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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Homeschooling and the Reform of Public Schools

This post reviews Robert Kunzman, “Life as Education and the Irony of School Reform” in Other Education: The Journal of Educational Alternatives 1, no. 1 (2012): 121-129. [Available here]

Kunzman, whose work is well known to readers of this blog as we have had many occasions to comment on it, here hints at some possible relationships between home education and public school reform in the United States.  He does this in the inaugural issue of the new journal Other Education, whose goal is to explore all sorts of alternatives to the conventional public school.

Kunzman begins by critiquing the trend in education reform toward faddish new programs or curricula, often sponsored by private foundations with vested interests in the next big thing. 

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School Refusal and Homeschooling

This post reviews Alan Thomas and Allison Wray, “School Refusal and Home Education” in Journal of Unschooling and Alternative Learning 7, no. 13 (2013).[Available Here]

Thomas, a well-known authority on home education in Britain and Visiting Fellow at the University of London Institute of Education, and Wray, graduate student at Cambridge University and mother of three children, two of whom had refused school, here present the results of a recent study of twenty-four children who had refused to attend school and whose families turned to home-based learning as an alternative.

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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 Philosophical Argument against Homeschooling, Part 2

This is the second of a two-part review of Randall Curren and J. C. Blokhuis, “The Prima Facie Case Against Homeschooling” in Public Affairs Quarterly, 25, no. 1 (January 2011): 1-19.

In my previous post I argued against the historic backstory Curren and Blokhuis provide as the underpinning of their argument.  Today I will look at the argument itself.  In general they make two basic claims.  First, they claim that all children are entitled to equal public protection of their educational interests, which means that all forms of education, including private schooling and homeschooling, must provide equal educative opportunities.  Second, they claim that the nature of knowledge is such that, especially at the secondary level, parents (or any other citizen) can be presumed to lack competence to teach, and that anybody who wants to teach must overcome this presumption of incompetence by proving their merit.

Curren and Blokhuis elaborate on these claims through a three-part argument.  I will first summarize their argument and then offer some critiques.

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Online Schooling and Elite Sports

Just a quick post today making note of a fascinating piece of journalism from Sports Illustrated.  Lee Jenkins writes in this week’s issue about the Eastern Christian Academy Honey Badgers.  The piece is available right now for free on SI’s website, but I don’t know for how long.

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Some Recent Court Cases involving Homeschooling

From time to time I like to provide a brief summary of some recent court cases relative to homeschooling.  Today I’m stressing only those decided by a court of appeals or higher, not district court decisions. We’ll begin with a couple of special education decisions that together say something important about homeschooling children with special needs. Then we’ll move on to the more unseemly stuff.

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Music Education and Homeschooling

This post reviews Jeananne Nichols, “Music Education in Homeschooling: Jamie’s Story” in Margaret S. Barrett and Sandra L. Stauffer, Narrative Soundings: An Anthology of Narrative Inquiry in Music Education (2012), pp. 115-128.

Nichols, a professor at the University of Illinois School of Music, here uses the experiences of one Arizona homeschooler to get leverage on the options homeschoolers have for music education. 

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A Peek Inside of Four Homeschools

This post reviews Kenneth V. Anthony and Susie Burroughs, “Day to Day Operations of Home School Families: Selecting from a Menu of Educational Choices to meet Students’ Individual Instructional Needs.” in International Education Studies, 5, no. 1 (February 2012): 1-17. [Available fulltext here]

Anthony, an instructor at Mississippi University for Women, and Burroughs, a professor of education at Mississippi State, here describe the daily activities of four homeschooling families, all of whom are part of the same classical education co-op in a “southeastern U.S.” state, which I presume to be Mississippi.

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What Happens when Divorced Parents Disagree about Homeschooling?

This post reviews Charles J. Russo, “Is Home Schooling ‘in the Best Interests of the Child?’ The Supreme Court of New Hampshire Answers – Not When Divorced Parents Disagree!” in Private School Monitor 33, no. 2 (Fall 2011).

Russo, a prolific scholar on legal issues in education who has had several occasions in the past to turn his attention to homeschooling, here examines the legal status of homeschooling in light of the recent In re Kurowski (2011) case (which I discussed here before it was heard by the State Supreme Court) in New Hampshire that pitted a divorced homeschooling mother against her ex-husband who disapproved of the practice.

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