Coleman on Homeschoolers in Middletown

This post reviews Rachel E. Coleman, “Ideologues: Pedagogues, Pragmatics: A Case Study of the Homeschool Community in Delaware County, Indiana” (M.A. Thesis: Ball State University, 2010).

Rachel Coleman, a reader of this blog, graciously sent me a copy of her Master’s Thesis she just defended this month at Ball State University.  It’s wonderful.  In this post I’ll summarize it and stress its main contributions to our knowledge about homeschooling.

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I’m taking a year off

In a few minutes I will post the last post this blog will see for about a year.  I have recently been asked to write a history of education curriculum for an online publisher that will take every spare moment to complete by the publisher’s deadline.  I love writing the reviews on this blog, but they do take up a lot of time.  My apologies to my many faithful readers for this break in programming.  I’ll be back in July of 2011 though, and by then I’m sure there will be a lot of new homeschooling research for me to note!

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Laura Brodie on Short-Term Homeschooling

This post reviews Laura Brodie, Love in a Time of Homeschooling: A Mother and Daughter’s Uncommon Year
(New York: HarperCollins, 2010).

Brodie, mother of three, part-time English professor at Washington and Lee, and author of other works of fiction and nonfiction, here offers a memoir of her one-year experiment in homeschooling with her eldest daughter Julia.  Brodie also has a blog on short-term homeschooling that has dealt a lot with school bullying as motivator for homeschooling.

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Parsons and Lewis on Special Needs Homeschoolers in Britain

This post reviews Sarah Parsons and Ann Lewis, “The Home-Education of Children with Special Needs or Disabilities in the UK: Views of Parents from an Online Survey” in International Journal of Inclusive Education 14, no. 1 (February 2010): 67-86.

Parsons, research fellow at the University of Birmingham, and Lewis, a professor at the same institution, came to this project after an earlier study of parents of children with disabilities kept running into anomalies.  Parsons and Lewis kept finding parents who didn’t fit their survey categories because they had pulled their kids out of schools.  7% of the sample of their earlier study had done this, which was a surprise to Parsons and Lewis.  They were further surprised at how many of these parents expressed frustration that their choices and views weren’t being taken into consideration in the original study.  As Parsons and Lewis put it, “our interest (and conscience) pricked, we were determined to find out more about these ‘invisible’ families.” (p. 68)  So they created an online survey for homeschooling families with special needs kids and got 27 British parents to fill it out.  Here is what they found: 

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New Ray Study of Homeschooler Demographics and Achievement

This post reviews Brian D. Ray, “Academic Achievement and Demographic Traits of Homeschool Students: A Nationwide Study” in Academic Leadership Live: The Online Journal 8, no. 1 (February 2010).  [Available Here]

This is the latest of a long line of nearly identical studies Ray has been performing for decades now at fairly even intervals.  In two previous posts I reviewed this large body of work, which you can read here and here.  This new study tries very hard to overcome one of the most persistent deficiencies of his previous work (and the 1999 Rudner study)–the near exclusive reliance on HSLDA’s advertisement to recruit subjects, leading to unrepresentative samples.  This time around Ray tried to recruit families from outside of the HSLDA orbit.  Did he succeed? 

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