HOME SCHOOLING IN CANADA: A Fraser Institute Report

Record: Deani Neven Van Pelt, “Home Schooling in Canada: The Current Picture–2015 Edition.”  Barbara Mitchell Center for Improvement in Education (June 2015).  [Available Here]

Summary: Van Pelt, who has published occasional studies of home education since 2003, is director of the Barbara Mitchell Center for Improvement in Education at theFraser Institute, a libertarian think-tank based in Canada with a long history of advocating market-based policies drawn from libertarian economists like Friedrich Hayek, Edwin G. West, and George Stigler.  This report updates a 2007 update of the widely cited 2001 report the Fraser Institute published called Homeschooling: From the Extreme to the Mainstream.  The 2001 report was written by Patrick Basham, who has since moved on to be a prominent voice at the Cato Institute, another libertarian think-tank based in the United States.

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HOMESCHOOLING AND YOUNG ADULT OUTCOMES: Evidence from Cardus 2011 and 2014

Record: David Sikkink and Sara Skiles, “Homeschooling and Young Adult Outcomes: Evidence from the 2011 and 2014 Cardus Education Survey” (2015): 1-16. [Available Here]

Summary: Cardus Religious Schools Initiative released their first survey in 2011 (review available here). They later released their second study in 2014 (review available here). These studies provide rare randomly sampled data about young adults who had been homeschooled in the United States. In this article David Sikkink and Sara Skiles analyze data from both studies to draw conclusions about the outcomes of homeschoolers in areas like the development of moral and religious values, family relationships, educational outcomes, and civic life.

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The Cardus Education Survey, 2014

Record: R. Pennings, et al, “Private Education for the Public Good: 2014 Report,” Cardus Education Survey, 2014. [Available for download here]

Summary:

In 2011 the first Cardus Education Survey was released.  With its large randomized sample of young adults age 24-39, it provided some of the best data ever compiled about the experiences of young adults who had graduated from various forms of private schooling, including homeschooling.  The present survey is another equally robust survey of 1500 young adults, age 24 to 39.  The sample was obtained by GfK, whose Knowledge Networks Panel respondents constitute a representative sample of the U.S. population.  Cardus drew on the GfK contact list to generate a sample of 500 public school graduates who served as a baseline for comparison to 1000 graduates of various kinds of private and home schools. Each of these subjects answered about ½ hour’s worth of questions about their high school experiences.

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FIRST MARRIAGE AND FIRST BIRTH: Comparing Religious, Home, and Public Schools

Record: Jeremy E. Uecker and Jonathan P. Hill, “Religious Schools, Home Schools, and the Timing of First Marriage and First Birth” in Review of Religious Research 56, no. 2 (June 2014): 189-218. [Abstract Here]

Summary: Uecker, a sociology professor at Baylor University, and Hill, a sociology professor at Calvin College, are both familiar names to readers of these reviews.  In a 2008 article Uecker found (among other things) that there was no difference in levels of adult religious commitment between graduates of public or home schools.  Parent religiosity, not school type, made all the difference.  In a 2013 article Hill found that homeschooled young adults were less likely to engage in volunteer activities than demographically equivalent graduates of public schools.  Both of these articles had drawn from the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR), a remarkably ambitious project that has borne great fruit in understanding the religious and political lives of young adults in the United States.

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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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DOES HOMESCHOOLING PROMOTE INTOLERANCE: A Quantitative Study

Record: Albert Cheng, “Does Homeschooling or Private Schooling Promote Political Intolerance? Evidence from a Christian University” in Journal of School Choice 8, no. 1 (2014): 49-68. [Abstract Here]

Summary and Critique: Cheng, a doctoral student at the University of Arkansas, here reports the results of a quantitative study comparing college students who were homeschooled with those who attended public and private schools on a measure of political tolerance.

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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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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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New Cardus Study of Homeschooling in Canada

This post reviews R. Pennings, et al., “A Rising Tide Lifts all Boats: Measuring Non-Government School Effects in Service of the Canadian Public Good” (Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 2012).  Available for free download here.

Back in 2011 I reviewed the first Cardus Survey, which provided rare randomly sampled data about young adults who had been homeschooled in the United States.  This new study does the same for Canada.  In the first study the Cardus researchers uncovered some fascinating information about adult homeschoolers, some of which proved rather controversial because it was not very flattering toward homeschooling.

This new study’s results are fairly similar.  The study is about much more than homeschooling, but since this is a blog about homeschooling research I will limit my comments to the homeschooling findings.

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