The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [10]
Let’s be kind and give our researcher the good, representative sample population he needs. Can we now rely on his results? Nope, we’ve still got problems. What about all the different styles of homeschooling? Families use dozens, even hundreds, of different texts and curricula, and those are bound to affect the test results. And those families with children who are late readers will skew the results for younger children, even though there may be no differences in skill levels and general outcomes once such children are older. Because of the variety of homeschooling approaches, different children attain skills and knowledge at widely varying ages, and one child’s lack of knowledge in a particular area may mean very little in the long run. Because of such anomalies, evaluating test results can be very difficult.
Finally, there is one huge obstacle researchers are unlikely ever to overcome. Learning is an incredibly individual and complex process; numerous variables—age, natural ability, instructional methods, determination, teacher rapport, parental support, sibling order, diet and exercise, humidity, and who knows what else—contribute to the mix. How do we know that the factor determining successful test scores is the homeschooling and not one of the other variables?
The only way to answer that question, to prove once and for all that homeschooling works, is to run a controlled experiment. Get a representative sample homeschooling population, carefully match for all those variables, if you can even figure out what they all are, and randomly assign families to either the homeschool group or the control group that attends school. Let everybody go about their learning for several years, and see which group performs better. It’s not likely to happen, of course, even if all the variables could be controlled—few, if any, homeschooling families would be willing to take the chance of being picked for the control group.
Besides, even if such an experiment were possible, we could still argue for years about the tests and other tools used to measure “success” and whether those tools truly give us any meaningful information. But debating the virtues and pitfalls of standardized testing and other forms of evaluation is far beyond the scope of this book.
Despite all that positive research on homeschooling, we simply can’t prove that it really works. We know that most homeschoolers are proficient learners, that they are good with people and grow up to lead normal and successful lives as adults. Many homeschoolers firmly believe that withdrawing their children from school was the only way to save them from tremendous difficulties in school and in later life. But there’s no way to prove that any homeschooled students wouldn’t have been just as successful and turned out just as well if they’d gone to school.
The research is handy for bragging and for giving to skeptical in-laws, curious reporters, or dubious school officials when they question our judgment in choosing homeschooling. All those mean average scores and standard deviations sound terribly impressive and definitive, and homeschoolers are not above citing them in situations in which that’s the sort of information people want to hear. But homeschooling research has a long way to go before it tells us anything very meaningful. Aggregates cannot tell us about individuals. For homeschoolers, the question to answer is not “Does homeschooling work?” The real question is “Can homeschooling work in our family?”
The Homeschoolers’ Version
How do you figure out whether homeschooling will work for your family? You might try the anecdotal approach. The first step is to find out as much as you can about it. Read general books, such as this one, about homeschooling, and some personal accounts of how particular families have gone about it. Take a look at homeschool resource guides and catalogs and magazines to see the kinds of materials