It’s always a welcome development when a notable journal decides to devote an entire issue to homeschooling.  This has been done only a very few times.  Back in 2000 the prestigious Peabody Journal of Education devoted Volume 75, Issue 1/2 to homeschooling, running several important articles that continue to be cited frequently in literature reviews.  Highlights of this volume included articles on feminist themes in home schooling, special education and home schooling, partnerships with public schools, Richard Medlin’s survey of the literature on socialization, and a much-discussed critique of homeschooling by Chris Lubienski.

In 2003 the journal Evaluation and Research in Education devoted Volume 17, Issue 2/3 to homeschooling.  Most of the articles published in this volume focused on homeschooling in countries other than the United States, though there was an important article by Mitchell Stevens on the U.S.A. as well as another critique of the movement by Chris Lubienski.

In 2004 the Journal of College Admissions devoted No. 185 to a much-needed discussion of homeschoolers and higher education.  Important work was published on attitudes of university personnel toward homeschoolers, federal law governing homeschooling and higher education admission, performance of homeschooled kids in college, and practical advice for admissions officers seeking to recruit homeschooled applicants.

While much good work has been published on homeschooling since 2004 of course, it’s been five years since a significant academic journal devoted an entire issue to homeschooling.  This year has seen two such efforts.  A few weeks ago I reported on several articles published by TechTrends in vol. 53, No. 4.  That issue was devoted to the cybercharter phenomenon.  Some of the articles were better than others, but it was nice to see the trend recognized by a journal devoted to such things.

Now comes probably the most important special issue of a journal since the 2000 Peabody Journal release.  Theory and Research in Education is a high-profile, high quality international education journal with great cachet in the field.  As such I will be spending the next several posts reviewing the articles that collectively make up volume 7, number 3 of Theory and Research in Education, which is devoted entirely to homeschooling.  As a foretaste of what’s to come, I’ll close this post with the contents of the issue.  If you want to read the abstracts of these articles now you can view them here:

Randall Curren

Editorial
Theory and Research in Education 2009 7: 275-276.

Cynthia M. Villalba

Home-based education in Sweden: Local variations in forms of regulation
Theory and Research in Education 2009 7: 277-296.

Thomas Spiegler

Why state sanctions fail to deter home education: An analysis of home education in Germany and its implications for home education policies
Theory and Research in Education 2009 7: 297-309.

Robert Kunzman

Understanding homeschooling: A better approach to regulation
Theory and Research in Education 2009 7: 311-330.

Milton Gaither

Homeschooling in the USA: Past, present and future
Theory and Research in Education 2009 7: 331-346.

Carrie Winstanley

Too cool for school?: Gifted children and homeschooling
Theory and Research in Education 2009 7: 347-362.

Michael S. Merry and Charles Howell

Can intimacy justify home education?
Theory and Research in Education 2009 7: 363-381.

The cerebral evangelical bimonthly Books and Culture just published a nice review of my book by Rob Kunzman.  You can read it here.

This post reviews Paul Theobald, Education Now: How Rethinking America’s Past Can Change Its Future (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2009).  [An article that summarizes many of the points made in the book is available here]

Theobald, Woods-Beals Chair of Urban and Rural Education at Buffalo State College and author of two other books on rural education and community revival, here presents a wide-ranging revisionist account of the economic, political, and educational history of Europe and the United States in an effort to suggest reforms that begin in schools and ultimately will transform the U.S. into a more populist and economically stable place.  In this review I’ll summarize his main argument and then explain what it means for homeschooling. 

Chapter one revisits the history of political thought.  Theobald contrasts the dominant tradition of European thought, that of Hobbes and Locke, with the rejected and forgotten alternative vision of James Harrington and Gerrard Winstanley.  Unlike Hobbes, Locke, and their American acolytes who framed the baleful and possibly illegal U.S. Constitution, Harrington and Winstanley did not reduce human beings to economic actors in a perpetual state of natural war against one another.  On the contrary, they envisioned a cooperative natural state.  Hence political deliberation, not economic activity, was the primary thing.  Their views lived on in the thought of Montesquieu, whose impact on the United States was significant for a time but ultimately eclipsed by Lockean individualist economic reductivism.

Chapter two revisits the history of economic thought.  Theobald contrasts the dominant tradition of European thought, that of Adam Smith, with the rejected and forgotten alternative vision of Francois Quesnay, Henry George, John Ruskin, and others.  Smith’s economic reductivism and belief in the inevitability of industrial growth was accepted by subsequent thinkers like Mill and Marx, who disagreed only about the pace at which reform would and should unfold.  But Theobald uncovers for us a third alternative to the poles of industrial laissez faire or industrial socialism.  Illustrated by the many communal experiments of mid-19^th century America, by Thomas Paine, and again by Gerrard Winstanley, who Theobald thinks should be listed “among the world’s great thinkers,” (62) agrarianism has always been available as a viable alternative to the human and environmental degradation that has followed from industrial “progress.”  But the agrarian option has been suppressed and eclipsed by entrenched business interests and the ideology of Social Darwinism.

