HOME BASED EDUCATION IN NORTH CAROLINA: A Master’s Thesis

Record: Chelsey B. Watts, “Home Based Education in North Carolina: A Case Study of Policy, Coordination, and Social Acceptance” in Master’s Degree Studies in International and Comparative Education 17 (April, 2014).  Available here.

Summary: Watts’ thesis was the result of her work at the Institute of International Education at Stockholm University in Sweden, completed under Professor Ulf Fredriksson.

Watts begins with a brief orientation to homeschooling in the United States, noting its dramatic growth over the past 15 years.  She offers a very brief and unreliable literature review, uncritically accepting the data provided by Ray’s nonrepresentative sample of North Carolina homeschoolers as representative [For a critique of Ray’s study see here], and limiting her survey to the HSLDA-funded studies.  She then provides a brief summary of the overall educational situation in North Carolina.

After these three introductory chapters, Watts describes her study.  She has chosen North Carolina as a case study since education policy in the United States is more of a state than a federal affair, and North Carolina has a vibrant homeschooling community (she also seems to have had several personal contacts among NC homeschoolers).  Watts contacted members of all of the support groups registered in North Carolina by email and distributed a questionnaire asking both closed and open-ended questions about homeschooling, including parental motivation, future plans for higher grades, opinions about how the broader society views homeschooling and about North Carolina’s policies, and level of participation in support groups and other resources outside the home.  Watts also sent out a questionnaire to the seven North Carolina government employees tasked with overseeing homeschooling, called directors.  This questionnaire asked about directors’ opinions about many aspects of homeschooling policy and practice in North Carolina.

Before laying out her findings Watts offers a brief and solid history of homeschooling in North Carolina.  She notes the state’s passage of a compulsory education statute in 1919 and the relative absence of home-based education from that time on until the 1980s.  A key event in the history of North Carolina homeschooling was the Delconte case, where the North Carolina Supreme Court determined in 1985 that statutory language about “school” does not exclude homes so long as they meet certain educational criteria.  These criteria were spelled out subsequent to the decision in North Carolina House Bill 837 (drafted in the main by North Carolinians for Home Education), passed in 1988.  North Carolina requires notification, requires that a homeschooling parent have at least a high school diploma or equivalent, requires attendance and immunization records, requires annual testing, and requires notification if a home school closes.

Next Watts reveals the results of her survey.  Surprisingly, Watts never says how many surveys she sent out or what her response rate was.  All we know is that she got 125 questionnaires back.  If it is true that she contacted every support group in the state, and in 2011-2012 there were 47, 977 homeschooling families registered in North Carolina, it’s possible her response rate was in the low single digits.  But this is just guesswork on my part.  Nevertheless, here are some of the results from her survey:

The vast majority of her sample’s homeschooled children were in the 5-12 age range.  High schoolers “were poorly represented” (p. 38).  Parents who responded are highly educated, with 73.6% saying they had finished college or higher.  Among the motivation options Watts offered, the top chosen by far was academic quality and the second was religion.  Almost half of her sample’s parents had worked in public education prior to homeschooling, and these parents were less likely to cite quality concerns and more likely to have a child with special needs.  Though her data showed a very small percentage of high-school age homeschoolers, a full 79% intend to keep homeschooling their younger children through high school.  93% of those surveyed think homeschooling is very or somewhat accepted by the broader society, and 91% of them find state law to be congenial.  There is not much active support of homeschooling by the state, but homeschoolers are just fine with that.  As one parent put it in a qualitative response, “lots of freedom.  Much appreciated!” (p. 47)  Most don’t even want access to public school resources like extracurriculars, though about 30% do.  93.4% reported being members of at least one outside organization or group, most of which provide socialization (for parent and children), extracurriculars, and academic enrichment.

Her director questionnaire was a bit of a bust.  Of the seven, only one director responded, and from Watts’ summary this person did not seem to have a lot to say.

After all of this information Watts switches gears and offers without explanation a “comparative” look at home education in Alberta, Canada.  Basically, in Alberta home education is much more carefully monitored and is an extension of the government school system, which means that home educators receive government resources and support.  It is also far less common.  Watts notes that there are more students being educated at home in North Carolina than in the entire country of Canada.

Appraisal:  This Master’s Thesis reads like a Master’s Thesis.  Were Watts my student I would have required her to read more widely in the secondary literature and especially to include more information about her sample–the geographic distribution, the percentage of respondents she had relative to questionnaires she sent out.  I would have also required her to be more forthright about the limitations of her methodology.  She states in her first chapter that her 125 subjects “can be somewhat generalized throughout the state of North Carolina,” (p. 12) but I doubt that.  Her sample was biased from the outset toward well-connected, middle-class homeschoolers by her exclusive reliance on state-registered homeschooling groups and email contact.  And it is biased even more if I am correct that she has an incredibly low response rate.  If that is true, you’ve got a very selective group of highly motivated individuals here.  That almost 50% of her sample are former school teachers or administrators is suggestive.  How representative is that of the entire North Carolina homeschooling population?

Given such limitations, what can we say for this study?  To me it offers two helpful bits.  First, when we compare the sample’s future plans with its own present realities I am prompted to intuit that a lot of homeschooling parents might think when their children are young that homeschooling will continue until college but then at a later time maybe change their minds and send their older kids to school.  Second, Watts did a fine job succinctly summarizing the legislative and judicial history of homeschooling in North Carolina.  I’ve long wished for a convenient resource that would do this very thing for each state in the country.

Milton Gaither, Messiah College, author of Homeschool: An American History.

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