The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [7]
The second fantasy is a bit different. This one is a natural for the cold, rainy morning when neither child can concentrate on anything, except for bickering with each other and complaining to you how boring their lives are. You realize that they will grow up to be nasty, mean individuals, illiterate and innumerate. They will each be fired from a succession of menial jobs. Your daughter will enlist in the Army but wash out of basic training. She will go on general assistance and write you frequent letters asking for money. Your son will join a bizarre survivalist cult living in Palo Alto and be under long-term FBI surveillance because of the frequent threatening letters he writes to savings and loan mortgage officers. On your fiftieth birthday, you will get letters from both of them complaining that everything they are and have done they owe to you and to the fact that they were homeschooled.
You realize intellectually that both fantasies are completely unrealistic, but your mother keeps asking you whether you’re really sure about what you’re doing to her grandchildren, and some of your friends tell you stories they’ve heard from other friends about people they’ve heard of who tried homeschooling and discovered that it just doesn’t work. How do you know that you’re doing the right thing, that you’re not dooming your children to lives of poverty and ignorance? What is known about how well homeschooling works, anyway? And even if it works for most families who try it, how do you know it will work for your own family?
In this chapter, we’ll try to answer some of these questions. We’ll look at some of the formal research into homeschooling and its effectiveness and some of the reasons the research may not give us much useful information. We’ll also talk about how homeschoolers view the effectiveness of homeschooling and what all this means for new or prospective homeschoolers trying to decide whether homeschooling will work for them.
Academic Research into Homeschooling
Numerous studies—master’s theses, doctoral dissertations, and professional journal articles—have been done on homeschooling. I can’t begin to cover all of them (and after the first few, they all start to sound the same, anyway), but in this section I’ll give you a sample of the results they typically find. First, let’s take a look at some research into the academic effectiveness of homeschooling:
In a 1990 master’s thesis, Mark Tipton compared the scores of eighty-one West Virginia homeschoolers on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills (CTBS) with those of conventionally schooled children. He found that the homeschooled third graders scored significantly higher on vocabulary, reading comprehension, mathematics concepts, science, and total mathematics; lower in spelling; and about the same in other areas. Homeschooled sixth graders scored higher in composite scores, vocabulary, reading comprehension, and total language and similarly in other areas. Homeschooled ninth graders scored higher in reading, lower in mathematics, and similarly in other areas. Homeschooled eleventh graders scored higher in reading and similarly otherwise. Tipton also found that the longer the period that families planned to continue homeschooling, the better their children’s scores were.
In 1992, Robert Calvery and others compared standardized test scores