The Homeschooling Handbook_ From Preschool to High School - Mary Griffith [9]
In fact, negative research on homeschooling is virtually nonexistent. Subscribers to Internet mailing lists on homeschooling are occasionally greeted with frantic messages from graduate students doing literature searches or parents looking into homeschooling. “Where’s the other side of the story?” they ask. Now and then, we’ll hear of a family for whom homeschooling did not work, whose children returned to school. But the children simply returned to school; they did not continue struggling with an unsuccessful option to the point that the children became horrible object lessons for the dangers of home education. Homeschoolers are a self-selecting bunch—they don’t continue homeschooling for years if it doesn’t work for them.
So this lack of negative research means that homeschooling is an undisputedly successful and effective form of education, right? Not exactly. There are a number of problems with even the positive homeschooling studies—specifically, with the biases of the researchers, the population of homeschoolers available for study, and the tools researchers use to determine successful academic and affective outcomes.
First, let’s look at how test populations for homeschooling studies are found. One obvious route for a researcher interested in homeschoolers would be to contact a state department of education to get a nice large random sample. Unfortunately, many states don’t keep records of homeschoolers. Or, perhaps the state maintains records, but a sizable chunk of the state’s homeschooling population doesn’t bother to register with the state, thus skewing the available sample. Perhaps the researcher could find a suitable sample through a homeschooling support group or a magazine aimed at homeschoolers. Good idea, but homeschoolers often are not the least bit interested in cooperating with such studies.
Why not help with homeschooling research? Wouldn’t most homeschooling families love to help prove the effectiveness of their educational choice? Part of their reluctance comes from some of the early studies attempted in the late 1970s and 1980s. All too often researchers showed up in homeschoolers’ homes, armed with clipboards and stopwatches, prepared to observe the number of “on-task minutes” children spent in each academic subject area. They looked for classroom behaviors rarely found in home education settings and failed to notice the other kinds of learning taking place right in front of them. Naturally enough, the subjects of such studies developed an aversion to such intrusions.
Other homeschoolers of the period, which also saw many legal challenges to homeschooling, simply preferred to stay out of view for fear that their participation in research might somehow put them at risk for visits from local truant officers or social workers. Most homeschool support groups still decline to sell or rent their membership lists because of such fears, which are still common among some of their members.
In recent years, even when most researchers have a better idea of what to expect, it’s common for homeschoolers to decline to participate in studies simply because of the increased interest in homeschooling. It’s become practically a trendy topic for dissertations and theses, and homeschoolers quickly tire of hearing the same basic questions again and again. For them, researchers are a distraction and an interruption whose work is unlikely to be of enough interest to make it worth the disruption.
All right, now let’s suppose our researcher has found a study sample of some kind, and he gets results similar to those of the studies described earlier. More evidence proving homeschooling works? Not yet. How does he know his sample is representative of the general homeschooling population? Maybe its members are all of the same socioeconomic level, all have graduate degrees, or all belong to the same church. Maybe it’s not the homeschooling that accounts for those successful outcomes, but all that money and education the parents have or the values instilled by their religious beliefs. Or maybe the kind of homeschoolers