Record: Talina Drabsch, “Home Education in NSW” in NSW Parliament E-Brief, issue 7 (August, 2013). [available here]
Summary: Drabsch, a frequent contributor to the New South Wales (NSW) Parliamentary Library pubilcations series, here summarizes the home education situation in NSW and so much more. Continue reading
Record: Jeremy E. Uecker and Jonathan P. Hill, “Religious Schools, Home Schools, and the Timing of First Marriage and First Birth” in Review of Religious Research 56, no. 2 (June 2014): 189-218. [Abstract Here]
Summary: Uecker, a sociology professor at Baylor University, and Hill, a sociology professor at Calvin College, are both familiar names to readers of these reviews. In a 2008 article Uecker found (among other things) that there was no difference in levels of adult religious commitment between graduates of public or home schools. Parent religiosity, not school type, made all the difference. In a 2013 article Hill found that homeschooled young adults were less likely to engage in volunteer activities than demographically equivalent graduates of public schools. Both of these articles had drawn from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), a remarkably ambitious project that has borne great fruit in understanding the religious and political lives of young adults in the United States.
In the present article Uecker and Hill turn to the other significant recent data set that, like the NSYR, uses random sampling to provide us with generalizable data about homeschooled young adults in the population. This is the Cardus Education Survey, whose results have also been frequently mentioned on this blog. For this article Uecker and Hill wanted to know the degree to which attendance at various kinds of private schools or homeschooling impacted the age of marriage and of first childbirth among young adults. Continue reading
Record: Kate D’Arcy, “Home Education, School, Travellers and Educational Inclusion” in British Journal of Sociology of Education 35, no. 5 (2014): 818-835. [Preview Here]
Summary: D’Arcy, a Lecturer at the University of Bedfordshire, here offers a rare look into the motivations of Roma and other Traveller populations in England for choosing home education for their children. Continue reading
Record: Rachel R. Hadrick, “Slippery Rock Area School District v. Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School: A Fight on the School-Funding Playground” in Widener Law Journal 22, no. 2 (2013): 289-305.
Summary: Hadrick, now an Associate at the law firm McNees, Wallace, and Nurick, graduated from the Widener School of Law in 2013. Here she summarizes and evaluates the 2011 Pennsylvania Supreme Court case Slippery Rock Area School District v. Pa. Cyber Charter School. Continue reading
Record: Chelsey B. Watts, “Home Based Education in North Carolina: A Case Study of Policy, Coordination, and Social Acceptance” in Master’s Degree Studies in International and Comparative Education 17 (April, 2014). Available here.
Summary: Watts’ thesis was the result of her work at the Institute of International Education at Stockholm University in Sweden, completed under Professor Ulf Fredriksson.
Watts begins with a brief orientation to homeschooling in the United States, noting its dramatic growth over the past 15 years. Continue reading
Record: Rachana Bhatt, “Home is Where the School Is: The Impact of Homeschool Legislation on School Choice” in Journal of School Choice 8, no. 2 (2014): 192-212. [Abstract Here]
Summary: Bhatt, an economics professor at Georgia State University, here presents a sophisticated statistical model to try to determine the degree to which a State’s passage of an explicit law granting homeschooling rights to parents increases the tendency for parents to choose homeschooling. Continue reading
Record: Garvey Lundy and Ama Mazama, “‘I’m Keeping My Son Home’: African American Males and the Motivation to Homeschool” in Journal of African American Males in Education 5, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 53-74. [Available 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 the present article they again use their rich study of 74 African American homeschoolers to focus particularly on boys. Continue reading
Record: Helen E. Lees, Education Without Schools: Discovering Alternatives (Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2014). [Abstract Here]
Summary: Lees, a Visiting Research Fellow in Education and Theology at York St. John University in England and founding editor of the online journal Other Education, here draws on her doctoral research to make an impassioned plea for expanding the public understanding of education to include more than formal institutional schooling. I summarized the first five chapters of her book here. In this post I will summarize chapters six through nine and end with a bit of analysis. Continue reading
