{"id":226,"date":"2012-10-16T12:42:28","date_gmt":"2012-10-16T12:42:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=226"},"modified":"2014-02-12T19:39:58","modified_gmt":"2014-02-12T19:39:58","slug":"academic-achievement-and-demographic-traits-brian-rays-latest-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/?p=226","title":{"rendered":"ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT AND DEMOGRAPHIC TRAITS: Brian Ray’s Latest Study"},"content":{"rendered":"

Record: \u00a0<\/strong>Brian D. Ray, \u201cAcademic Achievement and Demographic Traits of Homeschool Students: A Nationwide Study\u201d in Academic Leadership Live: The Online Journal<\/em> 8, no. 1 (February 2010).\u00a0 [Available Here<\/a>]<\/p>\n

Summary: \u00a0<\/strong>This is the latest of a long line of nearly identical studies Ray has been performing for decades now at fairly even intervals.\u00a0 This new study tries very hard to overcome one of the most persistent deficiencies of his previous work (and the 1999 Rudner study)\u2013the near exclusive reliance on HSLDA\u2019s advertisement to recruit subjects, leading to unrepresentative samples.\u00a0 This time around Ray tried to recruit families from outside of the HSLDA orbit.\u00a0 Did he succeed?\u00a0 Not really.\u00a0 At least 76.8% of his very impressive sample (11,739 subjects!) are some sort of conservative Protestant.\u00a0 95.2% are some kind of Christian.\u00a0 But he did try.\u00a0 Rather than just recruit from HSLDA and its affiliates as in past studies, this time Ray used not only the Bob Jones University Press testing service popular with conservative Protestants but also the Washington-based Family Learning Organization, which bills itself as an \u201cinclusive and non-judgmental<\/a>\u201d organization, the North Carolina-based Piedmont Education Services<\/a>, (which is at least as conservative Protestant as BJU), and the Virginia-based Seton Home Study School<\/a>, which is a service used primarily by conservative Roman Catholics.\u00a0 The use of Seton helps account for the impressive 12.4% of Ray\u2019s subjects who were Roman Catholic.\u00a0 Ray also tapped several smaller organizations, but it must be noted that many of these also cater to conservative Christians.<\/p>\n

Of his 11,739 subjects, at least 91.7 % are white (some of those selecting \u201cother\u201d I have a feeling are also white).\u00a0 97.9% are married.\u00a0 68.1% have at least 3 kids.\u00a0 42.2% have at least four.\u00a0 6.3% have seven or more children.<\/p>\n

80% of families have mothers who stay at home full time.\u00a0 62.5 % of the mothers in Ray\u2019s sample have a four-year college degree or higher.<\/p>\n

45.9 % of these families make over $80,000 per year.\u00a0 28.4% make over $100,000.<\/p>\n

In short, Ray\u2019s sample is much more conservative, much more Christian, and much, much whiter than the American norm.\u00a0 It is also richer and enjoys more intact family life (i.e. far fewer broken homes or single parent situations).\u00a0 It has a far higher number of children too.\u00a0 If the stereotype of the typical homeschooling family is that of the lily-white fundamentalist Protestant (or conservative Catholic) with a\u00a0 stay-at-home mom and lots of kids, this study completely reinforces it.\u00a0 It would only add that this family is doing quite well financially and has parents who have lots of higher education.<\/p>\n

Not surprising given this demographic, the test scores are off the charts.\u00a0 On all the tests administered to this sample of homeschoolers, students performed on average in the 84th to 89th percentile.\u00a0 Ray has been reporting stellar test results for decades, but these results are even higher than anything he has found before.<\/p>\n