Chapter three revisits the history of educational thought.  Here Theobald for the first time reverses things.  It turns out that the winners in the world of education, at least at first, were the good guys.  Jefferson’s egalitarian agrarianism provided the intellectual grounding for the common school movement.  Its emphasis on universal, free education, organized and governed by local communities, is one of the great achievements of the brief agrarian or “communitarian moment” in mid-19^th century America.  But it was not to last.  Business interests and Social Darwinism co-opted the common schools, re-defining them not as political but as economic engines that would sort and prepare students for future occupations.  Yet this did not occur without a fight.  Again, Theobald uncovers a tradition of dissent from the dominant trends.  This time it’s Lester Frank Ward, John Dewey, George Counts, and Harold Rugg who tried but ultimately failed to rescue schooling from the economic reductivists.  The economic view has now achieved overwhelming dominance, as illustrated in the absurd Nation At Risk report of 1983 and, most recently, No Child Left Behind.

Such is Theobald’s historical account.  The last three chapters lay out a series of reform proposals that all in one way or another seek 1) to restore to public education a political dimension that will allow students to critique the media-industrial complex that seeks to control every aspect of life, and 2) to restore control of schooling, and ultimately the nation, to local communities.  His reforms range from the plausible but unlikely (John Goodlad’s restructuring of grades), to the highly unlikely (randomly selected local citizens serving as a school’s Board of Assessors), to the wildly fantastical (a new constitutional convention that will completely revise our form of government).  His basic idea is that since schools are historically the only beach-head for agrarian values, school reform is the best bet for eventually producing society-wide transformation.

Here’s what all of this means for homeschooling.  Theobald’s historical claim is that the common schools of the mid 19th century were qualitatively different than the public schools that emerged in the 20th.  It was of course these 20th century public schools against which critics both left and right railed in the 1960s and 70s, which critique led to the homeschooling movement.  If Theobald’s efforts to return the country to a mid-19th century agrarian society where local communities ran their own schools were successful, there would be little need for homeschooling.  It is interesting that in his three chapters dealing with school and social reform he never once mentions private education of any sort.  Theobald doesn’t want his agrarianism to be a minority alternative movement.  He wants it to take over the country.

There is an obvious problem with this communitarian utopianism.  Theobald’s historical account that celebrates mid 19th century agrarian values does not come to terms with the racial exclusivism and religious bigotry that were pervasive in those days.  Communal values work best when the population is homogeneous.  To have communion you must excommunicate dissenters.  This was the dilemma Robert Putnam never really solved in his famous book Bowling Alone, and it is not even addressed here.  Theobald’s exclusive attention to the intellectual history of American economic, political, and educational life ignores the social side of things and masks the fact that one reason progressivism did what it did in all three domains was to replace the provincialism of local communities with expertise based on scientific knowledge.  We may debate the degree to which this scientific expertise was actually non-partisan (in fact it proved in the early 20th century to be even more racist than the agrarian provincialism it replaced), but the ideal at least was to have objectivity rather than outright partisan bigotry.  Were we to return to Theobald’s idealized 19th century, the same dynamic would be with us.  Some locales would probably be homogeneous enough to create consensus for universal free schools for all.  Others though would have significant minority populations who would probably have to turn to private schools or homeschooling to escape what they would take to be the oppression of majoritarian populism.  Roman Catholics had to do this during the period Theobald celebrates.  Others would have to do it today.

Theobald is something of a dreamer.  What he really wants is a new country.  He thinks the Constitution was illegally imposed on the nation and would have us go back to something more like the Articles of Confederation (but with changes–he lays out his proposals in the final chapter).  A more realistic tack he might have taken but did not would be to seek to have his agrarian ideals realized in minority communities of the like-minded.  Were he to make this switch he would probably find no Americans more open to his ideals than homeschoolers.

This post reviews Philip Marzluf, “Writing Home-Schooled Students into the Academy” in Composition Studies 37, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 49-66

Marzluf, professor and director of the writing program at Kansas State University, here pens a thoughtful reflection on the challenges that arise in composition courses when conservative Christian homeschoolers enroll in them.  The attraction of this paper is not so much its empirical base as in its grounding in a more theoretical literature that seeks to understand what professors should do with ideologically narrow-minded students in classes that require exposure to and conversation with multiple perspectives.

Marzluf interviewed seven previously homeschooled students at Kansas State, six of whom identified as conservative Protestants.  He spoke with each participant four times over the course of a semester and collected and analyzed the papers they wrote for their classes.

