HOME-SCHOOLING: AN EXAMINATION OF PARENTAL CHOICE AGAINST SOCIETAL NORMS
Thesis (Education (Curriculum and Instruction)) -- California State University, Sacramento, 2009.
The Ins and Outs of Homeschooling
This research investigates two major aspects of homeschooling. Factors determining parental motivations to homeschool and the determinants of the student achievement of home-educated children are identified. Original survey data from an organized group of homeschoolers is analyzed. Regression models are employed to predict parents’ motivations and their students’ standardized test achievement. Four sets of homeschooling motivations are identified. Academic and pedagogical concerns are most important, and it appears that the religious base of the movement is subsiding. Several major demographic variables have no impact upon parental motivations, indicating that this is a diverse group. Parents’ educational attainment and political identification are consistent predictors of their students’ achievement. Race and class—the two major divides in public education—are not significant determinants of standardized test achievement, suggesting that homeschooling is efficacious. It is concluded that homeschoolers are a heterogeneous population with varying and overlapping motivations.
Home Schooling for Individuals' Gain and Society's Common Good
People have been competing to control the education of children since the first Homo sapiens was born. Regardless of genteel and resourceful language and rationales promoting consensus building and democratic decision making during the past century and currently, historians of institutional education have revealed that education is typically a realm of contention. Education in the United States is no exception; history supports this claim. In like manner, the discussions about parent-led, homeand family-based education-home schooling-are simply a continuation of the struggle over who will control what goes into the minds and affects the hearts of children-the future full-fledged citizens of any nation. Whether more persons should choose to home school is, at first glance, an insignificant issue, because currently about 89% of all 52 million U.S. conventional school students in kindergarten through Grade 12 are in state-run institutions, with the other 11% in private schools (U.S. Department of Education, 1998); only another estimated 1.2 million to 1.7 million are home educated (Lines, 1998; Ray, 1999). The issue, however, goes to the core of the centuries-old debate over who should be in the primary position of influence in the educational lives of children and what effect the an-