So by self-selecting, you could make the case that the homeschoolers and the public schoolers who take the SATs are similar groups - college-bound teens in the last year or three of their education.
In other words, comparing SAT scores should acceptable as a metric for homeschool achievement.
Dear JenB,
"So by self-selecting, you could make the case that the homeschoolers and the public schoolers who take the SATs are similar groups - college-bound teens in the last year or three of their education.
"In other words, comparing SAT scores should acceptable as a metric for homeschool achievement."
Even more so, since the public schools actually get to jettison the 25% - 30% of kids that they fail utterly and entirely, with absolutely downside statistically. Remember, about 25% - 30% of public schoolers drop out without graduating. So, if a high school tells you that 70% of their graduates are going on to college, or that 70% are taking the SAT, what that means is that roughly 50% of the kids who started there as freshmen are college-bound or taking the SAT. In a district where 50% of seniors take the SAT, that's really only around 35% of their ultimate student population.
And, a significant portion of the kids who are graduating from high school were homeschooled through the elementary school years. I'm sure that they are pretty much exclusively at the top of their classes.
The Catholic high school that is recruiting my older son right now has a population of homeschoolers that's about 3% of the total school population. We've been told that these kids all graduate near the tops of their classes. Last year's valedictorian was a homeschooler.
Homeschoolers who re-enter schools at the high school level are helping to prop up the overall test scores of high schools.
Thus, when we examine things like SAT scores of public schools, we're typically talking only about the top 35% - 40% of these students, and a significant percentage of those folks were homeschooled for a large part of their education.
sitetest