Marzluf is very explicit that he is speaking neither as a critic of nor an advocate for homeschooling, and he is also not concerned with the academic achievement of these students relative to their non-homeschooled peers.  All he cares about here is how these students interpreted their experience in the secular university and how professors can best teach them.

He found that these Christian homeschoolers experienced a bit of difficulty at first in their writing classes figuring out how to write for a non-Christian audience.  Their early papers tended to included a lot of proof-texting from the Bible and were usually about predictable topics with predictable theses–homeschooling is good, abortion is bad, homosexuality is wrong, government should stay out of family life, and so on.  Most of these students had led fairly sheltered childhoods (all described how a major motivator for their parents’ decision to homeschool was fear of “danger lurking in the public schools.” (56))  But gradually these students figured out that the rhetorical strategies that they had always relied on at home are not acceptable in the academy.  With their professors’ help, they were able to construct new forms of argument that rely less on Biblical quotations and more on secular forms of evidence.  They did not, however, change their views on the topics they discussed in their papers, nor did they grow more hospitable to alternative perspectives.

As students grew in their awareness of secular modes of discourse, they also became adept at identifying “ideological hotspots” where they believed the university was biased toward the left.  Examples include repeated “bashing of George W. Bush” in classes, unquestioned commitment to evolution, and commitment to gender equality.  Nevertheless, these students came to embrace as their own a very thin form of tolerance.  They didn’t change any of their own views, but they did come to accept that college is about allowing everyone (including themselves) to speak their minds.  They were able to temper their need to turn every class into an opportunity to evangelize without compromising their own commitments.

After surveying his students’ attitudes, Marzluf lays out some practical advice for professors who teach such as these.  First, he counsels modesty in any attempt to “convert” such students to open-mindedness.  He notes other research that has shown repeatedly just how little most students actually change in college.  Most college students, like these homeschoolers, become adept at segregating their classroom selves from their real private selves.  Professors who feel the urge to transform their students are likely to be disappointed.

Second, Marzluf advocates that professors strike a balance between pedagogical sensitivity to their homeschoolers’ world view and the secular identity of their college classroom.  Professors will likely have better results if they enter empathetically into the Christian self-understanding of these students.  They may even be able to draw such students into a bit of self questioning by assuming heuristically some of the same beliefs these students hold and then using them to raise questions.  For example, if all people are sinful, including the student, then could not he or she be mistaken about some of his or her beliefs?  This is the only example Marzluf gives, but many more could be devised.  In my own teaching at an explicitly Christian college, my freshman writing course subject matter is the history of Church splits.  My students learn that committed Christians have disagreed with one another for millennia about all sorts of issues.  Exposure to the astonishing diversity of Christian beliefs is a very effective way to get my students, most of whom are very like the students being studied by Marzluf, to begin to question some of the beliefs they were raised with.  I think that’s the sort of thing he’s advocating, but to be able to do this well a professor would need to know quite a bit about Christianity, and I’m not sure how many writing professors in the academy would be willing to bone up on their Church history for the sake of their one or two homeschooled students.

Even as they grow sensitive to the theological orientation of their students, Marzluf reminds his colleagues that they should not feel obliged to surrender the secular nature of their classroom.  Homeschoolers do not have a right to preach or intimidate students they feel are godless or too liberal or what-have-you.  Professors have the authority and responsibility to maintain an atmosphere of tolerance and openness in the classroom, and they do their homeschooled students a disservice if they do not teach them how to discourse in secular modes.  He describes successful strategies for helping students revise their papers so that they transform their rhetoric from “sacred home situations” to “the expectations of public and secular audiences.”  (p.63)

I very much enjoyed reading this article.  Perhaps that’s because its intended audience is college writing professors, and that’s part of what I do for a living.  But surely many who are not directly involved with composition courses would find Marzluf’s thoughtful description of the tensions between conservative students and the liberal academy engaging.  I personally appreciated his sensitivity to the beliefs of these students–he has strong words to say against the occasional professor whose personal bigotry against Christians bleeds into his or her classroom.  But I also appreciated how his sensitivity did not overpower his commitment to teaching these young adults some of the skills necessary for democratic deliberation in the public square.

I would be remiss not to mention briefly that Marzluf occasionally reveals little awareness of the world of homeschooling.  He calls HSLDA the Home School Legal Defense League at one point, and he suggests in one place that racism may be a defining motive for homeschoolers [none of the many studies of parental motivation have ever found this to be the case].  But these are minor quibbles.  Though its empirical base is weak, Marzluf’s article is eloquent and wise.

