Record: Jesse Thomas, “Perspectives of Homeschoolers Motivated by Religious and Moral Reasons” in Journal of Research on Christian Education 28, no. 1 (2019): 21-42.
Summary: Thomas, a math teacher at Curry Ingram Academy in Brentwood, TN, previously wrote a 2016 report on homeschooling parents’ pedagogical motivations. This article, like his 2016 report, draws on a very large sample (n=1055) who took an online survey with both quantitative and qualitative aspects, a survey Thomas originally created for his 2015 doctoral dissertation.
For this article Thomas wanted to know more about the relationship between religious motivation to homeschool and willingness on the part of homeschooling parents (actually mothers. His sample is 97% female) to enroll their children part time in public schools. He begins with some background, covering the very familiar story of a left-liberal “pedagogical” wing and a right-religious “ideological” wing of the historical homeschooling movement that has given way more recently to a broader spread of motivations and pedagogies. In particular, hybrid experiences are increasingly common, where “homeschooled” children spend a good bit of their time in some kind of collective educational setting, including part-time enrollment in public schools. But, Thomas wants to know, are religiously motivated homeschoolers still more like their “ideologue” predecessors, unwilling to hybridize with public education? If so, why?
To find out he used a chi-square test to correlate subjects’ answers to a question in his survey about their homeschooling motivation with their answer to a question asking if they would consider enrolling their child part-time in a public school. If respondents answered “no” to the public enrollment question, the next question asked for qualitative feedback as to why. Thomas ran a regression analysis and found that religiously motivated mothers were 2.6 times more likely to say they would not enroll their child part-time in a public school (p. 28) than those with academic motivations. Of the 153 respondents of his sample who declared religious/moral to best describe their motivation, 119 of them said they would not enroll in a public school (78%). For comparison’s sake, only 47.2% who said academic reasons were their main motivation refused to consider part-time enrollment in public school.
For this article Thomas took respondents who had declared a religious motivation and had said “no” to school enrollment and then subjected their qualitative answers to analysis, creating categories based upon answers given and then sorting respondents’ answers into those categories. Some of these categories were not moral. In fact, the most frequently cited reason to reject public part-time enrollment among homeschoolers who chose the “moral/religious” category over the “academic” category, was poor academic quality in public schools (n=23). Regardless, Thomas hones in on the categories he took to be moral and provides illustrative quotations from respondents.
The top “moral” reason for rejecting part-time public was environmental (n=22). Parents objected to the poor environment of public schools and lauded the more beneficial environments of their own homes. Next came religious/faith-based reasons (n=18), which seemed mostly to be that God wants families to homeschool, not send their children to secular schools. Next came concerns about secular teaching (n=9), then negative peer influences (n=7) and, finally, reasons based in morality (n=5). In most cases parent responses were not robust enough to get much more than these categories themselves from the data.
In his discussion Thomas highlights the significance of his findings being based on the actual words of homeschooling parents. Given public education’s growing commitment to multiculturalism, to giving minority voices a hearing, perhaps these homeschooers’ voices should be attended to as well by public school people. If they are, one big lesson that can be learned is that these families want to feel included in the school’s decisions about content and pedagogy.
Appraisal: The first thing to say about Thomas’ article, to me, is that it happily makes available to a broader audience than would have encountered it otherwise his dissertation results. I had previously not known of this 2015 dissertation and its very impressive national sample of over 1000 respondents. The survey instrument Thomas used asked a lot of questions, and he covers a lot more ground in the dissertation linked above. In the dissertation he had only offered descriptive statistics, but a lot of what he finds corroborates nicely what many other researchers have found on many topics. Here he subjects some of his data to more sophisticated statistical analysis. Does it pay off? Not really.
Reading through the few qualitative quotations provided in this text makes it clear that the tidy bins into which Thomas has placed his data do not really capture the situation. First of all, as we’ve discovered repeatedly in the parental motivation literature, there is no facile distinction between academic and moral/religious reasons to homeschool, so Thomas’ bifurcation, which forms the theoretical basis of this article, is kind of bogus to begin with. But even if we grant him that distinction we quickly see that things break down even within this group. The moral/religious group’s most common reason for rejecting public schools was academic, not moral/religious! But even if we ignore that we see that things continue to break down. The responses Thomas quantified as “environment” were clearly about morality and religion. The responses he quantified as moral and religious were also about school environment. It’s all related, not segregated and tidy like the write-up wants it to be.
What I’ve just said is important, I think, for all homeschooling research. Thomas is trying here to mix quantitative and qualitative study, and it doesn’t really work for him. His quantitative data is great when it concerns things like the sex of the homeschool teacher, the age and number of children, demographics, etc., things that are easy to count. But the more complicated human elements–things like why people do things or how they justify decisions they make–are much more difficult to reduce to tidy categories and enumerate.
Milton Gaither
Messiah College