Gretchen Abernathy Reviews in English a Spanish Language Article about Homeschooling in Spain

This week again I have asked a guest to review for me.  In this case it was because the article is written in Spanish.  Thankfully, my sister Gretchen Abernathy is a professional translator with many years of experience translating Spanish language theological scholarship into English.  Here follows her expert summary and evaluation of a recent piece by three scholars from Spain.  I have again cross-posted this review on the ICHER website.  I’m encouraging my readers to familiarize themselves now with that site, for soon I’ll be moving over to it exclusively.

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.

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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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How European Nations Regulate Home Education and How They Could Do it Better

This post reviews Henk Blok and Sjoerd Karsten, “Inspection of Home Education in European Countries” in European Journal of Education 46, no. 1 (2011), pp. 138-152.

Blok and Karsten, both at the Kohnstamm Institute at the University of Amsterdam, here summarize what is known about homeschooling regulations in 14 European countries.

The countries covered are these:  Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, England, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Sweden.

For each the authors give a succinct summary of the nation’s homeschooling situation, and they recap it all in a convenient chart.  Over at the ICHER website we have our own graphic with some of this information, but Blok and Karsten give much more detail.

After summarizing the situation in each of the 14 countries they make a few generalizations and conclude with four policy recommendations.  First the generalizations:

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Homeschooling in Turkey

This post briefly reviews Elife Doğan Kılıç and Özgür Önen, “Homeschooling in Turkey” in US-China Education Review B 1 (2012): 113-123. [Available here]

Kılıç, an education professor at Sinop University in Turkey, and Önen, an education professor at Akif Ersoy University also in Turkey, here present the results of a survey of 20 Turkish teachers as to the viability of homeschooling in the Turkish context.

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Bad Research Uncovered by Home Educating Parents

This post reviews 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:

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New Cardus Study of Homeschooling in Canada

This post reviews R. Pennings, et al., “A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats: Measuring Non-Government School Effects in Service of the Canadian Public Good” (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 2012).  Available for free download here.

Back in 2011 I reviewed the first Cardus Survey, which provided rare randomly sampled data about young adults who had been homeschooled in the United States.  This new study does the same for Canada.  In the first study the Cardus researchers uncovered some fascinating information about adult homeschoolers, some of which proved rather controversial because it was not very flattering toward homeschooling.

This new study’s results are fairly similar.  The study is about much more than homeschooling, but since this is a blog about homeschooling research I will limit my comments to the homeschooling findings.

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Some Recent Homeschooling Articles in Popular Magazines

Here follow a few brief summaries of various articles that have appeared in the past few months that, while not scholarly, are still interesting and informative.  They include a story on homeschooling in China, an advocacy piece by a conservative Catholic, a description of public/private/home school hybrids, and a homeschool diary by a New Yorker:

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A Qualitative Look at What Children Think about Homeschooling

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

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.

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Homeschooling in Albania

This post reviews Timothy Hagen, “Free to Learn: The Rationale for Legalizing Homeschooling in Albania” in Central European Journal of Public Policy 5, no. 2 (December 2011): 50-85 [available fulltext here]

Hagen, a professor of economics at Epoka University in Albania, here offers what is I think the first ever article about homeschooling in that country. 

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