HOMESCHOOLING FAMILIES IN CHINA: A Qualitative Study

Posted on January 31, 2015 by Milton Gaither

Record: Zheng Guo-ping, “A Qualitative Study of Educational Needs of Homeschooling Families in China” in US-China Education Review 4, no. 6 (June 2014): 391-400 [Available Here]

Summary: In early 2014 I reviewed a fascinating article by Xiaoming Sheng about “Meng Mu Tang,” an education cooperative operated by a Confucian Chinese mother that began as a home school for her own children and eventually expanded to twelve children in the city of Shanghai.  This present study builds on Sheng’s work and offers an empirical study of this mother and four other home educating families in China. Continue reading →

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The HARO 2014 Survey of Homeschool Alumni

Posted on January 1, 2015 by Milton Gaither

Record: Coalition for Responsible Home Education, “A Complex Picture: Results of the 2014 Survey of Adult Alumni of the Modern Christian Homeschooling Movement” Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out (2 December 2014).  Available Here.

Summary:  Readers of these reviews are likely familiar with the emergence of a vocal and well-organized cohort of young graduates of Christian homeschooling who have lately been actively involved in several political and policy-related homeschooling issues.  Two of the most visible organizations to have emerged out of this community have come together for this report.  Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out (HARO), was founded in 2013 after the successful launch of its sister website Homeschoolers Anonymous.  One of its founders, Ryan L. Stollar, created the survey for this report.  In December 0f 2013 the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CHRE) was founded by Heather Doney and Rachel Coleman (Stollar is a board member).  CHRE analyzed the data for this report.  The two groups are organizationally distinct but clearly have overlapping concerns about the lax regulations imposed on homeschooling in most states.  HARO does not officially take policy positions.  CHRE does.  But both groups clearly share the same editorial space.  Their leadership, membership, and readership consists largely of formerly homeschooled young adults who generally would like to see more oversight of homeschooling in the United States due to a perceived tendency of some homeschooling situations to provide sub-standard education at best and outright child abuse at worst.  Both organizations are also often critical of the Christian fundamentalism in which most of their members were raised.

This document summarizes the results of a survey Stollar composed and sent out to his extensive network of formerly homeschooled young adults, first through Homeschoolers Anonymous and then through Facebook.  The survey was hosted on SurveyMonkey and was made available for about a month from mid-August to mid-September 2014, during which time 3,702 respondents completed it.  To be counted, respondents had to agree that they had been homeschooled for at least 7 years in a Christian context, were at least 18 years old, and were taking it for the first time. Continue reading →

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Taking January Off

Posted on January 1, 2015 by Milton Gaither

In a few moments I’m going to post the first review of 2015.  It will also be the last review posted here until February given my time commitments at my university during our January session.  But I’ll be back in February with more reviews of current research on home education/homeschooling.

Milton Gaither, Messiah College, author of Homeschool: An American History.

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State Homeschool Enrollment Data Trends, 2014

Posted on December 24, 2014 by Milton Gaither

Every so often my undergraduate workstudy helps me compile all of the available data maintained by the states that keep records on homeschool enrollment.  This is not an easy task.  Some states make this information available and accessible on state department of education websites, but many do not.  After several weeks of internet searches and phone calls I think we have collected all the data extant.  Continue reading →

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HOW TO MISLEAD WITH DATA: A Critique of Brian Ray’s Methodology

Posted on December 17, 2014 by Milton Gaither

Record: Chelsea McCracken, “How to Mislead with Data: A Critical Review of Ray’s ‘Academic Achievement and Demographic Traits of Homeschool Students: A Nationwide Study’ (2010).” Coalition for Responsible Home Education (15 January, 2014).  [Available Here]

Summary:  McCracken, who serves as the senior research analyst for the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, an organization advocating for increased regulatory protection of homeschooled children in the United States, here scrutinizes Brian Ray’s most recent study of homeschooler academic achievement.  For my own summary and critique of Ray’s study click here.

