New Post on U.S. and Canadian Homeschool Law at ICHER Reviews Section

I’m trying to make the transition from this site to the Reviews section of the International Center for Home Education Research website.  I thought I had set it up so that my readers who have joined my facebook group Homeschooling Research Reviews would be able to get an automatic notification of new posts.  But it didn’t happen the way I hoped it would.  Until I get the technology fixed, I’ll post links here as well.

The new post reviews a fascinating doctoral dissertation about the legislative and legal situation concerning homeschooling both in the United States and Canada.  While the U.S. stuff is pretty familiar to most readers, the Canadian material was, at least to me, completely fresh and very enlightening.  Read the new post here.

 

 

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My New Article that Reviews ALL the Homeschooling Research

The journal Other Education has just published an article Rob Kunzman and I wrote together titled, “Homeschooling: A Comprehensive Survey of the Research.”  It is the culmination of years of work by both of us compiling every piece of research on homeschooling ever written, culling through them all to select the best material, organizing them into coherent categories, and writing up the results.

Several months ago I reviewed Joseph Murphy’s excellent book Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement, which is a very thorough review of the scholarly literature.  Our article is not nearly so long as Dr. Murphy’s book and thus it lacks some of the detail he provides.  Anyone interested in homeschooling research should read his book cover to cover and keep it on the shelf for frequent reference.  But despite its length and depth of coverage, there are some topics and a few key studies Dr. Murphy leaves out, and he sometimes fails to differentiate between high and low quality studies or between studies published recently and those published decades ago.  I think our article provides even more breadth and does a better job discriminating between sources.  Plus you can download it for free!  Do so here.

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Two Recent European Conferences on Home Education

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.

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Homeschoolers and Mathematics?

This post reviews 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.

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.

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How Homeschooling Disrupts the Legal Definition of Public Education and What that Means for Government Regulation

This post reviews Robert Kunzman, “Education, Schooling, and Children’s Rights: the Complexity of Homeschooling” in Educational Theory 62, no. 1 (February 2012): 75-89.

Kunzman, as readers of this blog know very well, is one of the leading scholars currently working on homeschooling.  He is author of the important book Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling; he’s written many articles on homeschooling; and he maintains a helpful site that catalogs homeschooling research here.

A couple of years ago I reviewed an earlier piece by Kunzman on government regulation of homeschooling that dealt with some of the same themes he addresses here.  Back then Kunzman argued against various kinds of government regulations, concluding that only tests evaluating a homeschooler’s grasp of basic literacy and numeracy should be mandated.

This current article is a bit more theoretical.  It aims not so much to set out an explicit policy proposal as to argue for why certain domains should be considered legal rights (and thus be scrutinized by the government) while other, perhaps equally important domains, should not.

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Homeschooling and the European Union

This post reviews Colin Koons, “Education on the Home Front: Home Education in the European Union and the Need for Unified European Policy.” Indiana International and Comparative Law Review, 20, no. 1 (2010): 145-174.

Koons, a recent graduate from Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis, here explains the diversity of homeschooling law in various European countries and tries to figure out what the European Union’s legal paramaters would be for the practice.

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Constitutional Principles and Homeschooling

This post reviews Linda Wang, “Who Knows Best? The Appropriate Level of Judicial Scrutiny on Compulsory Education Laws Regarding Home Schooling” in Journal of Civil Rights and Economic Development, 25 (Winter 2011); 413-448.

Wang, a recent J.D. from St. John’s University School of Law, here seeks to make sense of the conflicting and hazy Constitutional principles at play in cases regarding homeschooling law and liberty.

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Regulating Homeschooling. Again.

This post reviews Paul A. Alarcón, “Recognizing and Regulating Home Schooling in California: Balancing Parental and State Interests in Education” in Chapman Law Review, 13 (2010): 391-416.

Alarcón, about whom I was unable to find any information on the web, here presents a summary of the recent In re Rachel L. and Jonathan L. decisions in California and an argument that the California legislature should pass new legislation that explicitly gives parents a right to homeschool but requires that they submit annual notification of intent to homeschool and annual standardized test scores.

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Who’s in Charge of Kids? Parents? Kids? The State?

This post reviews Courtenay E. Moran, “How to Regulate Homeschooling: Why History Supports the Theory of Parental Choice” in University of illinois Law Review, 2011, no. 3 (2011): 1061-1094. [Available Here]

Moran, a J. D. candidate at the University of Illinois College of Law and former homeschooler himself, here offers an ambitious, historically-grounded legal argument for the viability of limited goverment regulation of homeschooling.

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Are Homeschooling Regulations Too Lax? Are they Constitutional?

This post reviews Timothy B. Waddell, “Bringing it all Back Home: Establishing a Coherent Constitutional Framework for the Re-Regulation of Homeschooling” in Vanderbilt Law Review, 63, 541-598. [Available fulltext here]

Waddell, a recent graduate from Vanderbilt Law School and now a clerk for the U.S. District Court of Alabama, here presents a constitutional argument for increased regulation of homeschooling and much else besides.

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