Some Recent Homeschooling Articles in Popular Magazines

Here follow a few brief summaries of various articles that have appeared in the past few months that, while not scholarly, are still interesting and informative.  They include a story on homeschooling in China, an advocacy piece by a conservative Catholic, a description of public/private/home school hybrids, and a homeschool diary by a New Yorker:

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New Ray Study of Homeschooler Demographics and Achievement

This post reviews Brian D. Ray, “Academic Achievement and Demographic Traits of Homeschool Students: A Nationwide Study” in Academic Leadership Live: The Online Journal 8, no. 1 (February 2010).  [Available Here]

This is the latest of a long line of nearly identical studies Ray has been performing for decades now at fairly even intervals.  In two previous posts I reviewed this large body of work, which you can read here and here.  This new study tries very hard to overcome one of the most persistent deficiencies of his previous work (and the 1999 Rudner study)–the near exclusive reliance on HSLDA’s advertisement to recruit subjects, leading to unrepresentative samples.  This time around Ray tried to recruit families from outside of the HSLDA orbit.  Did he succeed? 

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A new edition of HOMESCHOOLING (CURRENT CONTROVERSIES), part 1

Back in June I reviewed the previous incarnation of this book in four blog posts (number 1, number 2, number 3, and number 4).  There’s a lot of interesting stuff in those posts, so if you haven’t read them I recommend doing so.

Myra Immel is the editor this time around of Homeschooling (Current Controversies).  The 2009 edition has been completely revised with all new material and a more manageable organization.  As with the previous incarnation, all of the articles it contains appeared previously elsewhere, but they are collected here in one convenient package, capably edited and introduced.  The selections provide various views on four questions: 

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Millman on Homeschooling in New Jersey and College Admission

This post reviews Gregory and Martine Millman, Homeschooling: A Family’s Journey(New York: Penguin, 2008).

Gregory Millman, economics journalist and author of several books on monetary policy, and his wife Martine Millman here produce a beautiful book that is part memoir, part how-to guide, and part research review on select homeschooling topics.  For this review I will stress the research component of the book. 

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Homeschool Diversity Roundup

One of the most interesting recent developments in homeschooling is the expansion of the practice to populations that historically have not been associated with it.  Given the dearth of representative, randomized sampling studies of homeschoolers, it has been very hard to quantify growth of this sort.  Many of the most oft-cited studies of homeschoolers, such as those conducted by Brian Ray and HSLDA (which I review here and here), use methods of data collection that lead to an over-representation of conservative Protestants.  Even the best quantitative data available can’t deliver even basic information on the racial, socio-economic, or ideological diversity among homeschoolers.

Another, less reliable way of getting at the growth of homeschooling among groups that have not traditionally done it is to attend to newspaper articles and so forth that offer more impressionistic, often intimate portraits of homeschooling.  This post briefly makes note of several recent news stories that describe homeschooling among a wide assortment of Americans who are choosing it for many reasons.

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