RIGHT TO HOMESCHOOL: Seeking A Free Speech Right to Homeschool

Record: Jennifer Karinen, “Finding a Free Speech Right to Homeschool: An Emersonian Approach.” The Georgetown Law Journal, 105, No. 1 (2016): 191-215. [Abstract]

Summary: Karinen, a lawyer in New York and graduate of Georgetown University Law Center, in this article explains that a right to homeschool, including for secular purposes, can be assumed from the free speech protections of the First Amendment.

Read Full Post »

HARO 2014 INSTALLMENT TWO: Demographics

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

Summary: This post reviews the second 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 two discusses the impact that variables such as age, gender, and parental education level had on the respondents’ experiences with homeschooling.

Read Full Post »

HOME EDUCATION IN NEW SOUTH WALES

Record: Talina Drabsch, “Home Education in NSW” in NSW Parliament E-Brief, issue 7 (August, 2013). [available here]

Summary: Drabsch, a frequent contributor to the New South Wales (NSW) Parliamentary Library pubilcations series, here summarizes the home education situation in NSW and so much more.

Read Full Post »

DOES HOMESCHOOLING “WORK”: A Critique of Advocacy Research

Record: Christopher Lubienski, Tiffany Puckett, and T. Jameson Brewer, “Does Homeschooling ‘Work’? A Critique of the Empirical Claims and Agenda of Advocacy Organizations” in Peabody Journal of Education 88, no. 3 (2013): 378-392.

Summary:

Lubienski is well known as one of the most prominent critics of unregulated homeschooling.  Here he and his colleagues do not challenge the rights of families to educate their children at home.  They limit their critique to the research and underlying agendas of homeschooling advocacy organizations.

Read Full Post »

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.

Read Full Post »

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? 

Read Full Post »

Duggan on Community College Marketing to Homeschoolers

This post reviews Molly H. Duggan, “Are Community Colleges ‘Home-School Friendly?’: An Exploration of Community College Web Sites as an Indicator of ‘Friendliness'” in Community College Journal of Research and Practice 34: 55-63 (2010).

Duggan, whose earlier work on community colleges and homeschooling I reviewed here, this time asks what community colleges are doing, if anything, to recruit homeschooled students. 

Read Full Post »

Baxter on the Right to Privacy and Homeschooling

This post reviews Teri Dobbins Baxter, “Private Oppression: How Laws that Protect Privacy Can Lead to Oppression” in Kansas Law Review 58, no. 2 (January 2010): 415-471   [Available for purchase here]

Baxter, Professor of Law at St. Louis University, here seeks to get leverage on how to best handle the FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints) issue that blew up in Texas two years ago.  As I described in a recent post, the FLDS made the news in a big way when their Texas compound was raided in April of 2008 by Texas State authorities, who removed 437 children from the site, prompting the largest child custody battle in U.S. history and enormous media coverage.

After summarizing the raid and its aftermath, Baxter does two things.  First, she surveys the various U.S. Constitutional issues the situation raises.  Second, she delves deeply into most of the important state-level court cases that have limned the extent of parental rights in terms of homeschooling.  Why her focus on homeschooling law?  Read on to find out. 

Read Full Post »

Chris Klicka, Rest in Peace

Yesterday homeschooling activist lawyer Chris Klicka died after a 15 year battle with multiple sclerosis.  Klicka was hired by the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) in 1985 before it had really gotten off of the ground, and he helped grow it into the powerhouse advocacy organization that it is today.  In my book on homeschooling history Klicka gets extensive treatment because of his central role at HSLDA.

Klicka also wrote one of the first histories of the homeschooling movement, Home School Heroes: The Struggle & Triumph of Home Schooling in America.  Though it has its flaws, it contains some great first-person accounts of pivotal moments in the legal history of homeschooling and some revealing insider information about HSLDA.

As you can see from the in memoriam page posted by HSLDA, Klicka was a pious Christian and a devoted family man.  He leaves behind his wife Tracy (read her journal describing Chris’ last days here) and their seven children, all of whom were homeschooled.  Though many people with whom I spoke in the course of my research do not share all of Klicka’s political or theological opinions, he was universally regarded as a generous and compassionate human being.

Klicka’s death is a real loss for the movement and a milestone in the history of homeschooling.  I tend to interpret the history of the homeschooling movement thus far as having had three phases.  Phase one was the era of Holt and the Moores.  Phase three is the recent trend toward a more mainstream and hybridized movement.  It would not be an overstatement to call phase two, when HSLDA was the dominant force in American homeschooling, the era of Chris Klicka.

Read Full Post »

New Ray/HSLDA Study on Homeschooler Achievement

This post briefly reviews preliminary releases of the new study conducted by Brian Ray for HSLDA called “Homeschooling Across America: Academic Achievement and Demographic Characteristics.”  The full study is scheduled for release in November 2009.

While the full report has not yet been published, HSLDA has already posted a press release describing its scope and celebrating its finding that homeschoolers score on average 36-37 percentage points higher than public schooled children on a wide range of standardized tests.   

Read Full Post »