There were slight differences between groups of homeschoolers based on some variables, and no difference based on others.\u00a0 Type of curriculum (complete school in a box or eclectic approach) didn\u2019t make any difference.\u00a0 Neither did level of state regulation.\u00a0 Very slight improvement in scores resulted from being a girl, from having fewer brothers and sisters, from having parents who had never been certified to teach (!), and from having a more structured approach to homeschooling [Ray asked families to rank the level of formality of their homeschool on a 1-7 point scale].\u00a0 A little bit more statistical improvement was connected to families being more wealthy and spending more on homeschooling curricula.\u00a0 But the only variable that really seemed to make a significant difference was parent education level.\u00a0 Kids with parents with at least a college education did noticeably better than kids whose parents had less formal education.\u00a0 But the main point here is not these slight variations.\u00a0 The main point is that all the subjects performed far above national norms.<\/p>\n

Why?\u00a0 Ray considers many possible answers at the end of his report but not the one that is obviously the case.<\/p>\n

Appraisal: <\/strong>Children from the families in Ray’s study do well on standardized test because children from families like this always do well on tests no matter where they go to school.\u00a0 Ray does acknowledge as much in a couple of places in his report:<\/p>\n

homeschool families and their students do not appear to be a completely representative cross-section of all families in the United States. And it was not possible within the constraints of this study to confirm whether this sample is representative of the population of home-educated students.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Despite acknowledgments like this Ray repeatedly suggests that while his study doesn\u2019t prove<\/em> that homeschooling itself is what makes these kids do so well, \u201cit may be that something about the typical nature and practice of home-based education causes higher academic achievement, on average, than does institutional state-run schooling.\u201d\u00a0 As much as he may want to think this, there are actually two places in his own data that suggest otherwise.<\/p>\n

The first comes in his comparison of students in his sample who were homeschooled their entire lives (59%) with those who have only homeschooled for a little while.\u00a0 He found no statistical relationship at all between number of years homeschooling and achievement.\u00a0 Later in the study Ray compares the scores of his homeschooled sample with scores from three of his large testing companies that include students enrolled in private Christian schools.\u00a0 The scores are nearly identical.\u00a0 From these two tidbits it is clear that what Ray is measuring is not a homeschooling effect but a sociological effect of stable, two-parent, middle-to-upper-middle class, white families whose parents are deeply committed to their children\u2019s well-being.\u00a0 Children with advantages like this are going to shine no matter what kind of schooling they get.<\/p>\n

Having said this, I want to end by praising the the study rightly interpreted.\u00a0 I know it is going to be misrepresented by many homeschooling advocates (possibly by Ray himself) as another study that proves homeschooling is better than public education.\u00a0 I know many unschoolers and others for whom the attraction of homeschooling is that it gets their families away from the standardized testing obsession are going to reject its very premises and see it, accurately, as ignoring their wing of the movement.\u00a0 But for all its demographic limitations (despite Ray\u2019s praiseworthy efforts to broaden his sample, this is still the same basic group of homeschoolers he\u2019s always studied, with the addition of some conservative Catholics) Ray has shown, yet again, that homeschooling does not by itself harm children academically.\u00a0 Middle class white kids from stable families who would excel in public or private schools perform at least as well on standardized tests if they\u2019re homeschooled.\u00a0\u00a0 Rather than insinuating that homeschooling is responsible for these impressive scores, I wish Ray would interpret his study as showing, as it so capably does, that homeschooling doesn\u2019t make privileged kids do worse on tests than they would have done had they gone to school.\u00a0 Homeschooling is no academic disadvantage.\u00a0 That\u2019s newsworthy enough I think.<\/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","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Record: \u00a0Brian D. Ray, \u201cAcademic Achievement and Demographic Traits of Homeschool Students: A Nationwide Study\u201d in Academic Leadership Live: The Online Journal 8, no. 1 (February 2010).\u00a0 [Available Here] Summary: \u00a0This is the latest of a long line of nearly … 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":[3],"tags":[136,61,46,63,62],"class_list":["post-226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-achievement","tag-academic-leadership-live-the-online-journal","tag-brian-d-ray","tag-brian-ray","tag-hslda","tag-nheri"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226","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=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1160,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions\/1160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/icher.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}