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Comment by Duff | Hacker News Reader

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/30/home-schooli...

"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.

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As usual, causation is not correlation, and consciously deciding to take your children out of public schools and either homeschool them or put them in an alternative school show's a significant amount more involvement in your child's life than is the norm.

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.

I think you mean `correlation is not causation'. Where there is causation, there certainly _is_ correlation.

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.pdf

Homeschooling or sending your kids to private school is out of the current norm because the compulsory system is so expensive that most folks cannot afford to pay for both. My school taxes in NY are $3,000 for a middle-class house -- $2,500 less than tuition at the local church school. Before about 60-70 years ago, public school wasn't the norm at all. The enrollment in the public schools in my city was 40% less in 1960, when the school age population of the city was double what it is now. Why? Parents sent kids to Catholic schools.

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.

"The average public school student taking these standardized tests scored at the 50th percentile in each subject area."

Was 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?

Did you mean that alternative schools have usually the same results as homeschooling or as standard schools?

Many of the specific issues that Gatto has with the public school system are addressed by alternate private schools.

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