This post reviews Cheryl Fields-Smith and Meca Williams, “Motivations, Sacrifices, and Challenges: Black Parents’ Decisions to Home School” in Urban Review 41 (2009): 369-389

Fields-Smith, a professor at the University of Georgia, and Williams, at Georgia Southern, here offer an important contribution to the literature on parental motivation for homeschooling.  This article is the first to look carefully at African American homeschooling parents to determine their motivations.  The authors used a “community-nomination process” to find black homeschooling parents to study.  That means that they used contacts they had with individual homeschoolers to gain access to others.  This approach netted them 24 families, all residing in the greater Atlanta region.  Fields-Smith and Williams then had these families fill out an open-ended survey of attitudes and demographic data, conducted lengthy personal interviews, and held focus-group sessions every six months over a period of two years.

Demographically, the families were mostly two-parent, multiple child, middle-income.  Most mothers had completed college and most had been homeschooling for many years.  With the exception of race, these families look very similar on paper to most white homeschoolers.  Compared to national averages for African Americans however, these families tend to be better educated, have higher incomes, and maintain more stable marital bonds.  As with whites, mothers tend to do most of the actual homeschooling, often quitting jobs to do so.  Most homeschooled their children from birth or after a few years in elementary school.  For all of these generalizations, however, the sample also included outliers–there were single mothers, some very poor families, some with only a high school education, and so on.  One significant difference with white averages is that 1/3 of the children in the sample were designated as special needs.

Fields-Smith and Williams separate their findings into four categories.  First, they discuss the salience of race as a motivation.  19 of the 24 parents interviewed said that experience of racial discrimination or inequality was a significant motivator.  This was especially the case for parents of black boys.  The authors include some powerful representative quotations of these parents’ frustration with the destructive social pressures schools place on black males.  Parents also noted that the homeschool groups, co-ops, and sports programs to which they belong are far more racially integrated than the nearly all-black public schools their children would otherwise be attending.  Homeschooling also allows these families to infuse “an afrocentric or Black American focus” into the curriculum (19 reported doing so).

The second topic the authors discuss is religion.  21 of the 24 families had religious motivations for homeschooling.  For six of the families religion was the primary motivator, giving them the strength of conviction to make and stick with the difficult choice to homeschool.  For the rest it was a contributing factor.  Though this section is not developed as fully as I would have liked, the authors generalize that the religious motivation for African Ameircans is cast in a more liberatory mode than for white Christian homeschoolers.  Homeschooling allows these families to connect the strong tradition of liberation theology that is at the heart of Black Christianity in the United States with their schooling.  Unlike many white Christians, whose faith leads them toward nostalgia for early American history and a desire to restore some form of “Christian America,” for blacks it is more about personal and racial liberation from the very culture many white Christians want to restore.  Christian faith becomes an asset and resource for liberatory education rather than something that must be kept out of the curriculum as in public schools.

The third theme discussed is the amount of sacrifice black families make to homeschool.  Historically black women have worked at a much higher rate than whites, and for many of these families it was a considerable financial sacrifice to forego a second income, not to mention that they now must pay for schooling resources.  Furthermore, many of these mothers face criticism from the Black community, many of whom see the well-educated stay-at-home-mom as an “abandonment of the rewards obtained from a long struggle toward equality in the workplace” (381) and of all of the civil-rights struggles to get black children in public schools in the first place.  Several of the parents report that their neighbors are angry at them because deep down these parents also know that public schools do not serve black children well, but they are not willing to sacrifice careers to teach their own children.

Finally, the authors address challenges these homeschooling families face.  Some of them are familiar to all homeschoolers–how to get everything done without going crazy (especially when babies and toddlers are in the picture), how to tailor instruction to each child’s unique learning style, how to maintain the joy of learning (especially in the higher grades), and maintaining patience when things don’t go as planned.  Like their white counterparts, these parents have found support groups to be a tremendous help in dealing with the daily grind.  Also like whites, homeschooling mothers are often held suspect by extended family, but as stated the pressure here is magnified by the association in the black community of racial progress with school success and female employment.

In conclusion, Fields-Smith and Williams note that while these black homeschoolers are similar to white homeschoolers in many ways, they “do not necessarily represent the ‘Conservative Right’” (384) that is the typical homeschool stereotype.  They are motivated by a desire to escape the destructive racial stereotyping public schools so often perpetuate and experience not only the usual stresses of homeschooling but the added stress of being cast by some as traitors to the cause of black integration.

This is a wonderful paper to have in print.  It doesn’t really add anything new to the narrative of African American homeschooling.  In my treatment of black homeschooling in my book I was able to make nearly all of their points by relying on newspaper articles about black homeschoolers and first-person accounts.  But the empirical approach here for the first time takes the study of black homeschoolers beyond the domain of anecdote and editorial and organizes everything into one convenient and well-constructed piece.  As with so many other studies of homeschooling, it’s unclear how far we can generalize from this this non-representative sample of 24 families all from one geographic region.  And we don’t get any sense from this article whether homeschooling is growing or declining among African Americans nationally.  But at least it’s a start.  Future studies of black homeschoolers will use this article as a starting point.

