Lisa Rivero on Homeschooling Trends and Special Ed

This post briefly reviews Lisa Rivero’s The Homeschooling Option: How to Decide When It’s Right for Your Family(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008).

Rivero, author of two previous books on home-based education, Gifted Education Comes Home : A Case for Self-Directed Homeschoolingand Creative Home Schooling: A Resource Guide for Smart Familieshere provides the latest in a long line of introductory books aimed at parents thinking about homeschooling and looking for advice.  Much of the book is similar to other books of this genre, but there are a few features that make it worth a brief notice in this blog on homeschool research. 

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My article “Homeschooling Goes Mainstream” now Online

My article “Homeschooling Goes Mainstream” from this month’s Education Next can be accessed here.  If you want the complete version with footnotes, click here.  In it I describe the growing diversity of homeschoolers and the increasingly heterogeneous forms homeschooling is taking, including collaborative efforts between families and public school districts.

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David Gilmour on Movies as Homeschool Curriculum

This post reviews David Gilmour’s The Film Club: A Memoir(New York: Twelve, 2008).

Gilmour, a Canadian novelist, movie critic, and media odd-jobber, here offers a memoir describing the experience of allowing his deadbeat 15 year-old son to drop out of school and live at his home rent-free on condition that father and son watch three movies of father’s choosing every week together and that son promise not to use drugs.  For three years David and his son Jesse are “the film club.”

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Gordon Korman and Charles Webb on Hippie Homeschoolers

This post is the second in a series noting recent works of literature or film that employ homeschooling as a plot device.  In this post I discuss popular children’s author Gordon Korman’s 2007 book Schooledand the 2007 book by Charles Webb, famous author of the ’60s classic The Graduate, titled Home School. 

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Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl and Homeschooling

As homeschooling has become increasingly common and familiar, we are seeing more and more works of popular fiction, movies, and so on with homeschooled characters.  This is especially true for children’s fiction.  In this post and many more to come I will discuss some of these cultural products, beginning here with Jerry Spinelli’s Stargirl(Knopf, 2000) and Love, Stargirl (Knopf, 2007). 

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