{"id":1369,"date":"2014-08-28T15:08:24","date_gmt":"2014-08-28T15:08:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=1369"},"modified":"2014-09-11T17:33:48","modified_gmt":"2014-09-11T17:33:48","slug":"home-based-education-in-north-carolina-a-masters-thesis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=1369","title":{"rendered":"HOME BASED EDUCATION IN NORTH CAROLINA: A Master’s Thesis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Record: <\/strong>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<\/em> 17 (April, 2014).\u00a0 Available here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Summary:<\/strong> Watts’ thesis was the result of her work at the Institute of International Education<\/a> at Stockholm University in Sweden, completed under Professor Ulf Fredriksson<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Watts begins with a brief orientation to homeschooling in the United States, noting its dramatic growth over the past 15 years.\u00a0 She offers a very brief and unreliable literature review, uncritically accepting the data provided by Ray’s nonrepresentative sample<\/a> of North Carolina homeschoolers as representative [For a critique of Ray’s study see here<\/a>], and limiting her survey to the HSLDA-funded studies.\u00a0 She then provides a brief summary of the overall educational situation in North Carolina.<\/p>\n

After these three introductory chapters, Watts describes her study.\u00a0 She has chosen North Carolina as a case study since education policy in the United States is more of a state than a federal affair, and North Carolina has a vibrant homeschooling community (she also seems to have had several personal contacts among NC homeschoolers).\u00a0 Watts contacted members of all of the support groups registered in North Carolina by email and distributed a questionnaire asking both closed and open-ended questions about homeschooling, including parental motivation, future plans for higher grades, opinions about how the broader society views homeschooling and about North Carolina’s policies, and level of participation in support groups and other resources outside the home.\u00a0 Watts also sent out a questionnaire to the seven North Carolina government employees tasked with overseeing homeschooling, called directors.\u00a0 This questionnaire asked about directors’ opinions about many aspects of homeschooling policy and practice in North Carolina.<\/p>\n

Before laying out her findings Watts offers a brief and solid history of homeschooling in North Carolina.\u00a0 She notes the state’s passage of a compulsory education statute in 1919 and the relative absence of home-based education from that time on until the 1980s.\u00a0 A key event in the history of North Carolina homeschooling was the Delconte case<\/a>, where the North Carolina Supreme Court determined in 1985 that statutory language about “school” does not exclude homes so long as they meet certain educational criteria.\u00a0 These criteria were spelled out subsequent to the decision in North Carolina House Bill 837 (drafted in the main by North Carolinians for Home Education<\/a>), passed in 1988.\u00a0 North Carolina requires notification, requires that a homeschooling parent have at least a high school diploma or equivalent, requires attendance and immunization records, requires annual testing, and requires notification if a home school closes.<\/p>\n

Next Watts reveals the results of her survey.\u00a0 Surprisingly, Watts never says how many surveys she sent out or what her response rate was.\u00a0 All we know is that she got 125 questionnaires back.\u00a0 If it is true that she contacted every support group in the state, and in 2011-2012 there were 47, 977 homeschooling families registered in North Carolina, it’s possible her response rate was in the low single digits.\u00a0 But this is just guesswork on my part.\u00a0 Nevertheless, here are some of the results from her survey:<\/p>\n

The vast majority of her sample’s homeschooled children were in the 5-12 age range.\u00a0 High schoolers “were poorly represented” (p. 38).\u00a0 Parents who responded are highly educated, with 73.6% saying they had finished college or higher.\u00a0 Among the motivation options Watts offered, the top chosen by far was academic quality and the second was religion.\u00a0 Almost half of her sample’s parents had worked in public education prior to homeschooling, and these parents were less likely to cite quality concerns and more likely to have a child with special needs.\u00a0 Though her data showed a very small percentage of high-school age homeschoolers, a full 79% intend to keep homeschooling their younger children through high school.\u00a0 93% of those surveyed think homeschooling is very or somewhat accepted by the broader society, and 91% of them find state law to be congenial.\u00a0 There is not much active support of homeschooling by the state, but homeschoolers are just fine with that.\u00a0 As one parent put it in a qualitative response, “lots of freedom.\u00a0 Much appreciated!” (p. 47)\u00a0 Most don’t even want access to public school resources like extracurriculars, though about 30% do.\u00a0 93.4% reported being members of at least one outside organization or group, most of which provide socialization (for parent and children), extracurriculars, and academic enrichment.<\/p>\n

Her director questionnaire was a bit of a bust.\u00a0 Of the seven, only one director responded, and from Watts’ summary this person did not seem to have a lot to say.<\/p>\n

After all of this information Watts switches gears and offers without explanation a “comparative” look at home education in Alberta, Canada.\u00a0 Basically, in Alberta home education is much more carefully monitored and is an extension of the government school system, which means that home educators receive government resources and support.\u00a0 It is also far less common.\u00a0 Watts notes that there are more students being educated at home in North Carolina than in the entire country of Canada.<\/p>\n

Appraisal:<\/strong>\u00a0 This Master’s Thesis reads like a Master’s Thesis.\u00a0 Were Watts my student I would have required her to read more widely in the secondary literature and especially to include more information about her sample–the geographic distribution, the percentage of respondents she had relative to questionnaires she sent out.\u00a0 I would have also required her to be more forthright about the limitations of her methodology.\u00a0 She states in her first chapter that her 125 subjects “can be somewhat generalized throughout the state of North Carolina,” (p. 12) but I doubt that.\u00a0 Her sample was biased from the outset toward well-connected, middle-class homeschoolers by her exclusive reliance on state-registered homeschooling groups and email contact.\u00a0 And it is biased even more if I am correct that she has an incredibly low response rate.\u00a0 If that is true, you’ve got a very selective group of highly motivated individuals here.\u00a0 That almost 50% of her sample are former school teachers or administrators is suggestive.\u00a0 How representative is that of the entire North Carolina homeschooling population?<\/p>\n

Given such limitations, what can we say for this study?\u00a0 To me it offers two helpful bits.\u00a0 First, when we compare the sample’s future plans with its own present realities I am prompted to intuit that a lot of homeschooling parents might think when their children are young that homeschooling will continue until college but then at a later time maybe change their minds and send their older kids to school.\u00a0 Second, Watts did a fine job succinctly summarizing the legislative and judicial history of homeschooling in North Carolina.\u00a0 I’ve long wished for a convenient resource that would do this very thing for each state in the country.<\/p>\n

Milton Gaither, Messiah College, author of Homeschool: An American History<\/a>\"\"<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer<\/strong>:\u00a0 The views expressed in reviews are not the official views of ICHER or of its members.\u00a0 For more information about ICHER\u2019s Reviews, please see the \u00ab\u00a0About these Reviews \u00bb Section.<\/p>\n

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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).\u00a0 Available here. Summary: Watts’ thesis was the result of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[9,11,19,12],"tags":[547,46,1140,63,1141,23,1142,1144,1143],"class_list":["post-1369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-legal","category-parental-motivation","category-policyregulation","tag-alberta","tag-brian-ray","tag-chelsey-b-watts","tag-hslda","tag-institute-of-international-education","tag-north-carolina","tag-stockholm-university","tag-sweden","tag-ulf-fredriksson"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1369"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1375,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369\/revisions\/1375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}