Contreras on Home-Based Extension Education

This post reviews Dawn A. Contreras, “Breaking the Bonds of Isolation: Can Home-Based Education Increase Social Support Levels?” in Journal of Extension 46, no. 2 (April 2008): 13-20.

Contreras, Program Leader at Michigan State University Extension’s Institute for Children, Youth, and Families, here presents the results of a study of the effectiveness of a parent-education program called  Building Strong Families, which offers at-home parenting classes to “limited-resource” parents with very young children. 

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Price cut on my book at Amazon.com

When it was released a few days ago it cost $29.95.  But this morning I checked and my book Homeschool: An American History is now $21.56 at Amazon.  Just wanted to pass that on.

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Anderson on Nomadic Homeschooling

This post reviews Helen Marie Anderson, “Learning (and Leaving) the Comforts of Home: A Radical Pedagogy of Homeplace,” in Philosophy of Education Yearbook (2007): 103-111.

Anderson here offers a two-pronged argument.  First, she makes the interesting claim that “where we learn becomes part of what we learn.”  Second, given Anderson’s conviction that traditional families and homes tend to reproduce all sorts of social pathologies and oppression, the only way to overcome deeply ingrained social inequalities is to deconstruct the home. 

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Neil MacFarquhar on Muslim Homeschooling

A recent New York Times piece  by Neil MacFarquhar titled “Resolute or Fearful, Many Muslims Turn to Homeschooling,” while not exactly educational research, does offer some hard-to-come-by data on homeschooling among Muslims.  It also raises important questions for the broader homeschooling movement.  Until more substantive research on homeschooling among American Muslims is produced, we will have to make do with journalism.

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Glanzer responds to Reich

This post reviews Perry L. Glanzer, “Rethinking the Boundaries and Burdens of Parental Authority over Education: A Response to Rob Reich’s Case Study of Homeschooling” in Educational Theory 58, no. 1 (2008): 1-16

Glanzer, an education professor at Baylor University best known for his work on moral education in U.S. colleges and in Russia, here offers a rebuttal to Rob Reich’s argument for increased government regulation of homeschooling, which I discussed in a previous post, and offers his own proposal for ideal government policy. 

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Isenberg on what research on homeschooling tells us

This post reviews Eric J. Isenberg, “What Have We Learned About Homeschooling?” in Peabody Journal of Education 82 (2007): 387-409.

Isenberg, affiliated with Mathematica Policy Research, Inc., here tries to synthesize all of the best research on several topics related to homeschooling.  After a brief historical orientation he begins by bemoaning the paucity of available data to do rigorous quantitative study of homeschooling.  The best available sources are the data collected by some state education departments and the massive cross-sectional National Household Education Survey (NHES).  Isenberg uses them and some other less reliable data to summarize what can be known about “how many, why, and how parents homeschool their children.”

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My book is out!

After six plus years of work, my book Homeschool: An American Historyis officially released today. 

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Yuracko on Regulating Homeschooling

This post reviews Kimberly A. Yuracko, “Education off the Grid: Constitutional Constraints on Homeschooling” in California Law Review 96, no. 1 (Feb. 2008): 123-184.

Yuracko, a law professor at Northwestern University whose work deals primarily with antidiscrimination law, here makes the case that state statutes and the Equal Protection clause of the U.S. Constitution require that states have a responsibility to regulate homeschooling in certain respects. 

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Countdown: HOMESCHOOL: AN AMERICAN HISTORY debuts tomorrow!

My bookon the history of homeschooling in the United States will be officially released tomorrow.  Here, for those interested, is a list of the chapter titles:  

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Plecnik on Homeschoolers’ access to public school programs

This post reviews John T. Plecnik, “Equal Access to Public Education: An Examination of the State Constitutional and Statutory Rights of Nonpublic Students to Participate in Public School Programs on a Part-Time Basis in North Carolina and Across the Nation,” published in the Texas Journal on Civil Liberties and Civil Rights, Fall 2007 (13: no. 1), pp. 1-30.

Plecnik, who was homeschooled “from cradle to college,” here uses North Carolina as model and constructs a hypothetical argument that would allow homeschooled and private schooled children to take advantage of some public school offerings without having to enroll full-time in the public school.  

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