Record: Luke C. Miller, “Community Characteristics of Homeschooling: The Case of Virginia” in G. K. Ingram and D. A. Kenyon, eds., Education, Land, and Location (Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2014), pp. 386-416 [available here].
Summary: Miller is Associate Professor of education at the University of Virginia. This chapter, published in 2014, escaped my notice until fairly recently, which is a shame as it offers a rare quantitative look at homeschooling. Miller begins with an overview of U.S. homeschooling, interpreting it as part of the broader school choice movement, and noting that it is harder to study than other forms of education given the paucity of data. Miller’s study intends to provide and interpret the best data available for the state of Virginia. Because Virginia’s homeschooling law requires parents to register, Miller has the data to correlate homeschooling rates with other community variables. This study thus tries to determine what factors are causing homeschooling to grow faster or slower in particular communities within the state.
To do this Miller obtained data from all 132 school divisions in Virginia. The school divisions of Virginia correlate for the most part with county and city designations, so there is a lot of data for each one. Each school division reports how many Virginia children are being homeschooled and under which of the three provisions Virginia law elaborates to do so. This is a significant fact, because one of Virginia’s options is explicitly a “religious exemption” from institutional schooling based on sincerely held religious belief. Miller was thus able to compare both explicitly religious and more generic rates of homeschooling across Virginia, correlating those rates with things like community type (rural, small town, suburban, urban), demographic factors (percent minority in a district), economic status of the community (median household income, unemployment rate, youth poverty rate, labor force participation rate), and what he calls “conservative values,” with percent voting Republican in a statewide election as proxy (p. 395). He is also able to compare the homeschooling rate with school factors like per-pupil expenditure level, performance on statewide public school tests, availability of other options (private, charter, magnet schools), and the percent of a school division’s budget that comes from local tax dollars.
Miller turned all of these variables into numbers and provided statistical breakdowns for each, which interested parties can consult on p. 397-398 here. Since his data covered the period 1998-2012 he was able to make observations about change over time. The first thing to note is that homeschooling increased profoundly in Virginia between 1998 and 2012 (a trend that has continued to the present), especially among those choosing the religious exemption pathway, even as private school enrollment has declined.
Homeschooling is most common in rural areas and smaller towns and least common in cities. It’s more common “in communities with healthy household economies, more widely held conservative values, more private school opportunities, and greater reliance on local revenues to cover public education costs.” (p. 406) The conservative values finding is not surprising, but the other two are. Earlier research had found that lack of private school options predicted homeschooling. Miller found the opposite. Why? Miller speculates that perhaps in these conservative, rural, wealthy regions there is a large-scale religious rejection of public education that increases commitment to all forms of school choice. He also speculates that for these areas the same economic factors that increase homeschooling (stable, well-propertied families) also benefit the local public school tax base. This means that it really is religion and not school quality driving Virginia families away from the (academically strong) public schools. As he puts it in a classic correlation-does-not-equal-causation statement: “families in rural communities are more likely to homeschool if local schools perform at higher levels.” (p. 409).
When looking at changes over time, the lack of private school options did become significant. Homeschooling is more popular in areas with a lot of private schools, but it grew at a faster rate in areas lacking them. It grew slower in areas with higher workforce participation rates and higher rates of youth poverty, probably because it’s harder for a poor working mother to homeschool.
The bottom line for Miller is that his findings support “the ideologue hypothesis,” that, at least in Virginia, it is religious conservatism that is the dominant driver of the growth in homeschooling, not poor academic performance of public schools. Miller does note, however, that his measure of school quality is test score data, and it could be that some homeschoolers are reacting against NCLB-era test-driven instruction.
Appraisal: First, a brief historical comment. In Miller’s introduction he mistakenly claims that the national push for homeschooling legalization began in 1983 with HSLDA’s founding. In fact, HSLDA didn’t really become active until 1985, and it didn’t become the lead player in the national movement until about 1988, by which time most states had already updated their homeschooling statutes, a process that had been underway since the late 1970s under the leadership of the real pioneers of the homeschooling movement, most notably John Holt, Raymond and Dorothy Moore, and Rousas Rushdoony. You can read the whole story here.
As for the findings, I think Miller’s Virginia finding is pretty clearly true for that state and quite possibly true on a much larger scale. Recent NCES data has found declining percentages of families listing religious or moral motivations as primary, and increasing percentages listing concerns about public school. This is the exact opposite of what Miller found. If you look at enrollment trends in the various states you see that growth is happening most places, but that growth is most dramatic Republican strongholds like Virginia, Utah, North Carolina, and West Virginia. The NCES’ representative data is potentially capturing a bimodal sample. Potentially there are “blue state” homeschoolers motivated more by academics and pedagogy and “red state” homeschoolers such as those covered in this article motivated more by religious ideology. That speculation may be incorrect, and of course there are likely plenty of conservative Christians in New Hampshire (where homeschooling is growing) and plenty of pedagogical progressives in Florida (where it is also growing). But the value of studies like Miller’s is that it provides data that shows a real correlation between ideological conservatism and homeschooling. As he notes at the end of this fine study, more work applying a similar methodology to other states would be most welcome.
Milton Gaither