Record: Deani Neven Van Pelt, “Home Schooling in Canada: The Current Picture–2015 Edition.” Barbara Mitchell Center for Improvement in Education (June 2015). [Available Here]
Summary: Van Pelt, who has published occasional studies of home education since 2003, is director of the Barbara Mitchell Center for Improvement in Education at the Fraser Institute, a libertarian think-tank based in Canada with a long history of advocating market-based policies drawn from libertarian economists like Friedrich Hayek, Edwin G. West, and George Stigler. This report updates a 2007 update of the widely cited 2001 report the Fraser Institute published called Homeschooling: From the Extreme to the Mainstream. The 2001 report was written by Patrick Basham, who has since moved on to be a prominent voice at the Cato Institute, another libertarian think-tank based in the United States.
Given the agenda of its publisher, the editorial slant of this report is predictably positive about home schooling in Canada. Van Pelt begins by summarizing briefly the history of home education in Canada and explaining that her report will first review research on home education published since the 2007 report and then move to a special emphasis on Canada.
Part I: After a brief comment on how to define home schooling, Van Pelt moves to her literature review. She begins with an homage to the International Center for Home Education Research, whose existence she takes to be a sign that the scholarly study of home education has matured from an advocacy-based approach to one engaged by legitimate academics housed in universities. [I might note as an aside that she quotes my own book in this section, which mistakenly perpetuated a falsehood about Gallup poll data, a mistake I discussed and apologized for here.] Citing many of the most recent books on home education, Van Pelt establishes first of all that home schooling has grown a lot since 2007.
She next moves to a discussion of curriculum practices, relying heavily on the literature review Rob Kunzman and I published in 2013. The conclusion here and in the next section on parental motivation is that things have grown increasingly diverse in recent years.
Next comes academic achievement. Van Pelt acknowledges that the HSLDA-funded studies done by Rudner and Ray cannot be used to claim that home schooling itself produces better academic results than institutional schooling, but she nevertheless thinks that there is enough evidence to suggest that, especially for poor and minority students, structured home schooling leads to superior academic results (citing here Martin-Chang, Gould, and Meuse 2011 along with Ray 2015). While it is plausible to suggest these connections, Van Pelt misses the much more obvious conclusion from the many studies on academic achievement, which is that test scores are impacted far more by SES and other family background variables than by the manner in which a child is educated. This was the clear conclusion of Kunzman and Gaither’s lit review, which Van Pelt obviously read very carefully, but you wouldn’t know it from her summary.
Next comes a section on secondary education/adult outcomes of home schooled students. Van Pelt cites her own and other work that has found very positive outcomes. To her credit she also cites the recent Cardus studies (one and two), based upon much better data, that have found more mixed results, though her discussion here to me seems deliberately unclear. She does not cite the equally robust studies of Uecker, of Hill and Den Dulk and Uecker and Hill, which continue to find a more mixed picture. This section is the first one that I think intentionally misrepresents the best of the literature lest it make home schooling look anything less than wonderful.
Next comes a brief discussion of some of the highlights of the U.S. legal debates. Readers of these reviews will be familiar with the arguments she briefly summarizes here.
Part II: In this section of the report Van Pelt summarizes developments in Canada since 2007. She notes that five Canadian provinces have changed their home schooling regulations since 2007, and unlike in the United States, where change almost always means less regulation, in some Canadian provinces (notably Saskatchewan) regulations have stiffened. Also unlike the United States, in three Canadian provinces the government actually pays for some home education expenses (Saskatchewan being one of them).
As for enrollment, Van Pelt cites figures from 2011/12 to claim a 5% annual growth (29% aggregate) in home education numbers during a period when there was a 2.5% decline in students attending institutional schools in Canada. This growth was not evenly distributed. Some Provinces (Newfoundland is a standout) saw dramatic growth, some saw more modest growth, and British Columbia actually saw declines. Despite the growth, however, the reported number of children being taught at home in Canada remains very small–about .4%, or 21,662 Canadian children overall.
Next comes a discussion of economics. Van Pelt claims that home educating parents saved Canadian tax payers $256.4 million dollars in 2011/12, a figure she reaches by multiplying the average per-pupil expenditure by the number of home educated students. Of course this is not actually true, though it sounds like it ought to be. Schools do not save money when one or two children leave a class. The teacher still is paid the same salary. The support staff stay the same. The buildings still must be maintained at the same level. If home education grew to the extent that entire schools were closed or consolidated then actual savings would occur, but what really happens when only a few children leave is that the economy of scale that makes institutional schooling less expensive than, say, private tutoring, grows less efficient. Van Pelt is clearly not an economist, but one would think that an institute like Fraser would be more sophisticated in its economic assessment.
Van Pelt concludes with some implications from the data. Her first point is to reiterate that home schooling has saved Canadian taxpayers millions of dollars. Again, that is not actually true. Her second point is that in the provinces where government funding has been provided, home education is growing at a fast clip. She does not note that this point undermines her first one. Her third point is that there is a gradual blurring of the lines between school and home school, represented best by the trend in British Columbia toward a distributed-learning model (roughly parallel to U.S. style cyberschooling. Could this be the reason for the decline in home education numbers in BC?). Her fourth point oversimplifies her more nuanced discussions of academic achievement and outcomes presented earlier to make it sound as if home schooling is itself responsible for increased academic achievement and good life outcomes.
The report includes two very helpful appendices. Appendix A describes home school laws in each of the Canadian provinces. Appendix B breaks down enrollment trends by province.
Appraisal: First of all, let me say that Van Pelt has done us a great service by clearly reproducing, organizing, and graphing the data on enrollment and the legal situation in the various Canadian provinces. For a U.S. researcher like myself this tidy resource is quite handy.
But there are serious problems with this report. As noted above, several of Van Pelt’s literature reviews are selective, crafted to make home education look as good as possible. I might also note that, oddly for a report ostensibly about Canadian home education, she fails to cite the large body of work produced by Christine Brabant and colleagues (it is in French, but a Canadian report by a Canadian organization should be equipped to handle that). Brabant’s work, along with many of the recent qualitative studies performed in the United States to which Van Pelt only alludes briefly, offers a fine-textured and nuanced look at various aspects of home education. Much of what the qualitative literature is finding is hard to reduce to the classic categories Van Pelt continues to favor–academic achievement, parental motivation, etc.–though it does reinforce her point that a diversity of motives and practices characterizes home education.
In short, though Van Pelt correctly notes that a key trend in recent research into home education is that researchers have moved away from an advocacy-based stance and advocacy-based topics, Van Pelt and the institution that sponsored this report continue to be advocates. This literature review thus feels and reads like an advocacy piece despite Van Pelt’s sincere efforts to ground her assertions in legitimate research. The advocacy lens causes Van Pelt to whitewash some of the more critical studies (and exclude others), to overstate the positive impact of home schooling on academic achievement and later life, and to dress it all up in a tone that sounds like it’s trying to win your vote. While there are many, many published articles on home education that sin far more egregiously than does this piece, it is unfortunately the case that Van Pelt’s article, for all its helpful information about Canadian provincial home education trends, is still a partisan narrative.
Milton Gaither
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