likely to be LESS involved than other parents.
In fact, the laws of many states are punitive toward homeschoolers with the excuse that the state must heavily regulate homeschoolers to make sure that 1) the children will receive a quality education and 2) that parents won't just goof off and make no effort to educate their children, and take homeschooling as an excuse to be less involved with their children.
It's a little hypocritical for the non-homeschooling folks to then say that this research “means nothing” because, of course we'll do a better job, because, well, obviously, homeschoolers are MORE involved with their children than other parents.
sitetest
The stat doesn’t mean “nothing”.
The report really does communicate useful information about a sample. It’s a logical fallacy to assume that just because a sample differs from the population at large that analyzing the sample is worthless.
Now, it would also be a logical fallacy to assume that education can significantly improve outcomes - that subjecting the wider population to the conditions of the sample population would elicit the same results.
“All this stat means is that home schooled kids likely have involved, intelligent parents who are likely wealthier and smarter than the average parents.”
That’s one of the useful things the study illustrates.
Given that recent studies of twins reared apart indicate that adult IQ is somewhere in the range of 70%+ to 90% genetically determined, and that childhood IQ variations due to educational environment tend to disappear in adulthood, and given that the 30% to 10% of IQ that is environmentally determined is determined least by education and far more by childhood nutrition and gestational environment (fetal alcohol syndrome for example), then one of the better predictive measures of a person’s cognitive power would be to look at said person’s biological parents and rate them on intelligence and involvement.
Much like looking at, for example, Eagle Scouts, home schooling isn’t necessarily about the effects the program would have on a child or young adult so much as the fact that the sieving process involved in completing the process weeds out a lot of individuals without the necessary self-discipline and inherent ability.
That doesn’t mean that actually quantifying the difference in test scores between home-schooled children and the wider population is worthless, far from it. Even if a sieving process is responsible for the massive differences noted, it is still useful to have an objective categorization that places home-schooled students somewhere on the spectrum from latch-key kids to pampered preppies.
For example, imagine that as an employer you have limited time and resources available for interviewing potential new hires. As you sit at your desk and sift through a pile of resumes for a new entry-level position, you compare and contrast two resumes. Both applicants have the requisite 4-year degree for the position (both from state colleges), however one applicant is a home-schooled Eagle Scout with an honorable discharge from the Air Force, and the other applicant is a Detroit Public School graduate.
Which person would you schedule for an interview first? Do you think that knowing home-school graduates tend to score highly on achievement tests, and tend to be raised by intelligent and involved parents as well, has some value for a decision-maker?
Not true!! I counsel home-educators about it and about parenting and have run email lists and chats with homeschool authors and more. Not only by far, but virtually everyone who homeschools struggles financially to provide this for their children. We just give up some things in order to do this though. That one aspect alone shows that you are not coming from a position of knowledge, but of assumption, and wrong ones.
‘All this stat means is that home schooled kids likely have involved, intelligent parents who are likely wealthier and smarter than the average parents’.
Involved, yes.
Intelligent, often. You can’t be dull and homeschool.
Wealthier,....you don’t know many homeschoolers, do you? These are common folks who have made decisions in favor of their kids, simple as that.
All this stat means is that home schooled kids likely have involved, intelligent parents who are likely wealthier and smarter than the average parents.
Involved? YES, DEFINITELY. Homeschooling requires you to be involved.
Smarter than average? I'd like to believe that we are, but we probably are not. INVOLVEMENT seems to be the key.
Wealthy? DEFINITELY NOT. We're from all walks of life, but most of us are struggling financially. Homeschooling is a full-time job with no paycheck.
the public school scores are dragged down by the scores of blacks and hispanics.
There has been a big boom in homeschooling among black families. (I don't know if that's true for Hispanic families.) It's the method of education that makes the difference, not the person's ethnic heritage.
I agree with that analysis. How many Blacks get homeschooled? Or Hispanics. Leroy can’t read is not news.
But overall my guess is that homeschooled kids probably do test somewhat higher. They enter and complete college in extremely high numbers.
The validity of that statement depends very heavily on what question the study is trying to answer.
If the question is "Is homeschooling a better system than public schooling?" then yes, the applicability of the numbers is at issue.
But if the question is "Should I hire this homeschooled job candidate or his public-schooled counterpart?" then the stat becomes very relevant indeed.
“This stat means nothing.”
Well, it doesn’t mean nothing, but you are right in that the statistic is somewhat “self-selecting” for many of the reasons you stated.
The best conclusion is, in my opinion that home-schooled kids can be high achieving (It doesn’t matter why) - so no interference is necessary from external sources - leave it alone.
I don’t think it takes away from high-achieving kids in any other venue. Similarly, it doesn’t mean that your kid will automatically become high-achieving simply by home-schooling them either. Both of those would be erroneous conclusions.
I’d like to see parents of homeschoolers be able to keep some of their tax money that would otherwise be used on their kids behalf in public while they are homeschooling them, or even sending them to private school.