After a Divorce, Who Controls the Education of the Children?

This post reviews Anthony Barone Kolenc, “When ‘I Do’ Becomes ‘You Won’t!’–Preserving the Right to Home School After Divorce” in Ave Maria Law Review 9, no. 2 (2010-2011): 263-302.

Kolenc is a  lawyer in the U.S. Air Force, adjunct faculty member at Saint Leo University, homeschooling father of five, and author of the monthly column “Legally Speaking” in The Old Schoolhouse magazine.  Here he constructs a legal argument aimed at helping divorced homeschooling parents involved in custody disputes.

Kolenc begins with the Kurowski case, which I discussed here and here.  Here’s the summary I wrote a few months ago of the facts of the case:

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A Book Chapter on Homeschooling

This post very briefly reviews William Jeynes, “Chapter 5: The Rise of Homeschooling as a Modern Educational Phenomenon in American Protestant Education” in the International Handbook of Protestant Education (2012), co-edited by Jeynes.

Jeynes is a professor of education at California State University Long Beach, and this is not the first time on the blog I’ve found work with his name on it to be substandard and poorly edited.  This book chapter is very weak.  It is basically a summary of the literature on homeschooling, but it’s not a very good one. 

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R. J. Palacio’s WONDER

This post reviews R. J. Palacio’s children’s book Wonder (Knopf, 2012).

I’ve reviewed a lot of children’s books with homeschooling themes on this blog over the years.  This one may be my favorite.  August Pullman is a boy born with serious, serious face abnormalities, so much so that his parents homeschool him until the fifth grade to protect him somewhat from the constant shocked looks and whispered conversations that follow him wherever he goes.  But for the fifth grade they decide it’s time he starts learning how to live in the real world a bit, so they send him to school.

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One of the Best Articles on Homeschooling Ever

This post reviews Linda G. Hanna, “Homeschooling Education: Longitudinal Study of Methods, Materials, and Curricula” in Education and Urban Society 20, no. 10 (2012): 1-23.

Hanna, an education professor at West Chester University, here gives us the results of a study of 225 homeschooling families coming from 25 school districts in Pennsylvania to get representative data on who chooses to homeschool, why they choose it, and how they do it.  She surveyed and interviewed these families in 1998 and then went back to them 10 years later for another round of questions.  Thus we have here one of the only longitudinal studies of homeschooling ever done.

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How do Homeschoolers do in College?

This post reviews Alexa Wood, “From the Kitchen Table to the Lecture Hall: Reaching an Understanding of the Lived Experiences of Home-School Students in Institutions of Higher Learning” (M.A. Thesis, North Carolina State University, 2011).  Available fulltext here.

Wood, who tells us that she herself had been homeschooled for nine years, attending a two-year institution during high school as preparation for college, here seeks to neither provide “an endorsement or criticism of an individual’s choice to participate in a home-school” but merely to provide an accurate account of what it is like to do so and then go to college.

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