CLASH OF TWO WORLD VIEWS: Homeschoolers’ Perceptions of Education

Record: Ari Neuman and Oz Guterman, “The clash of two world views – a constructivist analysis of home educating families’ perceptions of education.” Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 24, No. 3 (2016): 359-369. [Abstract]

Summary: Neuman is senior lecturer of education at Western Galilee College, in Akko, Israel, and Guterman is senior lecturer in the Department of Human Resources at the same university. In this article, they discuss the results of a study in which they interviewed 30 homeschooling mothers to discover the impact of homeschooling on the women’s children and families.

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HARO 2014 INSTALLMENT THREE: Academics and Extracurriculars

Record: Coalition for Responsible Home Education, “A Complex Picture: Results of the 2014 Survey of Adult Alumni of the Modern Christian Homeschool Movement, Installment Three” Homeschool Alumni Reaching Out (1 April 2015). [Available Here]

Summary: This post reviews the third installment of HARO’s survey of homeschool alumni. For the other installments in the series please click on the following links:

1. Installment 1: Background and Summary
2. Installment 2: Demographics
3. Installment 3: Academics and Non-Academics
4. Installment 4: Food and Health
5. Installment 5: Religion

Installment three covers the findings about academic achievement, extracurricular activities, and socialization.

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EDUCATION WITHOUT SCHOOLS: Home Education in the UK, part 1

Record: Helen E.  Lees, Education Without Schools: Discovering Alternatives (Bristol, UK: Policy Press, 2014). [Abstract Here]

Summary: Lees, a Visiting Research Fellow in Education and Theology at York St. John University in England and founding editor of the online journal Other Education, here draws on her doctoral research to make an impassioned plea for expanding the public understanding of education to include more than formal institutional schooling.  In this post I will summarize the first five chapters of her book.

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SOCIAL AND EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES: A Review of the Literature

Record: Joseph Murphy, “The Social and Educational Outcomes of Homeschooling” in Sociological Spectrum 34, no. 3 (April 2014), 244-272. [Abstract Here]

Summary: Murphy, a professor at Vanderbilt University and author of the excellent book-length review of homeschooling scholarship Homeschooling in America, here again summarizes much of the literature on homeschooling, attending especially to studies of the outcomes of homeschooling on the children who experience it.

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HOMESCHOOLED ADOLESCENTS: Drugs, Delinquency, and Grade Level

Record: Sharon Green-Hennessy, “Homeschooled Adolescents in the United States: Developmental Outcomes” in Journal of Adolescence 37, no. 4 (June 2014): 441-449 [Abstract here]

Summary:  Green-Hennessy is a psychology professor at Loyola Maryland.  After beginning with a very strong lit review, she describes the methodology of the data set she’ll be using in this study, the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH).  It is a yearly, nationally representative survey of U.S. household residents age 12 and over.  Subjects are interviewed by trained professionals and paid $30 for their trouble, which results in very high response rates (between 69 and 77% during the years Green-Hennessy uses).  Green-Hennessy combined the data on children aged 12 to 17 for the years 2002-2011, which gave her 182,351 subjects overall.  The demographics of this massive sample reflects the nation at large quite well.  Since one of the questions asked on the survey was type of schooling, Green-Hennessy was able to use this data to determine to what degree homeschooling prevents or exacerbates behaviors known to put adolescents at risk for drug use.

Of the 182,351 adolescents surveyed by NSDUH between 2002 and 2011, only 1094, or .6% reported being homeschooled. 

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WHY DOES THE APPLE FALL FAR FROM THE TREE: How Children Abandon their Parents’ Views

Record: Elias Dinas, “Why Does the Apple Fall Far From the Tree? How Early Political Socialization Prompts Parent-Child Dissimilarity” in British Journal of Political Science (April 2014): 1-26.

Introduction: This article is not explicitly about home education.  Its central question, however, is an important one for many home educators.  Many parents turn to homeschooling out of a desire to limit their children’s exposure to alternative views of life, hoping to secure allegiance from their children to the same religious and political values they hold themselves.  Dinas’ argument, if correct, suggests that such parents are actually engaging in behaviors that are likely to promote their children’s rebellion against parental values once the children reach young adulthood.

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THE TRANSMISSION OF VALUES: Do Homeschooled Christian Kids Keep the Faith as Adults?

Record: Braden Ryan Hoelzle, “The Transmission of Values and the Transition into Adulthood Within the Context of Home Education” in Journal of Research on Christian Education 22, no. 3 (2013), pp. 244-263.

Summary:  Hoelzle, a doctoral student in education at Southern Methodist University, here presents the results of a qualitative study of four young adults, all of whom had been homeschooled for eight or more years.  His goal was to assess the success of the strategy of using homeschooling to pass on parental religious and moral values.

Hoelzle reveals at the outset that he himself is an evangelical Christian who is hoping to use homeschooling as a way to transmit his values to his own children.  But so far the scholarship on this question is very thin.  He mentions Brian Ray’s oft-cited but methodologically weak 2004 survey of young adults who had been homeschooled, finding its generalizations too generic.  He wants to know in a deeper, richer way just what homeschooled children think about the religious convictions of their parents once they leave.

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RELIGION, VOLUNTEERING, AND EDUCATIONAL SETTING: How Does Homeschooling Impact Civic Engagement?

Record: Jonathan P. Hill and Kevin R. Den Dulk, “Religion, Volunteering, and Educational Setting: The Effect of Youth Schooling Type on Civic Engagement” in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 52, no. 1 (2013): 179-197 [Available Here]

Summary:

Hill and Den Dulk, both professors at Calvin College, here present results drawn from the massive National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) directed by Christian Smith and Lisa Pearce.  Read my summary of an excellent earlier study by Jeremy Uecker using this data set here.

In the piece before us today Hill and Den Dulk want to know whether the type of schooling a child receives goes on to have an impact on that individual’s habits of volunteering in young adulthood, and if so, why.  As the NSYR was a multi-stage longitudinal study of a representative sample of the American population, it can answer this question.

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Brian Ray’s Philosophical Argument for Homeschooling

Record: Brian D. Ray, “Homeschooling Associated with Beneficial Learner and Societal Outcomes but Educators Do Not Promote It” in Peabody Journal of Education 88, no. 3 (2013): 324-341.

Summary:

Ray is without question the most influential researcher in homeschooling given his many decades of work as the head of the high profile National Home Education Research Institute, a research/advocacy organization that has produced a steady stream of reports demonstrating the academic and social benefits of homeschooling, most of them funded by the Home School Legal Defense Association.  Ray has also for decades worked the homeschooling lecture circuit and has appeared as a pro-homeschooling expert witness in dozens of court cases.  In this article he moves beyond his usual empirical arguments to make more philosophical arguments in favor of homeschooling and against its critics.

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HOMESCHOOLING AND SOCIALIZATION REVISITED

Record: Richard G. Medlin, “Homeschooling and the Question of Socialization Revisited,” in Peabody Journal of Education 88, no. 3 (2013): 284-297.

Summary:

Medlin, a psychology professor at Stetson University, here continues a line of inquiry he began in one of the landmark articles of the original 2000 Peabody Journal homeschooling special issue.  Since that article he has published several pieces in the journal Home School Researcher, all of which find very positive results for homeschoolers’ social and academic development.  In this piece his goal is to review research on homeschooler socialization that has appeared since his 2000 article.

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