WHY WE NEED HOMESCHOOLING: Perry Glanzer Critiques Democratic Education

Record: Perry L. Glanzer, “Saving Democratic Education from Itself: Why We Need Homeschooling” in Peabody Journal of Education 88, no. 3 (2013): 342-354.

Summary: Glanzer, an education professor at Baylor University, here argues that homeschooling provides a helpful corrective to reductive definitions of education fostered by some advocates of public schooling.

His fundamental point is that many public school advocates have raised the concept of education for political citizenship to such a high level that it has become something like an established religion. 

Read Full Post »

New Post on U.S. and Canadian Homeschool Law at ICHER Reviews Section

I’m trying to make the transition from this site to the Reviews section of the International Center for Home Education Research website.  I thought I had set it up so that my readers who have joined my facebook group Homeschooling Research Reviews would be able to get an automatic notification of new posts.  But it didn’t happen the way I hoped it would.  Until I get the technology fixed, I’ll post links here as well.

The new post reviews a fascinating doctoral dissertation about the legislative and legal situation concerning homeschooling both in the United States and Canada.  While the U.S. stuff is pretty familiar to most readers, the Canadian material was, at least to me, completely fresh and very enlightening.  Read the new post here.

 

 

Read Full Post »

My New Article that Reviews ALL the Homeschooling Research

The journal Other Education has just published an article Rob Kunzman and I wrote together titled, “Homeschooling: A Comprehensive Survey of the Research.”  It is the culmination of years of work by both of us compiling every piece of research on homeschooling ever written, culling through them all to select the best material, organizing them into coherent categories, and writing up the results.

Several months ago I reviewed Joseph Murphy’s excellent book Homeschooling in America: Capturing and Assessing the Movement, which is a very thorough review of the scholarly literature.  Our article is not nearly so long as Dr. Murphy’s book and thus it lacks some of the detail he provides.  Anyone interested in homeschooling research should read his book cover to cover and keep it on the shelf for frequent reference.  But despite its length and depth of coverage, there are some topics and a few key studies Dr. Murphy leaves out, and he sometimes fails to differentiate between high and low quality studies or between studies published recently and those published decades ago.  I think our article provides even more breadth and does a better job discriminating between sources.  Plus you can download it for free!  Do so here.

Read Full Post »

Homeschoolers and Mathematics?

This post reviews Kathleen Ambruso Acker, Mary W. Gray, Behzad Jalali, and Matthew Pascal, “Mathematics and Home Schooling” in Notices of the AMS 59, no, 4 (April 2012): 513-521.

All four authors of this paper are affiliated with American University.  The stated aim of this misleadingly titled paper is to analyze the legal framework for homeschooling, noting especially the place of mathematics in it, and then to examine how well homeschooling prepares students for college and employment.

Read Full Post »

A Philosophical Argument Against Homeschooling, Part 1

This is the first of a two-part review of Randall Curren and J. C. Blokhuis, “The Prima Facie Case Against Homeschooling” in Public Affairs Quarterly, 25, no. 1 (January 2011): 1-19.

Curren, a distinguished philosopher of education, and Blokhuis, a recent graduate student of Curren’s who is now Assistant Professor of Education at Renison University College in Canada, here build on earlier work, especially Blokhuis’ doctoral dissertation, to argue that in the abstract common schools do a better job of preparing children for public life than do parents.  The term prima facie in the title is crucial for this argument.  It means that they are not claiming that public schools are actually better or that homeschooling parents are actually incompetent to teach.  They’re just saying that in principle a common school with professionally trained teachers at first blush seems like a better set up than homeschooling.  

Read Full Post »

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.

Read Full Post »

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:

Read Full Post »

How Homeschooling Disrupts the Legal Definition of Public Education and What that Means for Government Regulation

This post reviews Robert Kunzman, “Education, Schooling, and Children’s Rights: the Complexity of Homeschooling” in Educational Theory 62, no. 1 (February 2012): 75-89.

Kunzman, as readers of this blog know very well, is one of the leading scholars currently working on homeschooling.  He is author of the important book Write These Laws on Your Children: Inside the World of Conservative Christian Homeschooling; he’s written many articles on homeschooling; and he maintains a helpful site that catalogs homeschooling research here.

A couple of years ago I reviewed an earlier piece by Kunzman on government regulation of homeschooling that dealt with some of the same themes he addresses here.  Back then Kunzman argued against various kinds of government regulations, concluding that only tests evaluating a homeschooler’s grasp of basic literacy and numeracy should be mandated.

This current article is a bit more theoretical.  It aims not so much to set out an explicit policy proposal as to argue for why certain domains should be considered legal rights (and thus be scrutinized by the government) while other, perhaps equally important domains, should not.

Read Full Post »

Homeschooling and the European Union

This post reviews Colin Koons, “Education on the Home Front: Home Education in the European Union and the Need for Unified European Policy.” Indiana International and Comparative Law Review, 20, no. 1 (2010): 145-174.

Koons, a recent graduate from Indiana University School of Law-Indianapolis, here explains the diversity of homeschooling law in various European countries and tries to figure out what the European Union’s legal paramaters would be for the practice.

Read Full Post »

What Happens when Divorced Parents Disagree about Homeschooling?

This post reviews Charles J. Russo, “Is Home Schooling ‘in the Best Interests of the Child?’ The Supreme Court of New Hampshire Answers – Not When Divorced Parents Disagree!” in Private School Monitor 33, no. 2 (Fall 2011).

Russo, a prolific scholar on legal issues in education who has had several occasions in the past to turn his attention to homeschooling, here examines the legal status of homeschooling in light of the recent In re Kurowski (2011) case (which I discussed here before it was heard by the State Supreme Court) in New Hampshire that pitted a divorced homeschooling mother against her ex-husband who disapproved of the practice.

Read Full Post »