Record: Lynn Bosetti and Deani Van Pelt, “Provisions for Homeschooling in Canada: Parental Rights and the Role of the State” in Pro-Posições 28, no. 2 (May/August 2017): 39-56. [Available Here]
Summary: Bosetti, who has enjoyed a distinguished academic career, is currently Head of the School of Education at La Trobe University in Canada. She has long had an interest in issues related to religion and school choice. Van Pelt is a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute, a libertarian think tank dedicated to high level research aimed at fostering a more free market approach in Canadian politics. She has published numerous Fraser Institute reports related to school choice, private schooling, and homeschooling. You can read my review of a 2015 report she produced about home education in Canada here.
In this piece the authors are mostly interested in summarizing the homeschooling situation in Canada and drawing out some lessons from it that might be of interest to policymakers in other countries.They begin with an orientation to public education in Canada, noting that it, unlike the United States, has long had a tradition of tolerance for public funding of private schooling. They then trace the history of homeschooling in Canada, which, like in the United States, emerged in the 1970s from relative obscurity as groups of Christian Conservatives on one side and Left-leaning freedom advocates on the other expressed their ideological objections to public education by teaching their children at home. More recently, however, homeschooling has become a more pragmatic affair–just one among several school choice options parents choose because it fits the needs of their child at a given moment.
In terms of enrollment, homeschooling is still quite rare in Canada. Recycling data from Van Pelt’s 2015 piece, the authors claim that homeschooling enrollment in Canada remains at about .4% of the student-age population, thought under-reporting is likely.
Next comes a discussion of regulation. Here the authors divide the Canadian provinces into “high,” “medium,” and “low” regulation levels. Interestingly, two of the three high regulation provinces, Alberta and Saskatchewan, also have the two highest numbers of homeschoolers enrolled. Why? Because Alberta and Saskatchewan provide government funding to homeschoolers who follow the rules. Quebec, which is the other high regulation province, provides no funding and has the lowest percentage of homeschoolers of any Canadian province.
Next come two brief sections on outcomes and cost. Here Bosetti and Van Pelt reiterate claims Van Pelt made in 2015–namely that homeschoolers perform well above average on tests and that homeschooling saves Canadian taxpayers about 300 million dollars. I will address these claims in my appraisal below.
Finally, Bosetti and Van Pelt make some generalizations that they hope policymakers in other countries will find useful. Here are brief summaries of each of their six points:
- Offering government funding is a good way to get homeschoolers to comply with regulations and to increase the number of homeschoolers.
- Homeschooling saves taxpayers money because the parents take over the school’s role, and they do so without getting paid.
- Accountability is relatively robust in most Canadian provinces, which the authors seem to think is a good thing.
- In provinces where more government funding goes to private schooling, there is not as much homeschooling. The availability of excellent private and public schools seems to dampen enthusiasm for homeschooling.
- Blended options like public online schooling seems to increase interest in home education, though it does take away some of the autonomy enjoyed by parents who homeschool independently.
- Canadians are doing some good research on homeschooling, but more is needed.
Appraisal: Let me first address the claims that homeschoolers test well above average and save taxpayers money. As has been said many, many times on this blog, the evidence does not show that homeschooling as such makes students into better test takers. The vast majority of studies of academic achievement compare a self-selecting group of homeschoolers, almost all of whom are from middle-class, two-parent homes, with national averages that include large numbers of at-risk children. One of the only studies to date whose research design enabled accurate comparison, Martin-Chang, et al., was a Canadian study. It is frequently cited here. But Martin-Chang and colleagues, for all the brilliance of the research design, made a post hoc adjustment to their data by splitting it into “structured” and “unstructured” homeschooling. When they did this, they found that structured homeschoolers outperformed their demographic equals in public schools but unstructured homeschoolers underperformed. The bottom line is that we don’t really have evidence that homeschooling itself exerts some sort of independent effect on homeschoolers to make them into better test takers. For a full discussion of the academic achievement literature, see here.
As for the claim about homeschooling saving taxpayers $300 million, let me repeat the observation I made when Van Pelt made the same claim back in 2015. This claim sounds right. A student leaves a school and the school no longer has to pay to educate her, though her parents still pay taxes. Sounds like a win for the schools. But that’s not the way school funding works. Let’s say that in a given year ten students leave a public school to homeschool. The public school still has to provide the same exact services it has always provided to the several hundred students who are still there. A few classrooms may be slightly smaller, but a reduction of two students per class does not save the school much money. It still has to have the same number of teachers. It still has to heat the building, provide ancillary services, and so forth. No actual savings occur. The only thing that happens is that the school does not function quite as efficiently as it did before because it is spending the same amount of money to educate a slightly smaller number of students. It would take a massive reduction in students to really allow schools to save money by doing things like laying off unneeded teachers or closing unused buildings. The numbers in Canada are nowhere near high enough to do that.
Having said that, let me hasten to remind us all of the central insight of this article–that government funding and increased regulation is a winning combination both in terms of increasing homeschooling numbers and securing compliance with the law. This is a policy suggestion offered by Vosetti and Van Pelt for the rest of the world to consider.
We’re seeing part of it, the funding element, begin to emerge in the United States through mechanisms like education savings accounts and tax credits for education expenditures. What we’re not seeing so far in the United States is any effort to connect these increases in government funding of homeschooling with increases in accountability for what parents do in their home schools. Recent horrific news stories such as that of the Turpin family in California and Mark Anthony Conditt in Texas may lead to calls for increasing scrutiny of homeschooling families, but so far the trend in the U.S. has for many years been in the direction of further deregulation.
Milton Gaither
Messiah College