If that were the case, these students would probably get a higher quality of education even if they were forced to go through the system.
It's this same flawed argument that always comes up with college earnings. (College grads are more successful, therefore you should go to college.) Isn't it likely that those who are likely to enroll at a college are more driven, potentially-successful people to begin with?
Government should get out of the school/education provisioning business. It hasn't worked, period. What I don't mind the government doing is providing education funding via vouchers.
Do you want a government bureaucrat deciding on how to allocate public education money? Think about it this way, do you want to maximize parent choice, and have them decide on the quality of a school, or do you want a board of education member deciding on the quality of schools?
Do you trust the decisions of a swarm self-interested parents and children or, or the decision of a self-interested government official? I trust the swarm.
We let govt decide where people can spend food-stamps and what they can buy.
Oh wait - we don't - there's not nearly the same level of govt control wrt food.
Even the most extreme interpretation of govt food control doesn't approach the amount of govt control in primary public education. (I find that folks who talk about various subsidies tend to overstate them if they're opposed and understate them if they support. Note how that lets each side claim that the other is lying. Curious that they never notice that they're both correct about that.)
Or, are you suggesting that all amounts of control are the same?
But parents very likely Can tutor their own child, better than the teacher teaches a class of 30. That's the apples-to-apples comparison that matters, since its the option facing parents.
Imaging for a minute that the classroom teacher spends the day tutoring each child. That would be, what, 10 minutes per child per day? And this doesn't of course happen.
A parent can do better than that in the first half-hour after breakfast. The rest of the day is gravy.
What does a home-schooled child miss? Socialization, practice at behaving as a member of a group, classes that require investment in equipment/facilities (art, gym, sports). These things can be mitigated by the clever parent, and honestly missing some of that is not all bad.
Anyway you end up with a different child. Not necessarily better or worse, but certainly different. And I suppose we need a few different adults.
These kids end up absolutely unequipped to do anything but reproduce more of themselves and let the rest of us finance their existence.
You mean as opposed to kids who go through public schools (on our dimes) and end up with the same fate? What's the difference?
Home/un-schooling doesn't work for everyone. I've heard a story about a good friend of Ivan Illich who unschooled his two kids. The results were what you might expect: one went on to "great things" while the other didn't, and ended up on the dole.
I'd like to see statistics on homeschooled kids that back up your anecdotal evidence. Not that I don't believe you, but I'd be curious what the statistics say.
"Five areas of academic pursuit were measured. In reading, the average home-schooler scored at the 89th percentile; language, 84th percentile; math, 84th percentile; science, 86th percentile; and social studies, 84th percentile. In the core studies (reading, language and math), the average home-schooler scored at the 88th percentile.
The average public school student taking these standardized tests scored at the 50th percentile in each subject area."
If you look at results from alternative schools like Montessori schools, you usually find similar results. It's not magic -- I enjoyed school but recognize in retrospect that it was an awful experience in many ways that instilled bad habits.
Also, that study was produced by an organization, (http://www.nheri.org/) that is specifically dedicated to producing studies about homeschooling. The titles of their reports all allude to defending the idea of homeschooling, and they put out guides to putting it into practice. The children for the study were "almost 12,000 home-school students from all 50 states who took three well-known standardized achievements tests", which aren't required for children to take, unless possibly if they live in Iowa or California. It doesn't seem unreasonable to think that poorly performing homeschooled children would not take these tests, since they have nothing to gain from them.
For what it's worth, all the anecdotal evidence I have from growing up and knowing a number of home-schooled children, it's certainly not guaranteed to work better than public schools, and I've never met an intelligent, thoughtful person to come out of it. Not that amazingly smart people can't result, but I've never met them, and I feel like that's the attitude you're up against. I hope there are more and better stats, because presenting ones like yours above will only steel the negative opinion of most people towards homeschooling.
The Iowa tests are given to kids all over the country. I took them in Upstate NY. When I lived in NYC, we took a different achievement test... it was either a California test or a NYC-specific one.
I don't have any kids, and don't have much skin in the game. I simply presented some information. But equating parents who want to exercise the freedom to educate their kids in a way appropriate to them as abnormal is offensive to any citizen of a free society.
In any case, are their any methodological problems with this study that you can point to? Any other studies you can point to that give a different result?
I'm also curious about your anecdotal evidence, which you seem to give more weight than this study. Do you routinely ask people you meet whether they were home schooled? Do the ``intelligent, thoughtful'' people you meet routinely come out and tell you that they are not home schooled?
Almost three percent of the current US student population is home schooled[1]. You've probably met a lot more home schoolers than you realize...
[1] Study (pdf) as of 2007 at
http://www.nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009030.pdfWas that intended as irony? If not, exactly what would it take, given the overwhelming size of the public school systems, to move the average significantly off 50?