Upcoming Changes to this Blog and a Link to Where It’s Eventually Moving

Regular readers of my blog know that I’ve been working with several other scholars to build the International Center for Home Education Research (ICHER) website.  ICHER was founded last year by an international team of scholars with the intent of both facilitating networking among scholars interested in homeschooling and of making the research on homeschooling more accessible to the general public.

Of course making the results of research available to the public is precisely what I’ve been doing on this blog since 2008.  Given that track record, my colleagues placed me in charge of the “Reviews” section of the ICHER site.  It does basically the same thing this blog has been doing.  I have spent the past several months transferring over the great majority of my posts from this blog to the ICHER site.  The only things I didn’t bring over were the occasional forays I took into current events or representations of homeschooling in literature or on film.

Over the next few weeks I’ll continue to do weekly posts both here and on the ICHER reviews section.  But eventually I’ll stop updating here and post exclusively on the ICHER site.  As I know I have many readers who have programmed their computers to give automatic updates through facebook or wordpress whenever I post something, I want to give you plenty of warning before I stop updating on this site.  I’d ask you now to begin familiarizing yourself with the new site in anticipation of the eventual move.  Thanks!

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.

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.

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:

Why do Conservative Catholics and Muslims Homeschool?

This post reviews Jeff Humason, “Homeschoolers on Homeschooling: In Their Own Words” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Toledo, 2012) [available here]

Humason, a doctoral candidate at the University of Toledo with experience both as a public school teacher/administrator and as a Catholic homeschooling father of six (one of whom attends a public school), here presents the results of a series of interviews he conducted with several homeschooling parents to ascertain why they do what they do.

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. 

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.