Joseph Murphy Reviews Gaither and Kunzman’s “Comprehensive Survey of the Research”

A few months ago I reviewed Joseph Murphy’s excellent book that synthesizes nearly all of the literature on homeschooling into a convenient, coherent, and literate volume titled Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement.  A couple of years before Dr. Murphy’s book came out Rob Kunzman and I decided that we wanted to do the same thing.  I’ve been reviewing homeschooling literature since 2008 on this blog, and Dr. Kunzman has compiled an exhaustive bibliography, which can be accessed here.  Our article summarizing and synthesizing all of this literature came out a few weeks ago and I asked Dr. Murphy if he would review it for me.  He graciously agreed to do so, and here are his comments:

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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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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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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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A New Book that Surveys almost all Extant Homeschooling Research

This post reviews Joseph Murphy, Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement (Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin, 2012).

Murphy, Associate Dean at Peabody College of Education at Vanderbilt University and author of many, many books and articles on a wide range of topics, here provides a remarkable synthesis of nearly the entire corpus of homeschooling research published from the 1980s to the present.

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One of the Best Articles on Homeschooling Ever

This post reviews Linda G. Hanna, “Homeschooling Education: Longitudinal Study of Methods, Materials, and Curricula” in Education and Urban Society 20, no. 10 (2012): 1-23.

Hanna, an education professor at West Chester University, here gives us the results of a study of 225 homeschooling families coming from 25 school districts in Pennsylvania to get representative data on who chooses to homeschool, why they choose it, and how they do it.  She surveyed and interviewed these families in 1998 and then went back to them 10 years later for another round of questions.  Thus we have here one of the only longitudinal studies of homeschooling ever done.

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The Cardus Education Survey and Homeschooling

This post reviews Ray Pennings, et. al.,  Cardus Education Survey (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 2011)  [available here]

Phase 1 of the Cardus Education Survey was released a few weeks ago and has garnered significant national attention for its insights into private Christian schooling.  Though not the report’s major emphasis, it also includes some very interesting information about homeschooling. 

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A New Study on Academic Achievement of Homeschoolers

This post reviews Sandra Martin-Chang, Odette N. Gould, and Reanne E. Meuse, “The Impact of Schooling on Academic Achievement: Evidence from Homeschooled and Traditionally Schooled Children.” Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science 43, no. 3 (July 2011): 195-202.

The authors of this study of 74 children, half homeschooled, half institutionally schooled, conclude that structured homeschooling is best, public schooling next, and unstructured homeschooling worst at producing high levels of academic achievement. 

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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? 

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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 

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