Record: Darren A. Jones, “A Case for Home Schooling” in in Robert A. Fox and Nina K. Buchanan, eds., The Wiley Handbook of School Choice (Malden, MA: 2017), pp. 344-361.
Summary: Jones, a staff attorney with HSLDA, former homeschooler, and homeschooling father of four, here presents a brief survey of much of the literature on homeschooling within the context of a fictionalized narrative of the life course of one homeschooling family.
Jones begins by introducing us to his protagonists, the fictional Shaw family and their two children. Throughout the article we journey with the Shaws as they learn about homeschooling, start doing it, and progress in their homeschooling journey as their children grow. The children eventually graduate from homeschooling and move on, one to college and the other to a career as a professional musician.
Using the conceit of this family’s journey, Jones is able to discuss parental motivation (noting especially the distinction between ideological and pedagogical motivations), different kinds of homeschooling (from highly structured to unschooling), legal issues (Jones argues here for homeschooling being a fundamental right and thus subject to strict scrutiny protections), curricular options, socialization, academic achievement, college readiness and performance, and adult outcomes.
Interspersed amidst his colorful descriptions of the Shaw family’s life course and his pithy summaries of the scholarly literature are occasional personal comments, where Jones draws on his own experience as a homeschooled child to add particularity and color to some of the literature’s findings. Jones concludes that homeschooling has proven to be a good option for the Shaws, and he predicts that homeschooling will continue to grow at even faster rates in the future given its successful track record as presented in his literature review.
Appraisal: There is much to admire in Jones’ article. His fictionalized narrative and personal asides make the text far more readable, even enjoyable, than the typical piece of homeschooling research. But at the same time, Jones is clearly very conversant with the scholarship, citing much of the very best (and much of the less than best) literature in his laconic and engaging summaries.
On the other hand, Jones’ title is honest. This is not a nonpartisan literature review. This is “A Case for Home Schooling.” Jones has clearly and deliberately selected and interpreted his sources to provide the best possible case for his client. Jones is an HSLDA lawyer, and this document, winsome and disarming though it be, is clearly a piece of advocacy in keeping with his own personal and professional commitments. This bias is clear both in what Jones decides to include and in what he deliberately suppresses. Let me give just a few examples of both categories.
First, Jones, to his credit includes a lot more than the advocacy-based research HSLDA has funded for so long. He does not just cite Rudner and Ray and the other scholarship in that orbit. But he tends to cherry-pick. For example, Jones twice summarizes points from an excellent article by Sharon Green-Hennesy on homeschooler outcomes that draws from the massive National Survey on Drug Use and Health. He correctly notes that Green-Hennessy found that highly religious homeschooled adolescents reported far less substance abuse and were far less likely to have been arrested than their demographic equivalents who attended institutional schools. Jones also cites Green-Hennessy’s finding that highly religious homeschoolers were much less likely to be socially isolated than highly religious adolescents attending schools. These findings flatter homeschooling, so Jones highlights them. But Green-Hennessy’s finding that homeschoolers, even the highly religious, are more likely to report being behind grade level than their institutional equivalents goes unmentioned in Jones’ rosy discussion of academic achievement.
Second, Jones has deliberately not included some of the very best recent research on homeschooler outcomes because it does not fit into his celebratory narrative. Let me provide some examples. The two Cardus Surveys (one and two) both found, in direct contradiction to many of Jones’ claims, that homeschoolers report lower standardized test scores than their institutionally-schooled equivalents, are more likely to attend low status open admissions institutions, are less politically engaged, give less to charity, are more likely to express feelings of helplessness when facing life’s problems, and get divorced at much higher rates than institutionally schooled young adults. In a separate analysis of Cardus data, Uecker and Hill found that religious homeschoolers are marrying at lower rates than similarly religious young adults who attended Christian schools. It should be noted that the Cardus surveys were conducted by an organization that wants to celebrate private religious education. But their sample, drawn as it is from a nationally-representative dataset, just did not find what they hoped it would for homeschooling.
Another very important group of recent studies draws on the National Study of Youth and Religion, a rigorous and very large dataset that allows for excellent, statistically valid comparisons between homeschoolers and the institutionally schooled (unlike the advocacy research Jones cites repeatedly that does not control for parental background variables). Hill and Den Dulk, analyzing NSYR data, found that homeschooled young adults are less civically engaged than their demographic equals who attended institutional schools. Uecker found, using the same dataset, that homeschooling itself had no impact at all on the religious lives of adolescents–it was all about the level of parental religious commitment, not the kind of school a child attended or did not attend.
Many more examples of elisions or outright omissions could be cited, and there are many other aspects of Jones’ survey with which we might quibble (e.g. his claim that homeschooling is a fundamental right, a claim some legal scholars would accept and others would reject). But let me end where I began by celebrating Jones’ ability to cover the terrain with clarity and human interest.
Milton Gaither
Messiah College