NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {I} n a November 1 Washington Post investigative story, the title grabs attention: “Home schooling’s rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education.”
The Post piece gets many things right. Home education is expanding rapidly, with the huge bump up during the Covid-19 pandemic receding little, and in some states not at all.
Even school districts with high test scores often lose substantial enrollment to homeschooling. The movement is growing more ethnically diverse, with many minority parents choosing schooling at home. Parents choose homeschooling for a range of reasons, often because they saw traditional public schools treating their kids like numbers.
But the Post would have done even better had its journalists relied on a now substantial body of peer-reviewed research, which could have kept it from making at least three rookie mistakes.
First, the Post fails to note considerable research, some of it chronicled in a book one of us (Maranto) co-edited in 2018, Homeschooling in the 21st Century, indicating that even in technical subjects such as higher mathematics, students seem to learn slightly more at home than comparable students do in a brick-and-mortar school. For example, college students who had studied at home earned similar SAT math scores and higher college calculus grades than their demographically similar traditionally schooled peers.
Second, the Post repeats fears that homeschooled children will disproportionately end up isolated inside their families and churches, ill-prepared to function in our diverse democracy. With the caveat that homeschooling is growing and changing rapidly, so far, the empirical research does not support those concerns. In the most comprehensive review of the research to date, Professors Robert Kunzman and Milton Gaither describe a decidedly mixed picture, suggesting that there is nothing inherent about homeschooling that would help or harm socialization.
This may be because few homeschoolers just stay at home through adolescence, as University of Oklahoma professor Daniel Hamlin and one of this piece’s authors (Cheng) demonstrate in two studies using nationally representative data from the National Center of Education Statistics and the Understanding America Study. High-school students who have ever been homeschooled have been homeschooled for only five years, on average. Nearly half of adults who were ever homeschooled only did so for one to two years, while only one-tenth of adults who were ever homeschooled did so for ten to twelve years. Moreover, most homeschoolers enjoy a wide range of activities in and connections to broader communities, as Hamlin documents in another study.
Generally, as one of us (Maranto) points out in The Skeptic, the rise of homeschooling can be seen as an indictment of the schools of education which train most teachers. Parents untrained in medicine could not remove their children’s tonsils. Parents untrained in law could not capably represent their children in court. Yet currently, most empirical evidence indicates that homeschool parents do as well as or slightly better than certified teachers on both student achievement and socio-emotional skills. Well-intentioned intellectuals who propose more regulations or even to outlaw homeschooling, such as Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Bartholet, need to ponder this empirical reality before moving forward.
Finally, the thrust of the Post story is that homeschooling is something new. In fact, while home education has gone mainstream and increasingly gets public funding in states such as Florida, the movement has been going on for some time, as Stanford University sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens documented back in 2001 in Kingdom of Children. Further, from its modern beginnings decades ago, homeschooling involved large numbers of what Stevens called “inclusive” counterculture parents and religious “believer” parents, each of whom felt uncomfortable outsourcing child raising to conventional school bureaucracies. Indeed, the two groups have sometimes worked together.
In a broad way, home education is far older than a few decades. In the U.S. and across the globe, schooling began on the most intimate levels: the family and community. Centuries ago, most people, including many of our own nation’s Founders, received their education in the home, from family members or paid tutors. Over the past century and a half, schooling grew in size and scope, with ever-larger public bureaucracies educating and caring for more children for ever-longer segments of their lives.
Yet history rarely moves in straight lines. As technology develops and family size remains low by historic standards, homeschooling will likely continue to grow. Possibly, future historians will trace the evolution of education from the home to institutional schooling back to the home, and from personalization to bureaucratization back to the personal.
Social science can help us understand this social movement, but for that to happen, reporters and other opinion leaders need to read the research. The Washington Post slogan declares, “Democracy dies in darkness.” We would add that darkness grows when you ignore the research.
Robert Maranto edits the Journal of School Choice and is the 21st Century Chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas. Albert Cheng is an assistant professor and director of the Classical Education Research Lab at the University of Arkansas.