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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One of the Best Articles on Homeschooling Ever

This post reviews Linda G. Hanna, “Homeschooling Education: Longitudinal Study of Methods, Materials, and Curricula” in Education and Urban Society 20, no. 10 (2012): 1-23.

Hanna, an education professor at West Chester University, here gives us the results of a study of 225 homeschooling families coming from 25 school districts in Pennsylvania to get representative data on who chooses to homeschool, why they choose it, and how they do it.  She surveyed and interviewed these families in 1998 and then went back to them 10 years later for another round of questions.  Thus we have here one of the only longitudinal studies of homeschooling ever done.

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New Cardus Comment on Homeschooling

A few months ago I reviewed the very important results of the Cardus Education Survey as they related to homeschooling.  The findings weren’t pretty.  Homeschoolers in the survey didn’t do well academically, failed at marriage, have checked out of politics, and feel that their lives are adrift.

Yesterday Jedd and Rachel Medefind posted on the Cardus site an interesting editorial that builds on these findings. 

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Coleman on Homeschoolers in Middletown

This post reviews Rachel E. Coleman, “Ideologues: Pedagogues, Pragmatics: A Case Study of the Homeschool Community in Delaware County, Indiana” (M.A. Thesis: Ball State University, 2010).

Rachel Coleman, a reader of this blog, graciously sent me a copy of her Master’s Thesis she just defended this month at Ball State University.  It’s wonderful.  In this post I’ll summarize it and stress its main contributions to our knowledge about homeschooling.

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Winstanley on Homeschooling Gifted Children

This post reviews Carrie Winstanley, “Too Cool for School? Gifted Children and Homeschooling” in Theory and Research in Education 7, no. 3 (November 2009): 347-362

Winstanley, Principal Lecturer in Education at Roehampton University in London,  here argues that gifted children form a distinct group of homeschoolers that defy classification schemes usually employed by scholars to describe the homeschooling movement. 

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