Home Schooling goes Mainstream

Milton Gaither, via Education Next, wrote a feature story about the growing popularity and contribution of home schooling in the education sphere. (Thanks to elearnspace) Snippets:

From 1999 to 2003, the number of home-schooled children grew by 29 percent; among minorities, home-schooled children increased by 20 percent despite a modest decrease in home schooling among Hispanics.

Home Education is now being done by so many different kinds of people for so many different reasons that it no longer makes much sense to speak of it as a political movement.

Survey research has revealed a heterogeneous population of home schoolers and higher rates of
minority home schooling than expected. Economist Guillermo Montes’s analysis of data from the massive 2001 National Household Education Survey found that 70 percent of respondents cited a nonreligious reason as the top motivator in their decision to home school. Home schoolers whose motivations are primarily religious have certainly not gone away, but they are now joined by those whose reasons range from concerns about special education to bad experiences with teachers or school bullies to time-consuming outside activities to worries over peanut allergies

A 2004 study of the home-school admissions policies of 72 colleges and universities found  that home schoolers were generally happy with the way they were evaluated and universities were happy with the performance and graduation rates of the home schoolers they admitted.

Advertisement

2 Responses to Home Schooling goes Mainstream

  1. Pingback: P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Homeschooling goes mainstream

  2. I think home school is more meaningful to students of senior high school age. In this age where teenagers tend to like to try new things, and with home school parents will be better able to control the activities of their children.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

Please log in to WordPress.com to post a comment to your blog.

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s