Joseph Murphy Reviews Kunzman and Gaither, “Homeschooling: A Comprehensive Survey of the Research”

Posted on March 1, 2013 by Milton Gaither

Joseph Murphy, is the Frank W. Mayborn Chair of Education and Associate Dean at Peabody College, Vanderbilt University.  He has authored over 20 books, including, most recently, Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement, of which you can read a review here.  Dr. Murphy’s book is by far the most comprehensive and compelling synthesis of the literature on homeschooling ever assembled, and he is thus uniquely positioned to offer an appraisal of a similar, if shorter, effort to do the same thing by Kunzman and Gaither.  Here is Murphy’s review: Continue reading →

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Gretchen Abernathy Reviews (in English) Elizalde, Urpí, and Tejada, “Diversidad, Participación y Calidad Educativas”

Posted on February 21, 2013 by Milton Gaither

Record: Elizalde, M., Urpí, C., and Tejada, M., “Diversidad, participación y calidad educativas: necesidades y posibilidades del Homeschooling”[“Diversity, Parent Involvement and Quality Education: Needs and Possibilities of Homeschooling”], in Estudios sobre educación, vol. 22 (2012), pp. 55-72. [Available here]

María Ángeles Sotés Elizalde, Universidad de Navarrra

Carme Urpí, Universidad de Navarra

María del Coro Molinos Tejada, Universidad de Navarra

Summary: Elizalde, Urpí and Tejada, all representing the Universidad de Navarra in Spain, discuss in very general strokes the phenomenon of homeschooling in Spain and in a few other select countries, evaluating the issues of diversity, parental involvement and quality therein. Starting from the basic premise that education is necessary for children, especially in countries where millions of children and girls in particular have no access to basic formal education, they observe the irony that as baseline literacy needs are met in environments of material abundance, other problems arise: discipline, lack of motivation and mistreatment among students. The authors suggest that, given the transition from precarious to prosperous formal education in developed countries, the time is ripe to evaluate how homeschooling offers a positive pedagogical response and alternative that should be awarded legal credence and greater public acceptance. Continue reading →

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Cheryl Fields-Smith Reviews Mazama and Lundy, “African American Homeschooling as Racial Protectionism”

Posted on February 11, 2013 by Milton Gaither

Record: Mazama, A. and Lundy, G. (2012). African American homeschooling as racial protectionism. Journal of Black Studies, 43(7), 723-748.

Summary: Mazama and Lundy conducted a study of homeschooling among 74 African American families representing metropolitan communities across the South, Midwest, and Northeast regions of the U.S. Unlike the limited previous research focused on Black home education, the authors apply a purely Afrocentric lens to the phenomenon. The authors demonstrate how Black home education represents a practice of agency, which they refer to as racial protectionism. Through this piece, the authors effectively address the distinctions between African American families’ motivations to homeschool and White families’ motives to do so. Continue reading →

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Summaries of Two Recent European Home Education Conferences

Posted on February 1, 2013 by Milton Gaither

In November of 2012 two important conferences, one in Berlin, Germany and the other in Madrid, Spain, were held.  Both were concerned primarily with fostering a political climate of openness to home education in European countries. Continue reading →

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BAD EVIDENCE: Faulty Research Uncovered by Home Educating Parents

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Milton Gaither

Record: Bruce Stafford, “Bad Evidence: the Curious Case of the Government-Commissioned Review of Elective Home Education in England and How Parents Exposed its Weaknesses” in Evidence and Policy 8, no. 3 (August 2012): 361-381. [Abstract Here]

 Stafford, a Professor of Public Policy at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, here relates the remarkable story of how a group of home educators succeeded in undermining the status of a high-profile report on home education commissioned by England’s Department for Children, Schools, and Families (DCSF).  Stafford is interested in this story not because of home education but because of what it reveals about the flaws in the government’s tendency to farm out its research needs to private entities absent any sort of rigorous peer-review system.  Stafford himself, so far as I can tell, is not a homeschooling insider.  He’s an expert on various elements of government social policy, especially Disability Services.  He’s also done a good bit of contract work for the government himself, which might explain his interest in this particular case.  Here’s the story: Continue reading →

