No place like homeNow, I don't have their sources for all the figures (might check HSLDA), but it certainly rings true with what I've been hearing about homeschooling since my family started homeschooling. Teachers' unions and school boards may not like the homeschoolers, but I have yet to see them truly refute that homeschooling yields superior results.
For educating your kids, that is
On May 31, Evan O’Dorney, 13, from Danville, Calif., won the Scripps National Spelling Bee held every year in Washington, D.C. But that’s not the real news, part of which is that O’Dorney is home-schooled. The other part is that he’s the third home-schooled winner of the Bee in the past six years.
To put that in perspective, you need to know that there are about 2 million home-schooled children in the country, which represents about 3 percent of the school age population. Yet home-schooled children represent some 15 percent of the finalists in the Spelling Bee, and about the same percentage in the national geography contest for like-aged children.
Why the disparity? Well, studies show a 20-30 percentile point gap between public school students and home-schooled students . . . in favor of the home-schooled.
There are other revealing differences between public school and home-schooled students, among them that some 74 percent of home-schooled graduates between 18 and 24 years old voted in an election in the past five years, while public school graduates of similar ages voted at a paltry 29 percent rate.
The key factor in all of this, homeschoolers believe, is the role played by parents. Homeschooling takes enormous dedication and concern. Home-schooled kids aren’t smarter, obviously, than their counterparts in public school systems. They’re just brought up in a disciplined atmosphere, taught responsibility, shown the long-term advantages of a quality education, and, not least, are expected to learn. And behave. What child would not prosper under such a regimen?
Yet whom, do you suppose, fights the idea of home-schooling so strenuously that a nonprofit advocacy organization, Home School Legal Defense Association, has sprung up to defend parents’ rights to educate their children at home? If you said it’s the same people who oppose vouchers, charter schools, and any attempt to provide educational choice for children and their parents — teachers’ unions and the public school system — you’d be exactly right. We also might note that homeschool opponents are vociferous in trying to deny the use of certain public school amenities — speech therapy, occupational therapy and physical therapy — to homeschooled children. This, of course, despite the fact that those parents also pay taxes, and thus provide financial support to the public systems.
Fortunately, HSLDA has been so successful in fighting off government — i.e., union — intrusion into educational choice that the number of home-schooled children is growing at between 7 percent and 15 percent a year.
This all seems somehow appropriate to bring up during the graduation season. A huge majority of the home-schooled children now graduating will proceed to college, where they will, if the past is a guide, continue to outperform their public school counterparts. That’s not only the real news, it’s the good news, an uncommon coupling in this business.
As for the ossified public school system, an old refrain from a Pete Seeger tune comes to mind: “When will they ever learn?”
We're not just talking raw intelligence or knowledge. Kids are coming out of homeschools with better (notice I didn't say perfect) moral center, a confident bearing as a peer to adults rather than an outsider and a significantly better direction for their lives. This isn't part of my Reasons to Homeschool, but it's a good supplement to it.
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