Open invitation to contribute a post

A reader suggested that while I’m taking this year off there may be some of you out there who would be willing to do a review of a piece of homeschooling research you come across.  If so, I’ll be happy to post it here for everyone to read.  You can email me any reviews you may want to do at mgaither@messiah.edu.  Thanks Rina for the suggestion!

Coleman on Homeschoolers in Middletown

This post reviews Rachel E. Coleman, “Ideologues: Pedagogues, Pragmatics: A Case Study of the Homeschool Community in Delaware County, Indiana” (M.A. Thesis: Ball State University, 2010).

Rachel Coleman, a reader of this blog, graciously sent me a copy of her Master’s Thesis she just defended this month at Ball State University.  It’s wonderful.  In this post I’ll summarize it and stress its main contributions to our knowledge about homeschooling.

I’m taking a year off

In a few minutes I will post the last post this blog will see for about a year.  I have recently been asked to write a history of education curriculum for an online publisher that will take every spare moment to complete by the publisher’s deadline.  I love writing the reviews on this blog, but they do take up a lot of time.  My apologies to my many faithful readers for this break in programming.  I’ll be back in July of 2011 though, and by then I’m sure there will be a lot of new homeschooling research for me to note!

Laura Brodie on Short-Term Homeschooling

This post reviews Laura Brodie, Love in a Time of Homeschooling: A Mother and Daughter’s Uncommon Year
(New York: HarperCollins, 2010).

Brodie, mother of three, part-time English professor at Washington and Lee, and author of other works of fiction and nonfiction, here offers a memoir of her one-year experiment in homeschooling with her eldest daughter Julia.  Brodie also has a blog on short-term homeschooling that has dealt a lot with school bullying as motivator for homeschooling.

Parsons and Lewis on Special Needs Homeschoolers in Britain

This post reviews Sarah Parsons and Ann Lewis, “The Home-Education of Children with Special Needs or Disabilities in the UK: Views of Parents from an Online Survey” in International Journal of Inclusive Education 14, no. 1 (February 2010): 67-86.

Parsons, research fellow at the University of Birmingham, and Lewis, a professor at the same institution, came to this project after an earlier study of parents of children with disabilities kept running into anomalies.  Parsons and Lewis kept finding parents who didn’t fit their survey categories because they had pulled their kids out of schools.  7% of the sample of their earlier study had done this, which was a surprise to Parsons and Lewis.  They were further surprised at how many of these parents expressed frustration that their choices and views weren’t being taken into consideration in the original study.  As Parsons and Lewis put it, “our interest (and conscience) pricked, we were determined to find out more about these ‘invisible’ families.” (p. 68)  So they created an online survey for homeschooling families with special needs kids and got 27 British parents to fill it out.  Here is what they found: 

New Ray Study of Homeschooler Demographics and Achievement

This post reviews Brian D. Ray, “Academic Achievement and Demographic Traits of Homeschool Students: A Nationwide Study” in Academic Leadership Live: The Online Journal 8, no. 1 (February 2010).  [Available Here]

This is the latest of a long line of nearly identical studies Ray has been performing for decades now at fairly even intervals.  In two previous posts I reviewed this large body of work, which you can read here and here.  This new study tries very hard to overcome one of the most persistent deficiencies of his previous work (and the 1999 Rudner study)–the near exclusive reliance on HSLDA’s advertisement to recruit subjects, leading to unrepresentative samples.  This time around Ray tried to recruit families from outside of the HSLDA orbit.  Did he succeed? 

Duggan on Community College Marketing to Homeschoolers

This post reviews Molly H. Duggan, “Are Community Colleges ‘Home-School Friendly?’: An Exploration of Community College Web Sites as an Indicator of ‘Friendliness’” in Community College Journal of Research and Practice 34: 55-63 (2010).

Duggan, whose earlier work on community colleges and homeschooling I reviewed here, this time asks what community colleges are doing, if anything, to recruit homeschooled students. 

Using HULU to Track Homeschooling on TV

While reading this humorous and engaging take on homeschool stereotypes by the blogger Kelly Green and Gold I started thinking about some way to track how homeschooling is represented in popular media.  That’s a huge task of course.  But I knew that the website HULU archives a lot of television, so I wondered if there was any way to search the site for homeschooling themes. 

“Pauper Apprenticeship” in Early America

This post reviews Ruth Wallis Herndon and John E. Murray, eds., Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009)

This fascinating book is the product of a long process of collaboration by a wide range of historians brought together by the Spencer Foundation under the leadership of the amazing educational historian John Rury.  Herndon and Murray collaborated with 11 other researchers to produce the most comprehensive and compelling look by far at the institution of pauper apprenticeships in North America from the colonial period until about 1850.  Why does this matter for homeschooling?  Because throughout this period, the most common way to educate children in dire circumstances was in the homes of more stable families. 

Aasen Summarizes Homeschooling in 3 pages

This post briefly reviews Susie Heumier Aasen, “New Followers of an Old Path-Homeschoolers” in Educator’s World 32, no. 4 (January 2010): 12-14. [Available Here]

Aasen, veteran homeschooling mother of five in Washington State, here summarizes the basics of homeschooling research.  She leads off with the 2007 NCES data that estimated there to be around 1.5 million homeschoolers in the U.S.  She describes the diversity of motives, pedagogies, and types of people who homeschool.  She cites Brian Ray’s NHERI research to show that