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HEEDING THE VOICES OF LEARNERS: A Qualitative Look at One Child’s Experience

Posted on January 21, 2013 by Milton Gaither

Record: Lizebelle van Schalkwyk and Cecilia Bouwer, “Homeschooling: Heeding the Voices of Learners” in Education as Change 15, no. 2 (December 2011): 179-190.

Summary: van Schalkwyk and Bouwer, both professors at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, here try to attend to the voices of actual homeschooled children to get a sense of what they think about the practice.

Since 1997 homeschooling has been legal in South Africa.  But research on homeschooling, assert van Schalkwyk and Bouwer, has very seldom paid any attention to what the children being homeschooled think about the experience.  What little information there is on childhood experiences is typically gleaned from impersonal surveys.  To correct this gap the researchers attempt a qualitative study that attends to the thick family context of beliefs, habits, and interactions. Continue reading →

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THE PRIMA FACIE CASE AGAINST HOMESCHOOLING: A Critique, Part 2

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Milton Gaither

Record: Randall Curren and J. C. Blokhuis, “The Prima Facie Case Against Homeschooling” in Public Affairs Quarterly, 25, no. 1 (January 2011): 1-19.

Summary:

In my previous post I argued against the historic backstory Curren and Blokhuis provide as the underpinning of their argument.  Today I will look at the argument itself.  In general they make two basic claims.  First, they claim that all children are entitled to equal public protection of their educational interests, which means that all forms of education, including private schooling and homeschooling, must provide equal educative opportunities.  Second, they claim that the nature of knowledge is such that, especially at the secondary level, parents (or any other citizen) can be presumed to lack competence to teach, and that anybody who wants to teach must overcome this presumption of incompetence by proving their merit.

Curren and Blokhuis elaborate on these claims through a three-part argument.  I will first summarize their argument and then offer some critiques. Continue reading →

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THE PRIMA FACIE CASE AGAINST HOMESCHOOLING: A Critique, Part 1

Posted on January 7, 2013 by Milton Gaither

Record: Randall Curren and J. C. Blokhuis, “The Prima Facie Case Against Homeschooling” in Public Affairs Quarterly, 25, no. 1 (January 2011): 1-19.

Curren, a distinguished philosopher of education, and Blokhuis, a recent graduate student of Curren’s who is now Assistant Professor of Education at Renison University College in Canada, here build on earlier work, especially Blokhuis’ doctoral dissertation, to argue that in the abstract common schools do a better job of preparing children for public life than do parents.

Summary and Critique:

The term prima facie in the title is crucial for this argument.  It means that they are not claiming that public schools are actually better or that homeschooling parents are actually incompetent to teach.  They’re just saying that in principle a common school with professionally trained teachers at first blush seems like a better set up than homeschooling.  This first post will limit itself to the authors’ first paragraph.  A second post will summarize and evaluate their main arguments.

Curren and Blokhuis begin, I regret to say, with a very weak historical introduction.  It is weak because it is wrong.  Continue reading →

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MATHEMATICS AND HOMESCHOOLING: A Missed Opportunity

Posted on December 17, 2012 by Milton Gaither

Record: Kathleen Ambruso Acker, Mary W. Gray, Behzad Jalali, and Matthew Pascal, “Mathematics and Home Schooling” in Notices of the AMS 59, no, 4 (April 2012): 513-521.

Summary: All four authors of this paper are affiliated with American University.  The stated aim of this misleadingly titled paper is to analyze the legal framework for homeschooling, noting especially the place of mathematics in it, and then to examine how well homeschooling prepares students for college and employment. Continue reading →

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