Brian D. Ray and NHERI, part 1

Some weeks ago I had an interesting email exchange with Dr. Brian D. Ray who responded to me graciously but critically concerning several comments I have made about his organization in some of my blog posts.  Specifically, Dr. Ray objected to two things.  First, he objected to my association of his organization with HSLDA, maintaining that the two organizations are independent of one another.  Second, he objected to my assertions that NHERI’s research typically does not meet the standards of scientific methodology that are commonly accepted among social scientists and are thus of limited value.  In the course of our email exchange he challenged me to substantiate my claims or else stop making them.  I admitted to him then that my beliefs about NHERI were based upon general impressions I had picked up over the course of my research on homeschooling rather than on any systematic examination of NHERI and promised him that I would engage in a more rigorous study of NHERI and report what I found.  Here is what I found. 

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Zigler, Pfannenstiel, and Seitz on Parent Educators

This post reviews Edward Zigler, Judy C. Pfannenstiel, and Victoria Seitz, “The Parents as Teachers Program and School Success: A Replication and Extension” in Journal of Primary Prevention 29, no. 2 (March 2008): 103-120 [Available fulltext here].

Many government programs exist to try to help parents, especially low-income parents, better prepare their children for school.  Programs like Head Start’s “Home Start” (now called “Home-Based Program“) have proliferated in recent years, and some lawmakers have been pushing for years to allocate more federal money to the cause of parent education through the “Education Begins at Home Act.” 

Much scholarly effort has been expended studying the efficacy of such programs, with mixed results.  This article enters into the debate and offers evidence that the “Parents as Teachers” (PAT) program does help low income parents prepare their children for academic success.  

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Early on Reading to Children

This post briefly reviews Sherry Early, “Don’t Tell the Children: Homeschoolers’ Best-Kept Secret” in Horn Book (Sept/Oct 2008) [Available here]

Early, a homeschooling mother of eight, former elementary school librarian, and blogger, here describes the culture of reading among homeschoolers, especially her own family. 

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Meighan on John Holt

This post reviews Roland Meighan, John Holt (London: Continuum, 2007).

Roland Meighan, a British intellectual/activist and the driving force behind Educational Heretics Press, (whose website houses an archive of his articles), here provides a guide to the educational writings of John Holt, a leading American critic of public education in the 1960s, who in the late 1970s became the key public voice of the homeschooling movement for nearly a decade. 

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Gaither on Eating Humble Pie

Yesterday I received an email from Dr. Robert Kunzman, a professor at Indiana University who has written widely on topics related to moral and religious education in public schools and is currently working on a book on homeschooling.  After saying many kind and flattering things about my book he gently alerted me to an error it contains.  I’d like here to make this error public and explain how I made the mistake I did.  I know that there are many graduate students and others interested in research reading this blog, and hopefully my lapse here will serve as a lesson for others. 

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Thiem on Homeschooling as Spatial Politics

This post reviews Claudia Hanson Thiem, “The Spatial Politics of Educational Privatization: Re-reading the U.S. Homeschooling Movement” in Gulson and Symes, eds., Spatial Theories of Education: Policy and Geography Matters (New York: Routledge, 2007), pp. 17-36.

Thiem, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, here presents a complex argument for increased attention to geography when assessing political movements.  To illustrate her theoretical points she uses homeschooling as a test case. 

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Ray and Eagleson on Government Regulations and SAT Scores

This post reviews Brian D. Ray and Bruce K. Eagleson, “State Regulation of Homeschooling and Homeschoolers’ SAT Scores” in Academic Leadership: The Online Journal 6, no. 3 (14 August 2008).  [Available fulltext here]

Ray, founder and president of the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI), and Eagleson, Chief of Emergency Medicine at a hospital in Lebanon, PA, here present the results of a study of over 6,000 homeschooled students’ SAT scores nationwide to argue that homeschoolers’ academic achievement is not affected by the degree to which homeschooling is regulated by the states. 

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