Yesterday homeschooling activist lawyer Chris Klicka died after a 15 year battle with multiple sclerosis.  Klicka was hired by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) in 1985 before it had really gotten off of the ground, and he helped grow it into the powerhouse advocacy organization that it is today.  In my book on homeschooling history Klicka gets extensive treatment because of his central role at HSLDA.

Klicka also wrote one of the first histories of the homeschooling movement, Home School Heroes: The Struggle & Triumph of Home Schooling in America.  Though it has its flaws, it contains some great first-person accounts of pivotal moments in the legal history of homeschooling and some revealing insider information about HSLDA.

As you can see from the in memoriam page posted by HSLDA, Klicka was a pious Christian and a devoted family man.  He leaves behind his wife Tracy (read her journal describing Chris’ last days here) and their seven children, all of whom were homeschooled.  Though many people with whom I spoke in the course of my research do not share all of Klicka’s political or theological opinions, he was universally regarded as a generous and compassionate human being.

Klicka’s death is a real loss for the movement and a milestone in the history of homeschooling.  I tend to interpret the history of the homeschooling movement thus far as having had three phases.  Phase one was the era of Holt and the Moores.  Phase three is the recent trend toward a more mainstream and hybridized movement.  It would not be an overstatement to call phase two, when HSLDA was the dominant force in American homeschooling, the era of Chris Klicka.

This post reviews Chad Olsen, “Constitutionality of Home Education: How the Supreme Court and American History Endorse Parental Choice” in Brigham Young University Education and Law Journal 2 (2009): 399-423

Olsen, a law student at BYU’s J. Reuben Clark Law School, here provides a fascinatingly detailed, though flawed, analysis of the famous In re Rachel L. case, the 2008 California Court of Appeals decision that unleashed a national outcry by finding that California law did not permit homeschooling.    Olsen begins with a clear summary of the Rachel decision, the backlash it unleashed, and its rehearing, which determined that in fact California law did allow for homeschooling as a variant of the private school exemption to California law.  Though the particular parents involved in the Rachel case were ultimately deemed unfit to homeschool their children due to abuse, the freedom of other Californians to do so was upheld.

All good so far.  But in part two of his paper Olsen abruptly shifts focus to an account of Supreme Court decisions that he thinks have established a “right to home education” especially for parents who do so with a religious motive.  Olsen claims that “the Supreme Court has held that when parents choose to home school their children because of a religious belief, the religious belief fortifies the parents’ right to direct their children’s education.” (pp. 411-412)

The evidence he marshals to make this claim is not impressive.  He begins with Meyer v. Nebraska (1923) and Pierce v. Society of Sisters (1925), historic decisions that established parents’ rights to direct their children’s education (specifically protecting parents from laws requiring English-only language instruction (Meyer) and forbidding private school attendance (Pierce)).  He then moves to Wisconsin v. Yoder (1972), and it’s here that he makes his interpretive error.  Olsen interprets Yoder to have established a right to homeschool for religious reasons.  The actual ruling was far more narrow.  The Court was very explicit about the limited generalizability of its ruling in the Yoder case.  That case established that Amish parents had a constitutional right to disobey Wisconsin’s compulsory attendance statute because of a longstanding and legitimate religious tradition that viewed schooling beyond the eighth grade to be inimical to Amish religion and communal norms.  The Court doubted that there were very many other religious groups that would qualify for such exceptions in the United States.  But Olsen turns what was a very limited ruling (that doesn’t even mention “homeschooling”) into an expansive right.

After this survey of Supreme Court decisions, Olsen’s paper shifts emphasis yet again, this time becoming a survey of the history of home education, a history he derives largely from my book.  Olsen describes how the home was central to early American education, being eclipsed by the school only when Protestant Americans looked for a way to assimilate immigrants into their version of what America should be.  But by the late 20th century this “American synthesis” ended, and schooling narrowed its focus from inculcating broad civic and moral norms to imparting mere academic training.  Homeschooling has emerged as a counterweight against the public school’s reduction of all learning to the cognitive and as a protest against public education’s increasingly permissive moral compass.

It is this last point that potentially gets Olsen into trouble, for he seems to want it both ways.  On the one hand he argues for homeschooling because our society is now beyond the need to impose a particular “American synthesis” on every child.  But on the other hand, he acknowledges that homeschoolers are often the people who look back with nostalgia to those very same values the public school used to enforce.  His own solution is to try to shift public perception of homeschooling.  He wants us to think of it not as a critique of or judgment upon public education but as another form of public education.  Homeschooling joins with public schooling in the broad civic goal of educating all of America’s children.  And though it isn’t quite clear from his text, I think he’s saying that a truly post “American synthesis” public education system would be tolerant not only of traditionally marginal voices (such as those of gays, the example he uses) but also of people who reject gay rights as well.  The best way for this tolerance to be institutionalized, he seems to be saying, is not to have people who disagree go to school together but to allow for the sort of ideological balkanization homeschooling fosters.

