Homeschooling Facts

I'm still searching for an independent study of the efficacy of homeschooling, but George Bush's U.S. Department of Education did conduct a survey of WHO homeschool's their kids in 2003. Here's one of the more alarming statistics regarding the more than 1 million homeschooled children in the U.S.:

Parents’ highest educational attainment

Twenty-five percent of homeschooled students had parents whose highest educational attainment was a high school diploma or less; this figure is lower than that for public schooled students (34 percent) but higher than that for private schooled students (13 percent). Homeschooled students were also less likely than private schooled students to have parents whose highest educational attainment was graduate or professional coursework beyond a bachelor’s degree (20 percent compared to 31 percent).

Other Homeschooling facts:

Compared to the general student population, homeschooled children are more likely to:

- Be white;
- Be from the South;
- Live in a rural area;
- Have two parents in the household;
- Have only one parent working;
- Have a household income of less than $75K;
- Have three or more children in the family.

The survey also asked parents what their primary reason was for homeschooling their kids:

31% - Concern over school environment (negative peer pressure, drugs, safety)
30% - To provide religious or moral instruction
16% - Dissatisfaction with academic instruction

You can find the study here.

The closest thing I can find to an independent study of the efficacy of a homeschool education is this news release, touting a report from ACT, Inc. that homeschool students scored an average of 1.7 points higher on the ACT than public school students in 2003. Good for them. What the news release failed to mention is that less than 5% of the nation's homeschooled highschool juniors, or about 3,000 kids, takes the ACT each year.

Earlier commenters are correct, a slight majority of Americans do not believe in evolution, despite the fact that we rely on the forces of evolution - natural selection - everyday, from the food on our tables to the medicine we take, to capitalism and democracy.

This could help explain why the 2007 report from ACT found that only 28% of students met basic standards for college-readiness in the sciences. African American and Hispanic scores were abysmal, but only 33% of white students and 37% of Asian students were ready for college sciences.

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