When Home Is the Schoolhouse

When Home Is the Schoolhouse

Families dissatisfied with public schooling are doing it themselves

Until recently home schooling was almost exclusively the refuge of born-again Christian families dissatisfied with the moral education that their children were receiving in the public schools. Of the estimated half-million students whose families are engaged in home schooling today. Christian fundamentalists still account for a large majority. But many of the newest converts to home schooling are motivated less by religious concerns than by the belief that they can do better than the public schools are developing their children's academic skills.

Fueling the move toward home schooling, whose ranks are growing at a rate of approximately 15 percent a year, has been the pronounced change in legal attitude on the part of the states. A decade ago very few states permitted home schooling even when a parent was certified as a teacher. Today every state allows home schooling in some form, although the amount of education required of a parent shouldering the teacher's role, the type of instructional materials that a family is expected to use, and the question of whether students have to take standardized tests differs from state to state.

Several important objections to home schooling have also been muted in recent months by the boom in personal computers and online information retrieval services. Families that may have felt hindered once because they lacked access to a library, specialized teachers, or the stimulation of other students, can now partake of all these things via the Internet or one of the commercial online services.

Gibberish and studies. Photo by Elena

Educational services on the Internet allow students to engage in electronic discussions of what they're studying with others nationalwide. Home schoolers in Texas tap into the Texas Education Network, an online service that makes available research materials and facilitates consultations with up to 30 thousand Texas educators. One service known as Homer allows students to take courses and have their reports graded online. Many excellent software programs also have appeared to help teach reading, math, foreign languages, and typing.

Some families have even found a way to ensure that their home schoolers aren't shut out of the extracurricular activities that they would otherwise participate in at school. In many communities around the country, home school support groups are banding together to sponsor field trips and organize after-school sports leagues for their children. Some school districts have even begun to open up their extracurricular programs to home schoolers. 

Advocates of home schooling point to several studies suggesting that home school students outperform their public school counterparts in standardized achievement tests. The fact that many colleges now allow home schoolers applying for admissions to submit “portfolios” of their work in lieu of academic transcripts has also helped the movement. Unless public schools can regain the confidence of the communities they serve, that trend is sure to increase.