School of Education

New data show numbers of home schoolers up again; website to offer homeschooling research

School of Education professor sheds light on new home schooling numbers

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

New statistics from the U.S. Department of Education indicate the number of homeschooled students in the U.S. has again risen, despite the fact most analysts believed the number would plateau. Associate Professor for Curriculum and Instruction Robert Kunzman said the availability of classes over the internet is one factor that may have fueled that rise. Kunzman, the author of a forthcoming book on homeschooling, has unveiled a new website to provide more centralized resources for journalists, educators, and the public to consider the numbers in context.

The data released today (Dec. 23) from the National Center for Education Statistics indicate a 74% increase in homeschool students between 1999 and 2007, for an estimated total of 1.5 million homeschoolers in 2007. Since many homeschoolers are reluctant to participate in government surveys such as this one, some experts believe the total number is actually closer to 2 million. The most common reasons that parents gave for homeschooling their children were concern about the school environment (88%) and to provide religious or moral instruction (83%). 

The report is available at http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009030.pdf.

Kunzman said the availability of classes over the internet is one factor that may be fueling homeschooling’s continued growth.  The latest numbers raise some basic questions, Kunzman said. “I think it’s raising some fundamental questions about what it means to be educated and the variety of ways in which that can and should happen,” he said.  Homeschoolers and online students, he noted, often experience a very different sort of schooling than traditional institutions have provided.

To better explore these issues, Kunzman has established a new website, www.indiana.edu/~homeeduc, to provide easier access to homeschool research and scholarship. The site features a listing of numerous studies on homeschooling, as well as a “Frequently Asked Questions” section and other links. “The website is intended to provide an overview about homeschooling for those who are either new to the subject or just want to figure out some of the main attributes and characteristics of homeschoolers, as well as what the data say, and answers to frequently asked questions about homeschooling,” Kunzman said.

Kunzman developed the website in part because of what he says is a consistent misrepresentation of existing studies about homeschooling. “Two or three studies get routinely cited and misrepresented, and then get repeated in news stories in ways that give a misleading portrait of homeschooling,” Kunzman said. Particularly, he said that a study conducted 10 years ago about the performance of homeschooled students has been presented consistently, by advocacy groups and media reports, as demonstrating that the “typical” homeschool student performs academically better than public school students. “But this relatively small group of homeschool volunteers were in large part tested by their own parents without the same type of standardized procedures that would be done in a public school setting,” he said. “And they’re comparing against the entire public school population, so it’s really not a valid comparison.”

“What we find with homeschooling is that there is no typical homeschooler,” he said. “It’s as varied as a public school student profile would be.” One of the problems with making definitive statements about homeschool students is the fact that many families don’t report that their children are schooled at home to national surveys. More than half of families contacted declined to participate in the previous Department of Education report about homeschool numbers. “Representations about the average homeschooler performing at this or this level are simply incorrect because we don’t even know who all the homeschoolers are,” Kunzman said.

Over the last 5 years, Kunzman has intensively studied the home school movement, particularly conservative Christian homeschooling. His book, Write these Laws on your Children, to be published by Beacon Press this summer, documents findings from a year and a half he spent following six families around the country through their homeschooling experience. Kunzman said the Christian conservative families educating their children at home creates another dimension to the growing trend. “It adds another layer of complexity when intense religious convictions enter the mix, and we consider what it means for parents to have potentially sole oversight or control of their child’s education, versus a vision of education that incorporates the interests of children themselves and broader society as well.”

Interview Excerpts

Kunzman says the website will offer much more context for homeschooling in the U.S.: (Listen to this sound bite)
“So I think it’s an easily accessible way to see what’s out there and get a sense as to what there is beyond the 2 or 3 studies that routinely get cited. To me perhaps, the most important contribution of the website is these 2 or 3 studies that get routinely cited get routinely misinterpreted or misrepresented and very often get repeated in news stories in ways that give a misleading portrait of home schooling. What we find with home schooling is that there is no typical homeschooler. It’s as varied as a public school student profile would be. Representations about the average homeschooler performing at this or this level are simply incorrect because we don’t even know who all the homeschoolers are. So there are no comprehensive data about performance and things like that.”

Despite the higher numbers in homeschoolers cited by the Department of Education, Kunzman says researchers tend to believe that the actual numbers are higher: (Listen to this sound bite)
“I actually am inclined to believe the higher estimate, in part because the homeschoolers, the many homeschoolers that I’ve come in contact with as part of my research over the last 5 years are very reluctant to be counted certainly not by the government and so this past NCES study actually had a 58% refusal rate and I’m quite certain that many of those were the kinds of people that I talk with that don’t want the government to know anything about them. So I think that the number is probably quite a bit higher and I think that the new numbers coming out, while the best hard data we have are probably also still underestimating the total.”

The growth in virtual schooling has helped fuel homeschooling growth, Kunzman says: (Listen to this sound bite)
“One of the things that’s also happening is the growth of distance education and cyber schooling is starting to bleed into or merge with homeschooling, because there are so many more opportunities now to take courses online both through public school entities, but also through private, charters, what have you, not even the same district, not even the same state. So I think that the boom in virtual education is also fueling the continued rise in home schooling.”

Kunzman says the numbers of homeschoolers may be an indication that it’s time to reconsider definitions: (Listen to this sound bite)
“And I think that one of the things that it’s doing is it’s raising some fundamental questions about what we mean by public education and what counts as schooling vs. being educated at home in a variety of ways. It may include sitting down at the computer, it may include going to a home school cooperative, it may include learning something that doesn’t look like formal schooling and then yet you’d be hard pressed to argue that it isn’t education in a significant sense. So I think that the rise of school choice more generally and the home school sector in particular are questioning all sorts of delivery models for what we mean by education in the 21st Century.”