McCracken begins by noting that Ray’s sample is much whiter, richer, more married, more Christian, and more educated than the general population.  They are not representative Americans nor even representative homeschoolers.  Continue reading →

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EDUCATIONAL TRANSFORMATIONS: A Sociologist Worries about Privatization

Posted on December 4, 2014 by Milton Gaither

Record: Linda Renzulli, “Educational Transformations and Why Sociology Should Care” in Social Currents 1, no. 2 (2014): 149-156. [Available Here]

Summary:  Renzulli, a professor of sociology at the University of Georgia, here lays out two claims.  First, she believes that public education in the United States is experiencing two contradictory trends at once—centralization and standardization of curriculum, assessment, and accountability in public schools on one hand and growing local control and autonomy among alternative forms of public education like charter schools and vouchers on the other.  Second, she is concerned that sociologists of education have not dealt sufficiently with these trends.  Homeschooling comes into play in this analysis as an example of privatizing trends and as a pool of customers for virtual charter schools.  Continue reading →

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THE POLITICS OF HOMESCHOOLS: Culture Wars and State Regulations

Posted on November 22, 2014 by Milton Gaither

Record: Andrea Vieux, “The Politics of Homeschools: Religious Conservatives and Regulation Requirements” in The Social Science Journal (9 July, 2014).  [Abstract Here]

Summary: Vieux, a Political Science professor at the University of Central Florida, here provides quantitative data to try to determine the degree to which a state’s percentage of religious conservatives correlates with its level of homeschooling regulation. Continue reading →

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“I’M SORRY YOU HAD A BAD DAY”: Fathers in Homeschooling Families Speak

Posted on November 14, 2014 by Milton Gaither

Record: Lee Garth Vigilant, Tyler C. Anderson, and Lauren Wold Trefethren, “‘I’m Sorry You Had a Bad Day, but Tomorrow Will Be Better’: Stratagems of Interpersonal Emotional Management in Narratives of Fathers in Christian Homeschooling Households,” in Sociological Spectrum 34, no. 4 (2014): 293-313.[Abstract Here]

 Summary:  Vigilant, a sociology professor at Minnesota State University Moorhead and 12 year homeschooling veteran, here with two of his former undergraduate students, continues a line of research the team initiated in a 2013 publication laying out Christian homeschooling fathers’ ideologies.  Continue reading →

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The Cardus Education Survey, 2014

Posted on November 6, 2014 by Milton Gaither

Record: R. Pennings, et al, “Private Education for the Public Good: 2014 Report,” Cardus Education Survey, 2014. [Available for download here]

Summary:

In 2011 the first Cardus Education Survey was released.  With its large randomized sample of young adults age 24-39, it provided some of the best data ever compiled about the experiences of young adults who had graduated from various forms of private schooling, including homeschooling.  The present survey is another equally robust survey of 1500 young adults, age 24 to 39.  The sample was obtained by GfK, whose Knowledge Networks Panel respondents constitute a representative sample of the U.S. population.  Cardus drew on the GfK contact list to generate a sample of 500 public school graduates who served as a baseline for comparison to 1000 graduates of various kinds of private and home schools.  Each of these subjects answered about ½ hour’s worth of questions about their high school experiences.

 This time around, Cardus asked specific questions about curriculum (especially science and technology), vocational preparation and aspiration, and high school experiences and satisfaction along with their basic demographic questions.  They thus are able to reveal (based on self-report data) comparisons between public school graduates and graduates from various private options on these questions. Continue reading →

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AFRICAN AMERICAN HOMESCHOOLING: Curriculum and Identity

Posted on October 31, 2014 by Milton Gaither

Record: Ama Mazama and Garvey Lundy, “African American Homeschooling and the Question of Curricular Cultural Relevance” in Journal of Negro Education 82, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 123-138 [abstract here]

Summary:  Mazama and Lundy have recently published several important articles on the motivations of African American parents for homeschooling, all based on interviews with a sample of 74 such parents from seven U.S. cities.  In a 2012 article they first articulated their concept of “racial protectionism” as a defining motivation for many African American parents who want to rescue their children from the institutional and individual racism they experience at school.  In a 2013 article they added the concept of “educational protectionism” to the mix, which they characterize as an effort on the part of African American parents to replace the boring, unchallenging, and rigid curriculum of schools with higher expectations, relevant (often Afrocentric) curriculum, and student initiative.  In a 2014 article they explain how a small subset of their sample, about 15% of the overall group, did not identify with the racial dynamics expressed by everyone else.  For this small subset the motivation seems to be more exclusively religious (they call it “religious protectionism”), very like the motivations of the much larger group of white fundamentalist Christian homeschoolers.  In another 2014 article they explore how homeschooling is especially attractive to African American parents of boys given the discrimination black males regularly experience in public schools.   In the article before us today they examine how some African American homeschoolers are using the method to escape the Eurocentric curriculum that permeates public schools. Continue reading →

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