It is of course this ideological balkanization that worries critics like Rob Reich.  For him and for many advocates of public schooling, there still is an American synthesis that they would like all American children to be indoctrinated into–the synthesis of tolerance of and engagement with diverse people and perspectives.  Olsen does not address this potential criticism of his thesis.  I’d like to hear his thoughts on the matter.  My own thoughts are that public schools themselves typically do no better than homeschooling at this–most are segregated by race and class and provide very little by way of explicit engagement with ideological difference.

The best part of this paper was the beginning where Olsen provided great coverage of the Rachel case.  Even here though I think he might have given us more in terms of legal analysis.  My book was in the later stages of editing at the publisher when the Rachel case broke as national news, and because of it I had to add a last minute footnote to something I had said about California in one of my chapters.  Prior to the Rachel ruling I had written that despite the fact that California courts had historically ruled against the legality of home schooling, the California Department of Education had long allowed parents to do it if they claimed exemption as private schools.  I noted,  “though California has more homeschoolers than any other state, it has no [homeschooling] law, nor does it seem to need one.”  (p.185)  The Rachels decision was, I believe, actually a legitimate interpretation of California judicial precedent.  There still is no law that specifically gives Californians the right to homeschool.   My guess is that eventually this issue will come up again and the California legislature will have to write language into their compulsory education law that explicitly allows homeschooling to be considered private schooling.  Right now, though the practice is pervasive, if you look at the history of the case law prior to Rachel, either homeschooling is not legal or the current compulsory education statute is “unconstitutionally vague” (People v. Darrah and Black, 1986).  All of that simply to say that Olsen might have given us more legal context.

My final point is that I am really confused by Olsen’s Supreme Court argument.  He obviously read the first part of my book carefully.  As a law student you’d think he would have been especially interested in my chapter on the history of the legal issues, where I discuss Yoder and the other cases he mentions.  But his discussion and footnotes here suggest no familiarity with the weight of scholarly interpretation on these cases (see, for example Shawn Peters’ excellent book The Yoder Case: Religious Freedom, Education, and Parental Rights).  Perhaps we are to read this article like a court-room defense, where the goal is not to present the unvarnished truth but to try to make the best possible case for one’s client.  That’s the only way I can understand how a student who is just about to be awarded his J.D. could read the Supreme Court cases the way he did.

Continuing the theme of last week’s post, here follows a round-up of more recent treatments of homeschooling in the mainstream press.

First, here is a human-interest piece from the New Yorker about homeschooled child actors.    Rebecca Mead describes the lives of several of the child actors who are starring in the West End Theater production of “Snoopy!!!”  Several of the children are also in the Metropolitan Opera’s Children’s Chorus.  For these New York kids, homeschooling is a way to escape the predictable and prepare for more creative work.  One of the kids, 18 year-old Cole Houston, who was the lighting designer and stage manager for the play, just received a full scholarship to M.I.T. despite not having a high school diploma.

Next comes a story from The Economist profiling several religious homeschooling families.  This article is the sort that used to appear regularly in mainstream outlets back in the 1990s, explaining to their audience the basics of this strange new phenomenon of homeschooling.  This kind of article appears far less frequently these days now that homeschooling is no longer new news for most.  This article stresses the recent NCES findings of continued growth, especially among religious conservatives.  It speculates (citing Michael Farris) that having Barack Obama in the white house will only increase the trend of conservatives away from public schools.

A very short note in the American School Board Journal describes how some Baltimore area families were forced to turn to homeschooling after a new policy took effect whereby students found engaged in arson or detonating explosives were permanently expelled from school.  34 children under the age of 16 were expelled last year and had to either attend private school or homeschool.

Over in Southern Illinois, here’s a sensational case that has made the national news about Diane Dobbs, a grandmother who hid her daughter and grandson in her home for two years during a custody dispute with the grandson’s father, Mike Chekevdia.  The boy was homeschooled during this time, hidden out of fear that the father would sexually abuse him.  “Good Morning America” ran a story on this case, which you can read and see here.

Finally, here’s a story from the St. Petersburg Times about homeschooled 10-year-old Alana Whiting, an up and coming tennis talent from Florida.  Her mother pulled Alana and her sister from school “to have more time with them” and “so the kids could spend time on their activities.”  The story describes Alana’s gruelling but rewarding hours training to become an elite tennis player.

As I said last week, these stories once again illustrate the breadth of experiences going by the name homeschooling.  The families chronicled in The Economist have long been the most common type, but they are joined by child athletes, actors, and even troublemakers and fugitives.

I don’t have a piece of research to review for this week so instead I’ll briefly comment on a few homeschooling-related stories that have recently made the news or appeared in trade magazines.

