Lips and Feinberg on Homeschool Economics

This post reviews Dan Lips and Evan Feinberg, “Homeschooling: A Growing Option in American Education” in Backgrounder 2122 (June 2008). [Available fulltext here]

Lips and Feinberg, both with the Heritage Foundation, here produce a synthetic overview of homeschooling for the Foundation’s publication Backgrounder.  Most of what they describe will be very familiar to anyone who has spent any time studying the movement.  I will not here summarize everything they say but instead mention a few points unique to this paper. 

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Gathercole on Homeschooling and Socialization

This post reviews Rachel Gathercole, The Well-Adjusted Child: The Social Benefits of Homeschooling (Denver: Mapletree Publishing Co., 2007).

Gathercole, a veteran homeschooling mother and widely published homeschooling advocate, here provides book-length coverage of the issue that has vexed homeschoolers more than any other–socialization.  

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Furness on Homeschoolers and Libraries

This post reviews Adrienne Furness, Helping Homeschoolers in the Library (Chicago: American Library Association, 2008).

Furness, a children’s librarian, here produces a book aimed at other librarians, informing them about homeschooling and suggesting ways librarians can better serve homeschooling patrons. 

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British Researchers on Reading to Children

This post reviews Clare Kelly, Eve Gregory, and Ann Williams, “Home to School to Home: Syncretised Literacies in Lingustic Minority Communities” in Ofelia Garcia and Colin Baker, eds., Bilingual Education: An Introductory Reader (Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2007).

This essay is one of several chapters in a comprehensive reader on bilingual education.  The researchers compare and contrast the way home cultures in monolingual native British and polylingual immigrant families impart literacy to their children. 

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Koonce on Transitioning from Home School to Public School

This post reviews Jeffrey B. Koonce, “The Transitional Experience of Home-Schooled Students Entering Public Education: How Can Public Schools Better Serve the Home-Schooled Student’s Transition to Public Education?”  (Ed.D. Diss., University of Missouri-Columbia, 2007).

This is Koonce’s doctoral dissertation.  He now works for the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.  His study examined the experiences of children who had transitioned from homeschooling to public schools in an effort to discover how to make the process a smoother one for all concerned. 

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Andrade on Hi-Tech Homeschooling

This post reviews Albert G. Andrade, “An Exploratory Study of the Role of Technology in the Rise of Homeschooling” (Ph.D. Diss, Ohio University, 2008).

This is Andrade’s doctoral dissertation.  After an excellent and thorough review of extant literature on homeschooling he asks what forces led to its explosive growth in the 1980s and 1990s.  He has a hunch that the technological growth of those decades, especially the rise of the personal computer, might be an important factor.  Andrade interviewed 27 former and current homeschooling parents in the greater Albany, NY region to ascertain to what degree technology played a role in their decision to homeschool and the way in which they did so. 

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