Some Recent Court Cases involving Homeschooling

From time to time I like to provide a brief summary of some recent court cases relative to homeschooling.  Today I’m stressing only those decided by a court of appeals or higher, not district court decisions. We’ll begin with a couple of special education decisions that together say something important about homeschooling children with special needs. Then we’ll move on to the more unseemly stuff.

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Why do South Dakota Parents Homeschool?

This post reviews Bonnie F. Boschee and Floyd Boschee, “A Profile of Homeschooling in South Dakota” in Journal of School Choice: Research, Theory, and Reform 5, no. 3 (2011): 281-299.

Floyd Boschee, emeritus professor of education at University of South Dakota, and Bonnie Boschee, assistant professor of education at Northern State University, here present the results of a survey of South Dakota homeschooling parents concerning their motivations for doing so.

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What Iowa Homeschoolers are Doing

This post reviews Tina Marie Jorgenson, “Homeschooling in Iowa: An Investigation of Curricular Choices Made by Homeschooling Parents” (Ph.D. Diss.: University of Iowa, 2011). [Available here]

This doctoral dissertation uses data compiled from Form A of the Competent Private Instruction Report, which the state of Iowa requires all independently homeschooling parents to fill out.  From this data she was able to get a pretty good sense of what kind of Iowans homeschool, what curriculum they use, and why they do what they do.

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Homeschoolers and Health Care

This post reviews Alissa Cordner, “The Health Care Access and Utilization of Homeschooled Children in the United States” in Social Science and Medicine 75 (2012): 269-273.

Cordner, a graduate student in sociology at Brown University, here offers her first foray into homeschooling research.  She used the 2007 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH), a government phone survey of over 91,000 households randomly sampled from the national population.  The NSCH asked families about the kind of schooling the child being reported on attended, including homeschooling, so Cordner’s got great data from which to draw conclusions.

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How do Catholic Homeschoolers do in College?

This post reviews Marc Snyder, “An Evaluative Study of the Academic Achievement of Homeschooled Students Versus Traditionally Schooled Students attending a Catholic University” (EdD Diss: Nova Southeastern University, 2011).

Snyder, who recently received his doctorate, here tries to fill in at least a bit the enormous gap that exists in our understand of Catholic homeschooling.  He rightly notes in his lit review that very little research has been done on Catholic homeschoolers. 

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