First, there’s a great story in this week’s Sports Illustrated (28 September 2009) about Bonnie Richardson, who single-handedly won the class 1A Texas state track championship for her teeny school Rochelle High.     The story describes Bonnie’s “low-expectations town” where youth who don’t get pregnant as teens leave as soon as they can.  Yet Bonnie and her two sisters have all excelled.  Why?  Author Gary Smith explains,

Jack and Madelynn were determined to give Adele, Lee and Bonnie the same gift they’d grown up with–the great wide open–without conceding an inch of education or opportunity to suburban or city kids…. Mom homeschooled her three daughters during their early hears, having them run laps around the house for phys ed.  ‘We can say our phonics charts in our nightmares,’ says Lee. (p.62)

After homeschooling, Bonnie’s parents became very active in the local high school.  Her father served on the school board and her mother, acquiring a teaching certificate, taught all of the high school science classes.  Smith’s story goes on to tell in gripping detail about the childhood and athletic achievements of this remarkable young woman.

Next, there’s a horrible story posted on Sept. 9, 2009 at The Nation with the provocative title “The Nightmare of Christianity.”  Max Blumenthal provides here fascinating details about Matthew Murray, the 24 year-old who killed two Youth With A Mission (YWAM) staffers and then, thirteen hours later, killed two and injured two more at the famous New Life Community Church in Colorado Springs, before he was courageously taken down by undercover guard Jeanne Assam.

Blumenthal’s reportage gives us an intimate look at Murray’s pious upbringing and many disappointments, quoting at length from his internet postings and other writings.  We learn about his homeschooling and how he hated it.  According to Blumenthal, the Murrays used Bill Gothard’s authoritarian Basic Life Seminars and little else to teach him.  There are no government records on Murray past third grade, and it’s hard not to notice the almost sub-literate style Murray exhibits in his online postings.

We read of how Murray was forced by his mother to attend either YWAM’s “Discipleship Training School” or Oral Roberts University.  He chose YWAM but was kicked out of the program because of his incorrigible and anti-social attitude.  We learn of his anger at Ted Haggard, the infamous pastor of New Life Community Church who was at one time president of the National Association of Evangelicals and one of the country’s leading preachers before the scandal broke that he led an underground life paying for gay sex while taking crystal meth.

With this backstory in place Murray’s violence against the YWAM headquarters and New Life Church make sense.  Blumenthal summarizes:

All four of Murray’s victims were youthful, mostly home-schooled and extremely idealistic. They could have been his roommates at YWAM or could have joined him in a Christian youth fellowship. They seemed so much like him, at least on the surface. So did he single them out? Although there is no conclusive answer, Murray’s acknowledged grievances hint at his motives. Each of his victims represented to him the obedient, unquestioning religious automaton he was required to be but never could become. They had embarked on the exotic foreign missions he had been rejected for, discovering friendship and even (nonsexual) wholesome romance while he languished in his room–his “buried kennel.” The blithe everyday existence of these shiny, happy Jesus people was Murray’s “Christian nightmare.”

Blumenthal goes on to explain how many Christian sources have interpreted Murray’s actions as the logical consequence of listening to rock music, looking at pornography, or perhaps demonic possession.  The Murray parents are model conservative Christians, and in their Dobson interview they were at a loss to explain their son’s behavior.  Blaming Satan was about the best they could do.

But after all of this powerful reportage, Blumenthal tries to replace one simplistic and reductive interpretation of Murray’s actions with another.  It wasn’t Satan, says Blumenthal.  It was Conservative Christianity itself that produced this monster.  But blaming Christianity for Matthew Murray is no different than the frequent Christian strategy of blaming Atheism for the atrocities of the Soviet Union and other dictatorial regimes.  Most atheists are not Joseph Stalin, and most Christians are not Matthew Murray.

On a related note, there’s this horrific story that’s been in the news this week about a homeschooled girl, her friend, and both her parents all bludgeoned to death by a “horrorcore” rapper the family had brought home to Farmville, VA to stay with them after meeting at a horrorcore convention.  The murdered girls, both homeschooled, were described as dressing in the goth style and spending a lot of time on Myspace (their screen names were “Ragdoll” and “Free Abortions”).  The murdered parents had taken the girls to a 10 hour horrorcore concert in Michigan, where they met the killer and brought him back to Virginia.  The mother was a criminal justice professor at a small college and the father a part-time Presbyterian preacher.  Many internet sites, including Rod Dreher’s crunchy con blog, have been ablaze with indignation at the parents’ willingness to accompany their daughter to such an unseemly event.

Finally, here’s a story from Nashville, TN about a man “employed by Wynonna Judd to homeschool her two kids” who has been charged with several counts of child pornography distribution.  Judd fired him after he was arrested.

