Homeschoolers are WEIRD!!!

Say what? Homeschoolers are weird! Having been a homeschooler from pre-school to college that is one of the many derogatory comments I have heard from misinformed people who think ‘homeschooling’ means ‘no schooling’. The list goes on, “How will you learn anything?”, “That’s boring!”, “What about socialization?”, “How sure are you that you are getting a proper education?”, “How will you learn to communicate?”, “How will you know how to live in the real world?” Now, for those who honestly have no idea what “homeschooling” means here is a definition from Wikipedia.org:

Home education, also called homeschooling or home school, is an educational alternative in which children are educated at home by their parents, in contrast to the compulsory attendance which takes place in an institution with a campus such as a public school or private school.

In short, homeschoolers do get educated – just not by a public or private school. Still, the question remains. Does it work? Of course, it does! Don’t take my word for it, though. Take a look at official statistics from the research of government and non-government organizations in the United States.



Home school students do exceptionally well when compared with the nationwide average. In every subject and at every grade level of the ITBS and TAP batteries, home school students scored significantly higher than their public and private school counterparts (Figure 1).

Because home education allows each student to progress at his or her own rate, almost one in four home school students (24.5%) are enrolled one or more grades above age level (Figure 2). It should be noted that home school scores were analyzed according to the student’s enrolled grade rather than according to the student’s age level. In other words, a 10-year-old home school student enrolled in 5th grade would have been compared to other students in the 5th grade, rather than to his age-level peers in the 4th grade. Thus, the demonstrated achievement of home schoolers is somewhat conservative.

On average, home school students in grades 1–4 perform one grade level higher than their public and private school counterparts. The achievement gap begins to widen in grade 5; by 8th grade the average home school student performs four grade levels above the national average (Figure 3).

Another significant finding is that students who have been home schooled their entire academic lives have the highest scholastic achievement. The difference becomes especially pronounced during the higher grades, suggesting that students who remain in home school throughout their high school years continue to flourish in that environment (Figure 4).

The grade equivalent score comparisons for home school students and the nation are shown in the next graph. In grades one through four, the median ITBS/TAP composite scaled scores for home school students are a full grade above that of their public/private school peers. The gap starts to widen in grade five. By the time home school students reach grade 8, their median scores are almost 4 grade equivalents above their public/private school peers (Figure 5).

Education Policy Analysis Archives EPAA Editorial Board

Lawrence M. Rudner

Dr. Rudner is with the College of Library and Information Services,
University of Maryland, College Park

He has been involved in quantitative analysis for over 30 years, having served as a university professor, a branch chief in the U.S. Department of Education, and a classroom teacher. For the past 12 years, he has been the Director of the ERIC Clearinghouse on Assessment and Evaluation, an information service sponsored by the National Library of Education, U.S. Department of Education which acquires and abstracts articles and manuscripts pertaining to educational assessment, evaluation, and research; builds and maintains on-line databases; publishes articles and books; and provides a wide range of user services. Dr. Rudner holds a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology (1977), an MBA in Finance (1991), and lifetime teaching certificates from two states. His two children attend public school.


SOCIAL FINDINGS

In 2003, the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) conducted a survey of over 7,300 U.S. adults who had been home-educated (over 5,000 for more than seven years). Their findings included:

* Home-educated graduates are active and involved in their communities. 71% participate in an ongoing community service activity, like coaching a sports team, volunteering at a school, or working with a church or neighborhood association, compared with 37% of U.S. adults of similar ages from a traditional education background.

* Home-educated graduates are more involved in civic affairs and vote in much higher percentages than their peers. For example, 76% of surveyed between the ages of 18 and 24 voted within the last five years, compared with only 29% of the relevant U.S. population. The numbers of home-educated graduates who vote are even greater in older age groups, with voting levels not falling below 95%, compared with a high of 53% for the corresponding U.S. populace.

* Of those adults who were home-educated, 58.9% report that they are "very happy" with life (compared with 27.6% for the general U.S. population). Moreover, 73.2% of homeschooled adults find life "exciting", compared with 47.3% of the general population.

The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC), a U.S government agency, has published multiple articles on home education. Here are excerpts from one which examined several studies on home-educated children socialization:

According to the findings, children who were educated at home "gained the necessary skills, knowledge, and attitudes needed to function in society...at a rate similar to that of conventionally schooled children.

and;

The researcher found no difference in the self concept of children in the two groups, and maintains that "insofar as self concept is a reflector of socialization, it would appear that few home-schooled children are socially deprived, and that there may be sufficient evidence to indicate that home-schooled children have a higher self concept than conventionally schooled children."

Proponents argue further that the social environment of traditional schools:

* strongly inhibits individuality and creativity,
* follows the standards set by the slowest students,
* involves bullying, recreational drug use, early sexuality, defiance, criminality, materialism, and eating disorders.

and that socialization in the wider community:

* leads them to see adults, rather than peers, as role models,
* better prepares them for real life,
* encourages them to be more involved in youth, church, and sports organizations,
* helps them develop an independent understanding of themselves and their role in the world, with the freedom to reject or approve conventional values without the risk of ridicule,
* teaches children to deal with a variety of situations and people,
* still provides for interaction with conventionally-educated children after school hours in their neighbourhood and in other after-school activities.


Cafi Cohen -- author of And What About College? How Homeschooling Leads to Admission to the Best Colleges and Universities -- spent two full days observing public school classes. During those days, she kept track of administrative time versus on-task time. On-task time is roughly defined as students really doing something - reading, writing, listening to lectures, etc. Cohen discovered that less than one hour out of each six-hour school day was spent on-task. The bulk of the day was spent on administrative duties: taking attendance, collecting homework and reports, making announcements, passing out supplies, preparing for activities, cleaning up, and discipline - perhaps the biggest time-waster of all.