Being news items, these stories are of course sensationalistic and atypical, but they do remind us that homeschooling is a much more complicated and heterogeneous thing than many people realize.  A country music legend chooses homeschooling for her children.  A Gothardite becomes a Christ-hating murderer.  A homeschooling mother gets certified and teaches at the public high school where her daughters excel.  A couple of goth homeschoolers are murdered by their own rhetorical ideals.   Homeschooling is as varied and unpredictable as life itself.

This post reviews Mary K. Saunders, “Previously Homeschooled College Freshmen: Their First Year Experiences and Persistence Rates” in Journal of College Student Retention 11, no. 1 (2009-2010): 77-100.

Saunders here uses results from a survey of 261 college freshmen at Wheaton College to argue that first year students who previously homeschooled tend to report positive social experiences and commitment to the college.  Such students are just as likely as are  students who went to institutional schools to stay at the college. 

Saunders begins with a survey of the literature on academic achievement, uncritically accepting the Ray and Rudner studies I’ve discussed so many times in this blog.  Since academic achievement is a no longer a contested issue, she turns to socialization.  To try to measure how well socialized homeschooled children are, Saunders compares their first year of college experience to that of traditionally schooled kids.

Saunders grounds her discussion both in the literature on homeschoolers and socialization and in the literature on college retention rates.  For the socialization literature she again uncritically accepts the glowing reports of homeschooler socialization without mentioning any of the serious methodological limitations the studies she cites contain.  For the college retention literature she relies heavily on the work Vincent Tinto and of John Braxton and his colleagues, who explicate six factors that contribute to students’ decision to stay at or leave a college.

Saunders mailed a social experiences survey to the entire 2004-2005 freshman class of Wheaton in May, just after they had finished their first year of college.  Of the 596 she sent, she got 261 back, for an overall response rate of 43.4% (a good response rate for a survey).  Respondents skewed a bit more female and white than the whole of the freshman class.

Without going into the details of Saunders’ survey instrument and data here, I can summarize that she did a sophisticated “least squares regression” analysis of the data in order to separate out the variable of type of schooling from other important variables contributing to a student’s decision to remain in or leave the college.  Doing so, Saunders found “no significant effects on the student’s integration” into college life based upon previous schooling, and a slightly stronger intent among homeschooled students to remain with Wheaton.  Her moral is that “colleges/universities with similar demographics as Wheaton College…need not be concerned about previously homeschooled students finding ways to socially integrate and persist on their campuses.” (95)

Saunders’ methodology in this study is excellent, and she herself points out its limitations.  She notes that Wheaton is not a secular university, so it makes sense that Christian homeschooled kids will have a fairly easy time feeling at home there.  She acknowledges other limitations to her research design as well.

The only real weakness to her study in my view comes right at the end where she momentarily slips out of her carefully circumscribed discussion (where she repeatedly admits to the limited generalizability of her findings) to say that her study “provides data that supports the belief that the process of homeschooling does not negatively affect the ability of the student being homeschooled to integrate socially into his/her environment upon leaving the parents’ home.” (97)  Immediately after letting that slip she reminds readers that her study only considered one group of students at an elite Christian college, but I can easily imagine a pro-homeschooling editorial or PR piece quoting that one sentence and reducing Saunders’ excellent article to apologetic material.

Let me explain briefly why I’m uncomfortable generalizing from Saunders’ findings at Wheaton.  I attended Wheaton college myself.  It is the most academically selective of all of the Christian colleges in the United States.  Any student who can get into Wheaton is going to have had an excellent secondary education no matter how it was delivered.  Homeschoolers who were accepted to Wheaton are some of the best educated homeschoolers in the country.  Saunders acknowledges the religious limitations of a Wheaton sample, but not this academic component.

The real problem here is that there is no such thing as “homeschooling” in the abstract.  Just as there are some great public schools and some horrible public schools and many schools somewhere in between, so some parents are able to provide amazing homeschooling experiences for their children and some are less able to do so.  Rob Kunzman’s recent bookprovides rich and detailed examples of both extremes.  As with the academic achievement homeschooling literature, I think what Saunders is studying here is not so much the work of homeschooling itself as the family background of Wheaton students.  Almost all the Wheaton freshmen she studied are from well-to-do, white, two-parent households with highly educated parents.  Kids born into privileged families like this are typically going to shine whether they were homeschooled or not.  Her study, which finds no real difference between homeschooled and traditionally schooled kids, bears this out.

Having said all of that, Saunders’ study certainly shows at the very least that homeschooling does not by definition ruin a child’s social future.  I’d hope that by now nobody still thinks it does, but just in case, here’s a fine study that shows that far from handicapping a child socially, homeschooling turns out to make hardly any difference at all!  Kids from wealthy, stable, successful homes who are homeschooled have just as positive an experience at a college that shares the family’s values as do kids from wealthy, stable, successful homes who went to school in a building.  That’s the take home message of this excellent article.