MAJOR FINDINGS - ACHIEVEMENT

Almost 25% of home school students were enrolled one or more grades above their age-level peers in public and private schools.

Home school student achievement test scores were exceptionally high. The median scores for every subtest at every grade (typically in the 70th to 80th percentile) were well above those of public and Catholic/Private school students.

On average, home school students in grades 1 to 4 performed one grade level above their age-level public/private school peers on achievement tests.

Students who had been home schooled their entire academic life had higher scholastic achievement test scores than students who had also attended other educational programs.

There were no meaningful differences in achievement by gender, whether the student was enrolled in a full-service curriculum, or whether a parent held a state issued teaching certificate.

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The statistics all show that homeschooling does not provide inferior education. On the contrary, experts agree that homeschoolers are the highest scorers in nationwide achievement tests. Ok…but what about SOCIALIZATION? The ever recurring question when people find out that you’re ‘homeschooled’. Official studies state that "insofar as self concept is a reflector of socialization, it would appear that few home-schooled children are socially deprived, and that there may be sufficient evidence to indicate that home-schooled children have a higher self concept than conventionally schooled children." In our society, however (especially in the Philippines), there is a bias against anything not conforming to anything traditional. People who deviate from the traditional course become pariahs from society and are labeled as ‘non-conformists’, ‘crazy’, ‘selfish’, ‘weird’, or simply ‘stupid’.

My parents were the first in our area to dare to ‘homeschool’ and our family has experienced first-hand the prejudice that people have toward ‘non-conformists’. Our family became the outcasts of society, the essence of all things weird. Almost nobody wanted to be associated with us except for a select few who ‘tolerated’ us but still thought we were weird and pitied our ‘homeschooled = no education’ state. Happily for my sister and I, our parents persisted in their ‘craziness’ and homeschooled us all the way. No regrets, whatsoever. After about two decades of homeschooling in our family, people have started to change their minds – some even going so far as to also homeschool their own children. With all the things going wrong with the educational system in the Philippines parents are finally starting to wonder if maybe those crazy, stupid, weird, non-conformists were right after all. People who were once among the most rabid opponents of our being home-schooled have suddenly started praising our education and many have even become proponents of the very system they once lambasted publicly.

Sad to say, the system that produced my parents (both being honor students and valedictorians, my mom being first in her class and valedictorian from grade school to high school and getting top grades in college) does not work, or should I say, has ceased to work. It has been degraded to a point where students in that system are taught to hate learning and teachers have absolutely no idea what they’re doing. What child wouldn’t hate learning when he or she has to wake up at 4 or 5 in the morning to get to school on time then get home around 6 or 7 in the evening after having lessons crammed into their brains (the teacher being content to just throw out assignments without bothering to explain them – there’s the tutor for that). What’s more, right after dinner or during dinner there’s the tutor who’s going to be around ‘til around 10:30 in the evening to explain everything that the teacher didn’t explain – sometimes, if not most of the time, the tutor is that very same teacher. Now where’s the sense in that? You pay extravagant fees to the best schools to give your child an education then right after school you pay the same teacher to explain to your child what she taught them that very same day. Teachers nowadays don’t care whether a child learns or not, they’re just there to hand out assignments everyday, right? As if those assignments are even worth anything. What does a 7-year-old child learn from being given an assignment to type 50 poems and submit them by the next day? Typing? Students in our system even have trouble reading and understanding written english up to the 3rd and 4th grades and they’re expected to type fifty poems by the next day?

The state of our educational system is in such a deplorable state that students don’t retain anything that they’ve been taught. All they do is memorize dates and formulas for the next test and forget them to memorize the next set of dates and formulas and they don’t even have any idea about the details. Ask any high school graduate what he or she remembers from their 4 years in high school and a very large percentage will say “nothing”. Our system is such that even high school students have trouble with reading comprehension. How is it possible for high school valedictorians to fail a college entrance exam? Impossible as it may seem, it does happen.

One easy way to measure the quality of traditional schooling with homeschooling is to take the diagnostic test. In the past few years honor students, valedictorians, and many of the brightest students took diagnostic tests in schools offering the “homeschool curriculum”. Every one of them fell back 2 or 3 grades. The quality of the homeschool curriculum is such that if you graduate high school under this curriculum your grades will be among the highest in the country.

Education is not just cramming all kinds of information into a child’s brain until he or she can’t take any more – it’s about teaching a child to love to learn, to explore and be creative. The traditional system does exactly the opposite. We are in an age where “high standards” mean more homework, more tutors, more extra curricular activities, and lessons that are way above a child’s level. No thought is given to how much a child has retained or understood, just as long as he or she memorizes everything by the next exam. A student under the traditional system spends 9-13 hours every day studying and there isn’t even much assurance of passing grades – unless, of course, you pay an extra ‘fee’. Now compare that with the homeschool system. A minimum of 1 hour each day is required, no homework, no lessons above your level (you can’t move on to the next lesson if you don’t understand the current lesson), and passing grades are guaranteed – for most students it’s not a question of whether you will pass but whether the grade is perfect or in the 90’s.

To this day, many people are still opposed to homeschooling. Its opponents far outnumber its proponents but the results are undeniable. Every day, more and more people are having second thoughts about their beloved traditional system. Who knows, the day may come when people will say, “those weird traditional schoolers”. Come what may, this ‘Weird Homeschooler’ considers it an honor and a privilege to be counted among the few but steadily growing community of ‘weirdos’.

"Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel." -Socrates